Cuba Will Remain Under a 1917 U.S. War Law

An old filing cabinet has no sense of history. It does not blush when the century changes. It does not ask whether the label on its drawer still describes the country whose papers it contains. It simply holds the folder until someone with authority decides to remove it.

On August 25, Washington chose not to remove Cuba’s folder.

President Donald Trump renewed for another year the authorities under the Trading With the Enemy Act that sustain the Cuban Assets Control Regulations, extending them through September 14, 2027. The determination is one page long. It says the continuation is in the national interest. It directs Treasury to publish the decision. Then the drawer slides shut again. (Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/25/2026-17374/continuation-of-the-exercise-of-certain-authorities-under-the-trading-with-the-enemy-act; American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/presidential-determination-continuation-the-exercise-certain-authorities-under-the-3) (federalregister.gov)

The detail matters because the statute is from 1917.

Cuba is not being newly declared an enemy. The renewal is procedural, annual, and familiar. That is precisely what makes it revealing. A government can continue a policy for so long that its repetition begins to impersonate necessity. The form arrives on schedule. The signature is applied. A law written for wartime survives as part of the machinery governing ordinary economic life between two countries separated by ninety miles of water and six decades of exhausted hostility.

The regime in Havana will use the document as proof of its central political claim: that Cuba is besieged by a permanent adversary, that scarcity has an address in Washington, that national discipline is not oppression but defense. It has been handed another exhibit.

Washington, meanwhile, will say the renewal preserves leverage against a one-party state that has crushed independent political life, built a security apparatus around dissent, and repeatedly converted every foreign opening into revenue for institutions it refuses to reform. That case is not frivolous. A policy toward Cuba cannot be built on the pretense that the regime is merely a victim of history, or that pressure on a ruling structure has no moral basis because ordinary Cubans may suffer from it.

But the cabinet does not distinguish cleanly between a state and a country.

That is the problem with keeping a nation inside an enemy file. Sanctions are meant to narrow the regime’s room. In practice, they also enlarge the regime’s alibi. Every bank that hesitates, every supplier that walks away, every insurer that decides Cuba is not worth the compliance risk, every foreign investor who sees an island surrounded by legal tripwires becomes material for Havana’s explanation of why nothing can move. The state’s failures are real. Washington’s pressure is real. The Cuban family waiting for medicine, transport, food, remittance access, or a stable electric line experiences both realities as the same closed door.

The current sanctions architecture is more crowded than the old drawer suggests. Treasury says the Cuban Assets Control Regulations remain in force, while a separate 2026 Cuba-related sanctions program has been added alongside them. In May, OFAC had to issue a general license to clarify transactions otherwise authorized under the older Cuban rules but caught by the newer executive-order framework. The legal map is becoming less a wall than a thicket. (Office of Foreign Assets Control, https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information/cuba-sanctions; OFAC FAQ 1251, https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/1251) (ofac.treasury.gov)

A thicket can trap the hunter as well as the hunted.

The strongest argument for continuing the pressure is that normal commerce has too often become a subsidy for the Cuban state’s coercive core. The government has preserved a system in which property, licensing, imports, employment, association, speech, and advancement are all ultimately conditional on political obedience. It is reasonable to doubt that unrestricted money and tourism would independently produce freedom. The opening of 2015 to 2017 did not democratize Cuba. It did not dislodge the Communist Party. It did not make a court independent, a newspaper free, or a citizen secure against the state.

It did, however, prove something that the filing cabinet cannot record.

For a brief period, Cuba was treated less as a permanent exception and more as a country with which normal human and commercial traffic might be possible. Treasury and Commerce amended regulations to support the normalization process, widening some channels for travel, telecommunications, trade, and private economic contact. The opening was incomplete, reversible, and politically fragile. It is closed now. It cannot be reproduced by nostalgia, because the conditions that allowed it have vanished. (U.S. Treasury Department, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jl0581; U.S. Treasury Department, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jl9740) (home.treasury.gov)

But neither can it be replaced by ritual.

The annual renewal tells Washington that time itself is a policy instrument. Keep the authorities. Increase the pressure. Wait for the system to yield. Yet history offers no guarantee that prolonged deprivation produces the institutions required for a transition. It can produce flight. It can produce silence. It can produce a smaller, poorer, more suspicious country in which the surviving state has learned to administer ruin as proof of loyalty.

Havana has its own ritual. It points to every new restriction and says the answer is unity. But unity in the official Cuban sense means that the citizen must accept the state as both defendant and judge. The government may blame the embargo for constricted trade, reduced fuel, and frightened investors. It cannot blame the embargo for a political system that treats independent civic life as contamination. It cannot blame Washington for the instinct to allow a private business but deny its owner a public voice. It cannot blame a 1917 law for its own refusal to let Cubans become adults in the country’s political life.

The old folder is useful to both governments because it keeps the argument safely abstract. Washington can speak of leverage. Havana can speak of siege. Neither phrase describes the woman counting bills at a market stall, the family calculating which relative abroad can send help, the small entrepreneur wondering which rule will change before the shipment arrives.

A file is supposed to preserve a record. This one has become a substitute for policy.

On September 14, 2027, barring a change of course, the same drawer will be ready to close again. The paper will have another date. Cuba will still be there, no longer young, no longer patient, and still held in a cabinet built for enemies.