Washington, June 4 (Prensa Latina) President Donald Trump signed a proclamation today to prohibit and restrict travel from several countries to the United States, including Cuba and Venezuela, citing alleged security risks.

The Proclamation completely restricts and limits entry from 12 countries “with deficiencies in vetting and background checks, and which pose a very high risk to the United States,” he said.

This group includes Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

While it “partially restricts and limits” the entry of citizens of seven nations that, according to the directive, “also represent a high level of risk to the United States,” including Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

Regarding Cuba, President Trump repeats the false and arbitrary arguments that the island is a state sponsor of terrorism and that “the Cuban government does not cooperate or share sufficient law enforcement intelligence with the United States.”

He said that “historically, Cuba has refused to accept the return of its deported citizens.”

In line with the Proclamation, “the Report on Foreign Stays,” Cuba had an overstay rate of 7.69 percent for B1/B2 visas and an overstay rate of 18.75 percent for F, M, and J visas.

The measure establishes exceptions for legal permanent residents, current visa holders, certain visa categories, and individuals whose entry serves the national interests of the United States, he emphasized.

He further noted that “the restrictions and limitations imposed by the Proclamation are necessary to obtain the cooperation of foreign governments, enforce our immigration laws, and promote other important foreign policy, national security, and counterterrorism objectives.”

He added that, after reviewing a report submitted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in coordination with other Cabinet officials, Trump determined that the entry of citizens from certain countries should be restricted or limited in the interest of the aforementioned.

Pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order 14161, issued on January 20, 2025, entitled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other Threats to National Security and Public Safety,” national security agencies conducted a comprehensive assessment of the alleged risk.

Trump made the final decision to sign this proclamation after the anti-Semitic attack in Boulder, Colorado, last Sunday, an unidentified White House official told local media, although the idea had already been floated in Washington.

jha/dfm

Washington, June 4 (Prensa Latina) The Richmond, California, City Council approved a Proclamation urging the United States government to remove Cuba from the arbitrary list of state sponsors of terrorism and to lift all economic sanctions.

Issued in a solemn session and signed by Mayor Eduardo Martínez, Vice Mayor César Zepeda, and Council Member Claudia Jiménez, the proclamation emphasized that, for the past 64 years, the United States has imposed an economic, commercial, and financial blockade on Cuba.

The unilateral blockade—which at current costs represents losses to the Cuban economy of approximately five billion dollars each year—impedes most relations and trade with the northern nation and punishes other countries that attempt to interact with the island, he noted.

“The consequences of this embargo (blockade) continue to inflict daily hardship and deprivation on the Cuban people, generating shortages of basic goods such as food and medicine, and severely restricting international financial and trade opportunities,” the text, approved Tuesday night, emphasized.

He added that it prevents Cuba from obtaining vital equipment and supplies and even hinders the humanitarian response to catastrophic events such as recent hurricanes.

He recalled that, in 2021, Cuba was reinstated on the list of state sponsors of terrorism at the end of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, reversing the decision of the Barack Obama-Joe Biden administration in 2015.

With the influence of the Cuba solidarity movement here, in recent years many initiatives to end the embargo have been promoted and approved in municipal councils, state legislatures, and unions representing millions of people in the United States.

On October 30, 187 of 193 countries voted in favor of lifting the embargo on Cuba in the UN General Assembly, with the United States and Israel opposing it.

“On behalf of the Richmond City Council, I hereby urge our Congressional delegation to pass legislation that eliminates those aspects of embargo that have been codified in law,” the mayor emphasized in the Proclamation.

He also insisted that the United States lift all sanctions against Cuba and allow both countries to travel and trade freely.

At the City Council meeting, the Proclamation was presented to Cuban Embassy diplomats David Ramírez and Yasser Ibarra.

Since September 1999, Richmond and the Havana municipality of Regla, Cuba, have been twinned.

npg/dfm

June 3, 2025 — Belly of the Beast

Cuba’s national men’s basketball team was supposed to play their final game of the FIBA AmeriCup qualifiers last February in Puerto Rico. But the players never made the flight. Cuba had to forfeit the match when nearly all its players as well as the coaches and support staff were denied U.S. visas to attend the game.

Hear from the players themselves in our report HERE.

Cuban basketball players have been denied visas in the past, but Cuba’s Basketball Federation says this is the first time this has happened on this scale. Only two players – both living outside the island – were granted visas.

“We’re traveling as players, not tourists,” said Arle Zaporta, the team’s center. “Sports are sports. We just want to play.”

This March, 14 Cuban athletes were denied visas to participate in the World Masters Athletics Indoor Championship in Gainesville, Florida.

Cuba’s Olympic Committee denounced last week that Cuban sports officials had also been denied visas this year.

The trend is concerning for Cuban athletes as they begin qualifiers for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

“Our teams will always be in [regional] groups with countries that require a visa, like Puerto Rico and the U.S.,” said Dalia Henry, president of Cuba’s Basketball Federation. “There has to be a way for us to be allowed to…participate and qualify in the same way as everyone else.”

TRANSCRIPT

Cuba’s men’s national basketball team was supposed to play in February in the FIBA AmeriCup Qualifiers in Puerto Rico. But the team never got on the plane. Cuba was disqualified as a no-show after the U.S. denied visas to every Cuban player on the island.

“Our goal was to qualify for the AmeriCup and we were just one step away,” says Arle Zaporta, Center for the Cuban National Basketball Team.

“Finding out we weren’t going to Puerto Rico was a tremendous blow to our morale,” says Michel Espinosa, Forward for the Cuban National Basketball Team.

“It’s the first time a Cuban basketball team is denied U.S. visas. Only two of our players, who live abroad, received the visa. The rest of the players here in Cuba didn’t get the visa,” says Dalia Henry, President of the Cuban Basketball Federation.

“It made me sad because it was a big opportunity for me and the team,” adds Arle Zaporta.

“It was an awful shock because we had our hopes set on being in the AmeriCup,” adds Michel Espinosa.

“It made the players lose confidence and affected them mentally,” says Ariel Ferrán, Point Guard for the Cuban National Basketball Team. 

“We had to fight hard to get to that point. And we were not eliminated because we played poorly, but because of visas,” says Michel Espinosa.

“We know there was a change of government in the U.S., but if we played last year in Orlando, how can we now be denied visas to play in Puerto Rico?,” says Osmel Planas, Head Coach of the Cuban National Basketball Team.

Cuban athletes are often denied U.S. visas. Cuban sports officials say this is the first time it has happened to so many players.

“We’ve previously had issues getting the whole team to a tournament,” adds Dalia Henry.

“We need a visa for the U.S. and Puerto Rico. We travel with an official passport, which doesn’t require a visa for most countries,” says Michel Espinosa. 

“This is the second time I’m denied a U.S. visa. It’s unfair that a Cuban team can’t participate because of political reasons,” says Arle Zaporta.

“U.S. policy toward Cuba will become harsher.  It will continue to limit Cuban sports and Cuban athletes who are training despite the economic hurdles our country faces right now,” adds Dalia Henry. 

“It’s hard to convince our athletes to train daily when we have limitations in transportation, food and equipment. It’s not easy. We have no privileges. Our only privilege is to keep working, getting better and getting results,” adds Osmel Planas.

“Every player is proud to represent their country and we know it’s a long road. We need to be disciplined and focus on our goals,” says Michel Espinosa. 

“We work hard. With love and sacrifice. We give everything we have in every training session and every game,” says Arle Zaporta.

The 2028 Olympic Games will be held in Los Angeles

“This is a big concern for Cuba’s sports authorities. Our teams will always be in [regional] groups with countries that require a visa, like the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Puerto Rico 

and the U.S. There has to be a way for us to be allowed to have the same rights as other federations, to be able to participate and qualify in the same way as everyone else,” adds Dalia Henry.

“We’re traveling as players, not tourists. Sports are sports. We just want to play. 

This shouldn’t happen to any country in any sport,” says Arle Zaporta.

Havana, June 3 (Prensa Latina) President Miguel Díaz-Canel today thanked Iran for its support of Cuba’s struggle to end the U.S. blockade and its exclusion from the list of countries allegedly sponsoring terrorism.

Upon receiving the president of Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, at the Havana Palace of the Revolution, the Cuban leader emphasized the need for unity among nations and peoples subjected to coercive measures and sanctions imposed by U.S. imperialism.

He also condemned the escalating US interference in Iran’s internal affairs and recognized Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

He noted that the Iranian parliamentary leader’s visit continues the existing agreements on economic cooperation signed during former President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit to Cuba in 2023.

According to national television, the Cuban president took advantage of the meeting to extend greetings from Army General Raúl Castro and himself to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei and to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, inviting him to visit the island when his schedule allows.

Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, for his part, expressed his honor to be in a friendly and allied country with which, he said, his homeland has many things in common.

He stressed the importance of working together to counter aggression against independent countries and condemned the United States’ support for the Zionist regime of Israel in its aggression against Palestine.

The president of Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly heads a large parliamentary delegation.

During his stay in Havana, he will hold talks with Cuban officials, including his counterpart Esteban Lazo, and carry out other activities.

According to the National Assembly of People’s Power (parliament), Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf’s visit will contribute to strengthening relations between Cuba and Iran, especially between the two legislative bodies.

rc/evm

June 2, 2025 4:13 By Ike Nahem — People’s World

Editor’s Note: Though May Day is now more than a month past, People’s World presents these impressions of the mass May 1 march in Havana from Ike Nahem, a Cuba solidarity activist in the New York / New Jersey area. In this article and photo report, Nahem discusses not only the details of the May Day celebration in Cuba but also its importance as a symbol of Cubans’ determination to preserve their sovereignty, independence, and dignity in the face of an escalating economic assault by the U.S. government. As with all op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.

HAVANA—May Day 2025 in Havana 2025 was, first and foremost, an overwhelming revolutionary and patriotic mobilization of the Cuban working class and fighting people.  

The huge turnout (800,000 in Havana, 5 million+ across the Island), organized under the leadership of the Cuban trade union federation, Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), was also a big morale boost for the Cuban people. 

It registered the clear determination of the population as a whole to turn a corner out of the extended period of intensified (and accumulating) economic difficulties that has plagued them since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020.

That health crisis devastated Cuba’s tourism industry, which remains in slow recovery. All of this became a tipping point in the hammering of the Cuban economy over the past several years.

I hope the photos shown here can begin to convey some of the spirit of an amazing day which saw contingents from CTC-organized workplaces and industries, communities, and working-class families from all over the greater Havana area. They were up way early in the morning to board buses converging on Revolution Square. 

There were large spirited student contingents from universities, colleges, and schools; soldiers in uniform marching with their families; artists and dancers—it was a real sea of Cuban humanity that stretched for well over a mile. 

They had one loud and clear message: Understand this Trump, Rubio, Scott, and all other would-be imperialist aggressors—Cuba lives! Cuba resists! Cuba is not alone!

What stood out was the very youthful presence at May Day, the representation of a new generation of Cuban youth forged during the permanent pressure and aggression from U.S. sanctions. This includes intense imperialist propaganda on social media platforms targeting Cuban youth hoping to stimulate alienation, demoralization, and migration. And of course, there has been mass migration since the deepening of U.S. economic aggression.

All of these assaults aim to choke the dreams of Cuban youth for a better future inside Cuba. So it was particularly inspiring to see the identification of the Cuban youth on May Day with the history, heroes, and continuity of revolutionary, socialist Cuba.

From Trump to Biden to Trump 

This is the Cuba that is fighting to get out of the seemingly endless grip of U.S. economic warfare under Trump and Biden over the past nine years. There has been a near-seamless continuity of U.S. anti-Cuba hostility since the reversal of the relative, and ultimately illusory, “normalization” under President Barack Obama. 

What the Cuban working class has faced is an accumulating economic crisis of daily difficulties and near-calamitous conditions of shortages, including in medications and life-saving medical equipment. They have likewise experienced intense pressure on an overloaded, very old, and very inefficient electric grid. 

These last years have seen cascading crises in production and consumption, currency instability, rising prices, and shortages. On top of these, add the major material devastation of the Saratoga Hotel and Matanzas Oil Storage Facility explosions and the “natural” disasters of hurricanes, flooding, and even earthquakes. 

There are some signs and indicators lately of relative alleviation, with important direct foreign assistance, some advances in bilateral trade agreements and capital investment, as well as hopeful prospects that economic space can open up through Cuba’s formal association with the BRICs grouping (which has become more prominent in this era of Trump’s trade wars). 

Nevertheless, the overall situation remains harsh and difficult for Cuban working people. And that’s why the May Day mobilizations are so politically powerful.

Targeting Travel to Cuba

Without the anticipated foreign exchange from tourism, the massive capital investments in new hotel construction and other projects have added to budget and financing problems for Cuba. When the tourists don’t come, there’s no money to pay off these infrastructure projects.

The entire Cuban tourism industry has been directly targeted by the U.S. since the relative relaxation of extant travel sanctions under Obama. In the years before the pandemic, the industry had been recovering steadily and impressively.

Travel to Cuba is today, however, is a bureaucratic labyrinth, and not because of any impediments from “communist Cuba,” but rather from the U.S. government. The administration in Washington hassles and tries to intimidate all travelers to Cuba, making visiting the island a de facto political defiance of the U.S. blockade—even for mutually beneficial people-to-people exchanges. 

The U.S. government paints Cuba as a “hellhole” even as it aims to smother the right of U.S. citizens to travel and see its reality with our own eyes. Which poses the question: Who is afraid of whom?

U.S. visitors face severe restrictions in hotel and resort accommodations. Even folks on cruise ships face U.S.-instigated obstacles for stopping to enjoy Cuba’s truly rich revolutionary history, its marvelous architectural heritage, its music, museums, and art galleries, as well as its fabulous beaches. 

For those who do manage to get in, the devastating impact of the decades-long U.S. economic war are apparent: beautiful structures along the famous Malacon in states of disrepair and collapse; long lines for gasoline; generalized shortages of food, medications and medical supplies; and the total absence from store shelves of so many commodities.

Previously more open, Canadian policy under the unpopular Justin Trudeau government became more aligned with bipartisan U.S. anti-Cuba policy. Perhaps the new Liberal Party government under Mark Carney, in its clashes with arrogant Trumpian bombast insulting Canadian sovereignty, may drop the anti-Cuba posturing of its predecessor, increase trade and travel with the Island, and cease echoing U.S. bellicosity.

Europeans who wish to travel to Cuba face a particularly gratuitous U.S. intimidation tactic under the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) regulations. As part of the U.S. visa waiver program, ESTA allows travelers from certain countries to visit the U.S. without a visa. The ability to travel to the U.S. can be put in jeopardy if one has visited Cuba and that fact is registered in the databases and passports of one’s wholly legal travel.  Hoops, barriers, repetitive forms, and even visits to a consulate may be among the bureaucratic obstacle-course awaiting international travelers. 

Why does the U.S. government impose all these difficulties? In 2016, the ESTA eligibility rules changed as a result of the Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015, which disqualified travelers who reside in or visit any of the countries on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list. In an outrageous, obscene affront to the truth, Cuba and the SSOT list have been in on-again, off-again relationship since the island was first removed by Obama in 2015. 

The latter was in fact a precondition, along with the release of the three remaining Cuban Five political prisoners, for the establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana in 2015. It was among the steps that many hoped would lead toward actual normalization of relations between the two countries and an end to the U.S. blockade. This, of course, was illusory and short-lived. 

The initial limited steps taken by Obama were reversed during the first Trump administration. The Trump changes were shamefully deepened under Biden and the Democratic Party leadership in Congress, even under the conditions of the pandemic. That was the exact opposite of Cuba’s medical internationalist heroics during the COVID years from the Caribbean to Italy to Africa, as Marco Rubio just found out in meetings with Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments in March 2025.

The Importance of May Day 

Over the recent crisis period, there was some diminution of the traditional May Day mobilizations. For the past two years, the Cuban government and CTC have been forced to vastly curtail the traditional festivities due to terrible shortages in gasoline and fuel that made the logistics of organizing transportation impossible. 

Smaller mobilizations that were spirited and defiant did take place, but they didn’t match the scale of years past.

The overall situation has been alleviated enough to allow for a revival of the traditional mass Havana march this year. The change of situation was symbolized by the state’s ability to reserve the fuel necessary for the buses to converge near Revolution Square for the celebration.

I should add that for me, as a Marxist, May Day in Havana has always seemed a registration of a society where the working class is in fact the dominant class socially. It’s a chance for the people to showcase the moral values and social relations that are the true legacy of the Cuban Revolution. It’s an expression of the sovereignty which bipartisan Washington has been able to hurt but never defeat. 

May Day 2025 showed the Cuban Revolution remains a living revolution.