Trump’s War on Cuba: Crisis Made in the USA

The Cuban government is talking with us, they're in a big deal of trouble, as you know,

they have no money, they have no anything right now, but they're talking with us and

maybe we'll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.

We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.

Cuba is facing the greatest existential threat it has seen in decades.

Cubans say they are in survival mode, enduring frequent blackouts and soaring food prices,

as the United States continues to block fuel from reaching the island.

Well, we don't have electricity.

For example, last week, I was 16, 14, 18 hours without power.

That's Liz Oliva Fernandez, she's a Cuban journalist from Harana.

She works with the independent media outlet, Belly of the Beast, will be hearing a lot

from her in this episode.

But we don't have transportation, public transportation, only private ones.

They caught classes at the university, now they're online, but the problem is when they

electricity is out when we are in a blackout, the connection is also terrible.

So I don't have any idea how the kids are going to have online classes without internet

or electricity.

Liz says since the gasoline shortage began in January, the streets have been increasingly

empty of cars.

Piled high all around Havana, uncollected rubbish is rotting in the open air, much to the

despair of residents.

Trash is filling streets, because garbage trucks can't make the rounds.

They caught the service in the hospitals, they are not essential, and that's complicated

because there are a lot of people that are waiting for appointments.

In the last Donald Trump administration, the healthcare system has really impacted

by the sanctions, then Biden don't do nothing, maintain the sanctions, so it's a strong

Biden sanctions, and now Trump is back again in the sanctions at work, so the healthcare

system in Cuba has been affecting so hard in the last 10 years.

Now with this, it's just dying.

The banks are also closing, they have really small, like, is everything.

Like, a lot of people don't have gas to cook, but they don't have also electricity.

This is something that is not new, but has been aggravated in the last couple of weeks.

So people are cooking with wood, whatever they can find, to prepare the food for the kids,

for the elders, migration really hit this country in the last past years.

So there's a lot of moms, dads, and grandmothers and grandfathers that are just here alone

because their kids just left the country two, three years ago.

Things are bad.

There haven't been this bad in decades, and it's on purpose.

This is a humanitarian crisis made in the United States.

President Donald Trump spoke to reporters about Cuba in mid-February.

Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don't even have jet fuel to get their airplanes

to take off.

They're plugging up their runway, and we're talking to look at Cuba right now, and Marco

Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal, because it's

a humanitarian threat.

But Trump, Rubio and other officials have made it clear that they aren't interested in anything

less than regime change, and they're going after that goal full throttle.

The United States is now imposing an intensified economic blockade on the island nation that

is pushing it to the brink and hitting its most vulnerable residents the hardest.

So we can say that already people are dying because of their sanctions.

I cannot tell you a number, but whoever is behind these sanctions, they have blood on their

hands.

All of that in a minute.

This is under the shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the

role of the United States abroad in the past and the very, very present.

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I'm your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer

and host of the podcast's Brazil on Fire and Stories of Resistance.

I've spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I've seen firsthand the role of the U.S. government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not

for the better.

Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes, politically and economically.

The United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.

It still does.

This is season two of Under the Shadow Trump's attack.

Episode seven, Trump's war on Cuba, crisis made in the USA.

Today we're headed to Cuba, the next country on Trump's hit list after Venezuela and

Nala Iran.

Over the last month, the Trump administration has ratcheted up its actions against the

country with devastating effects.

On January 29th, Trump issued an executive order declaring that Cuba constituted a quote

unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.

The order accused the Cuban government of supporting terrorism and destabilizing the

region.

Trump declared a national emergency in response to the so-called Cuban threat.

He threatened to levy tariffs on any country, quote, found to directly or indirectly sell

or otherwise provide any oil to Cuba.

Now, cutting all oil to Cuba might not seem like such a big deal unless you remember that

Cuba is a nearly 800-mile long island in the Caribbean 90 miles from the U.S. coast.

It does have an oil refinery, but no way to access crude.

And like many countries on the planet, oil runs just about everything.

Fuel for gas, cars, trucks, the electrical grid, and therefore also the water system.

In other words, shut off the oil pumps and you essentially strangle the country, which

is exactly what the United States is trying to do.

And Cuba will be failing pretty soon.

Cuba is really a nation that's very close to failing.

You know, they got their money from Venezuela, they got the oil from Venezuela, they're

not getting that anymore.

That was Trump speaking just two days before issuing his executive order.

Francesca Immanuel is with the Center for Economic and Policy Research or SEAPR in Washington,

DC.

The current energy siege cannot be understood apart from its explicit political objective.

To force the island's economic collapse in order to precipitate the overthrow of the

Cuban government, regime changed a strategy that the United States has pursued for decades.

And that's just it.

This is just the latest iteration of an embargo or blockade that the United States has held

against the island in the name of toppling its government for more than 60 years.

A blockade that for decades has been denounced nearly unanimously by almost every country

in the world at the UN General Assembly.

The unilateral, economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States

of America against the Republic of Cuba remains a clear violation of the UN Charter and

International Law.

And Swab Lackman is the Barbados ambassador to the UN.

He spoke to the Assembly in 2025 before the annual vote denouncing the U.S. embargo.

For more than three decades, the General Assembly, guided by the Charter, has spoken with

clarity and consistency.

This embargo must end.

Sometimes the idea of sanctions is hard to wrap your head around.

And I want to just take a moment to put this blockade into perspective.

I'm bringing in an old friend to give some context.

I met her 20 years ago when we were both researching cooperatives in Venezuela.

Her name is Camila Pinedo.

And I'm a Cuban-American based in Maryland and I have dedicated my life to advances social

solidarity economy in and also in other countries around the world.

We spoke over Zoom in mid-February.

One way of putting in is if you have a swimmer and you chain one swimmer to the bottom of

the pool and you make that chain shorter and shorter and shorter.

Like there is no way that swimmer can swim and at some point is going to drown, right?

That is Cuba drowning under U.S. sanctions.

The new ones and the old ones that have been imposed on it since the 1960s.

It's like a medieval siege and over the last month the United States has tightened

the screws particularly around oil.

But that siege has been in place for a long time.

Who shortly after the victory of the Cuban Revolution on January 1st, 1959.

Marrying 26th July banners, joyous followers of Fidel Castro sweep triumphantly through

the Cuban capital hours after their rebellion had toppled the regime of Fulcencia Batista.

Such was the scene just before Castro's advance guard approached.

They had marched right across the island in a triumphant progress, joyfully acclaimed

all the way.

At last Dr. Fidel Castro himself arrived.

Time and again he was held up by the crowds.

He spoke to them of the new regime now being inaugurated, a regime by the way now formally

recognized by Britain.

Peter Cornblou runs the Cuba documentation project at the National Security Archive

in Washington, D.C.

He's also the co-author of the book Back Channel to Cuba, the hidden history of negotiations

between Washington and Havana.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was really one of the most significant and the most significant

David versus Goliaths in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

This small island off the coast of the United States took on the classes of the North.

Cuba, Pearl of the Antilles, playground of the Caribbean with a charm both bold and exciting.

The U.S. economic interests and U.S. political interests and U.S. mafia interests, crime

interests had controlled Cuba for the better part of since the 1930s, essentially.

And the United States actually had controlled Cuba under a special law that the U.S. Congress

passed at the turn of the 20th century called the Platt Amendment, which gave the United

States the right to basically tell the Cubans what to do, control their economy, control

their military, control their politics, take Guantanamo as U.S. property, in perpetuity, etc.,

etc.

So it was a symbol of U.S. imperial and imperialist interests in the Caribbean and Latin American

region.

And here comes this, you know, bearded uniform to revolutionary who stands up to United

States, leads a rather unbelievable revolution because of the nationalism of the Cuban people,

the Cuban people are so angry with the brutality and ruthlessness of the general that the United

States kind of controlled Cuba through, General Batista, that they were all willing to rise

up, the middle classes, lower classes, upper middle classes.

Castro is kind of a romantic figure, and he eventually turned to the Soviet Union as

the threat, as his reforms, set teed off U.S. officials as well as his federal rhetoric.

Cuba's plan offered another road to development. They rolled out literacy programs and trained

doctors. They also nationalized land and agriculture, expropriating foreign companies with the

goal of redistributing wealth inside Cuba. It did not sit well with the United States.

That is White House press conference, President Eisenhower announces that Cuba is a science

share of the United States sugar market, has been cut by 95 percent for the balance of 1960.

It replied of what I call Videl Castro's deliberate policy of hostility. Cuba is expected to

respond by new seizures of American poverty. That was a big deal for Cuba. At the time,

the island nation was the largest sugar producing country in the world. Sugar was its largest

export. Most of it went to the United States. Suddenly, Cuba had to pivot to new markets like

China and the Soviet Union from the Communist bloc. On October 19, 1960, U.S. President Dwight

Eisenhower announced the trade embargo on Cuba. It banned most U.S. exports to the island,

except for medicine and food. The Eisenhower decision to foster deprivation on the island

through a cutoff of exports was in response to Videl Castro's decision to expropriate U.S.

properties. The oil refineries, some of the fellow lands by the sugar companies, agriculture

reform, and also to receive a delegation, an economic delegation from the Soviet Union,

that the United States found to be a big problem. The whole point of the revolution was that

Cuba would become independent of U.S. economic and political control. Obviously, to do that,

it needed to develop alliances with other major countries.

Peter found the original copy of what's known as the Mallory Memo. It essentially outlined

the strategy for the trade embargo with Cuba. It's declassified and up on the National Security

Archive website. It's dated April 6, 1960, about six months before Eisenhower imposed the embargo.

Subject line, the decline and fall of Castro. It talks about the strategy of cutting off

U.S. economic ties to Cuba because Fidel Castro was too popular and the way to make him unpopular

was to create hunger and deprivation and somehow the Cuban people would blame Fidel rather than

blame United States. It has always been considered the general original logic of the trade embargo.

The document was written by U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs

Lester Mallory. It literally says, quote, the only foreseeable means of alienating internal

support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.

The goal, it says, is to quote, decrease monetary and real wages to bring about hunger,

desperation and overthrow of government. It's the same thing we would hear a decade later from

President Richard Nixon after socialist president Salvador Allende took office in Chile,

make the economy scream and thus was born the Cuban embargo or part of it.

The U.S. trade embargo was half-started by Eisenhower in 1960 and then completed by President

John F. Kennedy very early 1962 well before the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Eisenhower cut off

all U.S. exports to Cuba and Kennedy then cut off all U.S. imports from Cuba and expanded

the embargo to cover third countries and other Cuban goods that might come from elsewhere.

The embargo became a symbol that endured. It endured past the CIA, covert operation plots,

the assassination plots, the big invasion, all of that.

But the fiery bearded Castro is hardly short on words as he attacks what he calls United States

imperialism and calls on sister Latin American republics to aid Cuba.

There is so much history I'd like to dive into here today. The Cuban Missile Crisis,

the U.S. terror campaign against Cuba, the 1976 CIA-backed bombing of flight 455 which killed

all 73 people on board including the Cuban national fencing team. Clearly, I need to produce

an entire season of under the shadow just on Cuba. But for now, I'm going to bring us back to

the present and the ever-present embargo or blockade. Basically, I've located you were blocking

anything for coming in and from coming out and of course they had some point it wasn't 100%

effective because Cuba found ways but the U.S. every time has made it harder and harder and

like the easy times of the embargo or blockade, Cuba could not buy anything even by any company anywhere

in the world. If a product had 10% of U.S. components, Cuba could not buy. That was when the times

were good for Cuba. That's the minimum of the embargo. So you can imagine every technology

pretty much in the world has at least 10% of U.S. components.

Camila also says that ships that travel to Cuba to trade can't go back to the United States for

at least six months, six months, and that is not new. That rule has been in place since 1962.

There is no ship that is going to come to Cuba that is not going to want to go to the U.S.

Camila says U.S. efforts to undermine Cuba at every turn go well beyond the sanctions,

threatening other countries or companies blocking purchases from abroad even over medicine and

supplies to fight COVID-19 during the pandemic. It's also all the undercover actions that they do to stop

anything that the Cuban institutions try to do to develop or like satisfy the needs of the people.

If they know that the Cuban government is buying some part somewhere to fix a thermal electric,

they're going to sabotage that. So they do everything in their power to make our lives

in the lives of Cubans as bad as they can.

Everyone I spoke to for this episode told me the same thing. The closest comparison to the crisis

facing Cuba today is the special period in the 1990s. After the fall of the Soviet block,

which for decades had been Cuba's top trading partner and economic lifeline.

It's like the worst time of the special period with the difference that now you can find stuff

that is very expensive and then it was like you could not find stuff like people it was more

equal. So the pain was distributed more equally. Now the people that are most vulnerable,

the people who don't have any common foreign currency or like all people who don't

have anyone to care for or sick people are seeing it really, really bad.

The US blockade against Cuba is the longest running embargo blockade or economic sanctions

against any country in the world.

I just want to pause for a minute to let that sink in. A Cuban born anytime after 1960

has never lived a day without US sanctions on the island. In other words, anyone younger than

retirement age in Cuba has always felt the direct or indirect impact of the United States on their

lives. But journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez says that's hard to put into perspective when you're

struggling to get by from one day to the next. This inches is so big and people are so busy

surviving the day by day live that they don't have enough time to pay attention today.

Okay, let me see like political picture, the big picture, let me analyze how this is having

domino effects on me and also on my family. People are trying to oh my god, the price of the

chicken. Oh my god, we don't have eggs. Oh my god, it's impossible for me to buy eggs and to pay

transportation or buy chicken. I need to decide. So I'm thinking about a circumstance or to buy

medications. I'm trying to to to set the things down like people are really doing through ash right

now. Here's the thing, it didn't have to be like this. I have come here to bury the last remnant

of the Cold War in the Americas. I know this seems like ancient history, but President Barack Obama

made huge strides toward renewing relations with Cuba. When he was in office exactly a decade ago,

this month he was the first U.S. President to travel to Cuba in almost 90 years, Peter Cornbler.

That was to create momentum for the breakthrough in normalized relations. And at the time,

he brought a whole entourage of U.S. businessmen. People wanted to start to invest in Cuba. Cuba

entrepreneurs felt supported for the first time and an opening for the first time. Yes, that situation

didn't work out, but it didn't work out because Donald Trump came in and abrogated the deal with

Cuba that President Obama had made. And cutting off that relationship, which was creating significant

change, both in U.S. Cuban relations and on the island in terms of economic development,

was a major contribution to the situation right now. Instead, up until now, there's still some food

in the farmers markets and people who have access to dollars and are in the private sector are still

able to get food. Other parts of the country are not, however, and that is the majority of Cubans.

Peter Cornbler was in Cuba in late February on a fact-finding trip to get a sense of the reality

on the ground. Transportation is hampered, trucks are not on the highways any longer,

the tourism sector is quickly shutting down. This is having not just a ripple effect in the

economy, but a tsunami effect on the economy in a very short period of time. So Cuba is in a

dire economic position, which is what Donald Trump wants. He wants to pressure Cuba to cry uncle

and basically come to the negotiating table ready to concede their sovereignty.

And we have the president of the United States beginning to imagine and declare that we're going to

have some sort of U.S. friendly takeover of Cuba. Hopefully there will be some kind of agreement

that benefits both the Cuban people and U.S. interests, but nobody should forget that

that agreement is going to come at the end of a very threatening coercive dagger

emanating from Washington pointing right at the heart of the nation of Cuba.

Well, over the last 60 years, the U.S. has methodically made it very difficult for Cuba to have

normal trade relations in the world. Medea Benjamin is the founder of the peace group code pink.

She traveled to Cuba twice over the last month to bring humanitarian aid to the country.

This gets better in certain times like when Barack Obama was president and then it goes back again

and Trump has tightened the screws. But what it means is that Cuba was never able to really

try to reach its potential because it always came up against U.S. efforts to sabotage.

The sanctions when they're at their worst don't let Cuba deal with the international financial system.

They make it impossible for Cuba to use what's called the SWIFT system.

So Cuba doesn't have the ability to have a credit. When it buys anything, it has to do it in cash.

People in Cuba now don't have access to, for example, you can't use Zoom, you can't use PayPal,

you can't use GoFundMe, you can't use these kinds of things that other people around the world use.

It's hard to send remittances back to your family very hard. Other countries, poor countries,

their number one source of income is money that people who've left the country send back to their

families. Remittances. Cuba, it used to be you could send through Western Union, now the U.S.

closed that down, they closed down other avenues. So people literally have to carry the money

to take two relatives. So you look at any area where Cuba has tried to either act like a normal

country with normal trade relations or has tried to find different ways to get income like that

medical missions program that became, at one point, the source, the number one source of

hard currency to the country. These sanctions have made it impossible.

Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez says she was recently speaking with the Cuban American lawyer

Alfred Desias and he told her we shouldn't be using the term sanctions. I would say don't say

sanctions anymore because sanctions are legal. This is our unilateral coercive measures.

Against one country. And this is illegal on the international law. And don't fix anything

like compliance because you can't comply something that is illegal that makes you a complicit.

That is different.

It's hard to describe the very real impact U.S. sanctions have on people and communities in Cuba

or any place. The narratives we hear usually downplay the damage or skew the story.

We're told the financial or humanitarian crises caused in large part by the sanctions

are really to be blamed on the Cuban government's poor management or quote repressive apparatus.

This is what we're hearing from many U.S. news outlets, analysts, and lawmakers.

Florida Republican Congressman Carlos Jimenez spoke to Fox News in early February.

And that regime is a cancer, a cancer to the Cuban people, a cancer to the Western hemisphere.

We need some harsh medicine to cure the patient Cuba so that we can get rid of this cancer,

which is the communist regime that has basically oppressed its own people for over 65 years and

has exported its revolution to the Western hemisphere. And so they've been a real thorn in our side

for a long time. And I'm very glad that the President has taken decisive action.

I saw the direct impact of sanctions first hand in Venezuela in 2019.

I traveled there to investigate how ramped up U.S. sanctions under Trump were impacting

the lives of everyday residents. What I found was shocking.

Entire shelves of pharmacies were empty. Parents couldn't get even basic medicine for their kids.

The little medicine that was there was too expensive for most people. Much like the case with Cuba,

U.S. sanctions had blocked Venezuela from using international banking systems and threatened

actions against other countries that would trade with Venezuela.

One day, I traveled up into a maze of cinder block homes in the Port Barrio of Calcauita

in eastern Caracas. I was there to meet Carolina Subero, who lived with her mother, sister,

and three kids in a minuscule, two bedroom home. Her youngest daughter, then five-year-old

Hencarely's, needed four different medications for her epilepsy. But Carolina could only find one

of the drugs and she could only afford it some of the time. She has seizures every day,

Carolina told me. I've had to trade food for medicine. Hers was one of countless stories I heard.

According to a 2019 report by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research,

Hencarely's was one of an estimated 300,000 people at risk because of a lack of medicines or

treatment due to the U.S. sanctions on the country. In Caracas, broken vehicles lined the winding

road sides of the Port Barrio's because parts largely came from abroad and they were either

impossible to find or to expensive. The same went for broken water pumps and pipes leaving

entire residential water systems out of commission. The line from the U.S. government and the mainstream

media was that the Maduro administration had run the country into the ground. The reality, however,

was that the United States was blocking Venezuela from both buying products abroad and selling its oil,

the country's top source of income. The U.S. threatened repercussions on anyone who dared to

trade with Caracas and it forced many U.S. businesses out of Venezuela during a meeting between

Trump and executives of U.S. oil companies this January, the director of the oil company Halliburton

underscored this point. When did you leave Venezuela? As a company we left under the sanctions in

2019 so we had intended to stay and then when the sanctions went into place we were required to leave.

Actually the sanctions have a tremendous impact on Venezuela's economy and its ability to

import essential goods. Greg Wilpert is the founder of the independent new site

Venezuel analysis and the author of the 2007 book about then President Hugo Chavez

changing Venezuela by taking power. I would estimate that something like 80% of the economic

problems whether it's the decline in GDP or the increase in inflation are attributable basically

to the sanctions. In other words the United States was slowly strangling Venezuela and not just

the government, the people, the nation. According to that report by the Center for Economic and

Policy Research that I mentioned earlier between 2017 and 2019 the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela

killed 40,000 people. A study co-authored by the same organization in 2025 and published in the

Lancet Global Health Journal estimated that more than half a million people die around the world

each year from sanctions. Put another way more people are killed each year by sanctions than by

wars across the planet. The authors of the report found that most of the sanctions related deaths

over the last five decades were children under the age of five. By far the United States is the top

country in the world that uses sanctions as coercive measures against its political adversaries

and their populations. In fact according to Barnard College American Studies Professor Manu Karuka

the United States has imposed roughly two-thirds of the world sanctions since the 1990s. In other words

double all of the sanctions imposed by the entire rest of the planet combined. The people of Cuba

are starving because of our country. They are cutting them off from the rest of the world

through sanctions and total blockade of fuel. A country of 11 million people without fuel.

Michigan Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib spoke out in defense of Cuba in mid-February.

Think about that. Homes, schools, hospitals without power, children without food or medicine.

The four starvation of entire Cuban people. This is pure cruelty and we all say it together. Let Cuba live.

Back in Cuba following Trump's January 29th executive order

journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez went to the streets to ask people in Havana what they thought

about the U.S. measures against them. Who do these sanctions affect the most as Liz?

The people says a woman holding a baby. What about the blackouts as Liz? Well that's the worst

of it says the woman. Liz goes to this taxi stand in Havana where rows of old classic yellow and

black Pujo 509 sedans are lined up alongside the road. Why are there so many cars waiting

she asks? Because we don't have gas to be able to work says one driver. We're here waiting to get

gas says another so we can fulfill our social duties which includes taking people to dialysis,

working with the funeral homes and the schools that don't have parental support. That's the

main purpose of these vehicles. And how long have you been waiting for gas? Well on average we've

been waiting 24 to 72 hours as the man. She did that story in the end of January. It's become

so much worse now. These measures are hurting families the taxi driver tells Liz. That's where

we're hurting. That's what's bleeding due to all these measures. They say that they are

but the U.S. says they're doing this for the good of Cubans says Liz. It's not for the good of

Cubans says a woman in a striped shirt and a winter hat. It's what's harming all Cubans. What I

don't understand is how a country like the United States tells the whole world what to do. They want

to be the rulers trying to destroy Cuba. They're not going to destroy Cuba the woman says but it's

always been like this because I'm 61 years old and for as long as I can remember I felt the

blockade the blockade the blockade when will this blockade end she asks when will this blockade end

when we spoke Liz told me she was surprised by the defiant reaction of the people she interviewed.

People were really angry and they were really angry but they were really angry with the government.

They were really angry with the U.S. government and I was surprised of that because even when the

sanctions has a huge impact in the life of people in Cuba there is a lot of people the most of

them they don't really understand. So when you talk to them about the impact of the sanctions they

say yeah about yeah the blockade is true but the government the Cuban government. So people

they are really difficult to them understand how this is have to be with my life with my family

with me because this is not a sanctions against Luis Olio Fernández or her family this is

a sanctions against just a country and also the narrative on internet they repeat U.S. government

repeat U.S. politicians keep an American repeated time the sanctions just affect to the government

the sanctions don't affect the Cuban people if you get affected it's because the blockade in your

own country what this is like the biggest line and also like misleading in other words the line

from the Trump administration and in the mainstream media is that if things are bad it's because

of the Cuban government not the United States the U.S. ambassador to Cuba Mike Hammer has said this

outright enumerous occasions recently the financial situation in Cuba has deteriorated he told

the Miami-based Spanish language television station Telemundo in early February the situation

of the energy infrastructure is collapsing everything is getting worse tourism is clearly

impacted because who's going to go to a country without electricity and where crime is rising

little by little with there are no services this he explained was why Cuba needed regime change

and he said that would come sometime this year in another interview with the same outlet roughly

a week after Trump's new sanctions he denied that the blockade had any impact on the island

the only blockade here in Cuba is internal he said because they know they chicken from the United

States they receive medicine from their relatives in the United States there's trade between the

two countries Cuba can trade with all the countries in the world it wants and this about the blockade

just isn't true it's not true journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez saw the interviews on a say oh my god

shut up you can't be serious like are you talking about like the biggest country of the world the most

powerful country in the world united say that you always press praise about it are imposing oil

blockade an entire nation small nation they can even with nine million something of populations

you say that they're not having any effects where we're going to get the oil for keep the country

running and we don't think about this but the entire countries not just Cuba around the world run

by oil so how we can going to survive to this if everyone is so afraid of the United States

oh how can we stop in the United States how we can stop use government because I don't feel

that no one in this work can feel safe because you said like Greenland before yesterday

Venezuela then Cuba then what they are doing things that are illegal but no one are questioning

that so who is it going to be tomorrow and I feel like many people feel safe because like well

it's not Cuba it's not Venezuela it's not Greenland but do you know like maybe when is your

Tom is no one left to to help you now I do want to clarify something here that I think is

important under normal circumstances when there is not an oil embargo on the country

despite the blockade Cuba does buy food from the United States millions of dollars worth each year

poultry, swine, milk, even coffee these and other products are exempted they began to be permitted

in 2000 after the United States passed a trade bill which allowed for the export of certain food

and medicine this is likely in part what US ambassador Mike Hammer was talking about but Cuba

can only purchase those products with cash not credit and everything else regarding the blockade

that Medea Benjamin talked about earlier remains in place if all of that wasn't confusing enough

Trump in late February said he would now begin to allow some US companies to send fuel to businesses

in Cuba just as long as they are not tied to the Cuban government the goal in other words

isolate the Cuban government support the private sector Peter Cornblow the Trump administration

is trying to bolster that part of the society they want to keep the private sector going

because of course they see the private sector as key to the future of Cuba and Cuba's evolution

to a capitalist and prosperous society as for the blockade historian William Legrand wrote

on the 60th anniversary of its implementation quote the US economic embargo against Cuba or El

Broqueo as Cubans refer to it is not a single law but a complex patchwork of laws presidential

proclamations and regulations that Fidel Castro once called a tangled ball of yarn

the goal today as it was nearly 65 years ago force Cuba and its people to their knees with the

goal of removing the Cuban government members of the Cuban-American community in the United States

are applauding here's just one example well you know we are in Miami we're the Cuban

Americans in Miami and we're delighted that we're seeing the the light at the end of the tunnel

Maria Salazar is a Cuban-American congresswoman from Florida she was interviewed by Fox News

mid-February these are glorious momentous times for this for the Cubans in Miami that I represent

and for the Western hemisphere so Trump Bravo Venezuela first Cuba second journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez

I really get surprised when I read in social media people that are really glad and they are

celebrating this situation about how now Cuba is going to be free and I just think about like

I don't believe that the United States can bring some freedom any freedom to Cuba to the

country of the world because first you need to be free yourself and that's something that the

United States needs to work on but then how is possible that you feel like a victory when some

people have to die or some people have to suffer that's not a victory at all Liz says she thinks

that people in Cuba are for the first time really grasping not only the real impact of the blockade

but also how U.S. and Cuban-American politicians are quick to use Cuban people on the island

as bargaining chips in their political gambles on regime change because they are saying oh well

if a mother have to be hungry and a kid doesn't have access to medication and this is the

price that we need to pay well we need to pay in order to get freedom and people like

wait what it's not your kid it's not your mom it's not your people you're saying that you're

Cuba but you never put a foot in Cuba and also you are not here to pay in the price so who

actually are the people who are paying the price the people and for the first time they are

really understand the whole thing I think like the sentence always has been real but for the first

time in decades I think like it's clear crystal clear that the United States is forcing the

island and its residents to their knees and it's not messing around it wants the Cuban leadership

out and it doesn't matter if it causes people to suffer there. Trump's Cuban-American Secretary

of State Marco Rubio said this explicitly during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in

late January after Democrat Senator Brian Schatz pushed him on the issue. I'm not asking you

whether we would prefer a different kind of government I'm asking whether you're trying to

precipitate the fall of the current regime. Yeah but that's statutory the Helms Burton Act the U.S.

embargo on Cuba is is codified it was codified in law and it requires regime change in order

for us to lift the embargo. The Helms Burton Act was passed in 1996 under the Clinton administration

it essentially strengthened the U.S. embargo on Cuba by placing sanctions on foreign companies

trading or doing business with the island nation. We have rarely seen such a candid remark from a

top U.S. official openly admitting to pushing to overthrow another nation's government including Cuba

and the United States is taking everything to a whole new level. Tonight an elite Coast Guard team

repelling out of helicopter saw into the deck of an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast executing

a seizure warrant according to Attorney General Pam Bondi. We've just seized a tanker on the

coast of Venezuela large tanker very large largest one ever seized action and other things are happening.

The seizure of this oil tanker in December was the first of many the goal stopping Venezuelan

oil shipments and now blocking oil from Cuba. This news report was from late February. A tanker

full of fuel from Russia that was headed to Cuba appears to have been diverted.

There was a Russian tanker that was on its way to Cuba. It is stopped in the middle of the

Atlantic and apparently is being rerouted someplace else. One can only presume that there was a threat

that it might be intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard creating the first superpower conflict

since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Trump and Rubio want to actually control the spigot of oil that can go to Cuba so that they

have basically the ultimate negotiating tool. We will turn the lights back on in your country if you

agree to the economic terms and economic reforms that we want to start with.

Secretary State Marco Rubio said this about Cuba in the end of February.

That is not a system that's working. That's a system that's in collapse and they need

to make dramatic reforms. If they want to make those dramatic reforms that open the space for

both economic and eventually political freedom for the people of Cuba, obviously the United States

would love to see that and would be helpful. If they decide they're going to dig in and just

continue forward then I think they're going to continue to experience failure and the people of

the country are going to continue to suffer and it will be the regime's fault.

Code pinks, media Benjamin.

Marco Rubio and Trump and these right wing people in southern Florida smell blood and they feel

like this is the time that they can really overturn the government. Cuba still has a lot of

friends around the world as you see in the votes in the United Nations where the world comes together

and denounces the U.S. policies. And some of Cuba's friends are responding to the nation's crisis.

Canada has announced an additional $8 million to support Cuba as the country's humanitarian crisis

worsens. Two Navy vessels carrying humanitarian aid to Cuba set sail from Mexico.

The shipments are loaded with powdered milk, beans and other non-perishable goods.

If we were to continue sending humanitarian aid to food and some others,

that's the only thing that hasn't been done.

While oil for now is off the table, Mexico's Claudia Scheinbaum says Mexico will continue

to send humanitarian aid.

In Mexico City's Soculo and other squares around the country, groups are collecting aid to bring

to Cuba. We're here from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. says one of the organizers of the humanitarian aid

collection center in the Soculo. We invite everyone to put their little grain or big grain of sand

to break this siege, that the blockade has become more severe in this Trump era and we need to

support Cuba, which has given us so much, particularly to the Mexican people.

The Cuban doctors who are still serving in medical missions in impoverished communities

across Mexico.

Though the United States has been pressuring other countries like Guatemala to send the Cuban

doctors home, there are still more than 24,000 Cuban doctors working in more than 50 countries

around the world in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe.

Solidarity groups from the United States have also taken aid to Cuba.

Codeping founder Medea Benjamin has been there twice recently.

I went first a month ago to Havana and then I went more recently to the eastern part of the country

to Olgin. Both times was bringing humanitarian aid, food, powdered milk.

A total of 7,500 pounds worth. She says the situation outside of Havana in eastern Cuba is dire.

There is less fuel available. There were very few gas guzzling cars on the road,

the buses were not running. The electricity was much more infrequent than in Havana. In fact,

it was three to six hours a day that they had electricity.

And what you could see really was the cascading effects.

It's hard to comprehend everything that happens when you don't have fuel.

But we're seeing it happening in Cuba right now.

We are. We are. We are. We are.

She says people need to stand for Cuba because it has always suffered retaliation for trying to

offer an alternative. Cuba was a country that tried to do something different when people are

seeing that the model of vulture capitalism is really not one that is providing even the basic

needs for people around the world and the United States where I live. It's so difficult to even

get health care. The young people can't afford an education. We have ice thugs on our streets

that are just grabbing people and terrorizing communities here in Washington DC. We have national

guard troops with guns walking around our streets. So Cuba was trying to do something different

and a managed to achieve a lot at some point in its history. This health care system

that Cuba not only took care of its own people but exported health care workers around the world

is a model for the world and what we should be doing, taking care of people, training people

and then sending them out to the poorest communities or communities that are hit by earthquakes and

hurricanes and natural disasters.

So I think that in itself is one major reason. The other is just how much is the world going to let

the big bully of Trump just trample over other countries sovereignty. We just saw it happen in

Venezuela which is such an unbelievably corrupt and convoluted situation right now with the US

stealing its oil. What the US is still doing in the Middle East and threatening to do so.

You know, somebody's got to stand up to the big bully and Cuba's always been the one doing it.

So, you know, God bless them. We should be thankful that there's somebody standing up.

In March, inspired by the humanitarian aid flotillas to Gaza,

Medea Benjamin's Code Pink and Progressive International are planning to set sail from Mexico

with what they're calling the Nuestra América flotilla to send aid to Cuba.

Also, it might seem a little contradictory but someone else has been delivering aid to Cuba,

the United States. That's right. The country that is the most responsible for the crisis in Cuba right

now is also sending humanitarian aid, six million dollars worth through the Catholic Church and

a Catholic NGO. Yes, it's hypocritical, but it's also a strategic way of making it seem like the

United States isn't to blame. I've been traveling around the region to make sure the aid is arrive

in the US ambassador to Cuba, Mike Hammer, said on a video posted over social media in mid February.

To alleviate the suffering and to improve the conditions a little bit for the people.

Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández. We don't want nothing from the United States.

Please be quiet. Being your own country, doing your own things. We don't care about that,

but don't come here to pretend that you actually want to help us because we don't have your help.

I feel like maybe that's contradictory and that's just me and a lot of people say,

well, we want the United States help, but history has shown that whatever the United States

enter into the game to help, the things ends really bad.

That is all for today. Next time we go to Mexico. They left the whole front facade all along the

wall here. It's just pot marked with these holes that are left from the gunshots and the

firings by the US soldiers when they attacked. To look at the US threats on the country,

just the other side of the Rio Grande, the long history of US intervention in the United States

is closest neighbor to the south and the impact it's having today.

430 Mexico on edge following the Mexican government operation that killed the cartel kingpin known

as elemental. That is next time on under the shadow.

I'm your host Michael Fox. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today's podcast and you

like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow,

a subscribe, and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show.

Also, I want to thank everyone who took the time to speak with me for today's episode.

Peter Cornblue, Medea Benjamin, Camila Pinedo, Greg Wilpert, and Luis Oliva Fernández.

I'm adding links to them, their organizations, and their work in the show notes.

A huge shout out to Liz and Belly of the Beast in particular. You can find more of their work

at Belly of the Beast, either on their website or on YouTube. They're doing incredible work,

and there were huge help for this episode. As you heard, I used clips of several of their videos

for this episode. Thank you so much again to Liz and Belly of the Beast. Please check them out.

The Eisenhower document I mentioned that Peter Cornblue found the original of Mallory's memo.

It's on the website of the National Security Archives, and there's so much more there about the

U.S. covert war on Cuba over the last 60 years. If you have a chance, please take a look

also at Peter Cornblue's book Back Channel to Cuba, The Hidden History of Negotiations

between Washington and Havana. It's extremely relevant today.

As always, if you're looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump's on-slot

both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out the real news and

NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. If you're new to this podcast series,

you might want to consider checking out the first season of Under the Shadow. It looks at U.S.

intervention in Central America in particular throughout the 1980s. I highly recommend you go

back and give it a listen. It's super relevant today. I'll add links in the show notes or you can

find that by searching for Under the Shadow wherever you get your podcasts. The theme music here

is by my band Monteperdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you string music. This closing

song playing right now is off our 2024 album of Frenda. Finally, if you like what you hear,

please head over to my Patreon page Patreon.com forward slash M-F-O-X. There you can

support my work become a monthly sustainer or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest

on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue

to do this important work. Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.

This episode's script was edited by Heather Geiss. Thanks for listening. See you next time.