An open-pit mine begins with a subtraction.
First the trees go. Then the red earth is cut back in shelves. Then the mountain becomes a sequence of wounds, each one measured, blasted, hauled away, and translated into figures on somebody else’s ledger. From above, the mine looks less like an industry than an argument made against the landscape: what lies beneath matters more than what grows on top.
Cuba’s nickel country has become that kind of argument again.
On September 17, the United States designated four Cuban entities connected to the nickel sector, four military research and development entities, and three Cuban military officers under Executive Order 14404. The targets include companies and institutes involved in geological work, engineering, research, and technical services around nickel, alongside organizations devoted to naval capabilities, infantry weapons, military simulation, electronics, and communications. Washington has placed the ore and the apparatus beside one another, as if the connection required no further diagram. It does not. (U.S. Department of State, September 17, 2026: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesman/2026/09/further-sanctions-on-cubas-mineral-wealth-and-military-modernization-apparatus-fact-sheet/; OFAC, September 17, 2026: https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20260917; Reuters, September 17, 2026: https://www.internazionale.it/ultime-notizie-reuters/2026/09/17/us-sanctions-cuban-nickel-reserves-military-enterprises) (ofac.treasury.gov)
The immediate American case is blunt. Mineral wealth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues, has been diverted toward a narrow military elite while ordinary Cubans live with shortages, blackouts, and the daily diminishment of a state that demands sacrifice but cannot reliably furnish food or power. The regime has earned that indictment. Cuba’s ruling system has long treated the national economy not as a field in which citizens might freely build lives, but as a reservoir to be allocated by political rank. The armed forces do not merely defend the revolution’s perimeter. They sit too often inside its cash register.
Nickel is not a decorative target.
It is one of the few things beneath Cuban soil that still carries the weight of strategic language. Nickel hardens steel. Cobalt travels into batteries, alloys, and technologies whose future value is measured in geopolitical anxiety. Cuba was estimated to be the world’s fifth-largest cobalt producer in 2024. At Moa, in Holguín province, the Canadian company Sherritt and Cuba’s General Nickel Company operated a 50-50 venture that mined laterite ore and processed it into a nickel-and-cobalt intermediate for shipment to a refinery in Saskatchewan. The ore made a long journey north. The value did too. (U.S. Geological Survey: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/cuba) (usgs.gov)
That route is the historical loop inside this week’s sanctions.
Before Cuba became a Soviet client in the popular American imagination, its nickel was already an object of American strategic concern. In January 1959, as Castro’s revolution was still arranging its furniture, U.S. officials discussed whether Cuban reserves could become a security problem if they were made more available to the Soviet Union or Communist China. The Cold War had barely begun to settle over the island, but Washington was already looking past the cane fields and toward the metal in the ground. (U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06/d421) (history.state.gov)
Sixty-seven years later, the old mineral has returned to the center of the table. Only the furniture has changed.
The Soviet Union is gone. The sugar bargain that once underwrote Havana’s illusions is gone. The revolutionary state is no longer presenting itself as the headquarters of an alternative world system. It is a poorer, more enclosed, more exhausted machine, defending fragments of sovereignty with the language of an empire it no longer possesses. Yet nickel remains. It survives regimes, ideologies, and speeches. The red soil of Moa has watched foreign companies, Soviet technicians, Cuban ministries, Canadian refiners, and now American sanctions officers arrive with their maps.
The regime will say this proves the permanence of the blockade: that Washington still sees Cuba not as a country of people but as a problem of resources to be contained and controlled. There is truth in the charge. Sanctions do not land with the precision of a courtroom summons. They move through insurers, correspondent banks, equipment suppliers, shippers, and foreign firms that decide the Cuban risk is no longer worth pricing. The more financial doors close around an island already short of fuel, spare parts, and credit, the less plausible it becomes to pretend that the cost is borne exclusively by men in uniforms.
Sherritt’s own disclosures show the mechanism plainly. After the May expansion of U.S. sanctions, it suspended direct participation in Cuban joint ventures and moved to separate itself from the Moa operation, arguing that its ability to secure banking, auditing, and ordinary commercial continuity was endangered. Its announcement described a mine in Cuba tied to a refinery in Canada, with a corporate arrangement now pulled apart by policy made in Washington. This is what secondary pressure means in practice: an open pit in Holguín can become a compliance problem in Alberta. (Sherritt International, May 2026: https://sherritt.com/sherritt-provides-further-update-on-activities-in-cuba/) (sherritt.com)
That is the strongest case against congratulating ourselves too quickly. A sanctions policy can accurately identify a predatory state and still deepen the vulnerability of the people living under it. Cuba has endured enough grand strategies designed by men elsewhere. The easy American fantasy is that constriction naturally produces a clean political opening. It has not done so before. It may not do so now.
But Havana’s defense fails at the mine face.
The government cannot invoke national ownership while treating national wealth as an internal military inheritance. It cannot denounce foreign extraction while denying Cubans the legal security, property rights, transparent accounts, competitive institutions, and political voice that would make the country’s resources truly national. The problem is not that Cuba possesses nickel and cobalt. The problem is that its citizens remain spectators to the extraction of both.
The sanctions are therefore not merely another turn of the Washington-Havana ratchet. They reveal the architecture Cuba built for itself. The state has fused strategic industry, military authority, and political survival so tightly that an attack on one becomes an attack on all three. That may protect the ruling class from accountability in the short term. It also ensures that every foreign investor, lender, partner, and government sees the island’s economy as a restricted zone marked by uniforms.
The opening of 2015 through 2017 briefly suggested another arrangement. Cuba might have connected to capital, travel, remittances, and enterprise without becoming anyone’s colony again. That window was real, and it is closed. It cannot be reopened by nostalgia, a new embassy reception, or the recycled choreography of mutual concessions. Havana suffocated its own chance by refusing to let openness become autonomy for ordinary Cubans. Washington helped close the shutters with its familiar appetite for punishment as policy.
Now the island is back at the excavation.
Nickel is dug from Cuba’s northeast in layers of rust-colored earth. This week, Washington has put a new fence around the operation. Havana will call it siege. Washington will call it pressure. Both descriptions contain something true.
But the deepest wound was cut long before either side chose its latest words.
It was cut when Cuba’s rulers decided that what lay beneath the country belonged first to the state, then to the military, and only at the end—if anything remained—to the people standing on the ground above it.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Business.
