When I traveled to Cuba in May with a delegation led by Dr. Ron Daniels, president of the Institute of the Black World (IBW) and the Pan African Unity Dialogue (PAUD), it was my third trip to Cuba over the past 20 years.
I returned home with images and perceptions quite different from the Cuba I have grown to love.
This time, I witnessed a nation under assault with families navigating shortages of food and medicine, communities struggling with unreliable electricity, and people trying to maintain some sense of normalcy amid circumstances that made everyday life increasingly difficult.
As the U.S. media continues to report on the Cuban crisis, evidence months later shows how the conditions I witnessed have grown worse.
The U.N. Human Rights Council warned this week that “without swift action from the international community and civil society, Cuba risks becoming a “silent Gaza” — a comparison recently drawn by four members of the U.S. Congress during a visit to the island last month.”
“The humanitarian consequences are already unfolding into a full-blown crisis, threatening the rights to health, to life, to food and to development,” the Council said, according to the article.
This assault by the U.S. government, led by Secretary Marco Rubio, an American of Cuban descent, is based upon Rubio’s claims that the Cuban government and Fidel Castro led a seven-decade campaign of subversion against the U.S.
The allegations are outlined in a report released July 20 by the U.S. State Department, under the direction of Rubio, titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. The 100-page report concludes:
“When the war in Cuba was over, he [Fidel Castro] promised, a ‘much wider and bigger war’ against the United States would begin. Castro kept his promise. For 67 years, the Cuban regime has waged that campaign on every front. It has armed guerrillas, trained terrorists, sheltered fugitives, infiltrated the U.S. government, cultivated generations of American elites, built influence networks inside our institutions, and opened the Western Hemisphere to a succession of hostile foreign powers. It has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks. with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover, but also with ostensibly private exchanges, nonprofits, political organizations, and activist networks.”
Despite the allegations, sympathizers are calling the U.S. actions in Cuba “genocidal.” The oil blockades have caused an already fragile electrical system to collapse and a national outage on Aug. 2 put nearly 10 million people into darkness.
According to reports, the following day, the national grid collapsed again. The outages followed three nationwide grid failures during a nine-day period in July, as shortages of fuel, aging infrastructure and maintenance problems continue to strain the country’s electrical system.
But the absence of electricity is about far more than darkness.
It’s the people of Cuba, including pregnant women, seniors and children, whose lives have been disrupted due to the lack of access to clean water, telecommunications and health care, as well as businesses and other essential services. In July, the United Nations reported that nearly 500,000 people had received clean water assistance and more than 900,000 had received food assistance. Hospitals in Havana were forced to limit services, while water-pumping systems stopped operating in Havana and Santiago de Cuba.
At the same time, the political and economic pressures surrounding Cuba continue. On Aug. 6, the United States announced another round of Cuba-related sanctions.
There remains vigorous disagreement over responsibility for Cuba’s economic and energy crisis. The Cuban government maintains that decades of U.S. sanctions and restrictions have severely limited the country’s ability to obtain fuel, financing and replacement parts. The United States has attributed Cuba’s problems to failures of its state-run economic system.
That debate will continue.
That was the story I encountered when I traveled to Cuba. Meanwhile, the work of the Institute of the Black World (IBW) and the Pan African Unity Dialogue (PAUD) continues. On Aug. 4, Dr. Daniels announced an appeal to help convene a Cuba forum during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 55th Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., in September. The hope is to bring participants from Cuba and advance humanitarian assistance, public education and advocacy.
My original report (“The Human Cost of U.S. Sanctions: Cuba Confronts Mounting Economic Pressure”) is linked here — not simply as a look back at what I witnessed, but as context for understanding a humanitarian crisis that continues to unfold.
