What is happening politically inside the United States and beyond leaves little space for thinking about Cuba. But more than half a century’s worth of morally reprehensible measures taken against a tiny island reflects a mindset that the United States will police the world and that civilian deaths and war-zone chaos are acceptable.

The U.S. economic blockade of Cuba has disrupted Cuba’s trade and financial arrangements worldwide and caused shortages, grief and suffering.

Writing in 1960, State Department official Lester Mallory (born in Houlton, Maine) revealed a U.S. intention to cause such effects:

“The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support (for Cuba’s revolution) is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” Mallory sought “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

On Sept. 8, Hurricane Irma hit eastern Cuba. President Donald Trump chose that day to sign a memorandum reauthorizing the embargo for one more year. Evidently, suffering from just one disaster wasn’t enough.

The Trump administration is ending some of the reforms installed by President Barack Obama. Speaking in June before Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans, Trump indicated he would restore travel restrictions and block certain business ventures.

On Sept. 29, the State Department announced that, due to mysterious symptoms affecting 21 staff members at the U. S. Embassy in Havana, all diplomats there would be leaving except for a few who would handle emergencies. Later, 15 Cuban diplomats posted to Washington were expelled.

As a result, the processing of visas for travel in either direction has all but ceased. The impact falls on Cubans in one country wanting to visit family members in the other, on North Americans doing business in Cuba, and on Cuban artists and academicians blocked from visiting the United States.

The strange sickness hasn’t touched any of the half million U.S. visitors to Cuba this year. Even so, the State Department issued a health advisory to prospective U.S. travelers, thereby taking a poke at Cuba’s tourist industry that provides much-needed hard currency.

U.S. authorities haven’t identified the supposed victims or elaborated upon their illnesses or evaluations. Most of them were intelligence agents assigned to Cuba, the Associated Press reported.

News stories refer to the malicious use of sound waves, although “sonic weaponry … doesn’t exist,” according to the New York Times. No perpetrator has been identified, and Cuba’s government, having welcomed FBI investigators to the island, denies responsibility.

It is clear that anti-Cuban aggression has returned and prospects for early removal of the U.S. economic embargo are grim, especially because responsibility for ending it belongs to Congress.

Opinion surveys show that most Americans reject the embargo. On November 1, the United Nations General Assembly will be voting on a Cuban resolution against the policy. Annually for 25 years the Assembly has overwhelmingly — last year unanimously — condemned the embargo.

Now is the time for Maine’s senators and representatives to take extraordinary steps toward getting rid of the embargo.

Maine legislators must take on a leadership role in educating people at home and nationally about the embargo’s cruelty and U.S. purposes. They need to agitate among their colleagues for the embargo’s removal. The U.S. Senate traditionally has assumed special responsibilities for foreign policy, and Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King should be feeling heat from constituents.

William Whitney Jr. is a former pediatrician. He is a member of the Let Cuba Live Committee of Maine. He lives in Paris.