A People Under the Weight of the Siege and the Threat

From the White House, they want to force Cuba down a path of attrition, economic hardship, isolation, and systematic criminalization

Author: Raúl Antonio Capote | informacion@granmai.cu

July 28, 2026 11:07:46

Despite attempts to isolate Cuba, international solidarity has not abandoned the island. Photo: Ricardo López Hevia

In the jargon of U.S. prisons, the "last mile" is the stretch that separates the condemned from the gallows; it symbolizes the final step between life and death, the last moment of waiting before execution.

Observing the sequence of measures that the current Republican administration has deployed against Cuba in recent months, one could well say that the powers that be in Washington have decided to transfer this prison logic to the geopolitical arena.

Since July 16th, when the Secretary of State convened a ministerial meeting in Washington under the grandiose title of "Resurgence of Political Terrorism," the official U.S. narrative has escalated in virulence, something that seemed impossible to achieve.

There, the island was labeled "the world capital of radical left-wing terrorism." Four days later, on July 20th, 2026, the State Department published a report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Subversion, in which Havana is accused of fostering extremism and weaving a network of espionage to "undermine U.S. interests."

Every Wednesday or Thursday, like a macabre advent calendar, a new battery of "sanctions" appears, each tightening a different screw: the oil embargo, secondary penalties against foreign companies, the list of state sponsors of terrorism—a fallacious stigma that weighs more than a conviction—the official declaration of Cuba as a "threat to national security."

But let's go beyond the statements, because behind each resolution, each list, and each report, there are nine million lives that are not mere pawns on a chessboard. The embargo, already six decades old, the perfect past of an undeclared war, is becoming absolute.

Some analysts, with their memories still fresh, fear that only one step remains: the false flag operation, the perfect pretext. And this is not a conspiracy theory; it is a lesson learned in other scenarios.

That Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks of "political terrorism" while preventing the rest of the world from trading with the island under threat of reprisals is an exercise in cynicism that hardly needs comment.

The "last mile" they want to force Cuba to travel is a path of attrition, economic hardship, isolation, and systematic criminalization. But there is something those in power often forget: on that mile, the condemned do not walk alone.

On this journey, we are accompanied by the international solidarity of social movements, of honest people around the world, of a few governments that refuse to bow down, while the daily resistance of Cubans themselves transforms that stretch into a space of vital affirmation.

No one can plead ignorance when the facts are dated, signed, and published. The July 20th report is public, the sanctions are verifiable; it is a matter of the survival of humanity, even though they now prefer to bury their heads in the sand.

The last mile is not just the journey of the condemned; It is also the distance that separates us from our own conscience; in that mile, we still have time to stop, or there will be no world possible but that of the law of the strongest.

Because if the stories of prisoners on death row teach us anything, it is that, even in the final act, hope is the only shackle they cannot tear from us. Cuba, despite everything, continues to dance its waltz—not the waltz of surrender, but the waltz of resistance—or rather, we dance to the rhythm of the José Mambí rumba.

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