There has been a shift towards minimizing visible harm to civilian populations since the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in widespread malnutrition and epidemics. “There’s a strategy of trying to offload the enforcement to the private sector,” she said. “U.S. policy has created conditions that make it commercially compelling for the private sector to withdraw from whole markets, resulting in severe and widespread economic harm, but in a form that is not directly attributable to US policymakers.”

The Helms-Burton Act is a good example. In 2019, Trump implemented Title III of the law, which allows Americans to sue companies doing business with Cuba, which every previous president had waived. Cruise liners that took American tourists to Havana during the Obama years have since been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars in a Florida federal court for docking at Havana’s main port. The effect has been to deter multinationals from investing in the island.

But perhaps the best example of an almost invisible but insidious sanction is designating Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. Presented as a benign policy tool to make the world a safer place rather than an arm of economic warfare, it has contaminated the word “Cuba” more than ever in the global economy. Almost overnight the label provoked both global banks and vital exporters to pull out of the Cuban market, according to diplomats and businesspeople on the island.