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When Donald Trump reiterated that Cuba was a “failed state” and later referred to it as a “failed nation,” he not only repeated a political slogan: he reopened an uncomfortable debate that seemed to have been relegated to the margins of academia and diplomacy.
In less than a week, the U.S. president used those expressions three times in succession—first on January 30, when he signed an executive order declaring a national emergency in response to the Havana regime; then on February 2 and 3, insisting that the island "no longer has anyone to support it" and that "Mexico has stopped sending them oil."
The reiteration is not accidental. In the discourse from the White House, the concept of a failed state currently serves as a political and moral framework for a strategy of maximum pressure.
But beyond their instrumental use, Trump's words compel us to revisit a fundamental question: how close is Cuba to that threshold?
What does "failed state" really mean?
In classical literature, the concept does not simply apply to poor or authoritarian countries.
Authors like Robert I. Rotberg define it by the state's inability to provide essential political goods: effective security, rule of law, basic public services, and an economic framework that allows for the material reproduction of society.
When those functions cease to be fulfilled, legitimacy erodes, even though the institutions continue to exist.
In its most extreme version, William Zartman describes state collapse as the implosion of authority: loss of territorial control, fragmentation of coercive power, and dissolution of order.
Cuba, at least for now, is not at that point. The State retains a monopoly on force and maintains a significant capacity for control.
However, contemporary discussion has shifted. For over a decade, international organizations such as the OECD and the World Bank prefer to speak of fragility, understood as a gradual and multidimensional process rather than as a sudden collapse.
That conceptual transition does not invalidate the essential question: what functions does the State actually perform that today leaves millions of Cubans unprotected.
Control without protection
The most distinctive feature of the Cuban case is the disconnection between control and protection. The state apparatus retains its coercive effectiveness, but that control no longer translates into human security.
Prolonged blackouts, shortages of food and medicine, a collapse of transportation, persistent inflation, and a deteriorating healthcare system paint a picture of everyday life marked by precariousness.
In modern state theory, security is not limited to the repression of disorder; it encompasses the ability to ensure minimum living conditions.
When security is exercised almost exclusively as coercion, the State may continue to assert control, but it loses functional legitimacy.
Public Goods and Legitimacy: An Operational Failure
The degradation of basic services in Cuba is profound and sustained. The health, education, and supply systems exist formally, but their effective functioning is severely compromised.
Analytically speaking, a service that does not fulfill its basic function —even if it retains administrative structures— can be considered a failure.
For decades, the regime sustained its legitimacy through a performance narrative: the promise of relative well-being and social security.
Today, that legitimacy is depleted. The State not only offers less; it also fails to generate credible expectations of improvement. The social contract, while not formally broken, is devoid of content.
Opacity, capture, and paralysis
The fiscal and administrative weakness of the Cuban state cannot be solely explained by external sanctions.
Internal factors such as structural opacity, lack of accountability, and state capture by military-business elites —especially the GAESA conglomerate— have diminished their ability to convert income into public goods.
That pattern consolidates an extractive elite whose survival does not rely on the general well-being.
The result is not necessarily immediate chaos, but rather a state of sustained impoverishment and reformist blockage: a government that continues to maintain control, yet functions less and less each day.
Energy, fuel, and the threshold of paralysis
The energy crisis has turned the debate about collapse into something tangible.
Blackouts lasting up to twenty hours, unstable electrical grids, and nearly paralyzed transportation describe a scenario of partial paralysis.
This is compounded by the tightening of U.S. measures to cut off crude oil supplies—confirmed by Trump stating that Mexico and Venezuela will stop sending oil to the Cuban regime.
The effect is clear: the lack of energy simultaneously erodes production, services, and daily life.
The State may maintain formal authority, but loses real operational capacity. At that point, the line between fragility and collapse becomes a matter of time and additional shocks.
The exodus as a thermometer of failure
No indicator better reflects the loss of state functionality than mass emigration.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left the island—the largest exodus in its recent history. It is not just a migration crisis; it is a structural flight of human capital and youth, further weakening the country's productive and social capacity.
In the theory of state fragility, an exodus of that magnitude is equivalent to a silent plebiscite: the population votes with their feet in the absence of internal prospects.
Between the official narrative and empirical evidence
The reactions in Havana to those who have dared to speak of a "failed state" have been predictable.
In the midst of the emergency caused by Hurricane Melissa, Miguel Díaz-Canel rhetorically asked: “What failed state could organize and accomplish everything we are doing at a difficult time like this?”
His defense clashed with the visible reality: 650,000 evacuated, blackouts, lack of fuel, and collapsed hospitals. The popular response was even more direct: “Cuba is not a failed state, it is a deceased country.”
That spontaneous response summarizes better than any technical report the disconnection between the official discourse and everyday experience.
In practice, the State no longer protects, does not provide, and barely manages to sustain its own infrastructure.
Failed state or decomposing state?
The issue is not semantic. If a strict definition is adopted—total loss of the monopoly on force—Cuba does not yet fit.
But if we prioritize the functional definition —systematic failure in the provision of public goods, loss of legitimacy, and institutional capture— the diagnosis becomes more uncomfortable.
Cuba has not collapsed, but it structurally fails in essential functions. Its administration operates like an exhausted system that survives by inertia and coercion, not by efficiency.
Between the intact control and the risk of collapse, there lies a gray area where the State exists, but does not function.
Beyond the label
Trump's statements do not invent that reality; they amplify it and integrate it into the logic of his foreign policy.
By labeling Cuba as a "failed state" or "failed nation," Washington not only delegitimizes the regime but also sets the stage for a justified framework for a directed transition.
But even if the use of the term is political, the question it raises transcends rhetoric: What happens when a state maintains coercive power but loses the ability to ensure the daily life of its population?
That question encapsulates the current Cuban dilemma—and perhaps also the most accurate meaning of the "failure" that Trump is invoking today, as reality affirms.
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