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End Trump Oil Embargo on Cuba With War Powers Vote, Coalition Urges House Democrats
“Cuba is suffering through a man-made economic and humanitarian catastrophe, caused in significant part by deliberate policy choices of the United States."
Sep 11, 2026
Dozens of advocacy groups this week urged House Democratic leaders to force a vote on an existing war powers resolution aimed at endingr President Donald Trump's unauthorized aggression toward Cuba, including his administration's deadly de facto US oil embargo.
“Cuba is suffering through a man-made economic and humanitarian catastrophe, caused in significant part by deliberate policy choices of the United States," 45 groups said in a letter dated September 9 to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Foreign Affairs and Rules Committee Ranking Members Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.).
"Since January 2026, the Trump administration has imposed an oil blockade that has cut off the island from nearly all fuel imports, allowing only a single tanker to dock over the past seven months alongside minor US sales that are wholly insufficient to sustain the country’s economy and basic services," the letter continues.
"The consequences have been devastating and far-reaching, and the crisis is deepening," the groups stressed. "Cuba has endured at least six nationwide grid collapses this year—at times leaving over 9h million people without power, with outages stretching well beyond 20 hours in much of the country. Fuel shortages have stalled transportation, disrupted food and water supplies, and pushed a once-renowned universal healthcare system toward collapse and the rationing of care."
The groups behind the letter—which include American Friends Service Committee, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Demand Progress, Indivisible, National Nurses United, Pax Christi USA, RootsAction, United Church of Christ, and Win Without War—called for an immediate vote on Rep. Nydia Velázquez's (D-NY) Cuba War Powers Resolution, H.Con.Res. 106.
The privileged resolution—which can be called for a vote without approval from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—would direct the removal of US armed forces from hostilities within or against Cuba absent congressional authorization. The measure targets the de facto US oil blockade on Cuba, which proponents argue amounts to unauthorized hostilities against Cuba.
Velázquez's resolution came amid the Trump administration's escalating aggression against Cuba, including threats to attack or even invade the island, economic strangulation including the oil embargo and decades-old blockade that critics said were causing the deaths of infants and sick people, and the US Department of Justice indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro for his alleged role in the 1996 shoot-down of planes operated by a hostile US-based counterrevolutionary group following repeated warnings that they had violated Cuban airspace.
In April, US senators voted 51-47—with Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania joining all but two of his Republican colleagues, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky—to block a war powers resolution introduced in March by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.).
"Despite falling short of the majority, this was among the strongest votes in congressional history against the use of blockades, and one of the most important stands Congress has taken against US economic sanctions toward Cuba in over six decades," the 45 groups said in their letter. "The House should take a similarly forceful action at this crucial moment."
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A Shadow Hearing to Break the Blockade on Cuba Is Just the Beginning
“May we not remain silent at a time of injustice and what feels like a quiet genocide on the Cuban people. We will end this blockade. It’s the responsibility of Congress to do its darn job to end it,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez. It is also the responsibility of all people of conscience
Sep 09, 2026
On September 2, 2026, Democratic Congresswomen Delia Ramírez of Illinois and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota hosted a shadow hearing in Congress on “Breaking the Blockade: Reassessing the Moral and Legal Failures of US-Cuba Policy.” A shadow hearing, called by the minority party, has all the formalities of an official hearing of Congress. Four distinguished witnesses gave testimony about the current state of life in Cuba under the oil blockade imposed by the Trump administration in January, and additional coercive measures that have been steadily imposed since then.
Dr. Tania Zakrison of the University of Chicago Medical Center described a “humanitarian catastrophe” due to cumbersome licensing and state overcompliance with sanctions, which mean that supplies are not available to prevent loss of limbs in diabetes patients, for example, and that children and cancer patients are dying due to lack of medicines. The lack of oil to fuel the electrical grid and pump water has caused a severe water shortage. “One-third of the population now has no water at all and are digging into the ground to drink muddy, untreated water,” said Dr. Zakrison. This, coupled with a lack of supplies such as IV fluid bags, is contributing to the recent doubling of infant mortality; research clearly attributes the causality of thousands of excess child deaths to the blockade. Food production is down 60% since January. Doctors “are bearing witness to the preventable deaths that we in the US are causing.”
Rev. Dr. Robert Turner of Empowerment Temple in Baltimore, Maryland visited Cuba in July: “What I found was not a hostile, defeated, nor broken people. I found peaceful, loving, resilient, ingenious people surviving decades of a US embargo and now a blockade that has turned survival itself into a daily act of will.” Our government “has decided that disagreement over the political and economic system justifies collective punishment. That is more than reprehensible,” said Rev. Turner. “It is sinfully wicked and an abuse of the power God has allowed America to possess… What I saw was a constructed crisis, suffering manufactured by policy—our policy.”
Attorney Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyer’s Guild, listed several ways in which the US blockade of Cuba violates international law and is repeatedly condemned by the international community. Yet it escalates and is now accompanied by threats of illegal US military aggression. She stated: “The US justification—that Cuba poses an ‘extraordinary threat’ to national security—is legally untenable. A small island subjected to six decades of economic warfare cannot credibly threaten the United States. Likewise, Cuba’s designation as a 'State Sponsor of Terrorism' is arbitrary and politically motivated. It contradicts objective counter-terrorism criteria and ignores documented violations by other states, undermining the credibility of the list itself.”
“We have to talk about Cuba every single day until it becomes part of our algorithm."
Ms. Adely indicated that while Cuba is under siege and being denied the right to sovereignty, the US is arguably committing crimes against humanity and possibly even genocide.
Felix Sharpe Caballero, a Cuban-American living in Detroit who frequently visits family on the island, said: “I testify at great peril. There is a lot of patent hostility in the Cuban-American community. But to be silent, would be a betrayal.”
Caballero continued: “The injustices perpetrated on the Cuban people today have reached the point, quite frankly, of genocide. We are using hunger, lack of medicine, electricity to cook and draw water, food, and basic hygiene products… on the Cuban people to achieve the economic overthrow of the Cuban government. There are 7,000 containers sitting across the world that are not being delivered to Cuba because of State Department activity. The United States of America has been fighting a proxy war on behalf of the Cuban American aristocracy in South Florida.”
Mr. Caballero has learned from his physician cousin in Havana what happens to babies in the NICU when the power goes out. As his voice cracked, he indicated that “some of those babies are not going to recover when the power comes back on.”
With six other members of her Progressive Caucus in attendance, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), Jonathan Jackson (D-Ore.), Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Omar, Congresswoman Ramírez concluded the session by saying, “This shadow hearing is just the beginning.” She urged the American people to raise the profile of this issue. “We have to talk about Cuba every single day until it becomes part of our algorithm.” Ramírez vowed to keep pressuring her colleagues to pass three key pieces of legislation:
- H.R.7521 and its companion S. 136, the United States Cuba Trade Act to lift the blockade.
- Resolution 1056 to Annul the Monroe Doctrine, which advocates for “terminating all unilateral economic sanctions imposed through Executive orders, and working with Congress to terminate all unilateral sanctions, such as the Cuba embargo, mandated by law.”
- H.Con.Res 106 to Stop Unauthorized Military Action in Cuba.
Congresswoman Ramírez’s concluding words were: “May we not remain silent at a time of injustice and what feels like a quiet genocide on the Cuban people. We will end this blockade. It’s the responsibility of Congress to do its darn job to end it.”
It is also the responsibility of all people of conscience to make sure that happens.
A video recording of the shadow hearing can be found here.
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'Absolutely Bonkers' and 'Unacceptable': Trump Posts Map Showing US Takeovers of Other Nations
"As always, he is telling us what the plan is," said one critic. "We must take it seriously."
Sep 07, 2026
US President Donald Trump has spent his second term threatening takeovers of various other countries, from Canada and Cuba to Greenland, and on Monday he shared on social media a map that fueled fresh fears of his imperialist "Donroe Doctrine."
The map on Trump's Truth Social platform shows the US flag over not only the United States but also Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and multiple countries in Central America and the Caribbean.
The post was swiftly condemned across platforms, with Congressman Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) declaring that "this is unacceptable."
Journalist Stephen Robinson wrote on X that "another world leader posting something like this would have to apologize before their immediate removal."
Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot and former Democratic US Senate candidate from Kentucky, wondered, "What would we do and say if the Chinese president posted a map of China taking over the Western Pacific?"
Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former prime minister of Sweden, similarly said: "What would happen if Xi Jinping posted a map where [China] has taken over all of East Asia, and [President Vladimir] Putin one of [Russia] having absorbed all of Western Europe? It would have been seen as either insane or dangerous—or both."
While some critics called Trump "absolutely bonkers" and "f*cking insane," Dr. Brian Goldman, a Canadian emergency physician who's also an author and broadcaster, asserted: "That's not insanity. That's intention."
Democratic strategist Michelle Kinney agreed, saying: "As always, he is telling us what the plan is. We must take it seriously."
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, suggested that "the reason why Republicans attack education is so that people don't recognize the history that repeats itself."
Without directly mentioning Trump or his map, Mexican President Sheinbaum said in Spanish on Monday, "We reaffirm that Mexico is neither nor will be a colony or protectorate of any foreign country. Proudly we are a free, independent, and sovereign nation."
While Trump is a prolific poster, the map followed a series of posts from Sunday—including other maps and images produced with artificial intelligence—that led progressive influencer Harry Sisson to conclude that the president was "having a mental health episode online" and call for his removal from office.
"This man is unwell. 25th Amendment NOW," Sisson said, cataloging posts on a range of topics, from Trump's recent renaming of Lake Ontario amid tough trade talks with Canada, to the suggestion that New Mexico should be dubbed "New America."
The latter was ripped by several Democratic officials, including New Mexico's governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, who responded that her state's name "isn't up for debate—it's been ours since before the United States existed."
"What is up for debate? Who's showing up for working families," she continued. "While the president tries to distract Americans from his disastrous war in Iran, gas prices keep soaring. Americans are also spending more at the grocery store, losing access to healthcare and wondering if they'll ever be able to afford a home. Under Democratic leadership here in New Mexico, we're providing families with free childcare and college, protecting access to healthcare, and investing in housing. While the White House wastes time coloring on maps, Nuevo México is busy doing the work."
In addition to waging an illegal war on Iran, Trump this term has invaded Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and take control of the country's oil reserves, become the US commander-in-chief to bomb the most countries, and killed over 225 people by blowing up boats allegedly smuggling drugs through international waters. He's also threatened to seize the Panama Canal and possibly attack nations including Colombia and Mexico.
As Iran has responded to Trump's war by restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the president has teased declaring the key waterway a US territory and naming it after himself. He's also dubbed the Gulf of Mexico "the Gulf of America" and fought to put his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.
With the US midterm elections less than two months away, some Democrats in Congress have stepped up their critiques of Trump's foreign policy—including a delegation of progressive congressional lawmakers and candidates who headed to Uruguay last month for the third Pan-American Congress.
Shortly after that gathering, delegation member Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) stressed that "progressives reject the violent, imperialistic Donroe Doctrine, and believe in a foreign policy rooted in cooperation, diplomacy, and sovereign equality."
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Canada and the United States of Coercion
In the face of Trump administration threats, Canada has learned from Russia and Iran how to stand up to US economic pressure.
Sep 01, 2026
Cuba is starving. Iran is being economically cut off from the world. And Russia is the target of a sanctions regime unlike any that a major nation has ever faced.
The US secretary of state has abandoned his post to play viceroy of Venezuela, and his role has been filled by the amateur team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. American evolution has favoured the Pentagon and Treasury, while the State Department has gone extinct. Coercion is America’s only foreign policy strategy, and bombs, sanctions, and tariffs are its only tools. The US “will negotiate with bombs” and with “economic statecraft.”
Canada, previously America’s closest ally and its second largest trading partner, is now feeling the weight of that coercion in an economic assault unimaginable for most of the modern history of Canadian-American relations. The relationship changed at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term when he announced that he was prepared to use “economic force” to absorb Canada into the United States. “You’re at war when you get attacked,” Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, said. “We got attacked.” Canada has been subjected to economy-crushing tariffs and warned to “fall in line or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!”
The punishing 50% tariffs are meant to coerce Canada into surrendering aspects of its sovereignty. Part of what caused the latest round of trade talks to explode was demands that made Canada “a subsidiary of the United States” and “compromise[d] Canada’s sovereignty.”
The US is no longer a hegemon that leads for the mutual benefit of the West. It is a bully that coerces its former friends to “fall in line” for the singular benefit of America.
The US reportedly demanded compromises on the protection of French language and culture that is essential to Canadian federalism and unity. The US wanted Canada to repeal laws that promote French language shows to Canadian subscribers of streaming platforms and wave requirements that package labeling be in French as well as English (a demand the US now seems to have dropped).
They also demanded fealty on crucial trade decisions. The Trump administration demanded that Canada comply with American demands on what tariffs it places on other countries and what countries it trades with. Negotiators went so far as to insist on the right “to review and potentially dictate the terms for Canada’s trade agreements with other countries.” American dominance would be enshrined with the prerogative “to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement.”
The US had already set the precedent for this imperial strategy in other countries. In March, Trump declared that he “will be having the honor of taking Cuba.” Toward that end, he cut Cuba off, mandating that “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA—ZERO,” adding that “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He then signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba.
Despite the devastation that embargo has caused the people of Cuba, the Trump administration has continued to tighten its stranglehold, ever increasing the sanctions. “We have a pretty deep toolbox, especially when it comes to sanctions and enforcing them,” a senior administration official told Axios. “More is on the way.” On August 20, the US announced further sanctions.
The same playbook is being employed in Iran where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has become Trump’s chief executioner, has boasted of America’s ability to starve people into the streets and countries into submission. “President Trump ordered… maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked,” he said, “because in December, their economy collapsed... and this is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft.” Bessent told the Senate Banking Committee that “what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country… The Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”
But neither the people in the streets nor the brutal bombing campaign accomplished America’s goals in Iran. So, Washington turned to intensified economic warfare. Bessent has threatened the “toughest sanctions in history.” Trump called it “economic D-day,” "Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale.”
But the coercion extended beyond Iran. Trump warned that “ANY country that… provide[s] any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences.” Bessent provided the details, announcing “an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe.” He said, “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until it stands alone.” He then threatened that “any economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”
That global coercion is being challenged. China called the US threat “illegal unilateral sanctions” and promised that it will “take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests.” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said, “Cooperation between China and Iran has always been conducted within the framework of international law and should not be interfered with or disrupted."
Shockingly, like Cuba, neither Russia, Iran, nor Canada have backed down. Though Canada can hardly be called a fellow traveler of Russia or Iran, it has learned similar lessons and come to similar conclusions.
Like Russia, Canada has learned that, in the face of tariffs or sanctions, it must rely less on the US and more on itself. Russia has tried to substitute lost American business with domestic replacements. “Building at home,” Carney said, is “our plan A.” He says that Canada is “focused on building strength at home…. Launching big nation-building projects…. And… building Canada strong.”
Like Iran, Canada has learned that America’s “signature [is] written in pencil” and that countries negotiating with the US need to call “into question the reliability of any deal.” Like Iran, Canada has learned that deals with the US can be broken, like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement and the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. Like Iran, Canada has learned not to make any concessions in exchange for future promises but to get everything guaranteed up front because the US can change the terms any time, irrespective of the agreement.
The US is no longer a hegemon that leads for the mutual benefit of the West. It is a bully that coerces its former friends to “fall in line” for the singular benefit of America. Its former friends follow, no longer out of partnership, but out of fear.
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'Lethal and Illegal Economic Aggression': Trump, Rubio Rebuked for New Sanctions on Cuba
One Cuban diplomat accused the Trump administration of waging "economic warfare that actually kills people without bombs."
Aug 21, 2026
The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its campaign of economic pressure against Cuba, imposing sanctions on nine state-owned companies and three officials—a move critics condemned as an escalation of a decadeslong embargo amid a worsening humanitarian crisis.
"The Cuban regime has long sponsored a vast subversive network in the United States aimed at identifying, cultivating, and radicalizing subversives, largely operating under the pretext of educational or cultural exchange," US Secretary of State Marco Rubio dubiously claimed. Citing an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in May, he announced new sanctions against entities including the Cuban Ministry of Construction and the mining group GEOMINSAL.
Also sanctioned were three leaders of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, an international solidarity group, including ICAP president Fernando González Llort, a member of the so-called Cuban Five who served 15 years behind bars in the US after being convicted—critics say unfairly—of espionage in 2001 for infiltrating exile groups plotting terrorist attacks targeting Cuba's socialist government.
"The Trump administration will not stand by while a hostile foreign power seeks to exploit our freedoms—none of which are afforded to its people—by misleading and corrupting American citizens with lies, spy tradecraft, and other malfeasance as part of the regime’s raison d’être of exporting Marxism, racial resentment, and communist violence across the world," Rubio said.
Rubio—who has falsely claimed that his parents fled communism in Cuba when they actually emigrated during an earlier US-backed dictatorship—added that the new sanctions "make clear that the Trump administration will not tolerate the Cuban regime’s efforts to fund its repression or continue its decadeslong campaign of subversive anti-American activities."
Responding to the fresh sanctions, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez accused Rubio of having a "failed obsession against Cuba" and seeking to "punish Cuban companies with the deliberate purpose of harming our economy and preventing the government of Cuba from guaranteeing basic services to the population, which are already in a critical situation as a result of the blockade."
Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations Ernesto Soberón asked on social media: "What is [Rubio] afraid of? If he's so convinced that the Cuban government is incompetent, why does he need to impose new sanctions that collectively punish the Cuban people and also attempt to prevent Cuba's trade relations with third parties?"
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington, DC-based think tank, accused the US administration of "escalating its lethal and illegal economic aggression against Cuba."
CEPR research associate Pedro Labayen Herrera said in a statement that “these sanctions are the latest move in a more than 60-year US economic siege on Cuba, which has intensified since January’s naval blockade, an overt and illegal act of war."
“By targeting the island’s mining, metals, construction, and trade sectors, the administration will further restrict the Cuban government’s ability to manage a deliberately designed crisis that UN experts recently warned could become a ‘silent Gaza,'" he added.
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly condemned the broader US economic blockade of Cuba 33 times.
The new US measures follow months of escalating aggression against Cuba by the Trump administration, including threats and reported preparations to attack, an oil blockade that critics say is causing the deaths of infants and sick people, and a Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment of former President Raúl Castro for his alleged role in the 1996 shoot-down of planes operated by a hostile US-based counterrevolutionary group following repeated warnings that they had violated Cuban airspace.
The oil blockade has hit especially hard given the January US invasion of Venezuela—which supplied between one-third and half of Cuba's energy needs—and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
The Trump administration also reinstated Cuba on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list, from which former President Joe Biden removed the country before leaving office in 2021. Cuba was initially added to the list during the Reagan administration amid a decadeslong campaign of US-backed Cuban exile terrorism, failed assassination attempts, economic warfare, and covert operations large and small in a futile effort to overthrow the government of longtime revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.
The fresh sanctions follow last month's State Department report baselessly claiming that Cuba aims to "conquer" the United States and is backing “left-wing terrorism on American soil" while using dozens of US civil society groups, activists, journalists, and elected officials to further Havana's supposedly nefarious goals.
“Rather than publishing unfounded, far-fetched claims of a Cuban-led campaign to subvert the United States as a pretext for military action against Havana, Washington should recognize that over half a century of strangulation has failed to bring about regime change," Herrera said on Thursday. "Instead, US policy has crippled the country’s economy and healthcare system, depriving its people of a dignified life and contributing to significant levels of out-migration."
“The Trump administration must lift all sanctions, respect Cuban sovereignty, and engage diplomatically," he added, "or risk further immiserating the Cuban people and widening a crisis that will reverberate throughout the hemisphere."
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What the Corporate Media Never Says In Its Coverage of Cuba
Life in Cuba is full of suffering not because of socialism but because of a 67-year-long blockade by the world’s largest superpower.
Aug 20, 2026
Recently, while listening to an NPR interview with Cuban-American musician Arturo Sandoval, I was reminded of the late political scientist Michael Parenti’s classic text, "Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media."
In his 1986 book, Parenti described a situation that is still relevant 40 years later—when the US fears that another country’s non-capitalistic political model (and its attendant advances in social justice and quality of life) could cause US citizens to question their own system, it regularly imposes an embargo and sanctions against the country. Next, the news media reports on the suffering caused by these policies while, at the same time, avoiding any mention of the embargo and sanctions. Finally, when after years or decades of suffering, the people of this blockaded country take out their anger on the closest target and begin protesting against their government, the US steps in. It places a puppet president in power and pours into the country the money it had withheld throughout the embargo. Then, the media reports on how well everyone is now doing without, once more, acknowledging the oversized role the embargo played in the prior devastation.
In the aforementioned NPR interview, host Scott Simon perfectly perpetuated this model of media complicity by announcing towards the interview’s conclusion, “Arturo Sandoval, I’ve got to put you on the spot a little. You’ve been pretty quiet about politics over the years, but obviously you fled Cuba. When Fidel Castro died, you spoke out about your disdain for his regime. It was ten years ago.” Then, with no historical or even recent context, Simon concluded with, “Cuba seems to be almost worse than ever now.”
With this final declaration in which he erroneously implied a connection between Cuba’s current immiseration and Fidel Castro’s rule, Simon led Sandoval into his response: “Sixty-seven and a half years is way too long, man… The people in Cuba are desperate and hopeless.”
Citizens who are not given the context of the news cannot be engaged participants in the democratic process.
Simon allowed his guest to say this unchallenged as if these decades of desperation and hopelessness are the result of Cuba’s 1959 revolution. To the contrary, in addition to footing the bill for Sandoval’s musical education (he attended the free Cuban National Art School, founded by Fidel Castro), the Cuban Revolution redefined human rights as access for all to free education, free healthcare, low-cost daycare centers, and highly subsidized housing.
The desperation Sandoval referred to is the direct result of the 67-year-old embargo against Cuba imposed by the United States, the longest embargo in the history of the world. Combined with its multitude of supplementary sanctions (more than 200 of which were enacted during Trump’s first term in office), these punitive measures prohibit Cuba from purchasing products, including medicine, manufactured abroad if they contain more than 10% of US-origin components. They restrict US residents’ ability to travel to Cuba. They hinder Cubans residing in the US from wiring money to their families, a common way for immigrants from all parts of the world to supplement the income of relatives back home.
The Cuban embargo has received worldwide condemnation. For more than three decades now, the UN General Assembly has annually presented its members with a resolution to denounce the embargo. Year after year, its 193 member states cast a near-unanimous vote affirming the resolution. The only two countries that consistently vote against it—and in favor of the embargo— are, unsurprisingly, the US and Israel.
Unfortunately, the UN resolution, while a significant show of solidarity, has no authority to end the embargo. As codified by US law, only the US Congress has this power.
In addition and sadly, the suffering caused by the embargo is not a mere result of the blockade but the explicit objective of it as stated in a declassified 1960 government document posted on the National Security Archive’s website and abstracted as follows: “This memo, written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lestor Mallory, provides the original, unvarnished, policy rationale for imposing trade restrictions on Cuba. Fidel Castro’s revolution is quite popular in Cuba, Mallory points out; since there is no effective opposition against him, the only way to undercut Castro’s support is ‘through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.’ Mallory advocates a set of punitive economic actions designed to deny ‘money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.’”
Beyond the embargo and its sanctions, the US designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) contributes to what Sandoval referred to as the Cuban people’s hopelessness and desperation. The partisan political boomerang of the SSOT was initiated by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 for Cuba’s support of Latin American leftist groups. It was removed by Obama in 2015, reinstated by Trump in 2021, symbolically removed by Biden on January 14th, 2025, at the end of his presidency, and again reinstated by Trump on January 20th, 2025, at the start of his second term.
Along with other restrictions, the sponsor-of-terrorism status forbids US international aid organizations, including Food for Peace and the Peace Corps, from offering humanitarian assistance to Cuba. It prohibits Cuba from receiving loans from the World Bank and other international financial institutions. These are loans which could be used for much-needed projects such as an overhaul of the island’s aging electrical grid, which has caused multiple nationwide blackouts over the past two years.
Furthermore, as described by the Washington Office on Latin America, the SSOT “has a chilling effect on businesses, including banking or telecommunications investments that are crucial to promoting the type of transformation essential to expanding freedom on the island.” Ironically, this freedom (ie: the opening of business and economic opportunities) is precisely what the US purports to desire for the Cuban people. And it is this lack of this freedom, which Sandoval said in the somber closing statement of his NPR interview, that prevents him from returning to Cuba and will leave him to “die dreaming” of a homecoming.
At this point in the interview, what Scott Simon didn’t say becomes as, if not more, significant than what he did. It is that, in Fidel Castro’s final two years of life, a sense of hope and a feeling of, yes, freedom pervaded Cuba.
Hope came to Cubans with Obama’s 2014 détente, which, while not a revocation of the embargo [only able to be repealed by Congress], still enabled the US Embassy in Cuba and the Cuban Embassy in the US to reopen for the first time in 50 years. Washington’s rapprochement permitted commercial and direct mail flights between the two countries to be reinstated and for restrictions on remittances to be loosened. This, in turn, allowed Cuban-Americans, like immigrants from other countries, to now easily send money to their families on the island.
Freedom came from an opening of the Cuban economy, from the government’s expanded opportunities for private businesses. Cubans responded enthusiastically, opening record numbers of cafés and restaurants and music and art venues, among other enterprises to which their new American friends, now able to travel freely to Cuba, flocked in record numbers.
It was a boon for both sides—and evidence that another way of engaging with Cuba was possible. Until, that is, Trump was elected at the end of 2016 and, soon thereafter, began systematically shutting everything down once more.
If not for the very real damage it inflicts on the country, the SSOT designation could be considered laughable, as, during all these decades as a supposed sponsor of terrorism, Cuba has remained steadfast in its commitment to a peaceful coexistence with its neighbors near and far. For the past quarter of a century, Cuba’s Latin American Medical School, esteemed for both its size (enrollment-wise, it is considered the largest medical school in the world) and its focus on preventative healthcare, has offered a full-ride, plus a monthly living stipend, for students from low-income communities around the world, including the US.
Additionally, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cuba offered aid workers to the US, although President Bush rebuffed this overture. In the early days of COVID-19, Cuba sent medical brigades to help Italy contain its outbreak. And this was in addition to the doctors Cuba regularly sent to countries in need from Algeria to Honduras to Sri Lanka. Until, that is, in 2025 the US began threatening to deny visas to the leaders of countries accepting assistance from Cuban doctors; and the targeted countries, fearing retribution, terminated their contracts with Cuba.
This past March, as Jamaica’s Cuban doctors headed home following one such termination, hundreds of Jamaicans took to the streets for what they called a “Gratitude Walk.” For three miles, they marched wearing t-shirts reading, “Thank you Cuba for 50 years of medical service” and chanting, “We love Cuba” and “Bring back the doctors.”
Walk participant Rupert Walters, President of the Jamaica-Cuba Friendship Association’s St. Catherine’s chapter and a beneficiary of Cuban care for his prostate cancer, called his government’s decision to cave to US pressure “crazy.” Walters told the Jamaica Observer that he wished the government had “allowed the Cubans to support and give their services to the hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans who can’t afford it,” and warned that, as a result of the medical program termination, Jamaicans would die.
Rather than supporting terrorism, Cuba has long been the target of terrorist attacks by the US government. There was the CIA’s half-century of documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, involving everything from poison pens to exploding cigars.
Less comical and more lethal were terrorist attacks led by Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile and CIA operative. In 1976, 35 years before September 11th, Posada Carriles masterminded the Western Hemisphere’s first act of political terrorism against a civilian flight. His bombing of a Cubana de Aviación airplane killed all 73 passengers, 24 of whom comprised the entirety of the Juvenile Cuban National Fencing team. In the summer of 1997, Posada Carrilles began another bombing campaign, this time targeting Havana hotels, restaurants, and discotheques—and killing an Italian tourist. Finally arrested in Panama in 2000 for attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro at a conference he was attending there, Posada Carrilles later fled to the US, where he was detained for illegal entry and then pardoned by President Bush. In 2018, he died a free man in Miami.
Although Scott Simon didn’t say this in his interview with Arturo Sandoval, the current “worse-than-ever” situation he referenced is due to the US’s oil blockade, initiated by an Executive Order from Trump in January. Under this latest act of economic warfare, tankers trying to deliver petroleum to the island are threatened with tariffs and, if they still attempt to do so, they are chased away by US Coast Guard vessels.
Like the embargo, like the sanctions, like the SSOT status, the fuel blockade has caused widespread suffering for the Cuban people. It impedes access to electricity and also to water, which arrives at most houses in Cuba via an electric pump. It prevents the preservation of not just food but also of medicines that need refrigeration.
Many Cubans now sleep outside, on rooftops or on the Malecón seawall, to escape the sweltering summer heat, made all the more unbearable without the electricity to run their fans. Because electricity (which has been prioritized for hospitals and schools) is now available in most houses for just two hours per day, Cubans must wake up whenever it arrives (even if it is at 3 AM) to do all they couldn’t without it—wash clothes and dishes, cook and bathe. And collect water for the next outage. So, sleep too, has become a casualty of this US-provoked humanitarian crisis, referred to by a group of US Representatives who visited the island in July as a “silent Gaza.”
By engaging in de-contextualized reporting rather than shedding light on the reasons why the current situation is as it is, mainstream US media outlets like NPR do their listeners a grave and dangerous disservice. For, as The Washington Post’s motto warns us, albeit a little more ironically after Jeff Bezos’ purchase of it, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Citizens who are not given the context of the news cannot be engaged participants in the democratic process. Without the full story as to why what is happening in our world is happening, we are rendered powerless to change it. Without our consent, we become cogs in the bulldozer of US interventionism and imperialism.
Life in Cuba is full of suffering not because of socialism but because of a 67-year-long blockade by the world’s largest superpower. In a government now absent of checks and balances, we need to call out the offending media. We need to let them know that we’re paying attention, that we hold them accountable for their lies of omission— and that we demand better.
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The Third Door: How Covert Regime Change Slips Past the War Powers Resolution
Congress can stop a war it can see. It cannot stop one its members are forbidden to describe—and that is now the door the pressure campaign against Cuba has walked through.
Aug 13, 2026
Last December, writing here about unrest in Iran, I had to be careful. We must resist the temptation to treat capability as conspiracy, I wrote, while also resisting the delusion that absence of evidence means absence of action. That caution was owed to readers, because I could point to a history and a capability but not to an operation.
That caution is no longer necessary. In the first week of August, American newspapers reported that the Central Intelligence Agency has established a dedicated Cuba task force—case officers, analysts, cyber operators, specialists in covert influence—whose reported mandate is to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in the hope of pressuring the replacement of officials deemed anti-American with leaders more agreeable to the president's demands. Cuba has been elevated to "Priority 1" in the intelligence community's collection framework, alongside China, Iran, and Russia. Satellites are being re-tasked. The Agency declined to comment.
We are told there are limits: no organized Cuban partners, no authority for lethal operations. We are also told, in the same breath, that the president may modify those authorities at any time.
What is remarkable here is not the operation. Lindsey A. O'Rourke's Covert Regime Change documents 64 covert American attempts to change foreign governments between 1947 and 1989, against six overt ones—a ratio of 10 to one. Only 25 succeeded even by the undemanding measure that an American-backed client took power. Her most damning finding is the one least quoted: States targeted for regime change—especially those that survived the attempt—were more likely to experience civil war or mass killing in the years that followed.
Covert action undertaken to alter the composition or constitutional order of a foreign government should be forbidden.
What is remarkable is that nothing in American law stands in the way—and that the reason has nothing to do with secrecy.
A Statute That Ends Things, and a Statute That Only Reports Them
The War Powers Resolution is not, at bottom, a reporting statute. It is a termination statute. It gives the president 48 hours to report and 60 days to finish, after which he shall terminate the use of the forces concerned unless Congress affirmatively says otherwise. Congressional silence ends the operation. That default is the whole of its design.
Covert action runs under an entirely different law, 50 U.S.C. §3093. There must be a written presidential finding. The intelligence committees must be kept "fully and currently informed." These are real constraints, born of real scandals, and it would be wrong to say Congress is blind.
But §3093 contains no clock, no expiry, and no vote—ever. A finding, once signed and reported, may run indefinitely. Silence continues it. And where a war powers report enters a public record on which any member may act, a finding goes to two committees behind closed doors, sometimes to eight members alone. Those outside may not be told; those inside may not speak. The floor vote that the War Powers Resolution treats as the ordinary constitutional remedy becomes structurally impossible, because a legislature cannot vote on what its members are forbidden to describe.
Then there is the definitional gap, which is the loophole properly so called. The resolution regulates the introduction of "United States Armed Forces" into hostilities. Case officers are not Armed Forces. Identical objective, identical target, identical effect—but a different statute, depending on which badge the operator carries.
I have argued in these pages that economic warfare capable of collapsing a foreign economy should be subject to reporting and time limits comparable to those governing armed force. I still believe it. But I have to report that it would not close this gap. The War Powers Resolution regulates a category of actor. An economic amendment would regulate a category of instrument. Any scheme built on categories will leak, because the executive may always choose the category nobody regulates. Only a rule keyed to effects will hold.
Consent That No One Can Authenticate
In January I argued here that Washington's claims of Venezuelan "cooperation" were null and void, because consent extracted under coercion is not consent. Covert action takes that one step further, and it is worse.
Suppose the task force succeeds. Suppose that some month soon the Cuban leadership is reconstituted, or a concession is made, or an agreement signed on precisely the terms demanded. Who will be able to say who authored it?
Not Congress, which will have seen a finding but not its consequences. Not the United Nations, whose bedrock principle protects a state's freedom to choose its own political and economic system without external coercion. Not the Cuban people, in whose name it would be done. Not the American public, in whose name it was mounted. And not the negotiators themselves—the same agency whose director flew to Havana in May to meet Cuba's interior minister, its intelligence chief, and the intermediary through whom talks are said to run is the agency now tasked with fracturing the leadership those talks would bind.
A settlement whose authorship cannot be established is a settlement no one can rely on—including the party that obtained it. Covert influence aimed at the composition of a foreign government does not merely violate the norm against intervention. It destroys the evidence by which compliance with that norm could ever be judged.
The Trap in the Obvious Remedy
The obvious answer is to regulate: an effects-based trigger reaching any sustained effort to alter a foreign government's composition, whichever agency conducts it; a finding that expires by law unless renewed by recorded committee vote; a path by which a committee can reach the full Congress in closed session.
I proposed exactly that, and then thought better of the framing. A statute that regulates a practice licenses it. Write a clock for operations aimed at foreign governments and you have conceded that such operations are lawfully available—and that concession reaches backward across O'Rourke's 64, converting a record of illegality into the quaint era before the paperwork. This is, not coincidentally, what intelligence services themselves have long wanted: Statutory footing transfers the risk from the officer to the statute. The vocabulary follows on its own. Subversion becomes stabilization. Regime change becomes democratic transition assistance. Fracturing an elite becomes engagement with reform-minded elements.
So the operative provision must be prohibition, not licensing. Covert action undertaken to alter the composition or constitutional order of a foreign government should be forbidden. The trigger, the clock, and the escalation path are then not the scheme but its enforcement—and the governing rule for the intelligence work that legitimately remains: collection, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, counterproliferation.
What Is at Stake in Havana
None of this is abstract in Cuba right now. On August 2 the national grid collapsed for the sixth time this year. On August 3 the restoration itself failed, and it collapsed again. The country's own energy minister said plainly that Cuba has no fuel and expects none in the volumes it needs, and that containers of solar panels, food, and medicines sit held at nearby ports—some destined for children whose medical condition depends on electricity. On August 6, United Nations experts said the humanitarian consequences are unfolding into a full-blown crisis, called the measures incompatible with Article 2 of the Charter, and urged the Security Council and General Assembly to take the matter up as one of international peace and security.
Into that, we have now introduced an effort to fracture a political elite. Whatever one thinks of the Cuban government—and one may think a great deal—an operation of that kind, in a country in that condition, is not an operation with a narrow band of outcomes. It sits adjacent to the conditions in which atrocity becomes possible.
Congress can stop a war it can see. Six months ago I asked in these pages whose job it is when Congress can no longer stop an unauthorized war. The answer keeps narrowing, and the doors keep multiplying. Two have been narrowed. A third stands open, and we have just been told, in the newspaper, that someone has walked through it.
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Is It (Still) Un-American to Care?
I don’t think it’s inherently un-American to care about suffering in Gaza or Cuba. It is just an American expectation to get threatened by the State Department for giving a fuck.
Aug 09, 2026
I initially wrote this piece in 2024 during the student uprisings that took place around the United States. The content was focused on Gaza and the people who made up the movement for Palestine in the belly of the beast. I've rewritten some of it and replaced Gaza with Cuba. The arguments needed no editing at all.
In March, a delegation traveled to Cuba to bring medical aid to Cubans who were suffering under the fuel blockade imposed on them by the United States of America. In recent months, people and organizations who took part, including my own organization, have been targeted by the Trump administration via investigations, subpoenas, and threatening reports such as Marco Rubio's 100-page report "The Capital of 21st Century Communism." In this report, people who bring aid to Cuba or merely speak out against the unilateral policy of starvation that the US implements upon Cuba are accused of being foreign agents and linked to terrorism. People in the comment section of our videos echo the smears because if the accusation is coming from someone powerful like Marco Rubio, it must be true.
I’ve seen them suggest that CODEPINK and other organizers are acting on behalf of someone other than ourselves and perhaps paid to do so. And Rubio has even gone on record saying that the people he is targeting might even be "unpaid" agents of Cuba, which just sounds like he might be going after people for simply having their own opinions that are different from his.
Cuba has dealt with rolling blackouts, fuel, food, and medicine shortages as well as a looming threat of US invasion or attacks as threatened by the Trump administration. People are not getting the medicine they need or the nutrition, which can and will lead to a slow genocide in Cuba if the US starvation policy stays intact. That is what people are so against: the deliberate slow starvation of 11 million human beings, just 90 miles away from our own border. This recent escalation comes after 60 years of aggressive US policy toward Cuba that has punished its people for pursuing an economic and political system that strays from the US model of capitalist exploitation. Cuba, once existing as a playground for the wealthy elite of the US, is now a representation that not only can a small country overthrow US-backed puppets like Fulgencio Batista, but also pursue socialism.
How do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes the dominant narrative about anti-war activists?
The accusations of being foreign agents or affiliated with terrorist groups aren’t new or innovative accusations levied against anti-war activists. This narrative has been used since there were wars and people against them. So there are a few questions to be asked: Is it so un-American for regular people (not policymakers) to care about the disastrous loss of human life? Who is levying these accusations that some malign foreign entity pays (or doesn't pay) Americans who care about death and destruction to do so? And lastly, how do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes the dominant narrative about anti-war activists?
Is It So Un-American to Care About the Loss of Human Life?
There have been massive resistance movements to every single war, and whether politicians like it or not, many of the people who have participated have been Americans. If it’s un-American to disagree with our government, then we might as well pack it all up and call it a day on this whole democracy schtick. The accusation of being foreign agents or terrorist sympathizers denies the basic trajectory of social life at this present moment. In the United States, our neighbors are truly from all over the world, and humans are social animals. If we are, enjoyably, living our lives, then we will meet our neighbors, we will become their friends, and we will care deeply for them. Friends introduce each other to other friends, and we learn to care for people who live in places we have never been. Some forces seek to squash that diversity and others use it merely symbolically without accepting the fact that it might challenge who our country does or does not bomb. But both forces use the “foreign agent” accusation to destroy the lives of activists and squash movements into the curb until they have no teeth anymore. It has happened over and over again.
If we move ahead with the idea that it is not inherently un-American to care about massacres or blockades, what we are left with is that the accusation is a tool to get everyone to shut the hell up about what the pigs in power are doing to our families and friends far, far away from here. Or in some cases, right here at home when some of the most powerful people in the Trump administration launch First Amendment chilling investigations into regular people to attempt to stop them from talking about the massacres our country facilitates.
If the peace movement was such a well-funded foreign apparatus, we would never have a war ever again. We would never have blockades and embargoes that starve people to death. The war industry is far better funded than those of us in opposition to it.
So, I don’t think it’s inherently un-American to care about suffering. It is just an American expectation to get threatened by the State Department for giving a fuck. And the inverse is true: it’s also quintessentially American to remain apathetic to the massacres and not utter a word about them and be awarded some temporary comfort. For example, the quiet may have no subpoena in the mail this week or next. If you fall into the latter category, congratulations on your unthreatening inboxes, but I have some bad news for you: One day our country might do something that will anger you. Or, god forbid, your children become adults who decide to care. Then you or your children will become vulnerable to the same accusation and subsequent treatment, including repression, arrest, and murder (like we've seen in the cases of Alex Pretti and Renée Good). Unless we stop reproducing this narrative about protesters at this very critical moment, disagreeing with the government will continue to get you investigated, thrown in jail, or your life ruined by red scare tactics the US government continues to rinse and repeat.
Who Is Levying These Accusations That Some Malign Foreign Entity Pays Americans Who Care About Death and Destruction to Do So?
The short answer is the American elite. The politicians and rich have a vested interest in keeping us at war and attempting to drive communist countries like Cuba into the gutter. The US is the largest weapons dealer in the world, and the companies that make the weapons are the biggest donors to many of our politicians. Politicians are bought and sold by the war profiteers, but also by private equity that sees investment opportunities in Cuba. The ruling class has done a great job of making war a profitable industry for themselves. So they built up militarized domestic surveillance to protect the war industry from dissent. If the accusation of being foreign agents scared people into silence about what our country was doing to Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on, why wouldn’t this repression tactic work for what’s happening in Cuba? Besides the fact that the tactic has worked in the past, there’s also a part of it that might be a telling projection: that because the elite need to get paid for their morals and opinions, maybe everyone else does too.
So, their tactic of accusing people of being terrorists or foreign agents works at repressing the masses. They’ve learned this over and over again. Can we say the same, that we’ve learned the same lesson over and over again? It appears that we cannot. But we have the opportunity to do things differently right now.
How Do We, in the Greatest Interest of Preventing Future Wars, Stop Reproducing This Accusation So Much That It Becomes How We All View Anti-War Activists?
The longer we go without challenging this narrative, the longer it gets passed down to the war resisters after us. We don’t remember the US wars on Vietnam or Iraq kindly. So why do we still write off the people who resisted those wars? Maybe a lot of the Vietnam War protesters were communists, but they were also right when it mattered. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with the war in Vietnam now. Over 2 million Vietnamese people were killed by our government. It is long over. It only matters if you’re right when it’s actually happening or before it happens, not when the blood is already dried on the pavement.
And as it so happens, being a communist might be the most American thing you can do as more and more people feel like everyone around them somehow got the short end of the stick. Who has the long end of the stick? We’ve never met them.
Americans happen to have their own opinions, and many of us are not paid to have them. You can tell that is a fact by how few of us have healthcare. If the peace movement was such a well-funded foreign apparatus, we would never have a war ever again. We would never have blockades and embargoes that starve people to death. The war industry is far better funded than those of us in opposition to it.
If you ever disagree with the war machine, the titles of “foreign agent” or “terrorist sympathizer” will be waiting for you at your doorstep. It’s really just a matter of time.
Some of us can shake these accusations off. Two years ago, we all saw a photo of a young Palestinian girl with her face falling apart and her father trying to press her back together. We decided her life was worth more than any job or future opportunity we could ever lose from saying something. Her life was worth more than any threat I could ever receive—but the stakes don’t need to be so high for us to stand up for what’s right if we collectively decide right now that they don’t need to be. We can get it right when it comes to Cuba before it's too late. Power is reproduced in every single one of us. The accusations stick every time we don’t refute them on behalf of others. The accusations work every time it isn’t shot down or called out. So we must.
I am proud to be the national co-director of CODEPINK. I am called a foreign agent or terrorist sympathizer every time I post about a child being murdered in Gaza. Or that I don't agree with a policy of collective punishment in Cuba. Or when I dare suggest that the United States shouldn’t be stoking a war with China. The US and China both have nukes. I don’t have to be paid off by a foreign government to have the opinion that a confrontation between two nuclear powers would be a disaster.
Right now, CODEPINK, along with other organizations, are the subject of a smear campaign to discredit our work toward peace. We were accused of being funded by a deep and large web of interests that led back to the Chinese Communist Party, and now we are accused of being agents of the Cuban government. I am sorry to our haters and clickbait journalists, but that is just completely untrue. It is a disrespect to the fearless leadership of women in North America who don’t like blockades being imposed in our name and to our thousands of donors who make our work possible. Now, as the Trump administration escalates its hybrid war on Cuba and people are standing up for what they believe in, the same accusation is coming down on each and every one of us who happens to care about the 11 million Cubans who will go into this fall and winter without electricity, or without the medicines they need to survive. If you ever disagree with the war machine, the titles of “foreign agent” or “terrorist sympathizer” will be waiting for you at your doorstep. It’s really just a matter of time. If we want history to stop repeating itself, if we want to stop the senseless slaughter carried out by our government, we have to stop falling for the same tricks.
When the American elite make the inevitable pivot, and start telling you what country to hate: See through it. And when they start pointing fingers at people who think we shouldn’t go to war—ask if their accusations are actually admissions about their own integrity. You are not bought to care about Cuban life; your comrades aren’t either.
This moment, and every moment of resistance that comes after we are gone, requires us to learn this lesson and fast. The movement and the people sympathetic to it must stand up for themselves and reject the notion that it is fundamentally un-American to care about people or despise massacres.
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'Bay of Pigs Reloaded': New CIA Task Force to Further Destabilize Cuba Revealed
The revelation comes as the State Department "has been on a full-throttle media blitz," noted one writer, "painting Cuba as an espionage superpower and a threat to US national security."
Aug 05, 2026
After months of President Donald Trump threatening a US takeover of Cuba and ramping up a decadeslong economic assault of the island, The New York Times revealed Wednesday that the Central Intelligence Agency created a related task force, "setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political, and leadership changes."
"In 1960, the CIA established an earlier Cuba task force, whose members oversaw the failed, agency-backed invasion of Cuba the next year known as the Bay of Pigs," the newspaper noted. "The people briefed on the new task force said its mandate is more limited: to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in hope of pressuring the Cubans to replace perceived anti-American hard-liners with more practical leaders more amenable to Mr. Trump's demands."
Despite the anonymous sources' claims about the differences from over a half-century ago, Eva Golinger, an American lawyer who wrote multiple books about former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, simply responded, "Bay of Pigs reloaded."
The Times article—on which the CIA declined to comment—came a day after Politico reported that "the US has increased its intelligence assets in Cuba in recent months as it pushes the country's communist regime to reform or fall from power, according to two people familiar with the Trump administration's plans for the island."
The agency also declined to comment on Politico's piece, which pointed out that "US military operations are often preceded by increased American intelligence activity. CIA efforts to track the whereabouts of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro reportedly played a critical role this January in the successful US operation to capture him."
Sharing Politico's coverage on social media, Andrés Pertierra, a Cuba historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that it is "hard to say at this point to what degree this is theater aimed at rattling the cage in Havana or performing strength to Miami, on the one hand, or some kind of prelude to an actual escalation, on the other, given recent months of warnings of escalation that went nowhere."
Enrique "Ric" Prado, a Cuban exile who served in various posts at the CIA, "is convinced that Washington is preparing a definitive blow against the island regime," El País reported early Wednesday. He predicted, "Cuba is the next apple to fall from the tree."
This week's reporting followed the July release of a "McCarthyite" US Department of State document that was widely decried as an "attack on Americans' constitutional rights to free speech and assembly," as well as an attempt to justify an invasion of Cuba, where the Trump administration has fueled a humanitarian crisis.
"For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States," the department's report begins, "that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history."
Promoting the publication on social media, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime advocate of regime change on the island—claimed his department was "exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country."
During a Sunday interview with Fox News host Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, Rubio repeated claims from the report and called the island nation, about 90 miles south of Florida and home to roughly 10 million people, "an influence and espionage superpower." His comments drew criticism from Democrats in Congress, the Cuban foreign minister, and other experts.
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Marco 'McCarthy' Rubio Is Wrong on Cuba and Where 'Terrorism' Is Coming From
Those who challenge and protest US policies are not terrorists, and they are certainly not paid by other governments.
Aug 05, 2026
Thin-skinned and heavy-handed, the Trump administration apparently feels like it is being singled out by those who dissent from its policies. As a result, Trump appointees are taking drastic "McCarthy" tactics to stop dissent.
In less than one month, alleging that dissent and protests are part of attempts of other governments “to overthrow the government of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sponsored two major initiatives to frighten those who oppose the Trump administration's policies. The first salvo was orchestrating a conference with 60 countries participating over “Threats From Left-Wing Terrorists.” The second was the report on Cuba that alleged virtually every group that has ever visited Cuba is paid by the Cuban government.
No One is Paid to Protest—If One Is NOT Outraged Then You Aren’t Watching
These allegations of paid protest and travelling on the dime of another country are unfounded, untrue, and fly in the face of the history of protests in the US and travel by US citizens to see the effects of US polices on other countries.
President Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy, including the disastrous attacks on Iran as a favor to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli war machine; attacks domestically cutting health and education; horrific treatment of migrants; daily outlandish statements on just about every subject; and disregard for facts in virtually every issue all provide good reasons for protests by outraged US citizens.
I have not been paid by any country to protest US policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid.
No one needs to be paid to be outraged!!!
Dissent is Not Illegal and Is Not Paid by Other Countries
In particular, Secretary of State and National Security adviser Marco Rubio, who has authored the latest "McCarthy" report to quell opposition to illegal, immoral policies of his department and the Trump administration in general, seems to have lost his grasp on the history of dissent in the US.
From his 15 years in the US Senate, he should remember that many of each administration's domestic and international policies have been lawfully and non-violently protested by US citizens in the US Congress.
Having been a part of many protests since I resigned from the State Department in March 2003 in opposition to a war policy, President George W. Bush's war on Iraq, I know that these protests are NOT a part of attempts of other governments to “overthrow the government of the United States,” but are legitimate shows of concern about specific policies. Rubio’s allegations of other countries’ influence in these protests are unfounded and untrue.
I was not paid by a foreign government to resign. I resigned because I felt the war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, and a dangerous action jeopardizing the national security of the United States.
I have not been paid by any country to protest US policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid. Protest is a legitimate, time-consuming act of outrage about a policy that people use to bring attention to the policy, and hopefully effect change in the policy.
Marco “McCarthy” Rubio’s Tactics: Blame the Left When the Right Has Violently Attacked the US Government
The first attack against legitimate protest came in the US Department of State sponsored conference on “Far-Left Terrorism” held in Washington, DC in July 2026, where Rubio and White House pit bull Stephen Miller harangued the representatives of 66 nations about terrorists from the left wanting to overthrow the US government.
In his opening statement Rubio railed: “This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called left-wing extremism a growing threat aimed at “the overthrow of our system and form of government” that officials previously failed to sufficiently address. Miller railed: “We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.”
A White House press release stated, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
Oops, Trump and Rubio Forget to Mention the Violent Attempt at Overthrow of the US Electoral Process by the Trump-Inspired, Right-Wing January 6 Mob
Of course, neither Rubio nor Miller mentioned President Trump’s pardon of the over 1,500 persons who did try to violently overthrow the United States electoral process on January 6, 2021 as they attacked the Capitol police and broke into and destroyed many offices in the US Capitol.
The attempted overthrow of the 2020 election by seeking to nullify the election results through lawsuits in 62 federal and state courts was attempted by Trump’s loyal personal lawyers including the current acting US Attorney General and head of the US Department of Justice Todd Blanche and disgraced and disbarred lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Their cases of election fraud were stopped by rulings in all 62 federal and state lawsuits that no election fraud had occurred.
Rubio and the State Department’s Untruthful, Dishonest Report About Cuba and Paid Protesters
The most recent and most ludicrous allegations of left-wing violence and protests being funded by other countries is in Secretary of Rubio's 10- page report on “Cuba: the Capitol of 21st Century Communism.” Rubio accuses the National Network on Cuba, National Lawyers Guild, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, the People's Forum, IFCO/Pastors For Peace, and the Democratic Socialists of America of being paid by the Cuban government whose goal, the report states, has been for 60 years the overthrow of the US government.
Talk about turning the facts on their heads! As is well-documented, 13 successive US presidential administrations since 1959—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama (first term when CIA policies were still in effect, but changing in Obama’s second term with diplomatic recognition), Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2—have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government in the 60-plus years of its existence.
The current attempt of overthrow of the Cuban government by the United States is centered on the brutal total blockade of fuel going to Cuba, which has left Cuban citizens without electricity for operations in hospitals, for food preparation, for the ability to conduct normal life activities. Making life so miserable for the Cuban citizenry that they overthrow their government would fulfill the longstanding hopes of Cuban-American Rubio.
Rubio Is Not Honest About His Background as a Cuban American
Marco Rubio has been less than forthright about his heritage as a Cuban American in his quest for the overthrow of the Cuban government.
Marco Rubio, “Mr. Righteous against birthright citizenship,” is a "birthright citizen" born in the US of noncitizen parents who had immigrated in 1956 from Cuba under the Batista dictatorship, not under the 1959 revolutionary government.
Marco Rubio, “Mr. Tough on illegal immigrants,” ignores that his own grandfather entered the US illegally and was ordered to be deported but was saved from deportation by an amnesty during the Cuban missile crisis.
Despite these brutal, heavy-handed attempts to silence us, dissent is spreading to regular citizens.
Marco Rubio, “Mr. Kill the Boat Drug Runners of the Caribbean,” disregards that his own brother-in-law was convicted of drug running and his sister implicated but never charged.
Marco Rubio, “Mr. I Know All About Cuba Because I Am Cuban American,” has been to Cuba only once—where in Cuba did he go? A few hours at the US prison on the U. Naval base at Guantánamo.
No doubt, more will come in the next two years as Rubio, Miller, and others in the administration seem to think they can get away with outrageous bullying of individuals and organizations that do not agree with them and that challenge them in non-violent ways, in contrast to the January 6 gang.
In particular, there are always protests against the horrific effects of brutal sanctions that the US government uses to make life so difficult for citizens of other countries that they will overthrow their own governments, whether it be Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, or Nicaragua.
Israel’s Paid Influence on US Citizen Perceptions Seems to Be OK With Rubio
However, Rubio no doubt is thinking that since his buddies in the Netanyahu government have paid Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, millions of dollars in a specific program to influence US public opinion to stop the massive decline in Israel’s “likability,” that other countries have paid off US persons to work clandestinely on the same scale.
Parscale's firm was hired by Israel for $6 million in September 2025 and then signed a $15 million contract with Israeli firm Havas to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel according to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Parscale and his team sent conservative influencers suggested positive language about Israel for posts on social media sites such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. The influencers are then compensated based on how many “likes” each post gets from readers.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has dramatically increased spending on influence operations. Earlier this year, Israel increased by four times its “public diplomacy” influence budget from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026.
But even The Times of Israel says it’s too late for a “face lift” as a Pew Research Center poll reported that 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably after Israel has committed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza; pillaged and plundered homes, farms, animals in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian West Bank; destroyed southern Lebanon; and got the Trump administration up to its neck in the war on Iran.
Keep Challenging Illegal, Immoral, and Criminal Policies
The two recent major attempts of the Trump administration to quell dissent show how serious challenging illegal, immoral, and criminal policies has become and how important it is that we push back hard against these attempts intimidating citizens to silence their dissent.
However, despite these brutal, heavy-handed attempts to silence us, dissent is spreading to regular citizens. In a recent letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper Honolulu Star Advertiser, which serves a large US military population, a resident of Hawaii summarized the challenge very well: “The true domestic enemy includes those who monopolize political and economic power. The real enemy includes individuals who misinform, threaten, and disenfranchise the less powerful. The true enemy are those who are antidemocratic, have little or no concern regarding the welfare of others, and enrich themselves, family, and a few friends at the expense of the general population.”
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