For millennia, the siege of towns has been an effective tactic of war. It involved using hunger, thirst, and disease as a way to make the enemy surrender, starting with the Trojan War, when, according to legend, the Greeks besieged the city for ten years. The Crusaders were able to take the fortress of Acre after two years of total siege. At the beginning of the so-called Modern Age, in 1453, the Ottomans besieged Constantinople until they took it, and in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs did the same with Granada. Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis besieged Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), killing a million civilians. But the Soviets did not surrender, and that was the beginning of the triumph over Nazi-Fascism.
In general, sieges were horrific, with people dying of starvation or epidemics, and the besiegers throwing large stones to knock down the walls, fire, or corpses to contaminate those inside. The end ranged from general extermination to, in some cases, collective suicide. The latter was the case at Masada, facing the Dead Sea, where a thousand Jews committed suicide in the face of the Roman siege, after the second destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
Today's economic blockades and sanctions are the same, except that they are not against cities but against countries. But the goal is the same: to overthrow a sovereign government in order to impose the interests of the besieger. This new form of siege began with Napoleon Bonaparte blocking the British Empire from negotiating with Europe in the early 19th century. Argentina then suffered the same fate, with the blockade of Buenos Aires by France and England, always raising the false flags of "freedom" ... of trade. The blockade lasted from 1838 to 1845, but Juan Manuel de Rosas' Argentina resisted with the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado and other battles, until it defeated and drove away the two main powers of the world with their tails between their legs. In 1903, Germany, England, Italy, and other European powers blockaded Venezuela to demand payment of a debt. That blockade came to an end thanks to Argentine Foreign Minister Luis María Drago and the famous Doctrine.Drago, who says that debts cannot be collected through the use of military force. The United States took note and then came up with the Roosevelt Corollary, which is a twist on the Monroe Doctrine and guarantees the entire continent as its "backyard."
After occupying countries such as Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, among others, for years, the US opted for its preferred recourse: blockades and sanctions. The cruelest case is the one imposed on Cuba since October 1960. It consists of preventing Cuba from trading with the world and sanctioning or imposing tariffs on any country that trades with the island. Especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this strategy was frighteningly effective, causing Cubans countless problems and hardships, estimated at a staggering $2 trillion.
Only ingenuity and an ironclad political will to maintain dignity have made it possible for Cuba to resist, serving as an example of resilience and solidarity with the world in fields such as engineering, education, and medicine. And in more than six decades, the Empire has failed to achieve what it sought, just as the Greeks sought in Troy or the Nazis in Leningrad: to bring down its adversary. The Cuban Revolution is still there, with all its problems, its power cuts, its fuel shortages and, consequently, its food shortages.
Now, Donald Trump is tightening that blockade, if it can be tightened any further. Above all, he is imposing a total oil blockade, trying to starve the ten million Cubans. He threatens tariffs on anyone who dares to sell fuel to the island and announces, without blushing: "They won't be able to withstand it." No different from the Nazi leaders who besieged Leningrad in World War II.
And the terrible thing is that the Argentine government is supporting this new attempt at criminal siege by neo-fascism. Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno asked Argentines not to travel to Cuba, a way of adding his grain of sand to the economic stranglehold, yet another way of obsequiously groveling before his imperial masters.
However, what neither Trump nor Quirno, proud of their own ignorance, know is what Napoleon taught more than two centuries ago: "The only thing you can't do with bayonets is sit on them." What Napoleon meant was that starving a people, subjugating them through siege or invasion, does not guarantee that you can occupy them, let alone dominate them. Military, economic, or financial hegemony does not always go hand in hand with cultural hegemony. The United States understood this when it sold the "American dream" to the world. It understood this when it invaded the world with its music, its Hollywood movies, and even its junk food. All of this seems to have been forgotten by the Caligula who rules in Washington and believes he can dominate the world by bombing or starving entire peoples.
*Argentine researcher and journalist
