As Havana sinks, Miami sets the terms: the choreographed blame game over Cuba's collapse

On a Tuesday afternoon broadcast carried by PressTV's Unscripted programme on 15 July 2026, the US-born commentator Rick Sanchez put a blunt thesis to viewers: "The US is blaming the people of Cuba for not being able to fix a problem that the US created." The line, shared via PressTV's official Telegram channel at 17:25 UTC, is the kind of statement that travels precisely because it does what most US cable coverage of the island refuses to do, which is name the embargo as a cause rather than a backdrop.

Cuba's economic emergency is no longer debatable. What remains contested, after six and a half decades of sanctions architecture, is who owns the wreckage. The dominant Washington framing treats the collapse as the predictable end-state of a state-managed economy: misallocation, capital flight, demographic attrition, a centrally planned system unable to feed itself. The counter-framing, more common in Latin American chancelleries and on channels like PressTV, treats it as the predictable end-state of an extraterritorial economic siege. Both readings rest on real evidence. Neither tells the whole story on its own.

The blockade, in concrete terms

For more than six decades Washington has maintained a trade embargo against Havana, codified in statute and tightened through successive administrations, with extraterritorial provisions that push third-country banks, shipping lines and oil traders to choose between access to the US financial system and any dealings with Cuban state entities. Cuban state media and sympathetic regional outlets routinely refer to the measures as a "blockade," a term reserved in international law for acts of war, and PressTV's own framing echoes that vocabulary. The US government and Western wire services generally describe the same set of measures as an "embargo." The terminology dispute is itself a small piece of the larger argument about whose agency is being described.

The material effect is harder to argue with. Cuba has run chronic shortages of foreign exchange, hard currency for fuel imports, and inputs for its tourism and nickel sectors. Periodic tightening of US sanctions on oil shipments, financial transfers and remittances has coincided with the island's worst power-grid collapses and food shortages of the post-Soviet era. The country's economic deterioration over the past five years is visible from satellite in night-time light data and from any food queue in Havana, and it predates the most recent sanctions rounds.

The domestic mismanagement record

To leave the explanation there, however, would be to adopt only half the evidence. The Cuban state's own policy choices are part of the story. The 2021 monetary unification, the rapid opening and partial re-closing of the private sector (the so-called cuentapropistas), the long delay in allowing meaningful foreign investment outside the Mariel Special Development Zone, the centrally administered currency market and the dependence on a small number of hard-currency earners (tourism, remittances, medical brigades, nickel) all left the economy structurally brittle when external conditions deteriorated. Independent Cuban economists and diaspora analysts have documented these choices in detail for years, and they are not paid-up embargo apologists.

The hard counter-question is what margin of manoeuvre those choices were made in. A domestic tourism industry cannot hedge against a US Treasury instruction to foreign banks. A central planner cannot engineer currency stability while remittance corridors are throttled by OFAC enforcement. The two causal chains run on top of each other rather than against each other, and most serious analysts now treat them as intertwined rather than competing.

What the Miami frame leaves out

The Florida-anchored political class, which sets the de facto ceiling on US policy towards the island regardless of who occupies the White House, treats the embargo as a moral instrument rather than an economic one. In that framing, any softening of sanctions amounts to a bailout for the Cuban government, and the suffering of ordinary Cubans is the regime's fault and only the regime's fault. Sanchez's remark is sharper because it names that frame's consequence: when a population is told, year after year, that its hardship is the unique product of its government's choices, the policy architecture that produces a large share of that hardship becomes invisible.

This is not a novel argument in the region. Mexican, Brazilian, Bolivian and Argentine governments have raised the embargo at every hemispheric summit since 2015, and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has formally called for its lifting on humanitarian grounds. The ALBA bloc has gone further, treating the embargo as a violation of international law. None of those positions is dispositive on the underlying question of Cuban state failure, but they do establish that Washington's framing is not a hemispheric consensus; it is a domestic US political consensus projected outward.

Who wins if the trajectory holds

The trajectory, in mid-2026, points in two directions at once. Inside Cuba, a further year of blackouts, food lines and emigration will deepen the demographic hole the island has been losing population into for the better part of a decade. The principal beneficiaries of that dynamic, as measured by remittance flow and political attention, are the Cuban-American communities of Miami, whose elected representatives carry disproportionate weight on the relevant committees. The principal losers are the people still on the island, whose exit options narrow every year.

Outside Cuba, the embargo is a useful instrument for a different kind of audience: it is one of the few pieces of US economic statecraft on which there is durable bipartisan agreement, and it remains a signal to Caracas, Managua and any future leftist government in the region that the United States retains the capacity to organise sustained economic pressure. In that sense the Cuban file is less about Cuba than about the credibility of the US coercive toolkit in its own near abroad.

Sanchez's line, aired on a channel that does not enter the US cable market, did not move that needle on its own. What it did do is articulate, in thirty seconds and without academic scaffolding, the question that serious reporting on Cuba keeps circling: if the embargo is not the cause of the collapse, why does the embargo continue, and what is it for, if not the outcome it produces?

This article was filed from the Americas desk. PressTV is an Iranian state broadcaster; its commentary is presented here as a window onto how the embargo debate travels in outlets the US cable market does not carry, not as a stand-alone factual basis. The underlying questions of Cuban state capacity and US policy design are addressed using PressTV's framing of the Cuban government's own talking points, which the Cuban state and its regional allies have advanced for years.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/presstv/634073367f