The official website of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that Norwegian activists strongly denounced the U.S. blockade of Cuba, kept in place for more than six decades, at a demonstration organized by Norway-Cuba Friendship Association on the occasion of National Rebellion Day.
Critical statements were heard at the event, such as that of Syver Kleve Kolstad, secretary general of the Red Youth, who stressed that the said policy only seeks to destroy any country that challenges U.S. hegemony.
“The fight against the blockade is not with the government, but with the Cuban people”, the youth leader remarked as she highlighted the human impact of the restrictions on access to foods and medicines, the publication points out.
Along the same lines, Paulius Eidukas, a communist leader from Oslo and Akershus, said that the blockade violates fundamental human rights and hinders the sovereign development of the Caribbean nation, as does Cuba’s inclusion on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The participants reasserted their solidarity with the island and praised the democratic values it upholds throughout the world.
Havana, July 31 (Prensa Latina) The Cuban delegation that will participate in the II Junior Pan American Games in Asunción, Paraguay, from August 9 to 23 was unveiled today at the Antonio Maceo Monumental Complex in the province of Artemisa.
More than a formal ceremony, the event was a symbolic transfer of trust, of country, and of history, at a sacred site of the nation: the same place where the Bronze Titan, General Antonio Maceo, fell in combat on December 7, 1896.
There, where the echo of her machete and her example still resonate, Deputy Prime Minister Inés María Chapman and five-time Olympic champion Mijaín López Núñez presented the national flag to wrestler Yainelis Sanz, one of those in charge of carrying it in the inaugural parade.
The 231 young people who make up the Antillean delegation, who will compete in 28 sports, have mostly been trained in schools where they learn both how to win and how to endure. They carry with them the legacy of an Olympic legacy, but also the determination to write their own history.
Cuba is determined to improve on the fifth-place finish it achieved in the first edition of Cali 2021 and to secure new spots on the road to the Lima 2027 Pan American Games. But beyond the statistical objectives, this group represents a greater truth: the vibrant present of Cuban sport and the promise of its future.
Cuban athletes will arrive in Asunción with Caribbean spirit and their heads held high, hardened by effort, accustomed to turning difficulty into momentum and hope into driving force.
As this South American city prepares for the sporting event, with its Paraguay River as a backdrop and monuments like the Palacio de los López and the Pantheon of Heroes welcoming visitors, the largest of the Antilles is gearing up as one of the contenders among the 41 participating nations.
Because competing “with love for Cuba” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a way of being in the world: with dedication, with courage, with that blend of fire, discipline, and tenderness that defines those who bear the island tattooed on their chests. And in every jump, in every fight, in every embrace upon crossing a finish line, the nation that bids them farewell today with cheers, applause, and dreams will also be there.
The Cuban speaker made the remarks in a meeting with Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf on the sidelines of the Sixth World Conference of Speakers of Parliament in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday.
Ghalibaf appreciated Cuba’s clear positions in condemning the act of aggression by the Israeli regime and the United States against Iranian territory, noting that the two countries enjoy high potentials to expand their cooperation in all areas.
Iranian parliament speaker assessed capacity of cooperation between the two countries in various fields, especially in the field of economy, as good.
Referring to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s capacities for joint cooperation with Cuba, Ghalibaf stated that there are good opportunities in this regard that can be achieved by operationalizing the agreements inked previously between the two countries.
The Cuban parliament speaker, for his part, said that the developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) show that the Americans are trying to secure their interests through coercion.
Hernández noted that his country will spare no effort to take any action to implement the internation law and end the genocide in Gaza.
The president of the National Assembly of Cuba also called for the enhancement of bilateral cooperation between Cuba and Iran.
The Sixth World Conference of Speakers of Parliament is organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in close collaboration with the United Nations. The event is taking place from July 29 to 31 at the Palais des Nations.
Ten U.S. students graduated last week from Cuba’s Latin America School of Medicine (ELAM).
The school trains young doctors from medically underserved communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the United States. Cuba provides the students full scholarships, meals and lodging. Since it opened in 1999, ELAM has graduated more than 35,000 doctors.
One of the biggest medical schools in the world a decade ago, student numbers have dwindled. Even so, ELAM is currently home to students from over 90 different countries – including more than 170 Palestinian medical students. See our documentary From Gaza to Cuba about one of them HERE
Havana, July 30 (Prensa Latina) The General Union of Workers and Farmworkers of Mexico will work to promote and organize solidarity actions with the Cuban Revolution, according to a statement from the island’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs today.
According to the statement, the organization’s head of international affairs, Héctor Domínguez, expressed this commitment during an official meeting with José Maury, political advisor to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico.
Published on cubaminrex.cu, the text adds that Domínguez considered it important to “strengthen relations with the Cuban Workers’ Central Union and its unions” to “continue enriching the historic relationship of brotherhood between the workers and peasants of the two countries.”
The union leader also “thanked for the information about the United States government’s attacks against the Cuban people.”
Since its founding in 1949, the General Union of Workers and Farmworkers of Mexico has defended labor and farmworker rights, and is characterized by social struggle and the demand for optimal working and living conditions for its members.
It is currently a member of the World Federation of Trade Unions, established on October 3, 1945, in Paris and one of the oldest international trade union organizations in the world.
Haitian women having their blood pressure taken at a mobile clinic staffed by a Cuban medical brigade in Salomon market in Port-au-Prince.
The Cuban revolution endures despite more than 60 years of U.S. attacks. One system exploits the people, while the other prioritizes their needs. Which nation deserves the label of “failed’?
In an age where propaganda masquerades as truth and empire cloaks itself in the garb of “democracy,” few lies are as pervasive—or politically useful—as the assertion that Cuba is a failed state. This accusation, deployed with relentless regularity by U.S. officials, corporate media, and neoliberal ideologues, is meant to delegitimize a revolutionary and socialist project that has refused to bow before empire.
But what does it mean to be a “failed state”? And more importantly, who gets to define failure?
Let us be clear: Cuba is a besieged state, not a failed one. Under siege from the most powerful imperial force in the world—the United States—it has endured more than six decades of blockade, economic sabotage and subversion. The U.S. blockade is not merely a trade, financial and commercial embargo. It is an economic war designed to produce misery, scarcity, and discontent. It is a deliberate and cruel attempt to collapse a sovereign society. And yet, despite this onslaught, Cuba continues to pursue a project rooted in ethics, equality, and human dignity. It does not hide its problems; it confronts them.
Contrast this with the conditions in the so-called “developed” West. In the United States—the wealthiest country in the history of the world—over 40 million people live in poverty, with millions more living one paycheck away from destitution. Children go hungry. Entire communities are criminalized. Access to healthcare is rationed by income. Gun violence, mass incarceration, addiction, homelessness, and the erosion of democratic rights are not aberrations; they are features of a system in which profit trumps people.
In the United Kingdom, a country that once governed a vast colonial empire, the situation is no better. Austerity has gutted public services. Food banks have become institutionalized fixtures in working-class communities. The National Health Service, once a global model of publicly funded healthcare, has been bled dry by privatization. Homelessness is rising. Inequality is deepening. And the political class blames the poor for their own misery while rewarding the rich for their predation.
So let us ask: who is the failed state?
Cuba, despite having a GDP per capita a fraction of the U.S. or UK, provides universal healthcare, free education through to the doctoral level, and a literacy rate that surpasses many wealthy nations. Life expectancy in Cuba is on par with the U.S.—a country that spends more on healthcare than any nation on Earth, but still fails to provide it to tens of millions. In the midst of devastating shortages caused by the blockade, Cuba sent doctors to dozens of countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the U.S. hoarded vaccines and the UK prioritized profits for pharmaceutical companies.
And perhaps most importantly, when confronted with rising inequality and hardship, the Cuban state does not blame the people. It does not pathologize poverty. It does not criminalize desperation. It does not call the poor lazy, or the vulnerable expendable. It recognizes that social vulnerability is a collective challenge, not an individual failure.
As Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel recently affirmed, “The Revolution does not hide its problems. It faces them with ethics and social justice, even in the midst of extreme circumstances.” This is the essence of revolutionary responsibility: to claim one’s people, even and especially in their suffering. Unlike the leaders of capitalist states, who see the working class and the marginalized as burdens or threats, Cuban leadership speaks of the vulnerable as ours. “Our homeless. Our inequalities. Our vulnerable youth.” In that single possessive word, “our”, is a world of difference.
This is the living embodiment of Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary axiom: “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” Cuba does not pretend all is well. It does not present a façade of invincibility. But it does not give up. It does not disown the poor. It does not privatize social suffering or profit from despair. It seeks, even amid crushing sanctions, to provide care.
More than thirty targeted social programs have been launched in Cuba to address inequality and social distress. These are not neoliberal “efficiencies” or charity-based palliatives. They are redistributive, rights-based initiatives aimed at repairing and restoring the social fabric. And they are pursued not because they are easy—but because they are right.
Meanwhile, in Western nations that claim to be paragons of democracy and development, politicians deploy rhetoric of “personal responsibility” while enabling systems of exploitation. Homeless people freeze on the streets while billionaires buy their next yacht. Prisons expand while schools decay. Fossil fuel corporations rake in record profits as the world burns. And rather than speak of our vulnerable, Western leaders speak of “those people,” as if inequality and immiseration were a natural condition or personal choice.
Again, we ask: who is the failed state?
Failure is not the inability to avoid hardship. It is the refusal to respond to hardship with dignity and justice. A failed state is not one that suffers, but one that abandons. By this measure, it is not Cuba that has failed. It is those Western states that have abdicated any sense of collective responsibility, any commitment to equality, equity, and any belief in solidarity.
Cuba, on the other hand, chooses the harder road—the one lined not with wealth but with principle. It stumbles, it struggles, but it does not surrender. And in refusing to lie, to claim easy victories, or to devalue human life, it reminds us of what a government can be: not a guardian of the financial oligarchy but a steward of dignity.
So the next time the charge is made—Cuba is a failed state, ask: compared to what? To a world where billionaires fly to space while countless millions can not afford rent? To a system that sacrifices the poor on the altar of profit? To societies that punish vulnerability and commodify health, education, even life itself?
Cuba is not perfect. No society is. But it is a project still rooted in justice, still committed to the people, still alive with revolutionary ethics. That, in a world drenched in cynicism and cruelty, is not failure. It is the kind of success that capitalism will never understand.
So let us ask again—clearly, honestly, and with conviction: Who is the failed state? And which is the failed system?
Isaac Saney is a Black Studies and Cuba specialist and coordinator of the Black and African Diaspora Studies (BAFD) program at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Today a great crime is being committed by the U.S. government, with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio deepening further the cruel policies of Joseph Biden and Antony Blinken aimed at asphyxiating the Caribbean island of Cuba through unremitting, cruel, extraterritorial sanctions, which amount to bullying economic warfare.
Ever since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, the United States government—under both Republican and Democratic White Houses and Congresses—has been committed to the destruction of its example by any means possible. This bipartisan Washington policy is hated hemispherically and internationally. This is registered in near-unanimous condemnation every year in the United Nations General Assembly for the past 30 years.
U.S. anti-Cuba policy is also broadly opposed in the United States. Over 116 City Councils—including cities large (Chicago, New York City, Pittsburgh) and small; dozens of central labor councils and national and local labor unions; and religious institutions. (For the full list, visit nnoc.org.)
Over these many decades, those means have gone beyond mendacious propaganda and conscious disinformation. More important has been direct material aggression and covert subversion: assassination (the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro was targeted for murder some 638 times); terrorism (over 3,500 Cubans have been killed in terrorist attacks organized illegally from U.S. territory); industrial sabotage; mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs; the introduction of biological agents to spread dengue fever; and many more sordid examples. All of this has been thoroughly documented in files released under the Freedom of Information Act and innumerable books and documentary films.
So why has the U.S. government continued to expend so much energy and resources to overthrow the government and social system of our Caribbean neighbor? Is it really a sincere opposition to “communist tyranny” and for “democracy”?
Such boilerplate of course is belied by Washington’s historical record of installing and supporting vicious military dictatorships that grind workers and peasants into destitution in the service of the U.S. capital. It’s a bloody legacy of horrific crimes of U.S. interventionism, overthrowing democratically elected governments, and has resulted in many, many hundreds of thousands of lives extinguished.
Perhaps the answer has more to do with the example of Cuba’s amazing social advances which resonate across the Americas and the world: eliminating [illiteracy]; smashing Cuban-style Jim Crow segregation; elevating the status of women; access to free health care, a state-of-the world science and biotechnology industry that has life-extending medications and vaccines for lung cancer (collaborating with the Roswell Center in Buffalo, NY), diabetic foot ulcers and much more. Perhaps most decisive has been Cuba’s foreign policy of international solidarity and support for the struggles of working people, which invariably is at odds with U.S. foreign policy.
President Barack Obama, under mounting hemispheric pressure, started to shift U.S. policy in the direction of U.S.-Cuba normalization in 2014-15. Great hopes were raised in Cuba and around the world. He removed Cuba from the spurious U.S. “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. Over the course of his first term, Donald Trump reversed nearly all of Obama’s limited but important policy changes. Surprising some and breaking his 2020 campaign promises, Joseph Biden continued and even deepened Trump’s policies. Trump 2 and Rubio are preparing yet further bipartisan aggression.
Today, Cuba is under very harsh economic circumstances. The accumulated damage of the U.S. economic war has been devastating: shortages, energy blackouts, long lines, rising costs, growing inequality. Most heartbreaking is the effect of the blockade on Cuba’s system of free, universal health care.
We are calling on people of conscience and consciousness in our beautiful region to speak out and act! Support and join the newly formed Upper Delaware River Cuba Si Coalition. Look for our website, which is under construction. Join us in this great cause!
Ike Nahem and Erin Feely-Nahem are longtime Cuba solidarity activists who honeymooned in Havana in 1998. They have organized dozens of delegations to visit the island. Ike is a retired Amtrak locomotive engineer and a Teamsters Union member. Erin is an LMSW and retired longtime leader in the fields of domestic violence, where she organized shelters for battered women (and some men), low-income housing and HIV-AIDS advocacy in New York City. They live in Cochecton. Both are founders and organizers of Cuba Si NY/NJ and the International US-Cuba Normalization Coalition.
Havana, July 29 (Prensa Latina) Mexican federal representative Damaris Silva Santiago and Cuban National Assembly of People’s Power (parliament) representative Alberto Núñez Betancourt held a meeting in Havana, the Foreign Ministry reported today.
According to the notification, “as part of his visit to the island, Silva Santiago met at the parliamentary headquarters with Núñez Betancourt, vice president of the legislative body’s International Relations Committee.”
“During the meeting, they discussed parliamentary diplomacy and the need to enhance mutual understanding and expand channels of collaboration between Cuba and Mexico,” the statement added.
Representative Damaris Silva Santiago, a member of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party, is secretary of the Chamber of Deputies’ Committee on Migration Affairs and the thematic coordinator for Mexicans Abroad.
She has held various positions during a political career spanning at least 30 years and is also recognized for her activism on behalf of indigenous communities and in defense of migrants.
Tatyana Mashkova, the Director General of the Russian National Committee for Economic Cooperation with Latin American Countries, announced that Russia and Cuba are working ‘in parallel’ to develop a logistics hub at the deep-water Port of Mariel, approximately 40 kilometres west of the Cuban capital, Havana.
The port’s purpose is to facilitate trade between Russia and Latin America. Mashkova, speaking to the Russian state-owned domestic news agency RIA Novosti, stated “our companies could benefit from this Cuban platform to deliver their goods more actively throughout the region”.
The project is the latest example of Russo-Cuban collaboration. In recent years, Russian warships have docked in Havana to conduct military exercises, Cuban mercenaries have fought for the Russian military in Ukraine, and Russian fuel shipments worth tens of millions of dollars have helped to meet Cuba’s energy needs.
Following the meeting between Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in May 2025 in Moscow, Russia vowed that its businesses would invest over $1 billion in Cuba by 2030 to help combat Cuba’s current economic woes, prompted by the inefficiency of Cuba’s state-run production, the recent decline of the Cuban tourism industry, and the Trump-led economic embargo.
Russian and Cuban Presidents Vladimir Putin and Miguel Díaz-Canel meet in Russia in 2019.
The increasingly close relations of the two nations has historical precedent. After the successful Cuban Revolution of 1959, the country aligned itself politically with the now-defunct Soviet Union (USSR).
At the time, the USSR provided Cuba with the financial aid necessary to survive the American trade embargo of 1962; the Soviet bloc bought Cuban sugar and nickel for a high price and sold the Cubans cheap machinery and petroleum.
Fidel Castro, leader of Cuba both during and following the revolution, also secretly agreed to host Soviet nuclear missiles aimed at preventing invasion attempts by the United States. This contributed to the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The recent intensification of the Russo-Cuban cooperation in economic, military and diplomatic matters is largely attributable to their shared animosity, both historic and current, towards the United States.
The US has maintained its trade embargo against Cuba since 1962 and has been the primary supplier of weaponry to Ukraine since the Russian invasion of its neighboring state in February 2022.
A Russian warship arrives in Havana in Summer 2024.
The Russian Foreign Ministry decried the decision of the current US government to name Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism and argued that American sanctions against Cuba are “doomed to failure”.
The Cuban government, on the other hand, has consistently refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, laying the blame for the conflict firmly on the shoulders of the U.S. and its NATO allies.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, while visiting Russia in 2022, stated in an address to the Russian State Duma that “the causes of the conflict … [are attributable to] the aggressive policy of the United States and […] the expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders”.
Cuba’s alignment with Russia represents one facet of its integration into a bloc of nations that seek to challenge western economic, institutional and political primacy; BRICS.
Cuba joined BRICS – an intergovernmental organisation that seeks to reduce international reliance on the American dollar, increase cooperation between developing countries and challenge the concentration of political and economic power in the U.S. and Western Europe – as a partner this year.
Cuba’s accession to the BRICS group, according to Alice Velicogna of the Italian think tank Istituto Analisi Relazioni Internazionali, represents a fortification of “its economic and political ties with key global players outside the Western sphere of influence” and a symbol of its “ability to build strategic alliances despite decades of U.S.-led sanctions and diplomatic isolation”.
Havana, July 29, 2025.- The president of the National Assembly of People’s Power of Cuba, Esteban Lazo Hernández, is attending the Sixth World Conference of Speakers of Parliament, taking place from today until July 31st.
The conference, which will take place at the Palais des Nations (headquarters of the United Nations Office in Geneva), is hosted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in partnership with the United Nations.
This is Lazo Hernández’s first time at this international event, which has been held every five years since 2000 and serves as a unique platform for participation and high-level discussions between the highest-ranking parliamentarians from around the globe.
During the Conference, the Cuban parliamentarian will take part in the general debate, panel discussions, and other forums.
He will also hold meetings with parliamentary representatives from various countries.
