For more than three decades the world has voted overwhelmingly to end the US embargo on Cuba. Washington ignores the law, the UN, and the humanitarian cost – and its allies look away.

Ignoring a stinging rebuke from the UN, the USA is pressing ahead with its illegal siege and equally illegal secondary sanctions to crush Cuba and take control of one of the last truly sovereign nations in the Caribbean. Cuba Libre – Free Cuba – was the rallying cry of patriots in the 19th century as they sought to end Spanish rule, and is the cry again today in the face of Washington’s determination to force capitulation and impose US hegemony.

I think one of the most ludicrous and self-demeaning things I’ve seen this year was the attendees at the Munich Security Conference giving US Secretary of State Marco Rubio a standing ovation after he literally celebrated 500 years of Western imperialism and called for Europe and the US to unite to resume its expansionism. The hypocrisy of the Europeans was deafening, coming as it did less than a month after many of the same people gave a standing ovation to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos calling for a return to international law and the need to stand united against powerful bullies.

Cuba is a small country which has been bullied since 1959. It gets scant love from New Zealand, Australia or the “middle powers” who felt momentarily threatened by the US over Greenland. These powers are helping hollow out international law by refusing to unite effectively to break a medieval siege of Cuba which, if successful, will have devastating humanitarian consequences.

Since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has held an annual vote on a resolution titled:

“Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”

For each of those 33 years the world has voted in favour of the motion by a crushing margin. For each of those 33 years, the US, that shining light upon the hill, ignores the will of the people of the earth. That shining light, by the way, is the bonfire the US has made of the sacred tomes of international law.

Small, weak, vulnerable Cuba (population 10 million) apparently represents what the US President calls “

The centrepiece of the attack on Cuba is the imposition of tariffs on any  “other country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba.” These secondary sanctions are enforced by the equally illegal air and sea blockade that is trying to put a chokehold on 10 million men, women, children and babies.

As I have pointed out in recent articles, economies that are starved of diesel and other petrochemicals end up having starving populations as their agricultural sectors collapse. Oil imports have crashed by 90 per cent in Cuba partly due to the US attack on Venezuela but largely because countries like Mexico have been bullied into compliance.

In the case of Cuba, conditions have become so cruel that over one million Cubans, mostly young people, have fled to where they can get food, medicine and the chance of a paying job. The US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls this US-inflicted mayhem “economic statecraft”.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a stinging rebuke to the US in February for what it said was a serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order. It also said the US “lacked credibility” in its claim that Cuba represented a threat to the US.

“It is an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion with extraterritorial effects, through which the United States seeks to exert coercion on the sovereign state of Cuba and compel other sovereign third States to alter their lawful commercial relations, under threat of punitive trade measures,” a panel of UN human rights experts said.

As UN reports go, this is a thrilling read.  The report makes an important point that Western countries should heed.

“In the absence of authorisation from the United Nations Security Council, the executive order has no basis in collective security and constitutes a unilateral act that is incompatible with international law.”

They warned that “the US executive order directly violates the principles of sovereign equality, non-intervention and self-determination, which are essential pillars of a democratic and equitable international order as reflected in the UN Charter Article 2(1).” No wonder the mainstream media gave it so little coverage.

Sovereign equality is one of the most important concepts in international law. At its core, it means that powerful countries do not have the right to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. If you pair that with the foundational concept that international law should be equally enforced (no exemptions for powerful countries) and independently adjudicated (for example by the ICC, ICJ, WTO, etc) then we get close to a system that would make the world a more peaceful and far less dangerous place.

We don’t need to like or support governments – for example those of North Korea, Iran or Cuba (or, better still, the US, Germany and UK) – to respect their sovereign equality.  As the great British jurist Lord Bingham argued: exceptions based on political distaste are the first step toward tyranny. Welcome to Pax Americana.