The New Dark Age

Saturday, 18 October 2025 — Weaponized Information

They call it an embargo. We call it what it is—economic warfare, a colonial siege dressed up as policy, and proof that the crisis of imperialism has become a war against life itself.

By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | October 17, 2025

The Epidemic of Propaganda: How El País Manufactures Decay in Cuba

The story begins like a fever. “By the end of the summer,” writes El País, “people in Cuba were wondering what rare disease had them bedridden.” The tone is already clinical and moral at once—curiosity spliced with suspicion. We are told that whole families are sick, laboratories lack reagents, officials deny deaths, and citizens despair on Facebook. The reader is ushered through the scene as though guided by a sympathetic but weary foreign doctor, shaking their head at a country too stubborn to heal itself. It is a familiar rhythm, repeated across decades of Western reporting: pity the people, blame the state, erase the blockade.

Carla Gloria Colomé’s article in the English edition of El País (October 16 2025) performs this ritual with professional grace. From her perch in Miami—the exile capital of anti-Havana mythology—she paints an island overrun by disease, denial, and decay. Her prose carries the weary authority of someone who has already made up her mind. Cuba is sick, not because it is strangled, but because it refuses the cure prescribed by Washington. The journalist becomes a diagnostician, and the diagnosis always ends in “failed socialism.”

The trick works through rhythm as much as argument. Each paragraph moves from rumor to revelation to despair, creating the sensation of chaos without ever naming its cause. The epidemic spreads through verbs that erase agency: “people were infected,” “rumors circulated,” “officials denied.” No one sanctions, no one sabotages—illness simply falls from the sky. Even the mosquitoes, it seems, are counter-revolutionary. The government’s supposed “silence” becomes proof of guilt; the absence of laboratory reagents becomes evidence of indifference, not of embargo. And when the minister finally speaks, acknowledging deaths, his words arrive too late in the narrative to matter. The verdict—Cuba is negligent—has already been handed down.

There is an artistry to this sort of journalism. It is not outright falsehood but narrative engineering. The reporter selects her material the way a painter chooses color: a Facebook post from a suffering artist, a quote from a dissident intellectual, an image of garbage piling on a Havana street. Each brushstroke is true enough in isolation, yet together they form a mural commissioned by empire. The technique is simple: elevate anecdote to pattern, omit structural context, and let despair masquerade as data. The reader, softened by pity and repelled by decay, is led to a quiet moral conclusion—surely this system, this government, must fall.

What goes unsaid is the real pathology: the deliberate asphyxiation of an entire society by the United States and its obedient allies. That omission is the beating heart of the piece, the silence that makes its words possible. To name the blockade would be to spoil the illusion, to replace mystery with motive. So instead we are offered the theater of humanitarian concern—a spectacle in which Western media shed crocodile tears for the victims of their own governments’ policies. The mosquito becomes the villain, the state the accomplice, and the empire the concerned bystander taking notes for history.

Every metaphor is chosen with care. Blackouts, garbage, swarming insects—all stand in for socialism itself, portrayed as a system rotting under its own weight. The article’s structure mirrors a morality play: the innocent populace suffers, the corrupt state denies, and the outside world—embodied in the impartial Western journalist—speaks truth to tropical power. But what is really spoken is the language of domination dressed as concern, a sermon about civilization delivered through the megaphone of humanitarian liberalism. It is an old tune, played again for a new audience, with updated lyrics for the algorithmic age.

In the end, the piece leaves its reader not informed but inoculated—immunized against sympathy for Cuban sovereignty. The emotional message is clear: feel sorry for the people, distrust their government, ignore the empire behind the curtain. This is how propaganda operates in the age of plausible empathy. It does not shout; it sighs. It does not invent; it arranges. And in that arrangement, in the careful orchestration of omission and affect, we see the true epidemic at work—not dengue, not Oropouche, but the feverish moralism of imperial journalism itself.

The Anatomy of a Siege: What El País Refuses to Name

The El País correspondent describes a nation wilting under fever but never names the hand tightening the tourniquet. Cuba is portrayed as a house infested with mosquitoes and incompetence, its hospitals overrun and pharmacies bare. But behind every empty shelf stands a ledger in Washington. The country cannot freely import medical reagents or diagnostic machines containing even a trace of U.S. components, and banks that process the payments risk blacklisting. Shipments are rerouted through third countries, inflating costs by roughly thirty percent, and global suppliers—from imaging firms to laboratory giants—refuse contracts outright. What the paper calls “neglect” is simply the bureaucratic face of warfare.

When fuel deliveries from Venezuela collapse under secondary U.S. sanctions, the trucks that once sprayed insecticide stay parked, hospitals flicker through blackouts, and fridges storing vaccines go warm. The mosquito breeds where the empire dictates. To the Western press, this looks like mismanagement; to those inside, it feels like siege.

The framework of that siege was written long ago. Laws such as the Cuban Democracy Act and Helms–Burton Act reach across oceans, threatening any firm that dares sell Havana a stethoscope. A ship that docks in Cuba is banned from U.S. ports for six months. A syringe produced in Europe becomes contraband if a single American patent hides in its design. The embargo isn’t a policy; it’s a global architecture of punishment built into law.

During the 1990s “Special Period,” these same mechanics produced outbreaks of blindness, neuropathy, and Guillain-Barré syndrome when vitamins, soap, and water-treatment chemicals disappeared. History repeats: Washington tightens the chokehold, the media report a “Cuban crisis,” and the cause is buried under moral commentary about socialism’s failure to govern itself.

In spite of this, the island forged a health system rooted in neighborhood clinics and scientific sovereignty. Its infant-mortality rate rivals that of industrial powers, and its laboratories created therapies like Heberprot-P for diabetic ulcers and homegrown COVID vaccines. Yet those discoveries remain trapped because licensing restrictions and embargo rules block international collaboration. Even knowledge is embargoed.

The Caribbean’s record heat and rainfall in 2024 fueled a dengue surge across the region—from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. Isolating Cuba’s outbreak from this pattern allows the Western imagination to treat the virus as political contagion rather than climate reality.

The scale of deliberate harm is measurable. Cuba loses billions yearly and counts thousands of preventable deaths linked to sanctions—a death-toll written in spreadsheets rather than bullets. Each statistic hides a face: a postponed surgery, an ambulance without tires, a generator without fuel.

Since January 2025 the screws have tightened again. National Security Presidential Memorandum 5 (June 30, 2025) reinstated aggressive travel audits and reimposed bans on both direct and indirect financial transactions with Cuban entities tied to state institutions. The expanded blacklists published in July 2025 added more Cuban hotels, logistics providers, and service companies to the Cuba Restricted List and Cuba Prohibited Accommodations List. Remittance flows were cut off when Western Union suspended transfers in February, severing one of the few civilian lifelines that kept households stocked with cash for medicine and basic needs. In that same period, UN human rights experts condemned Washington’s decision to re-list Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, a designation whose real function is to frighten insurers, banks, and shippers into boycotting the island. By May, the State Department had also certified Cuba as a “Not Fully Cooperating Country” in anti-terrorism efforts, ensuring that the machinery of strangulation would hum on every financial and diplomatic front.

The Congressional Research Service now acknowledges that the 2025 moves restore the Trump-era blueprint and, via the new memorandum, expand it to cover indirect transactions—total economic pressure wrapped in legal language. The shortages that El País frames as mismanagement—missing reagents, empty fuel tanks, silent laboratories—trace directly onto the sanctions architecture. A lab without supplies is not a metaphor for socialism’s decay; it is the x-ray of imperial policy. The suffering is real, but the diagnosis belongs to Washington.

The Crisis of Imperialism: Blockade, Sovereignty, and the Colonial Contradiction

What the newspaper sells as “health news” is only the mask. Beneath it sits the old machinery of domination grinding away, the same engine that once sailed under the skull-and-crossbones of the Monroe Doctrine and now hums through sanctions dashboards and compliance memos. We live in the crisis of imperialism—a moment when a decaying empire can no longer rule the world cleanly, so it tries to fence off the hemisphere and starve the disobedient into submission. Call it whatever you want in polite company; the working class knows it as siege. In Cuba’s case, it is a total economic blockade—war by other means—whose purpose is not policy “pressure,” but the destruction of a people’s capacity to live on their own terms.

This is the oldest wound in the Americas reopening: the colonial contradiction. The former plantation refuses to return to its assigned place in the imperial supply chain. Cuba’s insistence on organizing care as a right, knowledge as a commons, and medicine as a social good tears at the fabric of colonial hierarchy. The metropole answers with scarcity as punishment. Where El País sees “mismanagement,” the oppressed see the old whip redesigned: a logistics regime that withholds fuel, blocks reagents, criminalizes remittances, and then blames the victim for bleeding. The vocabulary shifts—from “civilizing mission” to “democracy promotion”—but the relation remains: planter and plantation, creditor and debtor, master and those commanded to kneel.

Against this, Cuba practices what the text-books refuse to teach: anti-imperialist sovereignty. Not the empty sovereignty of flags and speeches, but the daily sovereignty of clinics kept open, vaccines developed in blackout hours, neighborhoods self-organizing trash pickups when the trucks go still. Sovereignty here is not a courtroom doctrine; it is a method of survival. It is the conviction that human need outranks market diktat. And it is intolerable to a system that requires obedience to capital as the price of entry into “civilization.” That is why the blockade targets the arteries of daily life. It aims to make endurance itself feel like treason.

Name the weapon without euphemism: genocide through economic warfare. Kill the hospital by denying parts, kill the lab by denying reagents, kill the household by denying remittances, and call the resulting deaths “unfortunate outcomes.” The empire prefers an unarmed cemetery to a sovereign clinic. Its cleverness is to commit the crime by spreadsheet, so that the corpses can be tallied as “externalities.” Its media chorus converts the hunger it manufactures into a morality tale about failed socialism, reciting pity as if it were evidence. They invert cause and effect so thoroughly that the noose looks like a necklace.

This inversion is not a mistake; it is how a hegemony in decline holds on. Unable to win the consent of the South, the North perfects coercion and spectacle. The crisis of imperialism expresses itself as a hemisphere put back under lock and key—a fortress painted as a family. The doctrine is simple: if global command slips, tighten hemispheric control; if sovereignty sprouts, salt the soil. In that theater, Cuba’s very persistence becomes heresy. Each day a polyclinic opens its doors, each time a neighborhood brigade drains a mosquito nest, each hour a scientist keeps a fragile machine alive—these are blows landed against the imperial fantasy that only markets can organize life.

So let us reframe the narrative honestly. The Cuban outbreak is not proof that socialism fails; it is proof that socialism bleeds under siege and still refuses to die. The shortages are not mysteries; they are the fingerprints of a blockade. The “silence” is not guilt; it is the sound of a government managing survival under a crosshair. The real story is not disease but jurisdiction: who decides whether a nation may breathe. Read this moment through our four lenses and the picture clarifies. The colonial contradiction sets the stage. Anti-imperialist sovereignty is the answer the colonized have forged. Genocide through economic warfare is the empire’s method. And all of it unfolds inside the crisis of imperialism, a system so frightened of the world it made that it now barricades its own hemisphere and calls the barricade “order.”

History moves elsewhere. The more the fortress tightens, the more its purpose is exposed. The island under blockade reveals the metropole’s truth: that domination can starve a nation, but it cannot starve the future. The narrative we write here is not of despair but of alignment—of a people whose persistence has already outlived the headlines, whose sovereignty has already outlasted the sneer. The crisis belongs to empire; the horizon belongs to those who refuse it.

From Outrage to Organization: Build the Corridors That Keep People Alive

The point of clarity is not catharsis; it is construction. If the blockade is a war, then our task is to assemble an army made of unions, neighborhoods, clinics, classrooms, and code. No saviors are coming. We will have to be the logistics: the diesel that moves the ambulance, the reagent that saves a child, the signal that cuts through the static. Begin where you stand. Turn pity into power, and power into corridors that defeat starvation by moving supplies, truth, and courage faster than the siege can stop them.

Start with what already breathes. Join and reinforce the living arteries: the caravans that have crossed borders for decades with medicine and milk; the church trucks that call their work faith and call it correctly; the health brigades that match doctors to patients when markets refuse. Find the hands that have not waited for permission—community groups that ship insulin by the cooler, student networks that crowdfund diagnostic kits, longshore workers who look the other way when a crate marked “books” happens to contain a centrifuge. Amplify these practices until they become a system. Do not reinvent the wheel; put air in every tire and send the wheels to Havana.

Build a workers’ front against the blockade. Trade union halls should not be museums of past fights but dispatch centers. Nurses can twin hospitals and share protocols; lab techs can pool surplus reagents; electricians can advise on keeping ventilators alive during blackouts. Dockers can refuse to handle cargo for banks that help enforce the strangulation. Teachers can turn every classroom into a seminar on how financial paperwork kills. If a corporation can sanction a people, a union can sanction a corporation. The ledger must learn that every fine extracted from Cuba will be paid back in strikes.

Open the municipal flank. City councils can pass binding procurement rules that cut ties with banks and insurers enforcing the blacklist. Public universities can create exchange programs with Cuban faculties and protect them with the same legal armor used for climate and immigrant sanctuaries. Public hospitals can negotiate sister-ward agreements to share training and equipment. When national governments act like subsidiaries of finance, local power must become internationalist: one city at a time declaring that blockading medicine is a crime and behaving accordingly.

Secure the digital ground. The siege uses algorithms to bury the truth and compliance software to throttle lifelines. Answer with encryption-by-default for aid networks, mirrored repositories for medical literature, and rapid-response translation cells that turn Cuban clinicians’ notes into multilingual guidance before the press can weaponize confusion. Train a thousand volunteer “signalers” who spend one hour a day breaking the narrative chokehold: surfacing testimonies, verifying claims, and flooding the channels with patient-level reality. Treat disinformation like a power outage and restore service together.

Make remittances ungovernable by the blockade. Families should not depend on the permission of a transfer giant to buy antibiotics. Build community remittance co-ops with robust compliance counsel, diversify corridors through friendly jurisdictions, and experiment with settlement methods that do not require the empire’s rails. Keep it lawful, keep it disciplined, and keep it moving. If a door is slammed, map a window; if a window is barred, dig a tunnel. The measure of our seriousness is whether grandparents can pick up their medicine on time.

Turn culture into logistics. Art is a supply line for morale and memory. Musicians can fund a generator with a show; graphic artists can make a poster travel faster than a press release; filmmakers can turn a neighborhood fumigation brigade into a story that recruits ten more. Let the galleries become storerooms, the book clubs become shipping lists, the poetry readings become fund drives with a target and a deadline. We are not performing charity; we are manufacturing victory.

Force the question in the imperial core. Demand that legislators strike the terror designations and the financial gags, not next year but before the next hurricane season. Tie every vote to a concrete human consequence: a NICU without power, a dialysis session missed, a vaccine lot wasted for want of a cold chain. Track the banks, the law firms, and the lobbyists who profit from the chokehold and make their names as common as the weather. If they can turn life into a balance sheet, we can turn their balance sheets into picket lines.

Finally, bind all of this together into an infrastructure that cannot be switched off: a permanent, federated network of unions, clinics, congregations, co-ops, code workers, and councils dedicated to keeping people alive under siege. Give it a cadence—monthly shipments, weekly teach-ins, daily truth shifts. Publish a simple ledger of needs met and lives sustained. Let the measure of our politics be painfully practical: How many refrigerators stayed cold? How many vials reached their destination? How many hours of light did we add to the ward?

This is how we answer a blockade meant to make sovereignty impossible: by practicing sovereignty from below until it becomes the new common sense. The empire has chosen the path of hunger; we will choose the path of bread. It has chosen darkness; we will choose power—electrical, moral, organized. And when the historians ask how a small island outlasted a giant, they will find the record in our manifests and our minutes, in the children who lived, and in the silence where a headline should have been but never came because the people, together, refused to let the lights go out.