Cuba: Failed state or state desired by the empire? 

Can a failed state have an education system that is a benchmark for the entire world? Can it have a public health system that is recognized across the globe and capable of guaranteeing the well-being of its population and that of other peoples? Would such an entity be able to tackle a pandemic such as COVID-19, making vaccines available in record time?
Could a country in such conditions have a scientific arsenal capable of producing these drugs, be at the forefront of the fight for the lives of its citizens and those of the world, based on accurate and outstanding scientific and innovative work?
Would it have exceptional exponents of the arts? We are talking about music, an outstanding dance company such as the National Ballet of Cuba, or poets and writers who have led the intellectual thought of their country. Could it be a sporting powerhouse, with Olympic and world titles in more than 15 disciplines?
It is one thing to be a failed state and another to want that state to fail as an economic and social project. The most powerful empire in the history of humanity has thrown everything it has at a small island of just over 110,000 square kilometers, with approximately ten million inhabitants and a dependent economy, in order to make it fail.
That power, which sits on a territory of 9,867,675 square kilometers, with a population of more than 340 million, and which, moreover, is the economy that prints the world's currency, should be ashamed of such ignominy.
To make it fail, the same person who labels it as such has gone through military invasion in 1961 (Playa Girón) and then Operation Mongoose in the same year, with 32 tasks: 13 economic, six political, five military, four intelligence, and four psychological warfare, to which biological warfare would be added, using a chemical agent to affect the eyesight of the sugarcane cutters and sabotage the sugar harvest. It has also resorted to bacteriological warfare, introducing cane rust in 1978, African swine fever between 1971 and 1980, blue mold in tobacco in 1980, hemorrhagic dengue, and hemorrhagic 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, which includes the hysterical persecution of Cuba's finances, the relentless blockade to prevent a single drop of fuel from reaching it, and its inclusion on the spurious and arbitrary list of state sponsors of terrorism, which reinforces its status as a country of risk for trade.
Now, in addition to persisting in all these areas, in which lies, media warfare, and hatred are other components, it is intensifying psychological warfare, as its own emperor has just done in responding to what would happen to Cuba after the treacherous aggression against Venezuela, which triggered the kidnapping of its constitutional president and his wife on January 3. "Cuba is about to fall, its economy is in ruins, and it will no longer have access to Venezuelan oil. I don't know how they're going to be able to sustain themselves," Donald Trump said.
That, more than the much-vaunted allusion to a failed state, is his state of desire, long frustrated because the Cuban people are a people who resist, reinvent themselves, and triumph every time the sun rises. They do so in the midst of an economic war that, like the 1960 memo from Lester Mallory, undersecretary of state, seeks to create despair, chaos, and hunger in the largest of the Antilles.
Because of the blockade and all the dirty tricks played by the U.S. government, Cuba is now suffering from a deterioration of its energy system that is damaging all of the nation's economic and social processes, from food production to industry, putting a strain on households across the country. With that same purpose in mind, they went so far as to commit the crime of denying life-saving oxygen in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, Cuba is still standing and fighting back. Of course, it suffers from the prosperity that the imperialist government steals from it every day. But despite all its vile hostility and power, it has not been able to make Cuba fail, and that twists its guts and gives it political spasms. The reason is that there is no power vacuum, an element that would establish the condition of a failed state. Those who oppose it know full well that the Party, the State, and the Government, together with their strongest bastion, which is their people, are relentless in their search for solutions; and that frightens them even more.
Four years ago, my colleague Michel Torres, in these same pages, quoted Canadian political scientist Kalevi Holsti, who defined a failed state as one that lacks the "ability to generate loyalty." Bad news for the fascist empire, because Cubans and their state have that attribute in spades, based on the strength of their unity.