Cuba Is Under Siege. We Are Going Back.

We return angrier every single time. Angrier at the deliberateness of it. Angrier at the cruelty of policies that target our island neighbors with the cold precision of a siege.

And we are going back.

For the next 8 days, Global Exchange returns to Havana. This trip, we are bringing cancer medicine to Cuban hospitals in partnership with the Hatuey Project. When we traveled in May, doctors told us that every shipment from our previous visit had already been used. They had received no new supplies since we’d last been there.

The numbers tell you what kind of war this is:

This is deliberate. This is collective punishment. This is what a siege looks like when it is designed to be invisible.

The United States administration has now sanctioned the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) and AMISTUR, our longtime friends and the Cuban institutions that have facilitated people-to-people engagements between Cuba and international solidarity for many decades. This is a clear effort to silence the international movement of solidarity and bring maximum economic harm to the Cuban people. 

By targeting the very institutions that keep Cubans and Americans in relationship with one another, this administration is trying to destroy the avenues through which global citizens connect and through which the truth gets out, through which solidarity is made real. Isolate Cuba

Strategy: Criminalize anyone willing to stand with the Cuban people. 

We refuse to be silent. We refuse to be criminalized out of our conscience.

During our days in Havana, we will sit with the people living inside this war. We will meet with doctors delivering care through blackouts and medicine shortages, with elders bearing the sharpest edge of this manufactured crisis. We will hear from CENESEX on LGBTQ+ rights and how sanctions undermine the expanded Family Code, from the community of the Literacy Museum and Centro Martin Luther King and the organic urban gardens,  people who are building life under siege. We will meet with Belly of the Beast, the independent journalists breaking through the blockade of information. 

Cuba has not been broken. Not by sixty-seven years of blockade, not by engineered blackouts, not by medicine shortages, not by being strangled from every direction by the most powerful empire in modern history.

We are going because the Cuban people, under blackouts, under shortages, under a siege designed to grind them into submission, continue to build and to resist. Their decades-long battle for self-determination demands our urgent solidarity.

We are going back to say: not in our name. Not then. Not now. Not ever.
The Cuban people will not surrender. Neither will we.

Please join Global Exchange and our partners in this battle of resistance, human rights, and survival. Contribute what you can in material and financial support. You will hear from us again as we, along with others, plan medical and support delegations as often as possible. 

Adelante, and thank you.