Medea Benjamin asks: who will win this demonic game Trump and Rubio are playing with the lives of eleven million Cubans?
Viñales in the tobacco fields in Cuba. (Guillaume Baviere / Flickr / CC BY 2.0)
By Medea Benjamin
in Holguín, Cuba
Common Dreams
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, U.S. 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 U.S. 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,’ he said. “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 U.S. 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.
The National Capitol of Cuba in Havana, built in 1929 in 2014. (Michael Oswald / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
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.
” … when the U.S. loosened the rope around our necks, we could breathe.”
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.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022. Other books include, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2018); Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection (2016); Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (2013); Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart (1989), and with Jodie Evans, Stop the Next War Now (2005).
This article is from Common Dreams.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
If Washington DC doesn’t want to trade with Cuba or Venezuela, that is perfectly acceptable. The problem surfaces when DC tells every other government in the world that they are not “allowed” to trade with those countries. That transforms DC into a bunch of Tony Soprano’s.
The United Nations was created to, among other things, prevent large, powerful governments from doing what Washington DC is doing to Cuba and Venezuela. The United Nations is actually just a bunch of clueless, inept bureaucrats who will do anything to keep their jobs. If the BRICS are to be successful, they will have to create their own UN and other International Organizations.
U.N. bureaucrats do what the Member States, i.e., governments agree to tell them to do. The General Assembly is democratic but its decisions are not legally-binding. The Security Council’s are but it is run and set up by the major victors of WWII and each can veto any decision. The U.N. is about the Member States and much less about the bureaucrats who serve them.
Washington does not hurt the political leaders in Havanna. The plain population is suffering. Washington knows that but they don’t care or that’s the intention hoping the population will stage a revolution. Cuba suffering and loss of life is just collateral damage. That’s the Washington mindset.
In a way recreating the conditions of desperation that the U.S. helped create that led to the 1959 revolution.
I have not been able to prove this, but I seem to recall President Nixon calling for the abandonment of sanctions against Cuba not too long before his death in 1994.
Does anybody else have a similar recollection?
“Mr [Henry] Kissinger, [US] secretary of state from 1973-77, initially supported underground efforts to improve relations with Cuba [for more information on Kissinger’s fleeting support for a détente approach toward Cuba, see the fourth chapter on “Nixon and Ford” in William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh’s 2015 book “Back Channel to Cuba,” and for additional information on Kissinger’s oft-overlooked attempts to improve US relations with other less powerful Marxist states such as South Yemen and Somalia, see my own 2025 Barnes Conference paper “A Conciliatory Kissinger?: Analyzing Accommodationist Approaches at the Bab-el-Mandeb and the Panama Canal” available via the TUScholarShare website]. But […] newly released documents show he was infuriated by Cuban President Fidel Castro’s decision in late 1975 to send troops to Angola to help the newly independent nation fend off attacks from South Africa and right-wing guerrillas. ‘Kissinger, the global chessboard player, was insulted that a small country would ruin his plans for Africa [i.e., the ‘Tar Baby’ option] and was essentially prepared to bring the imperial force of the United States on Fidel Castro’s head,’ Mr Kornbluh was quoted in the newspaper as saying.”
Source:
“Henry Kissinger ‘Considered Cuba Air Strikes’ in 1976,” British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Oct. 1, 2014
—
“In a book published at the time of his death, Richard Nixon offered advice on the handling of Castro that President Clinton should take seriously: ‘The hard line against him has failed . . . our best service to the Cuban people now would be to build pressure from within by actively stimulating Cuba’s contacts with the free world.'”
Source:
Robert Scheer, “Put Castro to the Test: End Embargo,” Los Angeles Times, Sep. 1, 1994
—
“Increasingly, longtime American critics of Castro and his policies are concluding that, in the post–Cold War era, the United States needs a new policy toward the island. For some years, the most prominent critics of the embargo ranged from the late president Richard Nixon through columnists William Buckley and George Will to the first Latin Americanist on President Reagan’s National Security Council staff, and analysts at the Cato Institute and Hoover Institution. With the initiative to set up a Presidential Bipartisan Commission on Cuba launched in October 1998, the number of those openly and as a group committed to at least seriously reevaluating current policy jumped exponentially. Among the supporters of a comprehensive reevaluation were former secretaries of state George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Lawrence Eagleburger, and former Senate majority leader Howard H. Baker Jr. By mid-December 1998, Senator John Warner and twenty-five Senate colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, were calling for a bipartisan commission.”
Source:
William Ratliff, “A Strategic Flip-Flop in the Caribbean,” Hoover Institution, Mar. 1, 2000
Thank you.
Nixon was quite pragmatic. He realised that Mao was not going to be overthrown in China and that the US should negotiate.
Would someone who has connections with people in Cuba please bring the following to the attention of the citizens and government of Cuba?
There exists on this planet one plant that would go a very long way to ending the suffering of the Cuban people at the hands of the criminal government of the United States of America. That plant is HEMP! Hemp is the most versatile plant on the planet. The hemp plant can be used for fuel, fiber, paper, food, medicine, construction materials and a whole lot more. Go into any large department store and everything you see that is not glass or metal can be made from hemp.
There are hundreds of books documenting it’s extraordinary versatility. At the top of the list, I would put Jack Herer’s ‘The Emperor Wears No Clothes’.
I would love to see Cuba become ‘THE Hemp-based Nation’ and lead the world in its production and use. What a fitting payback to the US for its decades of criminal activity against Cuba and its people.
Hemp for Victory!
Is Trump really that cruel, or does he just sign and approve all documents placed before him because he doesn’t know shit from clay?
Aren’t Cubans good Christians?
Very meaningful and nuanced reporting from a first-hand witness. Who will stand up to this international criminality? There should be a humanitarian refusal to cooperate, an international effort to prevent starvation and free trade, along with a voter rebellion in the US against sanctions and military coercion, and use of the military and federal agents in the states. We must stand up to end the 4th reich before it ends all of us.
A blockade is an act of war , where is the Congressional declaration? Make politicians fear the people.
America is on its last legs, growing more vicious as it loses respect in the world. We’ll make the world respect America again, Trump told the troops at Fort Bragg.
This is immoral genocide perpetrated by usa.
And better capitalism than found in usa’s fearful and restrictive federal management.
Feed & empower — rather than crush & embitter …
They’re doing the same thing to us, only more slowly, replacing us with robots and A.I., and poison injections that killed millions in a homeland genocide, and are still killing. Except the media pretends it’s not happening, so I suppose we all must admit if the TV says so, it is not happening. Neither are they genociding Cubans, but merely bringing democracy to an island laboring under the yoke of communist tyranny.