‘He Who Controls the Resources Controls the World’ – How the Embargo Became the Blueprint for Quiet Violence

Ninety miles separates Key West from Havana; across this strait, these two nations could not be more different. On one side, a superpower that throws away 40% of its food. On the other, a country that has spent thirty years perfecting how to grow food on scraps. Not the Cuba of cable news blackouts and empty shelves, but rather the Cuba that has been here before and knows exactly what to do about it. Three decades on, this same reflex is being asked to ignite again, for a different kind of shortage. 

Israel Hernandez fought in the mountains with the Revolution, then spent years working a dairy, long before the Soviet Union's collapse handed him a very different kind of battlefield: half an acre of concrete he refused to relinquish, growing on it ever since. Within five years of the Soviet exit, the country's agricultural output had fallen by 54%, and the average Cuban's daily calorie intake had collapsed from a comfortable 2,600 to somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 kcal, a number that, translated out of nutritional science, means a population quietly starving. Nobody issued an instruction; the rooftops, courtyards, and vacant lots became farmable overnight. By 1995, Havana alone counted some 25,000 of these small, improvised plots. The government caught up subsequently, offering land, composting facilities, and training only once the movement had already proven itself. Within a decade, Cuba's urban farms were producing 3.2 million tonnes of food a year, and Havana's organopónicos alone supplied 90% of the city's fresh produce. What took root in the early 1990s was not an agricultural strategy or a utopian resolution. It was a humanitarian reflex, the kind that surfaces automatically from intolerable necessity and the idea of resource control as a geopolitical tool. 

None of this is new, and if you go back far enough, nothing ever is. 

Cuba's fertile land was never built to feed its citizens. Spanish colonial planners, then American capital after 1898, positioned the island's richest soil toward one exportable crop, sugar, keeping Cuba, the world's largest producer for the best part of a century, hostage. The country has spent most of its modern history being extremely good at growing things nobody there gets to eat. Organopónicos were the exception; the first time in generations Cubans grew food on their own terms. When an island-wide blackout hit Havana this July, resident Mario Pedroso met it with the same skilful expertise his grandparents' generation would have recognised. Oil had not arrived in a while, he said, and there was no way to fix that. “We have to resist, as we Cubans say.” Two crises, one inherited attitude, a generation apart, and, on both occasions, a government elsewhere determining that Cubans can solve this crisis alone. In January 2026, Washington declared a national emergency and moved to block oil tankers bound for Cuba; by May it had layered on sector-wide sanctions reaching traders, insurers, shippers, and banks. Come June, blackouts were repeatedly running past twenty hours a day, food production had fallen by roughly 60%, and tens of thousands of surgeries had been cancelled. The UN's human rights chief, not an organisation inclined to hyperbole, said, “Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines.”  In the 1990s, however delicate, there was a standard; Cuba was impoverished, not starved by design. Environmentalist  Bill McKibben's longstanding description of Havana's urban farms as “the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture” reads rather like an example of an unconsented experiment, rather than a statement of praise. The organopónicos are once again being asked to prove themselves a second time against conditions considerably worse than before. 

Food has been a weapon for as long as sieges have existed, and the mechanism has scarcely needed reinventing since. Stalin's state starved Ukraine's grain provinces into submission in the winter of 1932, and Britain's blockade starved German civilians throughout World War I on the calculation that hunger negotiates better than artillery. Nigeria's federal government starved Biafra into surrender rather than utilising combat tactics: a blockade so brutal it directly produced the Geneva Convention Amendments of 1977, outlawing starvation as a method of warfare, a law that exists precisely because someone, once, thought this was a line worth drawing. What distinguishes the twenty-first-century version is not cruelty –  history is never short of that – but its imperviousness. Washington's embargo will not sink a ship nor fire a round. It will, however, ensure tractors cannot be repaired, seed cannot be imported, and money cannot move between a Cuban bank and anywhere else on earth. Sieges produce photographs, whereas sanctions produce spreadsheets: quietly falling numbers nobody is obliged to read, let alone report on. Speaking with documentarian and content creator Elliot Smith, who recently travelled to Cuba reporting on the lives of ordinary citizens, commented that “killing a cow for your own family's consumption is, in Cuba, illegal”, a relic law from an era of engineered scarcity, in a country that now has, by his account, roughly one cow for every ten people. As a result of the embargo, Cubans became dependent through extreme control of resources. Somewhere between these statistics and the abundance across the strait lies the true border: not the water, but the quiet machinery of control, where dependence is not an accident but a resource in itself. Starvation as control has not disappeared so much as learned to dress as policy; filed rather than declared, most of the West has stopped recognising it as violence at all. 

The law, as it happens, already agrees with the hypothesis of this piece. Starvation as a method of warfare has been explicitly illegal since 1977, with the Rome Statute going further in 2019, criminalising it even outside declared war. What nobody quite legislated for was a starvation that arrives not through military siege but through a database, imposed by a trading partner three hours' flight away, technically ‘at peace’. Cuba still runs its economy on ‘la libreta’, the ration book Fidel Castro instituted in 1962 and which has outlived every prediction of its own abolition, except that the book itself has become close to decorative. One woman queuing at a Havana bodega this spring put it more honestly than any mainstream media communication ever could: “Everything is scarce here… we’re practically living off air.” The UN's own human rights office has confirmed as much in its own register, warning that the fuel shortage has disrupted the rationing system and the regulated food baskets that Cubans have relied on for six decades. Elliot described a population that has “moved past the threshold of fear…people who talk about civil war and grid collapse” the way others discuss weather. Not because the prospect does not frighten them, but because dystopia has become normality. That, perhaps, is the more damning measure of what silence enables, not just deprivation but the normalisation of poverty in a modern world.

Rationing has now crept beyond food into electricity and fuel, a government conserving what little current it has left as though light were also a foodstuff, doled out by the hour rather than the plate. None of this is being done to Cuba by an occupying force, which is precisely why the law built for Biafra and Ukraine cannot quite reach it. Precisely why the West has found it so easy to look away, seeing no images with clarifying violence. Cuba only had internet access from 2016, and phone coverage remains patchy even now, a country that is, Elliot observed, “dystopian, but strangely peaceful.” Silence, again, is not an absence of information but an infrastructure. Rather, a slow, well-documented, and entirely legal-adjacent disappearance of a population's margin for survival. Silence, in this instance, is not an absence of information. It is a choice, made easier by the fact that nobody is required, on paper, to call this what it is: an unfathomable systematic stripping of basic human rights in the twenty-first century. There is also a colder calculation sitting underneath Washington's silence. America has an agricultural surplus problem of its own and a growing list of allies it has already burnt through with tariffs; food aid has historically been the pressure valve for both. Washington is quietly subsidising foreign demand for its own farmers’ surplus. It is not difficult to imagine the next offer arriving dressed as generosity, with credit lines for fuel and fertiliser, extended the moment Havana is prepared to fall in line. Starvation, in that scenario, was never really the end goal. It was simply the leverage required to make dependency look like relief. In a world of volatile tariffs, fracturing supply chains, and food increasingly wielded as a geopolitical instrument, the question is no longer whether Cuba's enforced self-sufficiency is a model worth studying but how many other countries are quietly running the same experiment without yet knowing it. Should Cuba be entering the textbooks, not as a cautionary tale safely contained on one island but as a preview? This predicament poses a question most governments would rather leave unanswered: whether states in comparably precarious positions, from Moldova to Georgia, squeezed between Brussels and Moscow, or Taiwan, which imports the majority of its diet across a strait scarcely wider than the one separating Havana from Key West, ought to be studying Cuba's model before scarcity makes the studying involuntary. What Cuba establishes is not self-sufficiency as an accomplishment so much as what a state is forced to build once it ceases being a choice and becomes a condition of fighting to survive. 

This is precisely where the reassuring notion that the world simply needs to “share” better collapses under its own naivety.

It is not that the international community is not willing to share; quite the opposite, in fact. Sharing constantly, with the pretext being it allows something in return, a market opened or influence purchased cheaply through aid. What it will not do is distribute where sharing might actually cost something, be that an argument picked, a trading partner offended, or a precedent set. Cuba is not going hungry because the world has nothing left to give. It is going hungry because the world has run the numbers and found that intervening costs more than Cuban hunger does and found, further, that nobody is likely to ask for the receipts. There's a second irony inside Cuba's own borders. Much of the island's hard-currency economy runs through GAESA, the military-run conglomerate that has kept its reserves comfortably provisioned through every round of scarcity ordinary Cubans absorb directly, a familiar reflex among states under siege, and one that tends to corrode the stability it claims to protect. Set against that, the organopónicos look almost like dissent: decentralised, community-run, and answering to no department. Two Cubas exist inside the same blockade: one hoarding and one growing. Beyond the island, the silence has not been universal. Mexico's Sheinbaum, Brazil's Lula, and Spain's Sánchez have each sent food aid this year, coordinated at a Barcelona summit in April, likely with less sentiment than self-interest, each governing a country with its own anxieties about food sovereignty in Washington's shadow. The gesture has come from the margins rather than the powers most able to intervene, articulating profusely who finds this dystopian and who has turned a blind eye.

Ninety miles is not a distance. It is a choice, renewed each time someone decides that what happens on the other side of the globe is somebody else's problem. Cuba will keep growing food in crises because it has no other option, and the rest of the world will keep calling that ingenuity rather than asking why ingenuity was ever required. That is the quiet violence this piece set out to name: not a war, not a headline, just a tractor that stays broken, a ledger that stays sealed, a silence that costs nothing to keep. For he who controls the resources controls the narrative, and the ones who control it unsurpassed are rarely the ones wielding the weapons. They are the ones who never had to raise their voices at all.

Illustration: Will Allen/Europinion