One would have to ask what the United States empire understands by a failed state, with which it sickeningly labels Cuba.

Can a failed state have an education system that is a reference point for the entire world? Have a Public Health system, recognised across the planet, capable of guaranteeing the well-being of its population and that of other peoples? Would that entity confront a pandemic like that of covid-19, making available vaccines generated in record time?

Could a country under such conditions have a scientific arsenal that produces such pharmaceuticals, be at the vanguard in the fight for the life of its citizens and those of the world, based on a precise and outstanding work of science and innovation?

Would it have exceptional exponents of the arts? We speak of music, of an excellent dance company, like the National Ballet of Cuba, or of poets and writers who have led the intellectual thought of their country. Could it be a sporting power, with Olympic and world titles in more than 15 disciplines?

One thing is a failed state and another is to want that state to fail as an economic-social project. To a small Island of barely a little over 110,000 square kilometres, with approximately ten million inhabitants, with a dependent economy, the most powerful empire in the history of humanity has thrown everything at it to make it fail.

That power, which is settled in a territory of 9,867,675 square kilometres, with a population of over 340 million; and which, moreover, is the economy that prints the world’s trading currency, should be ashamed of such ignominy.

To make it fail, the same one that labels it as such has resorted to military invasion in 1961 (Playa Girón) and later Operation Mongoose, in the same year, with 32 tasks: 13 economic, six political, five military, four intelligence and four psychological warfare, to which the biological would be added, using a chemical agent to affect the sight of cane cutters and sabotage the sugar harvest; it has also resorted to the bacteriological, by introducing cane rust in 1978, African swine fever between 1971 and 1980, tobacco blue mould in 1980, haemorrhagic dengue and haemorrhagic conjunctivitis, in 1981.

Today it maintains the lethal pressure of the longest and most genocidal economic, commercial and financial blockade in history, intensified by the current administration, in which it includes the hysterical persecution of Cuba’s finances, the implacable siege to prevent a single drop of fuel from reaching it, and inclusion on the spurious and arbitrary list of state sponsors of terrorism, which reinforces the country risk condition for trade.

Now, besides persisting in all those lines, in which lies, media warfare and hatred are other of its components, it heightens psychological warfare, as its own emperor just did by responding what would happen to Cuba following the treacherous aggression against Venezuela, which triggered the kidnapping of its constitutional President and his wife, on the past 3rd of January. «Cuba is on the verge of collapse, its economy is in ruins, and it will no longer have access to Venezuelan oil. I don’t know how they will be able to maintain themselves,» said Donald Trump.

That, more than the much-trumpeted allusion of a failed state, is its state of desire, long frustrated because the Cuban is a people that resists, reinvents itself and triumphs each time the day dawns. It does so amidst that economic war which, like the memorandum of Undersecretary of State Lester Mallory, of 1960, pursues creating desperation, chaos and hunger in the Greater Antilles.

To make us fail, the blockade and all the underhanded tricks of the United States Government, Cuba today suffers a deterioration of its energy system which harms all the economic and social processes of the nation, from food production to industrial, which strains life in the country’s homes. With that same purpose they went as far as the crime of denying, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, the oxygen that saved lives.

However, Cuba is standing and fighting; of course it suffers from the prosperity that the imperial government steals from it each day. But, despite all its vile hostility and its might, it has not been able to make it fail; and that twists its liver, gives it political spasms. The reason is that there is no power vacuum, an element that would define the condition of a failed state. The adversary knows well that the Party, the State and the Government, alongside its most upright bastion, which is its people, does not give up in finding solutions; and that frightens it even more.

Four years ago, the colleague Michel Torres, in these very pages, cited the Canadian political scientist Kalevi Holsti, who defined a failed state as one that lacks the «capacity to generate loyalty.» Bad news for the fascist empire, because Cubans and their State have that attribute in abundance, founded in the strength of their unity. (Author: Oscar Sánchez Serra | internet@granma.cu)