Why U.S. Policy Toward Cuba Violates International Law

For more than six decades, U.S. policy toward Cuba has relied on economic warfare instead of diplomacy. The U.S.claims to target the Cuban government but ends up hurting the lives of millions of civilians.

International law expert Alfred de Zayas speaks to Belly of the Beast on Trump’s latest executive order, which allows him to slap tariffs on any country that ships oil to Cuba, and how the policy violates international law. He explains the difference between sanctions and unilateral coercive measures, and how the devastating measures are really a form of collective punishment.

“We are witnessing an assault on the UN Charter, on international law, and on civilization itself,” warns Professor Alfred de Zayas.

What happens when powerful states ignore the rules they demand others follow? And what does that mean for global institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court?

TRANSCRIPT
Liz Oliva Fernández: Hi everyone. Welcome to Belly of the Beast. For more than 60 years, the United States has maintained an economic siege against Cuba, officially justified as pressure on a government but experienced by daily ordinary people. While international law is often quoted in the base over deeds policy, enforcement is another matter entirely. 

Today, we speak with Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, a Cuban-American independence lawyer and expert in international law and human rights, to examine what happens when power ignores law,  economic pressure replaces diplomacy and civilians become the real target.

Alfred, welcome to Belly of the Beast. 

Professor, Donald Trump's latest executive order allows the U.S. to impose additional tariffs on countries that ship oil to Cuba. Is that legally valid under international law?

Alfred de Zayas: Certainly not. 

There are commitments under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the rules of the World Trade Organization, and the United States would be condemned solidly if the United States were not blocking the administrative tribunal. 

The dispute tribunal is blocked because the U.S. deliberately sabotages it by not appointing the judges. So if you don't have an American judge sitting there, they cannot function.

So it is enormous bad faith. But one thing that is important, violating international law does not change international law. It only creates a precedent of impunity. That is, the United States gets away with it. The United States breaks international law, and there's noaccountability because the United States has refused to submit to the International Court of Justice.

Going back to the issue of tariffs, Trump is acting ultra vires. This idea of governing through decree is very undemocratic. It is, to put it mildly, fascist. It is a dictatorial regime that we have in the United States, and it is a disgrace that the United States Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate are not pushing back against this aggrandizement, self-aggrandizement of Trump, and the lack of scrutiny of all of his measures. 

You are in a state of outlawry, and you have a gangster called Donald Trump, who is acting like a Wild West sheriff and doing what he thinks his morality allows him to do, which, of course, will not last forever. I would hope that Americans have learned enough from Minneapolis that they will vote against [him].

Liz Oliva Fernández: If a powerful state openly disregards international law when it conflicts with its strategic interests, what remains of the international legal order for the rest of the world? What can they actually do?

Alfred de Zayas: What can the international community do? Many things. 

And they're not doing it. Don't buy any American weapons. Stop buying F-16 jets. Stop buying F-35 jets that cost billions and billions. Stop buying Boeing airplanes, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon products. Stop buying American cars.

Liz Oliva Fernández: In your writing, you emphasized that these are unilateral coercive measures rather than legitimate sanctions. Could you clarify that distinction and why it matters legally?

Alfred de Zayas: In the context of United States unilateral coercive measures against a third of the population of the planet, these unilateral coercive measures have been condemned for decades and decades by the United Nations as contrary to the United Nations Charter. 

Contrary to customary international law, contrary to a whole number of treaties.That is always listed in reports of the Secretary-General dating back to the 1990s. This problem is not new. It just has gotten worse over the years.

There is a section in the Secretariat of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights that deals with unilateral coercive measures, and I repeat, we do not use the term ‘sanctions’. If you say ‘sanctions’, you are actually playing the game of the United States. 

You say ‘sanctions’, and that implies that the country imposing sanctions has a moral or legal right to do so, which is not the case. And there are enough reports issued by the late rapporteur Idriss Jazairy and the current rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, Elena Dohan.

There must be at least 15 such reports that state why these unilateral coercive measures are contrary to international law and why beyond that, they are international crimes. Last year, 2025, a long study concluded, and this is shocking, that half a million human beings worldwide die untimely as a result of unilateral coercive measures.

Not only because of not having access to medicine, but also for malnutrition. 

If you cannot get nutrition, supplements, etc., because of the sanctions, your death is attributable to the unilateral coercive measures. But the complicity here, and that's my charge, if you want, against the mainstream media, they actually are apologists of this crime against humanity. They play it down. They try to convince you that these are smart sanctions. These are targeted sanctions. They're only intended to impact the government. It's not intended to impact the people.

Liz Oliva Fernández: How credible can U.S. claims, or Western hemispheric claims, be to defend human rights globally when it’s Cuba policy, I'm talking about United States policies on Cuba, systematically undermining access to food, medicine and basic economic survival.

Alfred de Zayas: The [UN] General Assembly has condemned the blockade, otherwise known as the embargo against the Cubans, 33 times. I remember back in 2016, it's going to be ten years now, that was the last term of Barack Obama. Not that Barack Obama was a good president. He committed enough crimes. But on this point, he realized that the American policies vis-à-vis Cuba had been thoroughly unsuccessful.

And why persist in error when you realize that even these draconian measures have not convinced the Cuban people to rebel against their government? 

Maybe you should try a different approach. But it's important to show that in 2016, 191 countries voted for the lifting of the sanctions and only two countries abstained. So for all practical purposes, the consensus worldwide was that these sanctions were ineffective, that they're causing a lot of suffering, and that they should be lifted. 

Liz Oliva Fernández: For me, it's important to highlight the double standard of all of this because, I'm pretty sure you and also our audience are tired to hear about the U.S. frequently, not just the United States, also Europe, frequently invokes international law to criticize other countries. So for me, it is about how does this policy towards Cuba affect the credibility of international law as a universal system rather than a tool?

Alfred de Zayas: We are witnessing an assault on the UN Charter on international law and on civilization itself. That is something that philosophers have already indicated: That we are at a crossroads. 

When those countries that self-declare themselves as the beacon of democracy, beacon of freedom, beacon of law and order, and I'm talking about the U.S., the collective West, the Europeans, when those countries allow a genocide, an open public genocide in Gaza, which has been continuing for over two years, when they connived and became complicit in eight decades of ethnic cleansing, racism, apartheid against the Palestinians. What credibility do these countries have?

Liz Oliva Fernández: Could you explain your point of view on collective punishment on Cuba, regarding U.S. measures against Cuba?

Alfred de Zayas: Well, collective punishment, because the entire Cuban population has been suffering under illegal unilateral coercive measures since 1960. The average Cuban, whether he lives in Havana or in Matanzas or in Sancti Spíritus or in Camagüey or in Oriente or in Pinar del Río, is suffering the effects of these unilateral coercive measures that have significantly impacted the commercial and infrastructural possibilities of the Cuban people. 

And everything gets older and cannot be replaced because the replacement parts fall under the unilateral coercive measures. So any number of industries are impacted negatively, and that impacts the entire population.

Liz Oliva Fernández: That's a good point, because U.S. officials often claim that economic pressure targets the Cuban government, not the people.

Alfred de Zayas: It’s absolutely laughable. It’s despicable to say something like that. Of course, it's the people who suffer. Of course, it’s the most vulnerable classes that bear the brunt of the unilateral coercive measures and not the government. 

The purpose of the unilateral coercive measures is to force regime change. 

People will say the Castro brothers were undemocratic or were illegitimate or whatever. 

And I say, hold it a moment. Immediately before Castro, we had a hyper-corrupt puppet of the U.S. by the name of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar. Now, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar came to power through a U.S. supported coup d'état against Prío Socarrás. 

Batista had zero democratic legitimacy. He was just a marionette of Washington and Washington wants, in all of Latin America, a series of marionettes. Washington's bidding, not for the benefit of the Cuban people or the Nicaraguan people or the Venezuelan people, for the benefit of the oligarchs sitting in Washington and in New York and in Boston and in Chicago and in Los Angeles. The whole thing is too obvious.

Liz Oliva Fernández: That's the modus operandi of the United States.

Alfred de Zayas: The difference is that Obama was suave, and even Joe Biden and Antony Blinken sounded more civilized than this gangster who happens to be the President of the United States of America. 

Liz Oliva Fernández: His own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio said it. “We love to see a regime change in Cuba,” and they're pushing for that.

Alfred de Zayas: That is the purpose. And it was always the purpose since day one. It's just that in the Eisenhower days, in the days of Kennedy, in the days of Lyndon Johnson and of Nixon, everybody talked human rights language. If you are adept in using the language of human rights, you can sell the product.

You manufacture consent in the American people by trying to ennoble your crime, by saying, we're doing this to help the Cuban people, and then impose your Monroe Doctrine on them.

Every country in the Americas has the right of self-determination. Every people in America has the right of self-determination. And the United States simply doesn't recognize it.

Liz Oliva Fernández: In your book, professor, you have described sanctions as a form of economic warfare. How does this economic warfare against a civilian population, like Cuba, differ in human terms from conventional warfare, and why is it often treated as more acceptable?

Alfred de Zayas: Hybrid warfare kills just as much as a conventional war. And that is the world of the 21st century. We have to take that into account.

That is why the International Court of Justice should speak on this issue. They've actually used many of the concepts that I am giving to you now. They used them in the three advisory opinions concerning Palestine and Israel and the International Criminal Court issued the warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and his then war minister Yoav Gallant.

But there again, we don't have enforcement of international law. And as they say, what is civilization? Civilization is this agreement that we have to live according to certain rules, rules of the game, but they have to be applied uniformly and not à la carte.

Liz Oliva Fernández: Do you see the Cuban case as a warning to other countries in the Global South about the consequence of political independence?

Alfred de Zayas: Obviously the Cuban experience is very relevant. But politicians in Latin America, in Africa and in Asia, not all of them have understood this. In order to understand this, you have to come to grips with the implications of the Monroe Doctrine.

You have to come to grips with the implications of Manifest Destiny and of the policies of Donald Trump.

Liz Oliva Fernández: Thank you very much again, Alfred, for your time and your knowledge about all these topics. It has been a pleasure to talk to you today.