The Cuban Handshake

Buenos Aires (Prensa Latina) With the executive orders issued by Donald Trump on January 29 and May 1, new sanctions were imposed on socialist Cuba. This intensified the illegal blockade formally implemented in February 1962, but which began in practice earlier and continues to this day.

• September 15, 2026

By Sergio Ortiz*

Contributor to Prensa Latina

Both during his first stay in the White House, from 2017 to 2021, and in his second term, the magnate adopted measures that qualify as genocide and is taking them to a new level. He and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have even hinted that they are not ruling out military action against the homeland of José Martí and Fidel Castro.

The Secretary of War, formerly known as the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, visited the US military base at Guantanamo Bay – an area usurped from Cuba through the Platt Amendment in 1902 – and urged the troops to be alert and comply with all of Trump’s orders (hopefully this madness will not happen, but in that case those soldiers will be among the first and numerous US casualties).

Speaking of Cuban defense, on September 11, Defense Day of the week, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel visited the Alamar Este area and reaffirmed that “the first priority continues to be defense.”

In other words, the island is on high alert, ready to fulfill its commitment to give everything, even life itself, in defense of its sovereignty and the achievements of the Revolution.

Even more so after all the patriotic and socialist activities held last August to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth. There were events, colloquiums, conferences, and seminars organized by the Communist Party and Cuban organizations, with numerous international guests and organizations.

The damage caused by the blockade continues to escalate. The report presented by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, which will be presented at the UN General Assembly next October, details this in meticulous detail.

The direct economic damage, between March 1, 2025, and February 28, 2026, amounted to $8.083 billion. Added to the figures for previous years, this totals $178.7 billion at current prices.

Without the damage caused by the blockade, the Cuban economy could have grown 10.8 percent this year and consequently improved the living standards, health, education, infrastructure and other aspects of the population.

In contrast, with this almost total nine-month oil shortage, during which only one Russian tanker entered the country, Cubans suffer daily power outages of 20 hours or more, with the resulting hardships in homes and hospitals where there are 100,000 patients, including 12,000 children who cannot be operated on due to these emergencies.

Numerous containers of medicine and supplies already paid for by Havana cannot reach port, be unloaded, or be distributed because shipping companies are under intense pressure from the Trump administration. As a result of these inhumane measures, infant mortality in the country has been rising: it increased by 148 percent from 2018 to 2025, from four per thousand live births to 9.9.

These power outages lead to a shortage of drinking water. This is because the water supply sources operate using electric motors that stop during the blackouts.

As the Cuban Foreign Minister rightly says, these aren’t just numbers; they are lives being lost in a country that was once, and still is, a model for its healthcare system focused on the well-being of Cubans—from pregnancies to infants and the elderly, encompassing all ages.

IT WILL BE VICTORY 34

Since the 1992 UN General Assembly, the Cuban Foreign Ministry has been presenting its motion for the United States to lift the embargo. This motion has garnered overwhelming support from a majority of nations; only the US, Zionist Israel, and a handful of subservient governments like that of Javier Milei vote against Havana.

Everything indicates that it will be the 34th Cuban victory since 1992. The movement of peoples in solidarity with Cuba is the decisive factor in these elections in New York.

Rodríguez Parrilla explained that Trump, by keeping the island on the list of “State sponsors of terrorism”, caused 34 international banking entities to suspend or refuse to carry out operations with Cuba between March 2025 and February 2026.

In July 2025, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) fined Delaware-based global logistics company Key Holding, LLC, $608,825 for alleged violations of the sanctions regime against Cuba. OFAC also fined Connecticut-based global logistics company Interactive Brokers, LLC (IB) $11,832,136 for the same reasons.

Because it primarily affects the island, but also international trade, this influences the majority of the 193 countries in the UN to vote against the blockade. This has significant political value but lacks concrete action, since General Assembly resolutions do not have executive power, which rests with the Security Council, whose five members have veto power. And Washington is one of them.

This demands a profound change in international politics and organization, which must be the result of the struggle for a new world order and a more just world, which is possible, as Fidel called for.

The sanctions continued against the Banco Exterior de Cuba, the Comandante René Ramos Latour Services company; Cexni, an importer and exporter for the nickel and cobalt industry; Abapet, an importer of energy supplies; and Comercial Cupet.

The situation in Cuba remains dire. The world must do more for this dignified country. In a note, Atilio Borón wrote on September 9: “We need more governments that have the audacity to disobey the orders of the empire, not only for Cuba, but also for their own self-interest; let’s hope such governments emerge.”

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Paris, September 12 (Prensa Latina) Strong rejection of the reinforced US blockade against Cuba and its marked extraterritorial character prevailed today in a debate about that Caribbean nation, within the framework of the Fête de l’Humanité.

• September 12, 2026 | 12:02

The president of Cuba Cooperation France, Manuel Pascual, referred to the hardships caused by the blockade and how it even prevents the sending of solidarity aid to the island as the United States tightens the noose even further.

Pascual denounced that the United States did everything possible to increase the policy of suffocating Cuba, including the suspension of direct visas for Europeans traveling to the island.

Furthermore, he outlined the difficulties arising from the strengthening of the American economic embargo in sending the solidarity aid collected in Europe.

For her part, Marydé Fernández López, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (CCPCC), gave a brief account of the development and intensification of the economic blockade, which has existed for more than six decades.

The official in charge of relations with the Union of Young Communists and other mass organizations pointed out that since 1960, efforts had been underway to apply all possible measures of strangulation against the Caribbean nation, the party official recalled.

He also noted that Trump imposed executive orders on January 29 and May 1, which imposed an energy embargo and a ban on trade with Cuba.

Similarly, the US government declared Cuba an alleged extraordinary and unusual threat to that nation and, on that basis, imposed dozens of unilateral coercive measures directed against all spheres of life in the Caribbean country, he noted.

Fernández López pointed out that two days ago, the United States Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, acknowledged that he imposed the strongest measures in history against the Caribbean nation.

For her part, Katia Aruca Chaple, an official in the International Relations Department of the CCPCC, denounced that the blockade violates international law, the right of Cubans to self-determination, and is a violation of Cuba’s sovereignty and the rights of the peoples of the world.

It is important to denounce the effects of the blockade in every forum where we talk about Cuba and to show European institutions that they have the right to denounce it, he noted.

“It’s about seeing the extraterritorial impact of the coercive measures applied by Washington on normal relations between peoples and states,” he said.

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September 10, 2026 — Belly of the Beast

At a maternity hospital in Cuba, anesthesiologist Dr. Yudmila Rodríguez Verdecia describes what happens when electricity fails during an operation.

“The surgery cannot be stopped. We have had to keep operating under the glow of cell phone flashlights,” she says in Cuba’s latest annual report to the United Nations.

The Cuban government calculates that U.S. economic warfare caused $8.083 billion in damage between March 2025 and February 2026, bringing its estimate of the cumulative cost of U.S. policy since Cuba’s 1959 revolution to $178.7 billion.

Watch Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla explain the damages HERE.

In addition to the six-decade-old embargo, the report points to a web of financial restrictions, the State Sponsors of Terrorism designation, the 1996 Helms-Burton Act and a de facto oil blockade that restrict access to essential goods and services.

Licet Rodríguez Alonso, who accompanies her son Diego between Villa Clara and Havana for cancer care, says fuel shortages from the U.S. oil blockade make her worry if his treatment can continue.

“Diego is in radiation [therapy], but there’s no fuel,” she says. “How will those machines run?”

Other medical supplies are already in Cuba but cannot reliably reach patients. According to the report, more than 30,000 children have been unable to receive vaccinations on schedule because fuel shortages have disrupted refrigerated transport, leaving medications stuck in warehouses.

The lack of fuel also affects food production. During the growing season ending in early 2026, irrigation operated for an average of just two hours a day rather than the 16 hours needed, the report says.

Meanwhile, UN agencies cited in the report describe disrupted shipments of more than 2,900 metric tons of food aid and $630,000 worth of medical supplies.

Shipping companies Hapag-Lloyd (Germany) and CMA CGM (France) stopped accepting new shipments to Cuba following Trump’s May 1 executive order threatening “secondary sanctions” on foreign companies doing business with blacklisted Cuban entities.

The report also identifies obstacles to buying and maintaining medical equipment. It says that due to payment restrictions and sanctions threats, the price of Japanese-made Olympus endoscopy equipment costs ten times more in Cuba than in other Latin American countries.

Baxter Healthcare (U.S.) and Vitalmex Interamericana (Mexico) cited the blockade in refusing to continue doing business with Cuba, while U.S.-made cardiac pumps remain “out of reach” to children with severe heart conditions.

The report describes a shortage of working Braille machines for blind students. Meanwhile, deaf students are unable to access cochlear implants because of broken components or missing batteries.

Read the full report HERE.

September 3, 2026 — Belly of the Beast

The impact of the Trump administration’s oil blockade now reaches into every aspect of Cuban life, including how children prepare for school and what teachers can offer once they arrive.

Still, students returned to their classrooms excited to begin a new year.

“I haven’t seen my classmates for about two months,” said Samuel Orta Pacheco, a middle school student in Havana. “Honestly, I’m really happy to be back here.”

The beginning of the new school year required families and educators to navigate blackouts, shortages and a transportation system starved of fuel.

Without fuel for school buses, many teachers and students have to walk long distances to attend their classes.

Getting to school is only the first hurdle. Cuba’s deepening food crisis is affecting students once they arrive.

The UN says Cuba’s food production has declined 60% since the Trump administration imposed an oil blockade earlier this year, while the cost of basic foods has spiked. As food grows scarcer and fuel shortages disrupt deliveries, feeding students at school cafeterias has become another daily challenge.

“Do you have any idea what it has meant for a country that was once accustomed to guaranteeing a properly balanced and adequate protein intake to now have to figure out how to even transport the food children need from one place to another?” asked Education Minister Naima Trujillo Barreto.

The effort required to keep children in school does not end when they leave the classroom. At home, families work around the blackouts, taking uniforms to neighbors with electricity to iron them and finding rechargeable lamps so children can study.

“Despite all the shortages because of the blockade,” said Zulema Rodríguez Leyva, a preschool principal, “we’re a country willing to give it our all.”

​Watch our new video to see how Cuban families and educators are keeping children learning through blackouts and shortages.

August 26 — Belly of the Beast

Marco Rubio’s State Department accuses Cuba of fueling “far-left terror” in the United States and recruiting solidarity activists to “turn America against itself.”

According to Teishan Latner, a leading scholar of U.S.-Cuba left solidarity, the claims are the same ones the FBI and CIA made in the 1960s and 1970s. They were as spurious then, he says, as they are now.

This week, Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez speaks with Latner about how the State Department twisted his scholarship into a sweeping McCarthyite conspiracy theory to criminalize U.S. social justice movements and justify possible military action against Cuba.

When the State Department released its report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” last month, historian Teishan Latner recognized the material — some of it seemed to be drawn directly from his own writing.

Latner, a history professor at Thomas Jefferson University, has spent over a decade researching the ties between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. left. His 2018 book on the subject, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992, is the first multi-decade scholarly account on the subject.

According to Latner, the State Department report regurgitates false claims the FBI and CIA made about U.S.-based activists in the 1960s and 1970s, when the agencies alleged that U.S. solidarity delegations served as a recruiting pipeline for Cuban intelligence.

“There’s no evidence that Cuba has actually successfully recruited anyone who has been a member of a U.S. solidarity brigade,” Latner said.

Asked how he’d grade the report if a student submitted it as a paper, Latner said: “It would probably be a very poor grade, especially on the basis of evidence.”

While the report may be laughable as a work of scholarship, Latner says it serves a political purpose: to crack down on progressive organizations and leaders, and to strengthen the case for the administration’s hostile policy against Cuba.

Watch Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez’s interview with Latner HERE.