Cuba marked the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks on Sunday with President Miguel Díaz-Canel accusing the United States of pursuing a “genocidal policy” designed to “suffocate an entire people in order to appropriate the country.” Speaking in Pinar del Río, he compared U.S. State Department officials to Nazi-era administrators and warned that Cuba would not be the last nation targeted by Washington. The commemoration unfolded without the presence of former President Raúl Castro, who at 95 missed the event for the first time in at least three decades; no official explanation was given, and his only contribution was a written message of support read by Díaz-Canel.

Viewed from Washington, the tightening of sanctions — including an effective oil blockade imposed in January and measures announced last week against Cuba’s overseas medical missions — is justified as a response to what the Trump administration describes as a security threat and a pattern of leftist espionage. The State Department has accused Havana of infiltrating U.S. institutions and backing domestic terrorism, while linking the medical programme to forced labour. U.S. officials also attribute the island’s crippling blackouts, fuel shortages and economic collapse to mismanagement and underinvestment, dismissing the Cuban government’s claims that external pressure is the primary cause.

Solidarity movements across Latin America echoed Havana’s charges. In Mexico City, a march from the Hemiciclo a Juárez to the former U.S. embassy drew participants from the Movimiento Mexicano de Solidaridad con Cuba and resident Cuban associations; demonstrators carried signs reading “Cuba is not alone” and demanded an end to the blockade and resumption of Mexican oil shipments. The protest later saw detentions after some individuals painted slogans on a government building, with contradictory accounts emerging between the Cuauhtémoc mayor’s office — which spoke of vandalism and arrests — and the capital’s public security secretariat, which stated that those held were released after warnings. Mexican groups denounced what they termed a “silent genocide,” comparing the economic stranglehold to war, though without the bombs of Gaza.

Analysts in Europe and Latin America note that the crisis has deepened despite Havana’s push in June for 176 market-oriented reforms, the most sweeping economic overhaul since 1959. The oil blockade, combined with secondary sanctions that deter foreign investment, has left the country of 9.4 million grappling with nationwide power collapses, a paralysed public transport system, and growing nocturnal protests — met, according to rights monitors, by reinforced security deployments. Whether Raúl Castro’s absence signals a health crisis or a strategic retreat from the political front line remains unclear; the former leader had recently been identified as a contact in back-channel talks with Washington. With Trump reiterating that Cuba constitutes an “extraordinary threat” and Havana refusing to discuss its political model, the immediate outlook is for continued economic suffocation and a hardened diplomatic stalemate.