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Suffocating an Island: What the US Blockade Is Doing to the People of Cuba
Who will win this demonic game Trump and Rubio are playing with the lives of eleven million Cubans?
Feb 11, 2026
Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Cuba’s eastern city of Holguín, covered her face with her hands and broke down crying when I asked her about Trump’s blockade of the island—especially now that the U.S. is choking off oil shipments.
“You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives,” she sobbed. “It’s a vicious, all-encompassing spiral downward. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood and charcoal in our apartments. It’s like going back 100 years. The blockade is suffocating us—especially single mothers,” she said crying into her hands “and no one is stopping these demons: Trump and Marco Rubio.”
We came to Holguín to deliver 2,500 pounds of lentils, thanks to fundraising by CODEPINK and the Cuban-American group Puentes de Amor. On our last trip, we brought 50-pound bags of powdered milk to the children’s hospital. With Trump now imposing a brutal, medieval siege on the island, this humanitarian aid is more critical than ever. But lentils and milk cannot power a country. What Cubans really need is oil.
There were no taxis at the airport. We hitchhiked into town on the truck that came to pick up the donations. The road was eerily empty. In the city, there were few gas-powered cars and no buses running, but the streets were full of bicycles, electric motorcycles, and three-wheeled electric vehicles used to transport people and goods. Most of the motorcycles—Chinese, Japanese, or Korean—are shipped in from Panama. With a price tag near $2,000, only those with family abroad sending remittances can afford them.
Production across the economy is grinding to a halt. Factories can’t function without electricity, and many skilled workers have given up their state jobs because wages are so low.
Thirty-five-year-old Javier Silva gazed longingly at a Yamaha parked on the street. “I could never buy one of those on my salary of 4,000 pesos a month,” he said. With inflation soaring, the dollar now fetches about 480 pesos, making his monthly income worth less than ten dollars.
Cubans don’t pay rent or have mortgages; they own their homes. And while healthcare has deteriorated badly in recent years because of shortages of medicines and equipment, it remains free–a system gasping but not abandoned.
The biggest expense is food. Markets are stocked, but prices are out of reach—especially for coveted items like pork, chicken, and milk. Even tomatoes are now unaffordable for many families.
Holguín was once known as the breadbasket of Cuba because of its rich agricultural land. That reputation took a severe hit this year when Hurricane Melissa tore through the province, destroying vast areas of crops. Replanting and repairing the damage without gasoline for tractors or electricity for irrigation is nearly impossible. Less food means higher prices.
Production across the economy is grinding to a halt. Factories can’t function without electricity, and many skilled workers have given up their state jobs because wages are so low. Jorge, whom I met selling bologna in the market, used to be an engineer at a state enterprise. Verónica, once a teacher, now sells sweets she bakes at home—when the power is on. Ironically, while Marco Rubio claims he wants to bring capitalism to Cuba, US sanctions are crushing the very private sector that most Cubans now depend on to survive.
I talked to people on the street who blame the Cuban government for the crisis and openly say they can’t wait for the fall of communism. Young people told me that their goal is to leave the island and live somewhere they can make a decent living. But I didn’t meet a single person who supported the blockade or a US invasion.
“This government is terrible,” said a thin man who changes money on the street—an illegal but tolerated activity. But when I showed him a photo of Marco Rubio, he didn’t hesitate. “That man is the devil. A self-serving, slimy politician who doesn’t give a damn about the Cuban people.”
Others put the blame squarely on the United States. They point to the dramatic improvement in their lives after Presidents Obama and Raúl Castro reached an agreement and Washington eased many sanctions in 2014–2016. “It was the same Cuban government we have now,” one man told me. “But when the US loosened the rope around our necks, we could breathe. If they just left us alone, we could find our own solutions.”
The only way Cubans are surviving this siege is because they help one another. They trade rice for coffee with neighbors. They improvise—no hay, pero se resuelve (we don’t have much, but we make it work). The government provides daily meals for the most vulnerable—the elderly, the disabled, mothers with no income—but each day it becomes harder as the state has less food to distribute and less fuel to cook with.
At one feeding center, an elderly volunteer told us he spends hours every day scavenging for firewood. He proudly showed us a chunk of a wooden pallet, nails and all. “This guarantees tomorrow’s meal,” he said—his face caught between pride and sorrow.
So how long can Cubans hold on as conditions worsen? And what is the endgame?
When I asked people where this is leading, they had no idea. Rubio wants regime change, but no one can explain how that would happen or who would replace the current government. Some speculate a deal could be struck with Trump. “Make Trump the minister of tourism,” a hotel clerk joked, only half joking. “Give him a hotel and a golf course—a Mar-a-Lago in Varadero—and maybe he’d leave us alone.”
Who will win this demonic game Trump and Rubio are playing with the lives of eleven million Cubans?
Ernesto, who fixes refrigerators when the power is on, places his bet on the Cuban people. “We’re rebels,” he told me. “We defeated Batista in 1959. We survived the Bay of Pigs. We endured the Special Period when the Soviet Union collapsed and we were left with nothing. We’ll survive this too.”
He summed it up with a line Cubans know by heart, from the great songwriter Silvio Rodríguez: El tiempo está a favor de los pequenos, de los desnudos, de los olvidados—"Time belongs to the small, the exposed, the forgotten."
In the long sweep of time, endurance outlasts domination.
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Bad Bunny, Good Neighbor
Bad Bunny reminded millions of people of connection, of shared humanity, of a hemisphere bound together by history and responsibility, just as the Trump administration tightened the screws on Cuba. What comes next is on us.
Feb 11, 2026
For 13 minutes on the most-watched stage in American culture, Bad Bunny made the United States feel expansive, uncontained, Caribbean rhythm-centered, and alive with a sense of belonging that crossed borders without asking permission. As a Venezuelan-American, I felt chills from the very first second to the last. I was a child again, asleep across two chairs pushed together at a family party that refused to end, the music still playing, adults laughing loudly in the background, grandparents locked into a serious game of dominoes as if nothing outside that table mattered. I could feel the dancing in the living room, smell the food that took all day to make, remember that deep sense of togetherness you can’t explain or translate—you simply grow up inside it.
And then came Bad Bunny’s ending—loud, defiant, and unmistakably intentional. When he said, “God bless America,” naming Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, las Antillas, the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, it felt like calling family members into the room, reminding everyone that America has always been bigger than the version that those in power are comfortable with, and that it has always belonged to more people than it is willing to treat with dignity.
At that very same moment, offstage, untelevised, and unacknowledged, the US government was tightening the screws on Cuba. Under Donald Trump, US policy toward the island has moved from long-standing hostility into something closer to an open siege. Sanctions have been escalated, fuel deliberately cut off, and third countries threatened with tariffs and sanctions for daring to trade with Cuba. The consequences are immediate and devastating: rolling blackouts shutting down hospitals, universities forced to suspend classes, factories and farms unable to operate, and entire transportation systems paralyzed. The US fuel blockade has grounded flights, stopped buses from running, and forced ambulances to be rationed.
The US embargo on Cuba itself is illegal under international law and is condemned year after year by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Yet the United States continues to enforce it unilaterally, using its navy, its financial system, and its political power to prevent oil shipments from reaching Cuba, to intimidate shipping companies, and to punish any country that dares to trade. US pressure doesn’t stop at its own borders; it extends outward, telling the rest of the world who they are allowed to sell fuel to, who they are allowed to insure, and which economies must be starved into compliance. When ships are blocked, oil is cut off, and a civilian population is plunged into darkness, this is a blockade. And under international law, that is an act of war.
If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals.
Washington then claims humanitarian concern, offering small, tightly controlled aid packages while maintaining the very sanctions that created the emergency. The crisis is manufactured first, then weaponized as proof that Cuba is “failing.” Scarcity becomes both the method and the message. This is collective punishment, designed to exhaust a population into submission through hunger, darkness, and isolation.
We need to be honest: This is not just Trump. Trump is blunt, crude, and unapologetic, but he did not invent this. For decades, US administrations have treated Latin America and the Caribbean as a sphere to be managed, disciplined, or reordered, operating from the same assumption: that the United States has a providential right to decide who governs and who must be punished into compliance. But ask yourself, really sit with it, can you imagine the humiliation of entire nations being told, again and again, that their future will be decided elsewhere? Imagine living under the constant threat that your economy can be strangled, your leaders removed, your people starved simply for refusing obedience. Who gave the United States this right? Who decided that Latin America’s sovereignty was conditional?
Two centuries ago, Simón Bolívar warned that the United States seemed destined “to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” His vision was not domination but dignity: nations free to determine their own paths, bound by solidarity rather than submission. Nuestra América, the America of José Martí, Simón Bolívar, Augusto Sandino, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chávez, is land, people, language, and resistance that still exist and insist on sovereignty.
This is the choice in front of us. You can accept Trump’s America, the America that governs through sieges, blockades, sanctions, and humiliation, deciding from afar who may rule, who may eat, and who must be punished into submission. Or you can stand with Nuestra América, the America Martí and Bolívar imagined, and that Bad Bunny echoed when he held up a football, reading “Together we are America.” This is an America that refuses domination, that believes no nation is a backyard, and that insists the future of this hemisphere belongs to its peoples, not to an empire. There is no neutral ground between those two Americas.
This is why the moment demands more than applause. It demands that we look past the spectacle and confront the systems that decide who gets to thrive and who is forced to flee. A real Good Neighbor Policy would respect sovereignty, stop weaponizing hunger and instability, and recognize that dignity does not end at the US border. Bad Bunny reminded millions of people of connection, of shared humanity, of a hemisphere bound together by history and responsibility. What comes next is on us. If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals. Because in the end, the message is simple and uncompromising: The only thing more powerful than hate is love.
If this article moved you, don’t let it end here. Right now, US policy is manufacturing hunger in Cuba and then pretending to solve it with crumbs. We can choose a different path. Join CODEPINK’s call to feed Cuba during this man-made crisis by supporting efforts that respect dignity, sovereignty, and life itself. Take action now: https://www.codepink.org/wck
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Iran’s Comprehensive Peace Proposal to the United States
The Middle East stands at a crossroads between endless war and comprehensive peace. A framework for peace does exist. Will the US finally seize it?
Feb 09, 2026
History occasionally presents moments when the truth about a conflict is stated plainly enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s February 7 address in Doha, Qatar (transcript here) should prove to be such a moment. His important and constructive remarks responded to the US call for comprehensive negotiations, and he laid out a sound proposal for peace across the Middle East.
Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for comprehensive negotiations: "If the Iranians want to meet, we're ready." He proposed for talks to include the nuclear issue, Iran’s military capabilities, and its support for proxy groups around the region. On its surface, this sounds like a serious and constructive proposal. The Middle East’s security crises are interconnected, and diplomacy that isolates nuclear issues from broader regional dynamics is unlikely to endure.
On February 7, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi’s responded to the United States’ proposal for a comprehensive peace. In his speech at the Al Jazeera Forum, the foreign minister addressed the root cause of regional instability – “Palestine… is the defining question of justice in West Asia and beyond” and he proposed a path forward.
The Foreign Minister’s statement is correct. The failure to resolve the issue of Palestinian statehood has indeed fueled every major regional conflict since 1948. The Arab-Israeli wars, the rise of anti-Israel militancy, the regional polarization, and the repeated cycles of violence, all derive from the failure to create a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel. Gaza represents the most devastating chapter in this conflict, where Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine was followed by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and then by Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza.
In his speech, Araghchi condemned Israel’s expansionist project “pursued under the banner of security.” He warned of the annexation of the West Bank, which Israeli government officials, as National Security Minister Ben Gvir, continually call for, and for which the Knesset has already passed a motion.
Araghchi also highlighted another fundamental dimension of Israeli strategy which is the pursuit of permanent military supremacy across the region. He said that Israel’s expansionist project requires that “neighboring countries be weakened—militarily, technologically, economically, and socially—so that the Israeli regime permanently enjoys the upper hand.” This is indeed the Clean Break doctrine of Prime Minister Netanyahu, dating back 30 years. It has been avidly supported by the US through 100 billion dollars in military assistance to Israel since 2000, diplomatic cover at the UN via repeated vetoes, and the consistent US rejection of accountability measures for Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law.
Israel’s impunity has destabilized the region, fueling arms races, proxy wars, and cycles of revenge. It has also corroded what remains of the international legal order. The abuse of international law by the US and Israel with much of Europe remaining silent, has gravely weakened the UN Charter, leaving the UN close to collapse.
In the concluding remarks of his speech, he offered the US a political solution and path forward. “The path to stability is clear: justice for Palestine, accountability for crimes, an end to occupation and apartheid, and a regional order built on sovereignty, equality, and cooperation. If the world wants peace, it must stop rewarding aggression. If the world wants stability, it must stop enabling expansionism.”
This is a valid and constructive response to Rubio’s call for comprehensive diplomacy.
This framework could address all the interlocking dimensions of the region’s conflict. The end of Israel’s expansion and occupation of Palestine, and Israel’s return to the borders of June 4, 1967, would bring an end to outside funding and arming of proxy groups in the region. The creation of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel would enhance Israel’s security as well as that of its neighbors. A renewed nuclear agreement with Iran, strictly limiting Iran to peaceful nuclear activities and paired with the lifting of US and EU sanctions, would add a crucial pillar of regional stability. Iran already agreed to such a nuclear framework a decade ago, in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was the US during Trump's first term, not Iran, that withdrew from the agreement.
A comprehensive peace reflects the foundation of modern collective security doctrine, including the United Nations Charter itself. Durable peace requires mutual recognition of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and equal security guarantees for all states.
Regional security is the shared responsibility of all states in the region, and each of them faces a historic obligation. This comprehensive peace proposal is not new, it has been advocated for decades by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (57 Muslim‑majority countries) and the League of Arab States (22 Arab States). Ever since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, all of these countries have endorsed, on a yearly basis, the framework of land-for-peace. All major Arab and Islamic states, allies of the US, have played a crucial role in facilitating the latest round of US-Iranian negotiations in Oman. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has clearly reminded the US that it will normalize relations with Israel only on the condition of the establishment of a Palestinian State.
The United States faces a moment of truth. Does it really want peace, or does it want to follow Israel’s extremism? For decades, the US has blindly followed Israeli misguided objectives. Domestic political pressures, powerful lobbying networks, strategic miscalculations, and perhaps a bit of blackmail lurking in the Epstein files (who knows?) have combined to subordinate American diplomacy to Israel’s regional ambitions.
The US subservience to Israel does not serve American interests. It has drawn the United States into repeated regional wars, undermined global trust in American foreign policy, and weakened the international legal order that Washington itself helped to construct after 1945.
A comprehensive peace offers the US a rare opportunity to correct course. By negotiating a comprehensive regional peace grounded in international law, the United States could reclaim genuine diplomacy and help to establish a stable regional security architecture that benefits all parties, including Israel and Palestine.
The Middle East stands at a crossroads between endless war and comprehensive peace. The framework for peace exists. It requires first and foremost Palestinian statehood, security guarantees for Israel and the rest of the region, a peaceful nuclear deal restoring the basic agreement adopted by the UN a decade ago, lifting of economic sanctions, the unbiased enforcement of international law, and a diplomatic architecture that replaces military force with security cooperation. The world should rally behind a comprehensive framework and take this historic opportunity to achieve regional peace.
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