Canadian efforts to help the crisis in Cuba

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Cuba is still recovering from a major blackout this past week as it continues to grapple with severe fuel shortages, rolling outages and dwindling essentials.

The country has long suffered from economic woes, but the situation has grown far worse since the U.S. deposed Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January, cut off Venezuelan oil to Cuba, and threatened other countries with terrorists if they send fuel.

That's all on top of President Donald Trump's threats to Cuba itself. He recently warned that Washington could take imminent action against Cuba.

It all stands and start contrast to the relationship that Canada has long had with the Caribbean nation.

CBC producer Julia Poggle explores that history, and the efforts Canadians are making today to help a country in crisis. Here's Julia's documentary.

We're just going to say the truth, because our crazy trauma is making it every hour, hour, hour, hour for our people.

He's trying to affect the government about all they do, and he's killing our people.

This is Eddie Garcia. He's telling me about life in Cuba.

Very desperate, very sad. We are our workers.

Like they don't mind getting up at five in the morning, working for 12 hours.

But supporting a family in Cuba is getting harder and harder to do. The country is desperately low on oil, and life in Cuba is grinding to a halt.

Even when the doctors and nurses wanted to look out to our people, there is no opportunity, there is nobody seen, nobody can supply.

Public transportation often never arrives. Busses don't have enough fuel.

Food is very expensive at the private grocery stores, partly because local manufacturing has slowed because of the severe lack of oil.

The cost of food has been a growing problem for years. Prices keep going up, and now a flood of eggs could cost close to a month's salary for some Cubans.

And many of the government-run grocery stores are almost empty.

Even if you had the morning, no fuel or the gas, or no electricity to cook the food.

So I can tell you that 90% of Cuban families are right now cooking with natural charcoal, which is also crazy hard to find.

When you find it, you have to pay a really, really expensive light. We are cooking like a moldy salary just to cook.

Eddie is usually a busy tour guide. But with Canadian planes no longer flying to Cuba, there are very few tourists.

He's stuck at home, just waiting.

When you see it at home, and nothing to do, and knowing, you know, and the days are running, the time is passing, you are getting nervous and desperate because you've got to support your family.

I have to look, it's Ryan and Adams. Ryan is 14 and my leader boy is 7th in there, is also now where school is still officially running.

Sometimes I took them to the school and they say, no, there is no classes today. Even when they go, they just stay two or three hours because it's so hard to support anything in a country like that that doesn't have fuel or anything.

It's so hard for a people. It's so hard.

There have been rolling blackouts, something that's been a reality for years, but is way worse now.

I'm told some can last over 16 hours. And recently, the entire country's electrical grid went down for days.

As Eddie mentions, it's hard to cook, food spoils in the fridge, then you can't charge your electronics.

And many times we made the line up like 3-4 hours in a gas station to get power, and then by the moment that you are getting in there, then we get a blackout.

So it is almost impossible to live like that. It's not in your hands, so that's the situation in view right now.

I'm talking to Eddie on speakerphone, sitting in Jennifer Ramer's living room in London, Ontario.

Honestly, we are just a lived-in little house. I'm a missionary. I don't make money.

Jennifer is a go-go kind of person. She woke up at 5.30 this morning to get her workout in.

She has four kids, three of them out of the house, the last finishing high school.

Eddie was a bartender at the resort. Jennifer and her husband were staying at, and they kept in touch.

She says Eddie is almost part of her family now, and Eddie agrees.

We became like family and friends.

She's close with his wife and kids too. And by the way, their names are Brian and Adam because he loves Brian Adams.

So when we're driving around in the car, we listen to Brian Adams all the time. It's so funny.

Eddie gives tours from his cab, but he also delivers aid, the Jennifer's charity, Together for Cuba, sends to his home country.

We've been working all over Cuba.

Together for Cuba is a charity Jennifer set up about 10 years ago.

After she delivered a bag of medical supplies to a hospital in Cuba.

I felt nervous and excited and didn't really know how they would receive it.

She'd been to Cuba before, on vacation. On that trip, she and her husband left the resort in Veredaro and explored the nearby town.

She saw empty pharmacies, and heard stories of hospitals with no supplies.

She knew she wanted to help. So on her next trip, she brought a bag of supplies to hand out when she got there.

And we gave the suitcase out and it was very emotional.

They are just blown away that were here, bringing them aid.

And then I just started going back. So one bag led to two bags and as of last year, we are sending over 600 medical bags per year into the country.

And I knew that this is where I was supposed to be.

Jennifer is supported with some of her work by a Christian missionary charity.

But she says that group mainly helps with tax receipts, some accounting.

She says Together for Cuba is really all Jennifer.

I did it mainly alone. I did have some volunteers that came once in a while,

which I'm so grateful 12 people volunteers, along with the people in Cuba who are distributing that aid.

This room is packed and I cleaned it up a little bit for you for the sake of you coming back.

She shows me around her Cuba room, the front room of her house, totally dedicated to storing the aid she gathers.

A map of Cuba on the wall, a painting of a beach and palm tree swaying in the breeze.

Just visible behind the boxes of aid.

Oh, this is this was supposed to go down. This is a water filtration system that will go down to Cuba as well with us.

This is your cataract surgery kit. This is all for orthopedic surgery.

We get walkers, wheel tears, canes. She preps these duffle bags to send to Cuba with tourists.

It's the cheapest and most efficient way to get aid to Cuba, she says.

Even though getting these bags ready is an enormous time consuming task for her.

So let's get this table set up and I'm going to show you what I do.

Jennifer slides her dining room table out of the way, sets up a folding table and starts unpacking the supplies from boxes.

I actually have to take it all out of the boxes and sort.

Okay, so now I've got to grab the scale and ziplock bags.

Yeah, so every day I pulled this all out and and just start sorting and packing and then the bags get full at 50 pounds.

I load them all into my car into my SUV, bring them over to the storage unit, hold them all up in there and then bring more boxes back with me and start all here again.

And I try to clean it up by like five so that my family don't come home and be like, my goodness, you don't even have a table to eat at.

She's witnessed so much that proves it's all worth it.

So a six year old patient having open abdominal surgery and the doctors were showing me that is all happening because that's your aid that you brought that you brought this another time.

Two month old baby, he needed heart surgery and he was near going to die and he was underweight and they needed tube feeding and it was amazing.

I had a hockey bag full of infant tube feeding and liquid and the cardiac doctor came in and was crying on my shoulder and said you saved your life today.

But Jennifer's stories like those have stopped.

I flew home January 26th without knowing that this was going to happen at all.

We were full ready on having the next trip come down.

The Trump administration has blocked shipments from Venezuela.

All major Canadian airlines have now suspended themselves from service to Cuba.

So here I am. We're just waiting and waiting and the people in Cuba have grown to know the mission as well.

And they're all going, oh my goodness, how are we going to get these supplies?

In the first 24 hours of the planes being canceled, I had around 500 messages come through.

We have social workers that work with us in Cuba and they're saying like we know there's communities that need certain supplies, they need food, they need medication.

We work with doctors in the communities and they're all waiting and we're hoping because I was coming down with like a hundred bags and now they're worried.

So they switched gears. She dipped into their funds and got her workers in Cuba to buy food and just drop it off around the country.

So my team on the ground, let's do this. Are you guys how much gas do you have?

Get out there, buy more food, buy more food, buy more food and they go out and we choose all the different communities that are really out.

We say Campo in the countryside and bring them food, many women with children wondering how they're going to feed their kids the next day.

I think we've delivered already to more than 300 homes as a whole, as a total census happened since the planes stopped flying.

Eddie has played a big role in these deliveries.

We've had people with food, with medicine, also on the people on the street, all over Cuba.

We were helping more than 10 kids that they are of a cancer.

So that's a huge humanitarian help. What kind of together for Cuba and especially Jennifer is doing to help and support what people now when the people really needed.

In this video, Jennifer sent me, Eddie's delivering food to school children.

He piles up bags of rice and beans on their laps and asked their names.

I was just there, I got many friends there, but my two best friends, one of them I share,

an apartment with, they both just managed to literally get out yesterday.

My name is Karen Dubinsky. I live in Kingston, Ontario, for many years.

I taught at Queens University and the departments of both history and global development studies.

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I call up Karen to get a historical perspective on what's happening in Cuba and place this aid work the Jennifer's doing in the context of Canada's long relationship with the country.

She's been in Cuba a lot over the past 18 years where she coordinated and taught an exchange program for students from Canada and Cuba, but on her most recent visit in January.

So I entered a country that at the middle of January that was in rough shape.

The Cuba I left after the oil blockade was announced was I could literally see in real time how things were changing.

So words like catastrophic are not an exaggeration. Let me say potentially catastrophic. They're fed up. They're frustrated.

And for me up until now the constant reference in terms of deprivation is the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed 70% of the Cuban economy collapsed with it and they called it ridiculously in my view the special period.

People talk about the special period the way my grandmother used to talk about the depression in the 1930s.

The special period therefore for certainly for several generations of Cuban stands as this moment of wow that was hell we survived that.

But this is the point of the comparison now is that this is way worse. This is way worse to people tell me in terms of desperation in terms of anxiety in terms of inability to plan in terms of uncertainty.

Most 1959 revolution when Fidel Castro took power was another time of uncertainty for the Cuban people.

There was the American CIA backed failed coup a potential nuclear arms war and an American trade embargo which completely cut off many imports to Cuba.

It was also the beginning of what would become an important relationship between Cuba and Canada.

I think a really interesting example of Canada taking a different stand Canada exhibiting some independence in terms of foreign policy Canada and Mexico both famously did maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba unbroken Canada did not impose an economic blockade Canada didn't participate in the economic blockade that the US imposed.

After the revolution there is an exodus of the intellectual class the country needed to build up its own professional capacity.

The first foreign non-governmental organization that was invited a requested by the Cuban government to work to help to in this case rebuild their engineering capacity was guess what a Canadian NGO Canadian University service overseas.

It's QSO which literally helped to build the engineering program at Cuban universities from the late 60s through the 1970s.

Just one example I think of the kinds of relationships of trust that existed at the government to government level.

Another example of Canada sharing expertise was building a better cow that could withstand the tropical climate literally brought from Canada.

It was Simon to Cuba and they created a new hybrid there's a statue somewhere I believe it graces a research institute to a Canadian bull that was seen to be one of the kind of the fathers shall we say and I'm not making up that language it was a big deal.

There's a back and forth between the two countries that kind of goes a bit unnoticed or at least overshadowed by the big explosive tensions between the US and Cuba.

Canada has long been among Cuba's more important trading partners.

We also obeyed the rules you know we didn't Canada didn't sell anything that could be conceived of as a weapon.

There were rules about what could be sold in terms of US like all this US hardware that was there right there were rules about what Canada could supply to help fix a singer sewing machine.

I remember that one because I remember people talking to me about that being one one really irritating example of a common thing that people needed and once the whatever broke on it you just couldn't get a you couldn't get a replacement for.

And tourism became a major way Canada supported the Cuban economy.

There was lots of education tourism there was what people called solidarity tourism which had this you know explicit political tie.

But over time they're developed just what we would think of as I guess regular tourism before the pandemic over a million Canadians a year visited Cuba.

And with this tourism many Canadians developed a deep connection to the country and its people I don't know of other places where people pack their suitcases full of vitamins and other kinds of medicines repeatedly as part of the friendship.

I mean is that white saviorism is that is it charity I you know there's if I won't say not that but I think there is a way in which it seems a more at least people imagine themselves on a more equal playing field because it's also about relations right it's about people with whom they have had a had a relationship in the past.

There are other organizations that sends aid to Cuba like Jennifer but Karen says all this aid.

It's a drop in the bucket the humanitarian assistance that Canada finally announced that's a drop in the bucket too right.

My name is Ray Ville and I'm in Santiago de Cuba.

Ray is a Canadian expat.

I've been here on and off the last 13 years but have traveled many times to Cuba before then basically I'm down here because I was married now divorced and I have a daughter.

And while Ray's Canadian pension allows him and his daughter a comfortable life in Cuba he sees firsthand how things are getting desperate for others.

There's school lunches they don't have electricity they can't do the proper cooking in that and that's a that's a problem for most of the kids.

I always pack a big lunch for my daughter Nicole and she's been there quite nice and that and share some or lunch with a couple of her classmates and that who don't have lunches from home.

Last few weeks he tells me the cost of bread has doubled.

He said stories of people breaking into homes just to steal rice and he wishes Canada was doing more to help.

Well they need a need a lot of international solidarity.

I know that there are solidarity groups in Canada.

Those organizations you know are sending far more money than the poultry eating billion dollars that the key government promised like that.

What is that that's absolutely nothing you know here we are.

Cuba has had a long long relationship a friendly relationship you know Canada is a abundance of oil and that why ever we sent down to Cuba some oil if you ship into oil and that.

I know Trump wouldn't like that in that but say hey let's you know let's do the hockey expression and put the elbows up and saying no we're doing this this is humanitarian aid.

I reached out to the federal Department of Global Affairs and in an email they said Canada is in regular contact with UN agencies who are working on plans to scale up humanitarian response in Cuba if and when necessary.

The email continued that Canada also responds to the crisis by funding experienced organizations like UN agencies and NGOs.

The email sites pass support like the 3 million Canada sent after Hurricane Melissa in 2025.

Now some believe that sending aid is not the right way to go.

Karen Dabinsky the Queen's professor knows some Cubans in the diaspora who are critical of people sending money or aid to relatives in Cuba.

They believe as she says hungry Cubans will rise up and bring down the government.

A government which has been an economic turmoil long before this current oil blockade and has been accused of harshly repressing its citizens who speak out against its policies but Karen says.

This is not the kind of debates about serious long term change that needs to happen in that country but that doesn't need to happen by Canadian tourists or frankly the Canadian government or any government.

Those are conversations that Cubans obviously need to be having and I don't know how they have those conversations now.

She can't imagine how people could rise up under these conditions. Many are in survival mode. So how could they plan the next steps for their country?

I still ask what does she think is next?

People saying to me if the Yankees come we're going to fight them on the streets.

Other people saying to me the status quo is so bad things are so bad we need change and I don't care where it comes from.

I have the echo of somebody saying to me even bad change and they sort of pause and say you know what I mean by bad change.

I still persist in believing that national sovereignty is national sovereignty and people should determine their own future but I don't know if that's going to happen.

The only thing she can say with certainty is the Cubans who I talk to want change but what form that takes that's a really big conversation.

He became to the point that not mostly one anymore.

A conversation that Eddie can no longer wait to hear the conclusion of.

It's not possible to survive in Cuba anymore. It's not a few stories at all.

He says he can't survive in Cuba.

That's what I make a sad but huge and important decision for my family to leave the country you know left the country and look for different you know options or choices.

He decided it was time to leave his country so he his wife Brian and Adam got tickets to the Dominican Republic which is where they are now.

It's going to be one week. I never wanted to leave my country because I'm so proud to be Cuban. I love my Cuban people and I love Canadians so I would never leave my country but I had no choice.

They left behind their parents the kids grandparents and his wife's twin sister.

That's a very sad part you know.

To leave my parents you know I'm planning to bring them later on because they are getting old very sad.

They just cry for days. I got no choice you know I had to do it.

The two weeks before I left I wanted to make something really beautiful and something that makes me feel you know as the human being very happy so I spent the three weeks before I left helping our people.

So we were to the worst country size where the leader families situation is so hard very very poor people I can't forget the house that I went in a little community was all men very very skinny you know like you can see that he's having a very tough time and we came with the hands full of foot you know that the Canadians made the money to support that.

I say hey we brought some food for you we have we have rice we have a pound of milk we have some ground beef from the kind of stuff you know a lot of food.

I say no I cannot take it say why you say because I cannot pay you know you don't have to pay this is free he is to start crying it was some moment that I wouldn't ever forget you know.

I'm not going to stop because Cuba still needs help as for Eddie and his family Eddie starting to drive a taxi in the Dominican Republic and the kids are starting school.

Full days no interruptions they call me the Ben and I the day that they got into D.R.

We're here it was so exciting to see.

There is way and and we can bring hope in small ways by bringing showing them like we're still here for you we always say Cuba you're not alone.

That documentary was brought to us by Julia Puggle with help from Joan Weber of CBC's audio documentary unit.

You've been listening to the current podcast my name is Matt Galloway thanks for listening I'll talk to you soon.

For more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.