The blockade against Cuba constitutes an act of war, researcher Francesca Enmanuele warned Thursday, urging the United States Congress to lift the unilateral economic siege that has inflicted harm on the Cuban people for more than six decades.

A specialist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., Enmanuele told Prensa Latina that Congress has the authority to halt the executive branch's acts of war.

"In the United States, the Constitution establishes that only Congress has the authority to act militarily and offensively against another country. We therefore hope it will succeed in putting an end to the blockade, which is an act of war," she stressed, demanding respect for Cuba, a nation that decided "more than 60 years ago its own future."

She referenced the Helms-Burton Act, signed on March 12, 1996, by then-Democratic President William Clinton, describing it as "part of one of the longest — if not the longest — sanctions regimes in history."

Notably, Enmanuele pointed out that Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself recently acknowledged that the blockade constitutes an act of war, holding him responsible "for the suffering of millions of Cubans if this blockade continues."

"That is why," she insisted, "from the United States, as in any part of the world, we must denounce and reject it."

Bennett Shoop, of the Claudia Jones School for Political Education, voiced a similar position, stating that the "cruel and genocidal blockade of Cuba is now escalating to a new level" with efforts to cut off the island's access to oil supplies.

Those economic measures, Shoop argued, were "designed to starve and destroy the people of Cuba and their sovereignty."

"It is essential," he insisted, "that we, as people who believe in the right of all peoples to determine their own future and their own destiny, oppose the atrocious and illegal actions of the United States and demand that this country respect international law and put an end, once and for all, to this blockade against the Cuban people — a blockade that the majority of the world rejects each year at the United Nations."

Cuba is currently grappling with its worst economic crisis in decades, a situation its government attributes to the unilateral economic siege. The Trump Administration has hardened its stance, and the prospect of bilateral dialogue appears to have all but disappeared from the agenda.

Cuban authorities have repeatedly expressed their willingness to engage in negotiations on equal terms, without preconditions and with full respect for national sovereignty.

This trajectory represents a policy that shifted from "maximum pressure to maximum aggression," as Johana Tablada, then Deputy Director General of the Cuban Foreign Ministry's Directorate for the United States, warned in a June 2025 interview with Prensa Latina in Havana.