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US Revolutionaries Had 1 Huge Advantage: They Didn’t Have to Fight Off the US
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
Jul 05, 2026
More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.
Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?
The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.
In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.
After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.
In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”
After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its cradle."
By the time the Reds had won, Russia had been at war for eight years, and the country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. According to United Nations data, in 1920 Russian life expectancy was a mere 20.5 years, as compared with 55.4 years in the US.
In other cases, the US targeted socialists or reformers who had gained power and sought egalitarian change through democratic systems. In Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, the US instigated and backed coups which overthrew democratically elected leaders—Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran—and installed murderous dictatorships.
In Indonesia, the US conspired to overthrow President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence, and eliminate his communist supporters. In The Jakarta Method…the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins explains:
In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million of their own countrymen, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).
The US Embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and, Bevins says, “handed them over to the army, so that these people could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list.”
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism. For example, after the French Revolution in 1789, armies from Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and others, aided by a revolt in Western France led by the Catholic Church, fought to destroy the revolutionary government and reinstitute the monarchy.
With the support of and extreme sacrifices from the French people, the Revolutionaries managed to beat all of them back, but were unable to return to the democratic system the Revolution had originally established. The Revolution ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, establishing a dictatorship.
America’s Founding Fathers were brilliant, but in establishing a new government they had a huge advantage that few revolutionaries of the past century have had—they didn’t have to fight America’s attempts to destroy it.
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The United States' Long War on Cuba
A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty.
May 15, 2026
In recent weeks and months, Washington has intensified its long-running campaign of collective punishment against the Cuban people. Escalating sanctions have further tightened the noose of a punitive US blockade that has strangled the island for more than half a century. The resulting “energy starvation” has deepened a manufactured crisis, threatening Cubans’ access to food, water, healthcare, fuel, electricity, and other basic human rights and needs, while intensifying the broader assault on the island’s sovereignty and development.
Since 2017, when the first Trump administration began dismantling the limited normalization measures introduced under former President Barack Obama, Cuba has once again been subjected to a regime of “maximum pressure” economic warfare. The consequences have been severe. These policies have degraded material conditions across the island, accelerated the exodus of more than 1 million Cubans, and imposed disproportionate suffering on the country’s most vulnerable populations.
This economic weapon, wielded by the ruling elites of the world’s largest financial and military power, has exacted particularly devastating consequences on mothers and children. During this period, the infant mortality rate rose from 4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025. Put plainly, an estimated 1,800 Cuban infants died during these years who would have survived absent Washington’s intensified criminal sanctions. This is but one stark measure of the blockade’s profound brutality and inhumanity.
The only “crime” of these children, like that of countless other Cubans, was being born in a country that continues to insist on its right to determine its own political and economic future outside the structures of hemispheric domination the United States has sought to impose across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider world. The infliction of such suffering has never been incidental to such policies. It has been, and remains, a central feature.
It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege.
The same has been true since 1959, as Washington has pursued a singular, near-fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neocolonial shackles it once imposed on the island. Its aim has been not only to undermine Cuba’s social transformation and internationalist commitments, but to extinguish the example the revolution represented: that an alternative to US hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment was possible.
So despite recent threats to “take” Cuba, such rhetoric cannot be understood in isolation, nor should it obscure a fundamental reality: A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty from a Washington-backed lawless order that has sought to punish Cuba for its defiance and refusal to submit meekly to the dictates of empire.
Cuba Under the Shadow of US Empire
Cuba’s independence has long been imperiled by its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. Situated 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the island occupied a central place within the US imperial imagination. Throughout the 19th century, Washington elites viewed Cuba not as a to-be sovereign nation, but as an inevitable extension of their commercial and geopolitical ambitions, a “crown jewel” destined to be drawn into Washington’s orbit.
The opportunity arrived in 1898. Seizing upon Cuba’s nearly victorious war for independence from Spain, the US intervened not to end empire in the hemisphere, but rather to inherit it. Washington presented its action as a selfless mission to secure Cuban liberation. But for many across the region, the contradictions were unmistakable. The US, itself forged in the crucible of empire, with all the violence and exploitation that project entailed, went to Cuba not to secure freedom, but to replace Madrid with Washington as the imperial metropole of the Americas.
As early as 1829, Simón Bolívar warned that “the United States seemed destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.” Decades later, Cuban revolutionary José Martí issued a similar denunciation. In his 1891 essay "Our America," he called for “common cause” among oppressed peoples and warned against the threat of subordination to the rising power to the north. Martí also championed self-sufficiency over integration into an unequal global capitalist system, insisting that Cuba must “make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine!” Having spent years in exile in New York, Martí sharpened that critique shortly before his death in 1895, writing “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”
History would soon vindicate these words. As the United States extended its “Manifest Destiny” to foreign shores, it repeatedly intervened across the hemisphere, seeking to transform it into a de facto protectorate. In doing so, Washington consistently sided with the interests of capital and local elites over the demands for popular sovereignty. In the decades that followed, the US invaded countries throughout the region, overthrowing democratic governments, crushing revolutionary movements, and backing brutal dictatorships.
In Cuba, this took the form of three lengthy military occupations spanning half of the island’s first 24 years of “independence,” from 1898-1902, 1906-1909, and 1917-1922. In each case, the objective was to uphold the neocolonial order established during the first occupation and rooted in US economic interests. Under this restrictive framework, the Cuban government was denied control over its foreign relations and domestic economic policy, compelled to cede territory to the US military, and forced to accept Washington’s unilateral right of intervention.
By the 1920s, this relationship had produced a profound dependence on exports, mainly sugar, to the United States while fostering a deeply corrupt system incapable of responding to the needs and aspirations of the Cuban people. The island’s land remained concentrated in the hands of American corporations and a domestic collaborationist aristocracy, while the state invested more heavily in repression than social development, constructing more barracks than schools. With the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of the sugar economy upon which the country had been made dependent, popular discontent only intensified.
By 1933, the government of Gerardo Machado, which promised to transform Cuba into an island of stability for American investment while violently suppressing nationalist and anti-imperialist currents in Cuban society, had become untenable. Amid mounting unrest, Machado was deposed, and a revolutionary coalition under Ramón Grau San Martín emerged, seeking to challenge Cuba’s semi-colonial status. But the United States refused to recognize it. The resulting instability created conditions for the rise of one of the more conservative figures within the anti-Machado coalition, army officer Fulgencio Batista, who in 1934 deposed the short-lived government and consolidated de facto power in his own hands with the backing of Washington.
The Roots of the Cuban Revolution
Batista would directly or indirectly pull the political strings in Cuba for much of the next quarter century. Though his earlier rule adopted a more populist posture, culminating in his election to the presidency from 1940 to 1944, life improved little for Cubans. Corruption and dependence on foreign capital remained entrenched. And by 1952, Batista had seized power outright in a military coup, inaugurating an authoritarian regime backed by increased state violence.
It was Batista’s rise, coupled with decades of economic disparities, political repression, and social neglect, that created conditions that were ripe for revolution. Among those preparing to contest the suspended elections that year was a young lawyer named Fidel Castro. Batista’s closure of even the limited avenues for democratic change lent weight to John F. Kennedy’s later observation that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around.
Castro’s first revolutionary assault came soon after, with the attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. Though the attack failed, Castro’s arrest and trial gave him the opportunity to defend not his innocence, but the legitimacy of and need for revolution, delivering a two-hour speech that condemned the island’s entrenched inequalities and the regime that sustained them.
The state imprisoned Castro and his fellow revolutionaries before commuting their sentences under popular pressure in 1955, after which they went into exile. From Mexico, joined by Che Guevara, they began plotting their return to Cuba and the overthrow of the regime. By late 1956, they had landed in Cuba and launched their insurgency from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Just two years later, Batista fled the country on New Year’s Day 1959, carrying with him as much as $300 million in siphoned state funds and ill-gotten gains amassed at the expense of the Cuban people, while leaving behind the ruins of a regime stained with the blood of as many as 20,000 Cubans.
Counterrevolution in the Caribbean
In 1959, the new leadership inherited a desiccated country picked over by the buzzards of foreign capital and a corrupted local elite. The Cuban revolutionaries set out to overcome these conditions and construct a more just social order, one capable of guaranteeing a basic standard of living long denied to the Cuban population through the misappropriation of the island’s wealth and resources.
The earliest measures included agrarian reform, universal education, a national literacy campaign, expanded healthcare, urban reforms that opened pathways to homeownership for working-class Cubans, and anti-discrimination laws aimed at dismantling entrenched racial hierarchies. Crucially for the trajectory of US-Cuban relations, the revolution also nationalized parasitic foreign-owned and privatized industries.
The new Cuban government was initially met with a degree of popular appeal and favorable media coverage in the United States, further amplified by Fidel Castro’s April 1959 visit to the country, during which he sought to explain the revolution to American audiences. While in Washington, Castro even met with Vice President Richard Nixon, but the Eisenhower administration quickly soured on the revolutionary government and soon resolved to see it fail.
The concern was not Cuba itself, but what the revolution might represent. As State Department official J.C. Hill warned that year, “there are indications that if the Cuban Revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.”
By October 1960, that decision had effectively been made with the imposition of a blockade on the island. The logic underpinning this economic declaration of war was made explicit in a memo by State Department official Lester Mallory. Recognizing that Castro retained widespread popular support, Mallory concluded that the most effective means of undermining him was the deliberate immiseration of the Cuban people. The memo called for the denial of “money and supplies” to the island in order to produce “hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”
In April 1961, Washington escalated its campaign by backing a direct military assault on the island. Yet the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion did little to temper the obsession with unseating Castro. In the aftermath, consensus hardened across the Kennedy administration that “US policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro.” What followed was an expansive campaign of covert warfare involving sabotage, assassination plots, and support for anti-communist exiles.
Among the proposals considered were plans to manufacture consent for military escalation through false provocations. One suggestion was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area… pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States… [which] would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” Other proposals called for false flag attacks on the US navy and the shooting down of a civilian airliner that would then be blamed on the Cuban government.
This single-minded fixation did little to advance US objectives. Instead, it pushed Cuba further toward the Soviet Union, which offered the island an economic and political lifeline in the face of Washington’s blockade and escalating campaign of destabilization. It was within this context that Castro declared the Marxist-Leninist character of the Cuban Revolution in 1961. The relentless threats to the island also fostered a profound and understandable sense of siege within the Cuban government itself.
Ultimately, Washington’s Cuba policy, combined with what Kennedy privately described as the “goddamned dangerous” deployment of US missiles in Turkey, helped create the conditions for the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust and revealing the extent to which the US was willing to risk a senseless, largely self-imposed global catastrophe in defense of the maintenance of its empire.
The Persistent “Threat” of Example
Despite this long war against Cuba, the Cuban government and people have not abandoned their revolutionary project. They have continued to build socialism and a new social order toward what Che Guevara described as the construction of “new [people]”: human beings whose motivations, commitments, and social relations are not governed by opportunistic self-interest at the expense of others, but by solidarity and a shared sense of collective humanity.
Cuba has consistently sought to demonstrate this commitment on the world stage. One of Fidel Castro’s earliest acts of foreign policy was the support of those seeking to liberate the Dominican Republic from the brutal US-backed dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. In the decades that followed, Cuban soldiers and advisers would play major roles in liberation struggles across Africa, including in Algeria, the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name.
Cuba’s foreign interventions proved especially consequential in the struggle against South African apartheid and white minority rule in Southern Africa. It was this material solidarity that led Nelson Mandela to declare during his 1991 visit to Havana that “the Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the peoples of Africa,” traveling to Cuba shortly after his release from prison.
But Cuba’s principal export to the Third World has not been bombs to take lives, as in the case of the United States. It has sent doctors to provide life. Since 1960, Cuba has dispatched more than 600,000 medical professionals to over 160 countries. In doing so, Cuba has advanced not only the principle and practice that healthcare is a human right, but a vision of education and foreign policy rooted in both science and conscience.
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around. It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege. It is not a sponsor of terrorism, but the victim of sustained US aggression.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name. Cuba, like all those confronting US empire, deserves not the “freedom” of the grave that Washington has so often offered the world, but a true freedom rooted in justice, self-determination, and respect for human life and dignity.
We must therefore demand an end to the blockade on Cuba. We must reject any further military escalation. We must call for Cuba’s removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list. And we must support the restoration of Cuban sovereignty over the occupied territory at Guantánamo Bay.
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In Cuba, US Media Only Films the Darkness
The real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel.
May 02, 2026
When the lights go out in Havana, the foreign cameras arrive to film the darkness.
They come for the blackout glow: candles in apartment windows, families sleeping on balconies, mothers fanning infants through another airless night. They come for the line outside the pharmacy, the bus that never comes, the refrigerator gone warm.
They come for the darkness.
A recent CBS segment on Cuba offered viewers a familiar script: a “failed” island, an aging revolution, refugees in Florida, and Washington once again contemplating what to do with the place 90 miles away. But the segment was also built on an omission so large it swallowed the truth: that while these cameras speak of shortages and collapse, babies are dying under a policy designed to create both.
If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?
A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found that the expansion of US sanctions beginning in 2017 was likely the primary cause of a dramatic rise in infant mortality in Cuba. According to the report, Cuba’s infant mortality rate surged by 148% from 2018 to 2025. Had the rate remained stable, approximately 1,800 babies who died during those years would likely still be alive.
Read that again. Babies.
The report links the rise to the tightening of unilateral US coercive measures under the first Donald Trump administration, the continuation of most of those measures under Joe Biden, and further escalation under the second Trump administration. Instead of telling that story, prime-time segments like CBS recycle Cold War clichés.
In this segment, people are invited to remember prerevolutionary Cuba as a lost paradise. But beyond the casino lights were cane cutters; domestic workers; rural families without doctors; children without schools; Black Cubans denied the full rights, dignity, and opportunities the government claimed to promise; workers, surviving in an economy where much of the wealth flowed upward. For many Cubans, the revolution was a rupture with dependency.
It is common in US media to shrink the Cuban Revolution into one beard, one speech, one man. As if millions of lives, shaped by inequality, dictatorship, and foreign domination, could be reduced to nothing more than a personality cult. Fidel Castro was central to Cuba’s history, but so were peasants who wanted land, teachers who crossed mountains to teach literacy, doctors who stayed in poor neighborhoods, workers who believed sovereignty meant something more than a flag.
Like any other country, Cuba has real internal problems. Bureaucracy exists. Economic errors exist. Frustration is real. Emigration is real. And yet, these realities are routinely seized upon by Washington as the ready-made justification for intervention, pressure, and policies that deepen the very conditions they claim to condemn.
For decades, the United States has built an external wall around the island brick by brick. Sanctions. Financial penalties. Shipping restrictions. Fuel pressure. Banking obstacles. Threats against companies that trade. Punishments for third countries. Obstacles to medicine, parts, credit, investment, and entrepreneurs. Policy papers described the logic openly generations ago: Create hardship, provoke desperation, generate political unrest.
This is where media like CBS plays a critical role by showing the suffering while obscuring the system that produces it. By rendering US policy as background noise rather than as an active force shaping the very reality being filmed. And this is not an isolated editorial choice. It is a pattern.
But when infant deaths rise sharply during a period of intensified external strangulation, honesty demands more than repeating those talking points. It requires naming cause and responsibility. And it requires asking a more uncomfortable question: If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?
You don’t spend decades trying to suffocate something that poses no alternative. Why isolate, sanction, and punish a model you believe is irrelevant? Unless the fear is not that it will fail. Unless the fear is that it might, even with all its contradictions, suggest a different way of organizing society. One where people are not reduced to clients, markets, or consumers to be captured, but honored as human beings to be nourished, protected, and allowed to flourish.
When I walked through Havana during a blackout, I saw neighbors calling across courtyards, playing dominoes by candlelight. Someone on the corner had a speaker with half a battery and enough music for three buildings. Two young people kissed along the Malecón. Someone cursed the government. Someone cursed the blockade. Someone cursed both. Someone laughed. I saw human beings remain stubbornly human.
Why does CBS not cover that? Because they film the darkness. But the real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel, the policy that constricted the hospital, the silence that normalized preventable deaths, and the infants whose names will never appear in the broadcast.
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The US War on Cuba's Doctors
The US is forcing countries to end decades-long relationships with Cuba to further isolate the island from the world, all at the expense of the access and quality of healthcare for millions of people.
Apr 04, 2026
“Cuban eye doctors in Jamaica are the only reason why my grandmother didn’t go fully blind in one eye after she got a botched surgery. The work they’ve done for rural and poor Jamaicans is immeasurable,” wrote a Twitter user last week after the first set of Cuban doctors and nurses left Jamaica.
Two weeks ago, hundreds of Jamaicans marched in a “gratitude walk” to thank Cuba for the 50 years of medical solidarity that they have received. Meanwhile, others on the island have been reportedly rushing to get eye treatment at clinics before Cuban doctors were set to depart. A few weeks ago in Honduras, people were in tears as they applauded and thanked Cuban doctors for their years of service, particularly in providing free eye surgeries. If this is clearly contrary to the interests of people, why are all Cuban doctors, nurses, biomedical engineers, and technicians leaving?
They are not leaving because these countries want them to, but because the United States is forcing them to.
Last year, the United States threatened to cancel US visas for leaders of countries that have Cuban doctors working in them, as part of a decades-long campaign of aggression to destroy Cuba’s medical solidarity, which has saved over 12 million lives across the world. In reaction to this coercion, the governments of Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Paraguay, the Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Guyana have formally ended the Cuban medical missions after decades. The governments of Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and Calabria in Italy have committed to gradually reducing Cuban medical missions. The US is forcing countries to end decades-long relationships with Cuba to further isolate the island from the world, all at the expense of the access and quality of healthcare for millions of people.
Cuba’s ability to provide medical missions, despite the 66-year-long genocidal blockade, is a testament to the indestructible resolve of the Cuban people and the country’s commitment to humanity.
Cuba has carried out 30 million medical consultations in Honduras, 900,000 surgeries, and 80,000 eye surgeries. Many of the doctors were working in a free ophthalmology clinic in San Jose de Colinas in Santa Barbara as part of the Venezuelan-Cuban Operation Miracle, which provided free eye care to millions. Now, 150 Cuban doctors have left the country after the newly elected right-wing government immediately cancelled the medical mission.
In Guyana, 200 doctors have left after 50 years of providing health access for people who otherwise would not have had any. Last week, Cuban doctors began leaving Guatemala after the government ended Cuban medical missions, which began in 1998 following Hurricane Mitch to provide critical health services to Indigenous communities underserved by the Guatemalan health system. Now, 412 Cuban health personnel are beginning to end their service following a closing of ties with the government of Guatemala and the United States, and a clear willingness to bow down to coercive measures. The Bahamas has terminated its Cuban brigades, opting for discussions with the United States over building a workforce based in Canada to serve the medical system.
In Jamaica, Cuban doctors cared for more than 8,176,000 patients, undertook 74,302 surgeries, attended the births of 7,170 babies, and saved 90,000 lives. Now, the Jamaica Cuba eye care program is ending after 16 years of solidarity and 25,000 instances of people regaining their sight.
Despite initially saying that “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die,” the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has chosen to let the 60 patients receiving dialysis and critical care from Cuban doctors lose their care with the end of the Cuban medical missions to the country.
Not all countries are accepting this attempted coercion and sacrifice of the health of their nation. Trinidad and Tobago and Calabria in Italy have refused to cancel the Cuban medical missions. The Trinidadian president said, “I just came back from California, and if I never go back there again in my life, I will ensure that the sovereignty of Trinidad and Tobago is known to its people and respected by all.”
History of Medical Solidarity
In 1960, medical aid was sent to Chile after the Valdivia earthquake. But it was 1963 that marked the start of Cuban medical brigades. 58 medical personnel traveled to Algeria to support in rebuilding the health system after the victory of the independence movement in booting out French colonialists. Fidel Castro gave a speech at the opening of a new medical school in Cuba, hours after meeting Ben Bella, Algeria’s President:
Most of the doctors in Algeria were French, and many have left the country. There are 4 million more Algerians than Cubans, and colonialism has left them with many diseases, but they have only a third—and even less—of the doctors we have…That’s why I told the students that we needed 50 doctors to volunteer to go to Algeria.
I’m sure there will be no shortage of volunteers…Today we can only send 50, but in 8 or 10 years’ time, who knows how many, and we will be helping our brothers… because the Revolution has the right to reap the rewards it has sown.
This act of revolutionary solidarity, just four years after the revolution, marked the start of decades of solidarity from Cuba to the world. Since then, more than 600,000 Cuban doctors and health workers have provided healthcare to 165 countries. In fact, there are still Cuban medical brigades operating in 15 Algerian provinces, mainly to reduce maternal and infant mortality.
In 2004, Cuba and Venezuela launched Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle), aimed at providing free eye care and surgeries for people suffering from preventable blindness and other visual impairments. The program restored vision to more than 4 million people across 34 years in just 15 years. This historic program is being forcibly shut down as the US pushes Cuban doctors out of countries today, breaking one of the world’s most remarkable progressions in health provision.
In 2005, following Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impacts in the United States, Cuba created the Henry Reeve International Contingent to respond to natural disasters and health epidemics. While the Bush administration refused Cuban help in responding to Hurricane Katrina, this incredible mission has sent 90 brigades to 55 countries to respond to Covid-19 in Europe and Latin America, Ebola in West Africa, cholera in Haiti, and more. In 2020, the Henry Reeve International Contingent was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2014, Cuba provided the only permanent brigade to support Sierra Leone, Guinea-Conakry, and Liberia in dealing with the Ebola epidemic. No other country or international organisation provided long-term support for the countries. It was Cuban doctors who managed to successfully contain the epidemic.
In March 2020, as Covid-19 was declared by the World Health Organization as a pandemic, Cuban doctors immediately traveled to Lombardy in Italy, the epicenter of the pandemic; Angola; as well as Latin American countries, including Venezuela and Suriname, to provide support. When a Covid-19-positive cruise ship with over 600 people onboard was refused docking in every Caribbean country, it was Cuba that allowed them to dock in “a shared effort to confront and stop the spread of the pandemic.”
As the US blockade prevented Cuba from accessing vaccines, they manufactured their own—and five of them at that. The blockade slowed down the process significantly, given the lack of medical equipment permitted into the island, the limited research laboratories, and the inability to access enough syringes for mass vaccination.
It is only because of the resilience and humanity of Cuban doctors and researchers and the international solidarity of organisations, including CODEPINK, in donating syringes, that Cuba managed to not only protect its population from the pandemic but also export them to the world. In fact, the vaccines produced by Cuba did not require refrigeration, unlike most manufactured in the Global North, given the lack of access to facilities, particularly as they were distributed far across the island. This meant that the vaccine could be sent successfully to countries across the Global South with similar lack of access to refrigeration to protect those otherwise shut out of Global North supply chains. In the face of attacks, Cuba’s resilience is a benefit for all humanity.
Campaign of Destruction
The United States has sought to interrupt, discredit, and dismantle this enormous feat as part of its attempts to destroy the Cuban revolution. Cuba’s ability to provide medical missions, despite the 66-year-long genocidal blockade, is a testament to the indestructible resolve of the Cuban people and the country’s commitment to humanity.
On February 23 of this year, the State Department sent a sensitive memo to Marco Rubio, which outlined a strategy of coercing countries in Latin America to boot out Cuban medical missions over the next 2-4 years. These attacks on Cuba’s medical missions were an escalation in the US’ war of imperialist aggression on the island for daring to commit to solidarity and peace, rather than welcome greed and destruction. On March 2, Congress approved a law to impose sanctions on any country that has Cuban health workers operating in it. Last August, the Trump administration imposed restrictions and revoked visas from countries working with Cuba on medical missions. Since then, countries have been pulling out of medical missions in fear of US retribution.
Under George W Bush’s presidency, the US set up the “Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program,” which aimed at getting Cuban doctors to desert from their mission and get residency in the United States. This ended under President Barack Obama’s administration.
This policy has been carried by a vicious propaganda war that has sought to label Cuban medical missions as “forced labor” and Cuban doctors as “slaves.” While this is a frankly offensive and disrespectful attempt to discredit a revolutionary act of solidarity, it is not only a ruse to justify attacks on Cuban doctors but also a fundamental revelation about the US. The descendants of slave owners can tell Cubans they are slaves for supporting countries made victims of colonialism and imperialism, but refuse to acknowledge that the transatlantic slave trade was the greatest crime of our time.
It is no wonder that healthcare is a significant target of the US empire’s attacks. Cuba maintains that healthcare is a right, whereas the US affords it as a privilege and arena for profits.
Cuba’s medical missions, beyond providing critical health services for millions of people, also provide support for the Cuban healthcare system and economy. When doctors are paid in the countries where they work, their money goes into the public healthcare system to pay the doctors, provide support for their families, as well as patients, doctors, and the healthcare system for the entire island. This is a remarkable act of solidarity for Cubans and the world.
The Cuban health system works; in fact, it works so well that Cuba has the highest rate of doctors per capita in the entire world. Whereas, in the United States, people survive depending on whether a company decides they can have a medicine, or if they can afford to pay another large corporation thousands of dollars for the privilege of treating an illness. The US dares to lecture Cuba while more than one-third of Americans cannot afford to access healthcare; while 1.3 million diabetic people ration insulin because the price skyrockets year on year as greedy pharma execs decide; and while over 66% of bankruptcies in the US are because of the costs of healthcare.
It is no wonder that healthcare is a significant target of the US empire’s attacks. Cuba maintains that healthcare is a right, whereas the US affords it as a privilege and arena for profits.
Another critical dimension to Cuba’s medical solidarity is its world-renowned Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). Founded in 1999, the school provides tuition-free medical education for students from across the world who might otherwise not have access to medical studies. They gain a free medical degree in Cuba, then return to serve their communities back home to develop medical self-sufficiency and sovereignty for their countries. There are over 250 Palestinian students from Gaza studying medicine in Cuba, completely free of charge, in the hopes they will travel back to Palestine and care for their people. Today, there are more than 31,000 doctors in 120 countries who have been trained at ELAM. This truly extraordinary and selfless act of material solidarity is also met with attacks. The US has told St. Lucia to stop sending doctors to Cuba for medical studies, which the prime minister has warned would cause a “major problem.”
I visited ELAM last year and spent time speaking with two female medical students from Sri Lanka, who were quite excited to see someone else from South Asia in Cuba! I asked them how they found studying at ELAM, living in Cuba, and being taught medicine for free to go back to their communities. They were ecstatic and told me how much they loved being there, and what a unique opportunity it was to become doctors from backgrounds where they otherwise would not have been able to. Their only issue with Cuba was the lack of spicy food!
Also on this trip to Cuba, I met with doctors working in a local hospital outside of Havana. They each shared with pride the different countries they had served in: Angola, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Italy. A similar situation you might find in the United States, or elsewhere in the Global North, is of someone in the military who might tell you with pride how they served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. While Cuba’s missions save lives and serve people, US missions massacre people and serve Lockheed Martin.
As more US soldiers are sent to West Asia as part of threats to invade Iran and to kill for the interests of imperialism, it is truly devastating to see Cuban doctors leave hospitals in the Caribbean to the tears of locals who have been helped by them.
The poles could not be more stark. Cuba, the most blockaded country in history, has saved more than 12 million lives with its medical missions. The US, a belligerent empire with the biggest economy in the world, has killed as many as 23 million people in 28 countries since the 1950s.
Cuba reveals the unfettered barbarity of the United States. That is why they fear a tiny island 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Cuba shows us that the world does not have to be dominated by one empire that violently exploits people, extracts resources, and imposes its own will through F-35s and 2,000-pound bombs. Cuba reveals humanity to people who have been propagandized into believing that every person has to look out for themselves, and there is danger and violence at every corner. Cuba unravels the lies that the United States is based on.
So, every single time the US attacks Cuba, discredits its government, its economy, its people, its society, it is trying to protect itself. This has nothing to do with Cuba and everything to do with the US. The only future for humanity is an end to the US empire.
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What I Saw in Cuba? Resilience
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
Mar 28, 2026
I traveled to Cuba this month. As a Cuban American, that sentence carries the weight of longing born of an estrangement from my roots. For much of my life, Cuba existed as a distant story, a place I knew only through descriptions from my father.
I was there as part of an international solidarity convoy; over 500 representatives from more than 30 countries, united by a simple conviction: No country has the right to strangle another simply because it chose a different path. I cannot stand by while the island of my family’s heritage is suffocated.
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
A Public Health System Under Siege
One of the most profound visits was to a neighborhood polyclinic in Havana. These clinics are the backbone of Cuba’s public health system. Doctors live on the second floor, above where they work. They know every patient in their community by name. They treat physical and psychological health alike, and they embody a model of care that prioritizes people over profit.
I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
But the doctors I met face heartbreaking constraints. They are highly trained professionals who know exactly what their patients need, and they know those treatments exist. Due to the US embargo, they cannot access them. Imagine living every day with the skill to heal and being blocked by a political and economic siege.
We brought what we could: 6,300 pounds of medical supplies delivered by our delegation, including neonatal equipment, analgesics, catheters, and other critical materials, valued at $433,000 and more still in unquantifiable amounts stuffed into carry-on and personal bags, sacrificing space for our own clothing and toiletries. Cuban doctors told us about nights when the power goes out, and medical students rush to respirators, manually pumping air for hours until electricity is restored. They save lives with their bare hands.
Community and Creativity in the Face of Scarcity
Everywhere we went, I saw people organizing to survive. In a central Havana neighborhood, we helped refurbish a crumbling playground. We brought paint and new swings. A local man who maintains the park offered to take the swings down each night so they wouldn’t be taken, then put them back up each morning for the children. That kind of mutual care was everywhere.
We met an artist named Lázaro, who collects garbage and old newspapers to create recycled art. He teaches neighborhood kids to do the same. His studio walls are covered in vibrant works that double as expressions of resistance and creativity.
On another day, we set up a table outside Lázaro’s studio with construction paper, markers, and glue. Children from the neighborhood gathered to write letters to pen pals in Singapore. I translated letters from English to Spanish, helping each child respond in Spanish and illustrate their replies. Parents played drums and danced while the kids painted and wrote. It was a profound moment of cross-border connection—kids building relationships through art and translation, across continents, across the blockade.
For Cuban Americans, there is something like a spiritual cost that is paid for quietly going along with the status quo in the face of the many injustices we have grown up with for decades, which seem to us to have intensified in these recent years. But the children I saw in Havana had their spirit intact.
The Human Cost of the Embargo
The blockade is not an abstraction. Poverty is real. I gave what I could, but as individuals, we cannot meet that scale of need brought upon by a systemic crisis created by US policy.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work.
Rolling blackouts on the island are the result of a strategy of siege warfare intensified in January. Cuba has gone months without fuel imports due to sanctions and naval pressure aimed at stopping oil shipments to the island. Power plants cannot run consistently. Hospitals cannot perform necessary surgeries. Water pumping infrastructure fails. This is not a natural disaster. It is man-made violence; it is a silent war.
And yet, the Cuban people do not wait for rescue. They organize. They adapt. They invent.
Solidarity and a Call to Action
As a Cuban American, I have heard all my life that Cuba is a country ruled by capricious autocrats. That the Cuban people are waiting to be liberated. That their strangulation is meant to help them. But standing on that island, talking to doctors and artists and children and families, I saw something else entirely. I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
Cuba is open to dialogue and investment with respect for its sovereignty. But the US continues to enforce a policy that even much of the world condemns. Year after year, the United Nations General Assembly votes overwhelmingly to end the embargo. Year after year, the US ignores it.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work. But solidarity cannot end after a single delegation. We need to break the siege. We need to end this decades-long economic warfare.
Cubans have a right to self-governance. They have a right to medicine, to electricity, to water, to dignity. My father chose to leave Cuba in the face of poverty brought on by a cruel sanctions regime. I chose to return for the same reason.
Let Cuba live.
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Why US Cuba Coverage Falls Far Short of the Truth
As the Trump regime tightens the screws of the embargo by further restricting oil access to the country, legacy media continue to toe the government’s line on the issue, with coverage that is either low on context or outright stenography.
Mar 22, 2026
The US government’s decades-long economic blockade against Cuba is in many ways not a complicated issue. The policy of restricting trade with the country’s communist government was put into full force under the Kennedy administration, with the explicit goal of causing enough economic hardship, hunger, and desperation to spur regime change.
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly and consistently voted to end the embargo since a resolution to that effect was first introduced in 1992. Member countries argue that the embargo violates international law. It has cost the country anywhere between $130-170 billion since its inception, and has restricted the Cuban people’s access to food and medicine. And it has not accomplished its primary goal of overthrowing the Cuban government.
These are key points that should be included in any article reporting on Cuba’s economic struggles. However, US journalists have consistently leaned into the US government’s framing of the issue: that the country’s communist government is largely or exclusively to blame for its financial woes (FAIR.org, 11/4/24).
As the Trump regime tightens the screws of the embargo by further restricting oil access to the country, a move that has been condemned by UN human rights experts as a further violation of international law (New York Times, 2/13/26), legacy media continue to toe the government’s line on the issue, with coverage that is either low on context or outright stenography.
‘Extraordinary Threat’
President Donald Trump has tried to justify his administration’s significant escalation in tactics on the basis that Cuba represents an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the security of the United States, primarily by supporting US geopolitical enemies. This accusation is not new: The country has previously been accused of hosting both Russian and Chinese spy bases. Despite neither claim being backed by evidence (Belly of the Beast, 2/6/26, 8/1/24), the Trump administration doubled down on them when rolling out its new and harsher set of policies.
But the administration also unveiled a new claim that upped the ante: Cuba has apparently been harboring Hamas and Hezbollah forces, not 90 miles off of our shores! “Cuba welcomes transnational terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” reads an executive order from January 29,
creating a safe environment for these malign groups so that these transnational terrorist groups can build economic, cultural, and security ties throughout the region, and attempt to destabilize the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.
The administration did not provide evidence to support this claim, and none has surfaced, despite local journalists’ investigative efforts (Belly of the Beast, 2/2/26).
That hasn’t stopped legacy media from repeating the claim uncritically, with nothing more than an “alleged” or “accused” attached, suggesting reporters can’t be bothered to fact-check it. This could be found in coverage in both The Guardian (1/29/26) and CNN (2/1/26) at the beginning of the recent round of escalations.
A full month later—plenty of time for a serious reporter to get to the bottom of the allegations, or at least ask the administration what evidence it has—The Atlantic (3/1/26) relayed the claim yet again, with just as little evidence supporting it as when it was first made. Throwing in the word “alleged” does little to change the fact that the US government has been given primary control of the narrative in this media coverage.
Despite the abundance of evidence regarding the intentions of US foreign policy toward Cuba, legacy media often fail to give proper context when reporting on the topic.
The Cuban government has categorically denied harboring or supporting terrorist organizations (Granma, 2/2/26). But defying basic journalistic practice, neither The Guardian nor The Atlantic gave any space to the Cuban government to respond to the claims made against it.
The Atlantic did quote a source that pushed back on using Cuba’s designation as a “state sponsor of terrorism” as a rationale for overthrowing its government. But that designation long preceded Trump’s recent comments, and the article did not offer any challenge to the recent accusations. The CNN article included only that Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that Trump’s threats were made under “empty pretexts.”
‘It Is Indeed a Blockade’
Some recent New York Times reports, on the other hand, have shown a willingness to break from the official narrative. An article by reporter Frances Robles (1/30/26) on the decision to cut off fuel to the island noted that the administration hadn’t provided evidence to support its claims that Cuba is harboring Hamas or Hezbollah fighters.
The article’s sourcing is more robust as well. For instance, the Times gave Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum space to oppose Trump’s decision, affirming her support for the sovereignty of the Cuban people and respect for international law. This was followed by Cuba’s foreign minister saying that what his government calls the “economic genocide” being enacted by Trump’s decision is built on “a long list of lies.” A social media post attributed to the Venezuelan government rounded out the opposing sources balking at the idea that Cuba constitutes a threat to the US.
The Times (2/20/26) challenged official terminology in another piece headlined “A New US Blockade Is Strangling Cuba.” The article, by Jack Nicas and Christiaan Triebert, explained that the term “blockade” is a contentious one:
The US government called its 1962 policy a “quarantine” to avoid using the word “blockade,” which legally could be interpreted as an act of war. The Trump administration has also avoided using the word “‘blockade.”
Regardless of the Trump administration’s refusal to call the recent change in policy a “blockade,” the article said, “it is functioning as one.”
The article also quoted Fulton Armstrong, “former lead Latin American analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency,” who agreed with the diagnosis. “Among us longtime Cuba watchers, we’ve always resisted people using the word blockade,” he says. “But it is indeed a blockade.”
(Of course, the Cuban government has considered the US’ economic punishment to be an illegal blockade and a “wartime measure” long before the recent escalation—Granma, 2/2/17.)
The article also had a rare reference to the possible illegality of US sanctions:
The United Nations has criticized the US policy as a violation of international law that has exacerbated the suffering of Cuba’s roughly 10 million residents.
‘Lead an Army of Exiles’
Despite the abundance of evidence regarding the intentions of US foreign policy toward Cuba, legacy media often fail to give proper context when reporting on the topic. In a Reuters report (2/25/26) about the Trump administration allowing oil sales to private companies in Cuba amid the ongoing crisis, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was given space to blame the Cuban government for the country’s woes without any pushback.
“What the Cuban people should know is this: that if they are hungry and they are suffering, it’s not because we’re not prepared to help them. We are,” he said. “It’s that the people standing in the way of us helping them is the regime, the Communist Party.”
Are there any average citizens of Cuba who value their nation’s sovereignty, who don’t want their government to relent, or who blame the United States for enacting policies designed to hurt their own economy? Herald readers may never know.
The article allowed this quote to hang bizarrely in the middle of a story about the US exercising disproportionate power over the country. The article put very little blame on the US at all, noting that its recent escalations have only been “worsening an energy crisis in the Communist-run country that is hitting power generation and fuel for vehicles, houses, and aviation.”
Nowhere was the long history of US attacks on the Cuban economy mentioned. Nor was there any suggestion that Rubio, a man who boasted as a child that he would one day “lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba” (Atlantic, 12/23/14), might be invested in policies that might achieve his childhood dream. Rubio’s recent admission (Belly of the Beast, 1/28/26) that the Trump administration would like to see regime change in Cuba, a condition that is itself codified into US law as a prerequisite for lifting the “embargo,” is glaringly absent as well.
‘Failure of the Socialist Economic Model’
Similarly, the Miami Herald (2/17/26)—long hostile to the Cuban government—depicted Rubio as simply urging the Cuban government “to make economic reforms as a way out of the impasse.” While documenting the poor conditions on the streets of Cuba, the Herald‘s Nora Gámez Torres reported:
The economic crisis, a deep economic contraction that has lasted years, has largely resulted from the failure of the socialist economic model, a hard-currency-hungry military stashing billions of dollars in its accounts, and years of Cuban leaders dragging their feet on urgently needed economic reforms. The Covid-19 pandemic and the tightening of US sanctions under the first Trump administration also played a part.
The “stashing billions” reference is to a bogus story the same reporter (Miami Herald, 8/6/25) published last year; Gámez Torres, who accused the Cuban military of having a huge secret reserve of cash based on a leaked spreadsheet, apparently failed to understand that a dollar sign is used to denote both US dollars and Cuban pesos (FAIR.org, 8/29/25). In her latest piece, the final line of the paragraph is the only reference to the decades-long history of economic warfare against the island.
“By design, these sanctions exist in order to suffocate the country economically, and they’re very effective in doing so,” Alexander Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told FAIR. He notes that the sanctions are aimed at cutting Cuba off from the wider economic world. For instance, Cuba’s current placement on the US State Sponsor of Terrorism list has been deterring foreign investment in the country.
“It’s not going to happen because nobody wants to invest. They’re scared to death of running afoul of the sanctions criteria, so there’s this effect of overcompliance where companies are just not going to do it,” he says. “The risk of being hit by secondary sanctions is just way too high.”
And yet, throughout the Herald article, the US is depicted as simply wanting to “make economic changes,” “increasing external pressure” in an attempt to “reform the island’s hardline Marxist economy.”
‘Willing to Drown an Entire People’
The idea that the Cuban government has been rigid and unwilling to enact reforms is a false one, according to Main. “For better or for worse, they’ve taken a lot of measures to open up the economy,” including a major reform in 2021 that gave the private sector access to most sectors of the economy. “There’s a very limited number of sectors that remain completely under state control.”
“The problem with these reforms,” he says,
is that you can’t really implement them when there’s an embargo or blockade going on, when you’re basically restricting all of foreign capital from getting in, when you’re restricting the means of Cubans to import essential inputs for their own national production, when you’re starving the economy of cash. These reforms aren’t going to go very far.
Yet Cuban leaders are depicted throughout the Herald article as stubborn and cruel for refusing to give in to US pressure, which the paper’s choice of sources would have you believe is contrary to the interests of the people. Indeed, resisting extended economic attack, and refusing to allow the United States its God-given right to decide the structure of any country it chooses, is depicted as Cuban leaders being “willing to drown an entire people in the name of ideology,” by an unnamed “source in connection with Cuban officials.”
Are there any average citizens of Cuba who value their nation’s sovereignty, who don’t want their government to relent, or who blame the United States for enacting policies designed to hurt their own economy? Herald readers may never know, as the source given the most space to push back on the economic attack is a former Democratic congressmember from Miami. A quick reference to Cuban diplomats encouraging comparisons between the Trump admin’s actions and Israel’s in Gaza is also thrown in four paragraphs from the end of the article, though only in the context of “what some Cuba observers see as a strategy to blame the humanitarian crisis entirely on the United States and create a public-opinion crisis that would put pressure on the administration.”
The Herald gives priority to sources that are consistently critical of the Cuban government, though it is not especially difficult to find Cubans capable of giving a different perspective, as a video from Cuba-focused outlet Belly of the Beast (1/31/26) shows. The Herald’s reporting makes clear that the paper is capable of lifting up Cuban voices, just so long as those voices are singing the right tune.
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Stop the Sadistic Trump Administration Policies Choking Cuba
Instead of threatening the island further, the president must ask Congress to end the embargo that began in 1960 so that the economic reconstruction of the country can begin.
Mar 20, 2026
President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House, “I think I can do anything I want with it” referring to Cuba. His remarks are reminiscent of his recorded Access Hollywood statement to host Billy Bush, “When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab them by the *****.” No, Mr. President, you have no right to despoil Cuba as you please.
Cuba is being choked by this administration’s sadistic policies. The best we can do for the 10 million people living there is not to rape the island but rather end the embargo—and reset the opening of relations that had been the hallmark of progress during the Obama administration.
I led educational tours to Cuba before Trump destroyed rapprochement, increased sanctions, and suffocated the blossoming of enterprises tied to tourism and small business entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, the Biden administration chose to follow Trump rather than returning to Barack Obama’s approach aimed at improving relations between the two countries and supporting the emerging free market economy.
There is growing popular sentiment in Canada, Mexico, Spain, and other countries that are providing humanitarian aid to Cuba for their governments to show their independence from Trump’s chaos by breaking the blockade and dispatching lifesaving fuel. It is time to end the embargo of Cuba.
Decades of US policies aimed at destabilizing Cuba hurt ordinary citizens and set back progress within Cuba.
Vermont’s Sen. Peter Welch has been a leading voice of reason with respect to Cuba. He is clearly concerned about the terrible price ordinary people are paying as a result of the blockade of fuel supplies. I urge readers to listen to Sen. Welsh’s recent speech.
Senator Welch has proposed a forthright plan to end the suffering of the Cuban people:
First, Trump should end restrictions on the rights of Americans to travel to Cuba. Welch says, “The American and Cuban people should freely interact with one another.”
Second, the president should maximize support to Cuba’s private sector, particularly small businesses.
Third, Cuba must be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. As Sen. Welch pointed out, “No other country agrees that it applies.”
Fourth, the president must ask Congress to end the embargo that began in 1960 so that the economic reconstruction of the country can begin.
Sen. Welch does not mince words about the need for political reforms in Cuba, beginning with the release of political prisoners and the right to speak freely about the society and government. But he also makes it clear that decades of US policies aimed at destabilizing Cuba hurt ordinary citizens and set back progress within Cuba and in the development of healthy relations between the US and Cuba.
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What Does It Mean to Be a Good Cuban American?
Being a good Cuban American means to support the people, and to fight for what's right and just for them, not for the government; American or Cuban.
Mar 15, 2026
What does it mean to be a good Cuban American? If you'd have asked me that question six years ago my answer would have been the standardized one, because it was an answer that had been etched into my mind since I was young.
To be a good Cuban-American I had to:
- Vehemently hate the Cuban government and revolution;
- Oppose anything that remotely resembles communism or socialism; and
- Thoroughly support the Embargo on Cuba.
Those were the three basic pillars for being a good Cuban-American, and they were not optional. They still aren't. At least, that's what the loud Cuban-American voices in Miami and South Florida want you and me to believe.
For me, being a good Cuban American means stopping the embargo. Stop suffocating my people.
I was born in Cuba a few years before their “periodo especial,” which lasted from about 1991 to 2000. Essentially, it was an economic crisis that was highlighted by extreme reductions of already rationed foods and severe energy shortages (apagones). For the duration of my childhood and young adult life, I was taught that these burdens that Cuba felt were the sole fault of Fidel Castro and his government. That it was communism's fault, and that Che Guevara was the main architect of Cuba's torture. As a result, I grew up the way most Cubans who live in the USA do, with a severe mistrust of anything socialist or communist, fully believing that the embargo was choking the Cuban government, and having the lowest possible opinion of Castro and Che.
When I started college, I got involved in activism, and worked very closely with right-wing ideological organizations. Although at the time, I didn’t realize their beliefs were right-wing, I just felt that it was the only way to think and act as a Cuban. I was taught a lot by them, and of course, deep within all of those lessons were the continued lessons on hatred of communism and socialism, Castro and co., and supporting the embargo. This went on for many years, and I eventually became president of a local university-aligned organization. One day, I had a conversation with someone who had also been heavily involved with dissident work. We began discussing trips to Cuba; he'd said it would be his fifth trip over to the island, and I mentioned I hadn't been back since I left back in 1994. He questioned why.
I began listing all of the reasons that had been so eloquently placed into my psyche for the past 20 years: traveling to Cuba was dangerous, it only benefited the Cuban government, my money would never reach the people of Cuba, I would be blacklisted here in the USA because I would be seen as a communist sympathizer, and so forth.
He looked me right in the eyes and said all of the reasons I'd mentioned were American propaganda, and served no other purpose than to instill fear into people who would otherwise see a situation for what it truly was—cruel and unusual. A situation that only hurt the people of Cuba. A situation that was orchestrated by the American government under the guise of hurting the Cuban government, but the real objective was to obtain control of the small sovereign nation.
Over the last five years or so, I have done a lot of unlearning, and while I still feel very strongly about the Cuban government and their crimes toward the Cuban people who oppose them, I do not believe the issue of Cuba is as black and white as the loud voices in South Florida want you and me to believe. The one thing, however, that is very black and white is that the embargo does nothing but hurt the people of Cuba. The embargo does nothing else but cut off an already limited supply of items, medicines, and tools that the Cuban people need to survive.
If you ask me now what it means to be a good Cuban American, my answer is simple, yet in true Cuban fashion also very complex. Being a good Cuban American means to support the people, and to fight for what's right and just for them, not for the government; American or Cuban. Being a good Cuban American means to call for an end to the decades-long embargo that has done nothing but strangle an already struggling country. Being a good Cuban American means recognizing that NO government is without flaw, but understanding that at times when you are pushed into a corner, there are only a handful of ways to stay alive.
For me, being a good Cuban American means stopping the embargo. Stop suffocating my people. Stop oppressing my people, and stop using their suffering as the excuse to blame another government. Not in my name.
End the embargo. Help the Cuban people. If this calls to you, please join Cuban Americans for Cuba. We have poured our hearts into an open letter against the current US policies toward Cuba (CubanAmericansForCuba.Org/Letter), which is a call to our fellow Cubans to stand with us and show the world who we truly are and what we truly stand for.
Our movement is a blend of members across the United States who don't all think alike, but who share one unshakable conviction: that the future of Cuba belongs to the Cuban people, and to them alone, free from American interference and manipulation.
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We're Tired of Marco Rubio Speaking for Us: A New Cuban-American Movement
What we share is the belief that the future of Cuba should be left to Cubans on the island to decide without US interference and meddling.
Mar 13, 2026
“Put three Cubans in a room together, you’ll have five different opinions,” a Cuban friend of mine likes to joke. He was referring to debates in the town-hall meetings during Cuba’s constitutional convention process of 2018. But I immediately thought, of course, of any Nochebuena celebration at my dad’s house, just a few hundred miles north. Siblings, cousins, babies, abuelas, family, and friends of all ages and political opinions gathered around a brilliant feast. Between the devouring of lechón, yuca, plátanos, and flan, a flurry of back and forth between English and Spanish. Everyone hugging, praying, laughing, and occasionally yelling. Well, maybe more than occasionally.
The existence of contradictory political opinions across generations will come as no surprise to diaspora families from all over, and my Cuban family is no exception. My abuelo participated in the Cuban Revolution against Fulgencio Batista before being turned off by what he saw as the horrors of communism. My family moved to Miami, and after being jailed for counterrevolutionary terrorism, my grandfather then defected and fought for the US in the Bay of Pigs. (A Brigada 2506 flag hung on the wall of my childhood home.)
Like many Cuban Americans growing up in Florida, I was taught countless criticisms and failures of the government of Cuba by family members. But my proudly capitalist father also raised his children to lobby against the US embargo on Cuba. And as an adult, I learned about the positive aspects of Cuba’s policies, such as the nation’s historic biomedical achievements, or the remarkable advances of LGBTQ rights under the recent Families Code referendum. Today, my older brother and I are openly Marxists and organize as such for labor, social, and environmental justice. As you may guess, sometimes things get a little complicated!
Following the festivities this past December, one of mis primos worried to me about her brother who lives on the island. With increasing blackouts and energy strains, a stressed economy, and hawkish US policies toward her first homeland, things were only getting harder. "The only people who pay attention to what's happening in Cuba are Cubans," we lamented. "Hopefully that will change."
We work together across our differences to end the Embargo, knowing that this is the best way to allow for freedom for all to flourish.
Then 2026 came. With it, the Trump administration's war games: Kidnapping presidents, murdering leaders in other countries, seizing foreign oil, and threatening sovereignty. People were paying attention.
People are starting to learn about the 66 years of failed US policy against Cuba. People are learning about the trade restrictions that prevent medicine, food, and fuel from getting to the island. People are learning about the starvation, pain, disease, and death that come from these policies. And people are also beginning to notice that Cubans across the political spectrum want something different than what the US provides!
There has long been a particular image, a particular idea, of what it means to be Cuban American. You know it well: “The Miami Cuban.” The man who's opposed the communist policies in Cuba so much that he’s willing to go to war with the island, that he’s willing to bomb, and destroy. And this hyper-machismo image, along with intergenerational trauma in Cuban families, has been used for decades to push US policies against Cuba that do nothing but harm the people of the island. That harm our family, our friends, and a country that we deeply love.
I’m tired of the extremist “Miami Cuban” propaganda machine. I’m tired of the Marco Rubios and Ted Cruzes of this country claiming to speak for Cuban-Americans.
I know, however varied our politics, what my family wants is this:
We want the embargo to end. We want the cruel, inhumane oil blockade by the Trump regime to end. We want the current administration’s posturing toward war games and invasion to end. We want engagement, not escalation. We want friendship. We want trade. We want to gather with our families, watch béisbol, and drink cafecitos by the Malecón.
Despite what the Marco Rubios, Maria Salazars, and Carlos Giménezes of the world try to tell people, this is what most Cubans in America want.
Ready to speak up, a group of us has come together to build the Cuban Americans for Cuba movement. We have launched an open letter against the current US policies toward Cuba (CubanAmericansForCuba.Org/Letter), so other Cubans can sign on and show the world the true values of Cuban Americans. Our organization is growing, with members all over the United States, and we span a variety of opinions. What we share is the belief that the future of Cuba should be left to Cubans on the island to decide without US interference and meddling. We work together across our differences to end the Embargo, knowing that this is the best way to allow for freedom for all to flourish.
And that is why a delegation of Cuban Americans is going on the Nuestra América convoy later this month with other Cuba solidarity activists, a delegation which I am proud to join. We are going to deliver thousands of pounds of medical aid to the people and communities that we love. We are going to show that Cuba is not alone, and that the working people of the USA stand with them. We are going to build bridges of friendship and solidarity and a better world where we all have liberation. A world where we all have peace.
Some, including Republicans in the US Congress, have accused the convoy of being an anti-American venture and the participants of being communist agents. But just like Cubans and Cuban Americans, the Nuestra América convoy and our supporters are made up of people across the political spectrum. The out-of-touch politicians who seek violence may not understand this, but here's the truth: the only thing you need to be to oppose the US Embargo on Cuba and the Trump administration's war games is a human being.
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