The State Department wants Americans to believe that an island of roughly ten million people—struggling with severe shortages of food, medicine, fuel, and electricity and going more than 100 days without a single imported shipment of oil because of escalating U.S. sanctions—is secretly running American politics. That is the claim at the center of Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, a 100-page report released last week by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s department. It names 43 Americans and organizations—mayors, congresswomen, a Ben & Jerry’s co-founder, a podcaster, and even Global Exchange—as evidence of a Cuban “influence network” supposedly powerful enough to have shaped the George Floyd protests, Antifa, and campus activism nationwide. The report goes further still, casting Black liberation movements as foreign-directed rather than what they are: the legitimate response of communities fighting racism and police violence.
We know this playbook. It is the one that jailed American writers and union organizers under McCarthy in the 1950s. It is also the one Washington exported: in Indonesia in 1965, a U.S.-endorsed anti-communist purge killed roughly half a million people in five months, many of them identified through nothing more rigorous than a list like this one. The report even praises the “effectiveness” of “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” at breaking the Communist Party USA.
Nobody is fooled, and nobody here is guilty of anything but believing that Americans and Cubans have a right to know each other.
That belief is the actual target. For decades, Global Exchange has organized people-to-people exchanges between Americans and Cubans—delegations, dialogue, and ordinary human connection—on the conviction that understanding, not blockade, is what opens the way to a more peaceful and respectful relationship between our two countries. That is precisely what this report seeks to criminalize: not espionage or violence, but dialogue itself.
Rather than reckon with the devastating human toll of the U.S. blockade, the Trump administration has chosen to portray those who advocate for dialogue, exchange, and humanitarian solidarity as threats to national security. There is nothing strong about that. It is smash-and-grab foreign policy dressed up as national security, and it is Washington, not Havana, that has turned a fragile but real thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations back into a nightmare.
That is the level of seriousness behind this “war on Cuban subversion”: manufacture a villain, then manufacture the crime to match. It would be funny if the people on that 43-name list weren’t real Americans now facing real exposure for holding an opinion. It would be funny if ten million Cubans weren’t living the life-threatening shortages this report never mentions.
We are not intimidated, and we are not stopping. Next week, Global Exchange returns to Cuba with a delegation, bringing humanitarian aid and carrying cancer medicine, building people-to-people connections, and standing in solidarity with the Cuban people as they endure the collective punishment of this horrific blockade. We will keep building the human ties between the United States and Cuba that no report—however cartoonish—will persuade us to abandon.
None of this happens without resources, and we’re asking you directly for help. For over three decades we’ve taken principled positions — on Cuba, on Iraq, on Iran, on Palestine — that plenty of people with deep pockets found inconvenient enough to walk away from. We don’t have corporate sponsors or a billionaire benefactor bankrolling this work. We have each other. That means when the State Department tries to make dissent expensive and frightening, the people who keep it possible are the ones reading this.
Last week, a dozen community projects across Havana- health clinics, elder care centers, community kitchens, and educational organizations that have served their neighborhoods for decades- received humanitarian aid from Global Exchange, delivered amid the collective punishment of the U.S. blockade and escalating sanctions. And in partnership with the Hatuey Project, we also supported the delivery of urgently needed cancer medicine to hospitals across Cuba.
Everywhere we went, we saw the same story. Extraordinary people doing everything they can to care for their communities while struggling under a blockade designed to make daily life increasingly unlivable.
At La Castellana Center, staff provides daily care for people with severe mental disabilities despite chronic shortages of basic supplies. At Quisicuaba, a community kitchen now prepares nearly 12,000 meals every day while its free clinic struggles to obtain medicines that should be routine. At CENESEX, Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, access to reproductive health and hygiene supplies has become another casualty of U.S. policy. We also delivered aid to a neighborhood polyclinic and a Casa de Abuelos (Grandparents House), where staff continues to care for older members of the community despite increasingly difficult conditions.
If you brought donations to our office, they made it. The supplies you collected were delivered directly to the community organizations and health centers we visited. The cancer medicine you helped fund has already been received and is now reaching hospitals across Cuba, with additional shipments planned for August and September.
This is not the story of a country that cannot care for its people. It is the story of a country whose ability to do so has been systematically targeted for decades by a blockade designed to create scarcity, to create hardship, to create suffering. What we witnessed was the resilience of people refusing to surrender to it.
We were last in Cuba in May. Two months later, the crisis has deepened with startling speed.
With virtually no fuel reaching the island, transportation has ground to a halt, and blackouts have intensified. Roads that once teemed with cars now sit silent. Hotels that once filled with visitors stand empty. Long lines snake outside banks, spilling into the streets as recurring blackouts disrupt banking services. Market shelves grow barer by the week. These are the visible signs of an economy under relentless siege.
As we write this, Cuba has once again been plunged into a nationwide blackout, the third in just six months. For millions of Cubans, that means hospitals without reliable electricity, families without running water, food spoiling, medicines at risk, and entire communities brought to a standstill.
The need continues, but so does the resistance. Hospitals need medicine and supplies. Communities need solar panels, power stations, and equipment to keep lights, fans, and refrigerators running through blackouts. And the blockade needs to be met with pressure here at home, in calls to our elected officials, in the streets, in every conversation that pushes this crisis into public view. Standing with Cuba means meeting that need again and again, for as long as the blockade demands it.
Join our next delegation.
Global Exchange returns to Cuba August 8-15 with more cancer medicine and humanitarian aid. And then again in September. Email drea@globalexchange.org to learn more.
Help deliver the next shipment.
Help us continue delivering cancer medicine to Cuba. Please donate today.
Take action from home.
We are partnering with Cuban Americans for Cuba and the Latin America Working Group to host an Advocacy 101 webinar. Whether you’re a seasoned advocate or new to the movement, we invite you to join the conversation and learn how to talk to your representatives about the U.S. blockade on Cuba and demand an end to the policies that continue to inflict profound hardship on Cuba’s 11 million people. Register here: https://actionnetwork.org/events/congressional-advocacy-101-webinar
The blockade is a choice. It is made and remade in Washington. And it can be unmade.
We will not stop until the blockade ends.
Thank you for standing with the Cuban people.
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:
Cuba’s infant mortality rate has risen 148 percent since 2018 — from 4.0 per 1,000 live births to 9.9 in 2025. If the rate had stayed the same, approximately 1,800 fewer babies would have died. Cuba’s infant mortality rate used to be lower than the United States. As of 2025, it is 83 percent higher.
Nurses in neonatal units rush to manually pump ventilators for premature babies during power outages.
More than 460 essential medicines are in shortage across the island.
More than 96,000 people are waiting for surgeries they cannot access, 12,000 of those children.
Children with leukemia have a 5-year survival rate of over 90% — when they have access to the right medications.
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.
Fox News recently published a list of 145 organizations it believes should be investigated for their work related to Cuba. Global Exchange is on that list.
The Justice Department and Treasury Department have reportedly announced investigations into whether solidarity organizations coordinated activities with Cuban government officials without registering as foreign agents. Organizations have begun receiving extensive requests for records, travel documentation, receipts, donor information, and communications.
The purpose is not difficult to understand. Investigations, subpoenas, and information requests consume time, resources, and attention. They are designed to make solidarity expensive, humanitarian work exhausting, and ultimately to convince people that helping is no longer worth the risk.
We’ve seen this before.
In March, Global Exchange delivered cancer medicine to hospitals in Havana. When we returned in May, doctors told us that every shipment had already been used. They had received no new supplies since our previous visit. More than 100,000 people in Cuba are currently waiting for surgeries they cannot access. More than 12,000 of them are children.
The real scandal is that sixty years of a cruel blockade are now being escalated by the Trump Administration into a genuine humanitarian disaster — deliberate, unnecessary, and entirely preventable. And it is being done in your name.
On May 1, President Trump signed a new executive order further tightening sanctions on Cuba, deepening the island’s energy crisis and worsening daily blackouts, food shortages, water shortages, and mounting medical emergencies. That was just one month ago. Yesterday, the U.S. government imposed another round, this time targeting Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, members of his family, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), an important bridge between Cuba and international solidarity movements, and Amistur, our longtime partner in organizing legal travel to the island, along with other Cuban institutions.
This is not policy. This is punishment — designed to tighten the economic strangulation of the island, collectively punish 11 million Cuban people, and intimidate those around the world who choose solidarity over silence. By targeting the very institutions that facilitate international engagement and people-to-people exchange, the message is clear: isolate Cuba, deepen the suffering, and criminalize anyone willing to stand with the Cuban people against these policies
Marco Rubio and Donald Trump are discussing military intervention. After decades of economic warfare, the answer cannot be more escalation. The answer cannot be more suffering for a population already struggling to obtain food, medicine, electricity, and fuel.
We have traveled to Cuba for decades — and we intend to keep doing so.
We are tired, in the way people become tired after watching the same cruelty administered in new forms for decades. But we are not done. And we will not be silenced.
Medicine is still needed. Doctors are waiting. Patients are waiting. Thousands of children are waiting. No investigation, executive order, or political attack changes that reality.
That is why we are moving forward with the next shipment of cancer medicine to Cuba, and why we are asking for your support today. Join us in this crucial battle to save lives and end policies that continue to inflict hardship on Cuban families. Whatever lists are published, whatever threats are made, and whatever obstacles are placed in the way, our responsibility remains the same: to stand with the Cuban people, ensure that lifesaving medicine reaches those who need it, and continue the fight for peace, sovereignty, and an end to policies that cause needless suffering.
I returned from Cuba last week, delivering $20,000 worth of urgently needed cancer medicines in partnership with the Movimiento Mexicano de Solidaridad con Cuba and through the generous support of so many of you who donated, organized, and made this effort possible.
We brought the medicines because Cuba is being deliberately strangled by a decades-long U.S. blockade designed to make daily life unbearable, cutting off access to medicine, fuel, food systems, banking networks, transportation, and the basic materials needed to sustain life.
One of the places we delivered medicine was Cuba’s leading oncology institution in Havana, the country’s largest center dedicated to cancer diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doctors there told us they had not received a shipment of cancer medicines since our delegation arrived in March.
The country’s premier cancer hospital. Months without critical cancer medicines. Doctors trying to stretch what little remains. Families waiting. Hoping. Improvising.
And on May 1, while millions of Cubans filled the streets in defense of dignity, sovereignty, workers’ rights, peace, and an end to the blockade, President Trump signed yet another Executive Order escalating the economic war on Cuba.
As workers, students, families, and international delegations marched through Havana rejecting war, intervention, and collective punishment, Washington announced new measures designed to deepen shortages, tighten isolation, and further suffocate Cuba’s already fragile economy.
The order expands sanctions targeting major sectors of the Cuban economy and threatens third-country companies and financial institutions that engage with the island. It deepens restrictions on fuel, trade, banking, transportation, and economic lifelines that ordinary Cuban families rely on to survive. Particularly alarming is language that could further restrict humanitarian aid and solidarity efforts, placing even more barriers between patients and lifesaving medicine.
The contrast was impossible to ignore: millions of people publicly calling for peace and survival while the United States doubled down on a policy whose effects are felt in darkened hospitals, empty pharmacy shelves, and families searching desperately for medicine they cannot find.
While this Executive Order was being signed in Washington, we were in Havana marching alongside workers, students, families, and international delegations during May Day celebrations. It was one of the most powerful demonstrations of collective dignity and resistance I have ever witnessed.
Delegations from around the world walked beside Cuban workers calling for an end to the blockade and defending the right of people to live free from economic warfare and foreign intervention. At a moment when U.S. politicians openly threaten military aggression against Cuba, the meaning of international solidarity felt profoundly urgent.
There were conversations during the trip that I will never forget.
People spoke quietly about preparing for the possibility of invasion. Parents described gathering small toys and keeping them packed in backpacks for their children in case the worst happens, something to comfort or distract them from the sounds of war, if electricity disappears, if chaos erupts.
In the face of escalating sanctions and growing shortages, we are not stepping back. We are deepening our solidarity.
Global Exchange and our partners are already preparing our next humanitarian delivery of cancer medicines to Cuba in the coming month because patients and healthcare workers cannot wait while politicians in Washington continue tightening a policy of economic suffocation.
We are also expanding our humanitarian aid collection efforts from our San Francisco office, gathering urgently needed medicines and medical supplies to send directly to communities and hospitals across the island.
Our solidarity delegations are returning in June, August, and September, creating opportunities for people in the United States to witness the realities of the blockade firsthand, build relationships with Cuban communities, and participate in the growing international movement demanding an end to collective punishment against the Cuban people. We recently added the August delegation in response to growing interest, and we will be sharing more details soon.
The blockade depends on isolation. Solidarity breaks it.
At a moment when hospitals are rationing medicine, families are enduring daily blackouts, and parents are quietly preparing backpacks for their children in case war comes, neutrality is not an option.
Global Exchange is launching a Bay Area Humanitarian Aid Hub for Cuba in San Francisco’s Mission District to mobilize community solidarity and deliver urgently needed supplies to the island. Working directly with Cuban communities, we will collect and ship essential humanitarian goods, including medical supplies, basic medicines, hygiene products, and other critical materials to communities facing acute shortages.
Cuba is only 90 miles from U.S. shores, yet decades of U.S. policy have severely restricted the flow of essential goods. Today, Cuba is facing one of the most severe shortages of fuel, food, and medicine in decades, the result of more than 60 years of U.S. economic warfare that has imposed collective punishment on the Cuban people.
As the Trump administration ramps up its campaign to isolate the island, shortages are deepening and the human consequences are becoming more severe. The effects of this economic siege are felt most sharply by the most vulnerable—newborns and parents, the elderly, and those living with serious illnesses who struggle to access basic medicines and care.
For nearly 40 years, Global Exchange has worked in solidarity with the Cuban people, organizing educational delegations, people-to-people exchanges, and humanitarian efforts, while calling for an end to the inhumane U.S. blockade and for Cuba to be removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
How to Support the Humanitarian Aid Hub:
• Donate supplies at our Mission District collection hub. View the donation list below. • Donate online to support humanitarian aid shipments. Donate here.
Thanks to community solidarity, we have already delivered more than $43,000 worth of specialized cancer medicines to hospitals in Cuba and transported over 2,000 pounds of humanitarian aid collected through local donations. We will continue sending urgently needed medicines and supplies with the support of online donations.
Every shipment we send is both an act of solidarity and a statement: we refuse to accept policies that inflict suffering on innocent communities. Humanitarian aid alone cannot end the blockade. But it can save lives, meet urgent needs, and sustain communities while we continue the fight to end these cruel and unjust policies.
📦 Donation Drop-Off Dates & Times
Please email us at cuba@globalexchange.org to organize a drop-off time.
Location 2973 16th St., Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94103
Priority Donation Items for Cuba
The following medicines and supplies are in high demand due to ongoing shortages of fuel, electricity, and medical resources. All items must be new, unopened, and within expiration dates.We are only accepting items from this list.
Lice and scabies treatments — shampoos, creams, sprays
Oral rehydration salts ORS packets
Cold and flu medication
Women’s & Baby Care
Feminine hygiene pads and tampons — all sizes
Menstrual cups — reusable, extremely high impact
Baby diapers — newborn through size 5
Adult diapers — for elderly and ill patients
Wet wipes and baby wipes
Diaper rash cream
Baby shampoo and body wash
Food
Powdered milk
Canned fish – tuna, sardines, salmon, mackerel
Canned meat – chicken
Dried beans
Pasta and noodles
Peanut butter and other nut butters -powdered if possible, no glass
Bouillon cubes and soup packets
Baby food pouches
Fortified cereals
Vitamins & Supplements
Multivitamins — adults and children separately
Vitamins A, B complex, C, D, and E
Iron supplements — especially for women and children
Calcium supplements — especially for the elderly
Prenatal vitamins
Medical Supplies & Equipment
Medical gloves — nitrile, all sizes
Surgical face masks and N95 respirators
Digital medical thermometers
Bandages, gauze pads, and rolls
Medical tape and adhesive bandages Band-Aids, all sizes
Alcohol wipes and swabs
Hydrogen peroxide and iodine solution
Syringes — unused and sealed only
Wound closure strips — steri-strips
Blood pressure monitors — battery-operated
Blood glucose test strips
Reading glasses for the elderly — various strengths
Mosquito & Vector Control
Mosquito repellent —spray or lotion DEET-based
Mosquito nets — for sleeping
Permethrin spray — for treating clothing and mosquito nets
Life and Death Under Trump’s Oil Blockade
By Corina Nolet With appreciation to Elena Gutierrez and Marco Castillo for their partnership and shared experience during the delegation. Written following participation in the Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba March 26, 2026
Pharmacy shelves lie bare. Streets darken. Refrigerators sweating as the power fails once again. Doctors counting doses. Families counting meals. This is what the U.S. blockade looks like in Cuba. It is the daily struggle to keep life going.
We leave Cuba changed. Not because we did not expect hardship, but because of its scale, and because of the quiet endurance of a people, of a community, of a nation required to live within these conditions year after year.
What we witnessed cannot be captured in headlines or statistics. It is etched into daily life across the island: into the long lines for transportation that never arrive, into homes that go dark without warning, into cancer patients waiting for treatment that has been delayed, and into the question many carry: Is this the worst, or is the worst yet to come?
U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have made clear their intention to pursue regime change in Cuba.
For over three months, no fuel has been allowed to reach the island. Not a drop
The United States oil blockade is driving Cuba toward a humanitarian crisis. The most vulnerable — newborns, the elderly, and the sick — are at the greatest risk. What is debated in distant, cold political language is lived here as daily deprivation.
It is difficult to convey what that means unless you see it firsthand. The stillness of streets once filled with buses, the darkened neighborhoods when electricity falters, the palpable fatigue in the faces of people who have adapted again and again to scarcity that is neither natural nor inevitable.
And yet, even in the midst of profound exhaustion, life continues. Communities organize. Teachers return to their classrooms. Doctors keep working, caring for the sick. Neighbors share what little they have. The resilience of the Cuban people is steady, daily, and collective. Even in the face of the most egregious acts of violence, Cubans remain committed to life, dignity, and self-determination.
This visit to Cuba has made silence impossible.
Global Exchange traveled to Cuba as part of the Nuestra América Convoy, a coordinated international effort that brought together hundreds of people from across the United States, Latin America, Europe, and beyond in a collective act of solidarity. Communities organized, gathered supplies, and joined hands to deliver urgently needed humanitarian aid during a period of severe shortages. As part of this effort, Global Exchange carried more than $23,000 worth of life-saving cancer medicines and approximately 1,700 pounds of humanitarian aid, contributing to the convoy’s delivery of more than 20 tons of supplies to communities across the island.
When Fuel Disappears, Everything Slows. Then Stops.
At first glance, cutting off oil to Cuba may look like a pen pressed to paper in a quiet office, a decision made under bright lights, far from the darkened streets it will leave behind. On the ground, it reshapes daily life in the most fundamental ways.
Cuba stretches nearly 800 miles across the Caribbean, just 90 miles from the shores of the United States. The country can refine oil, but it does not have its own supply of crude. Like most nations, its basic infrastructure depends on fuel for transportation, electricity, water systems, agriculture, and healthcare.
Cuba’s last shipment of oil arrived on January 9. Since then, the country has been forced to operate with dwindling reserves.
When fuel disappears,
Cars and trucks remain idle. Ambulances remain parked because there is no fuel. Food cannot be transported from farms to markets. Electrical grids falter, and when electricity fails, so, too, do water systems. Hospitals are canceling surgeries and sending patients home because doctors and nurses can’t commute to work.
The effects ripple outward through every layer of society.
Daily life begins to falter. Slowly at first, then a rapid collapse. This is the cruel intention of the United States’ fuel blockade. Its impact is measured in human lives. Its target is the Cuban people.
In recent weeks, the consequences have become horrific. Entire sections of Havana have gone permanently dark. On some nights, the power fails across the entire nation. We were there during one of the blackouts. On Saturday, Cuba’s power grid collapsed, leaving the country without electricity for the third time in March. The streets fell silent. Businesses closed their doors. Cell phones stopped working, and the internet disappeared. Entire neighborhoods went dark. At our casa, a table sat covered with flashlights that could not be used because there were no batteries. In refrigerators across the country, the little food families had managed to store began to spoil as the power failed. One friend told me she has been getting sick repeatedly, forced to rely on food that has gone bad after yet another outage.
Hospitals are designed to be the last institutions to lose power, but even they are vulnerable during nationwide blackouts. Healthcare workers we met described racing to the bedsides of infants and patients on ventilators, manually pumping life-support equipment while waiting for generators to engage. These are moments measured not in policy debates, but in seconds. Seconds that determine whether a baby in the NICU survives.
This is inhumane. This is genocidal.
Photos by Lexine Alpert
Photo by Lexine Alpert
Photo by Lexine Alpert
Photo by Lexine Alpert
A Health System Under Siege
Across hospitals and clinics, doctors are working with critically limited supplies of essential medicines, forced into decisions under inhumane conditions that no healthcare professional should ever face.
Doctors we met with spoke about the impossible choices they are forced to make when life-saving medicines are scarce. They must weigh whether to administer a scarce treatment that may extend one life briefly, or to reserve it for another patient with a greater chance of survival.
In the face of these shortages, healthcare workers improvise.
It is difficult to fully convey the severity of the U.S. blockade on Cuba, and the extraordinary measures it forces healthcare workers to take simply to provide basic care. They adapt, repair, reuse, and invent.
In one hospital we visited, a child was using a makeshift device fashioned from a discarded plastic bottle to collect urine, an improvised solution created because proper medical supplies were unavailable.
The nurse who showed us the device did not present it as an innovation or a success. She held it carefully in her hands and explained that this was what they had available. She spoke about the responsibility of caring for children when supplies run out, about the fear of making mistakes when equipment is scarce, and about the exhaustion of working every day under conditions that no healthcare system should be forced to endure.
That exhaustion does not end when her shift is over. She often returns home to a dark apartment, unable to cook because the electricity has failed again. Sometimes the power returns in the middle of the night for a few hours before shutting off again before sunrise. When that happens, she gets up to cook whatever food she can, preparing meals for her children to take to school and something to carry with her to work, and then lies back down to rest before the next day begins.
At the oncology hospital we visited, it was a matter of life and death.
Today, 96,000 Cubans are waiting for surgery as shortages of fuel and electricity slow hospital operations across the country. About 11,000 of those patients are children. Doctors explained that an estimated 16,000 cancer patients in Cuba require radiotherapy and are experiencing disruptions in treatment — not because the country lacks trained doctors, hospitals, or medical expertise, but because the resources needed to sustain care are increasingly difficult to obtain.
Healthcare professionals remain ready to treat their patients. Facilities remain staffed. The will to provide care is intact. But when medicines, fuel, replacement parts, and medical equipment are restricted, even the most capable health system cannot do what it was built to do — save lives.
Communities Sustaining Life
We visited a school serving children with hearing impairments, part of Cuba’s universal education system, where students with disabilities learn alongside their peers and receive specialized support. Teachers spoke about their work with deep commitment and with growing concern about the difficulty of obtaining something as basic as batteries for hearing devices. Inside the classroom, students receive the support they need to learn and communicate. But outside the classroom, shortages create new barriers. When batteries are unavailable, families struggle to maintain the tools children depend on to connect with the world around them. A small detail with enormous consequences.
We visited organic farms and community gardens where farmers are working collectively to grow food under increasingly difficult conditions. These projects reflect a long tradition of resilient communities adapting, sharing knowledge, and sustaining local food systems when imports become unreliable. What we saw was not just agriculture, but cooperation: neighbors working side by side to ensure that families have something to eat, even when resources are scarce.
We met with members of the Henry Reeve Brigade, a contingent of Cuban doctors and nurses who have traveled the world responding to disasters, epidemics, and humanitarian crises. Since its creation in 2005, Cuban medical teams have deployed from Haiti to West Africa to communities across the Americas, providing care when it was needed most.
What we witnessed tells a very different story from the one often told about Cuba. This is a country that has sent doctors — not bombs — across borders for decades. Cuban medical teams have responded to disasters in Haiti, treated patients during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, supported overwhelmed hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, and worked alongside Indigenous communities across the Americas to expand access to healthcare. Their work reflects a model of international solidarity rooted in care, prevention, and service.
In recent months, several countries have been forced to scale back or end Cuban medical missions under pressure from the Trump administration. In Honduras, communities lost the Cuban healthcare workers who had been providing free medical care for nearly two years. Guatemala, Paraguay, the Bahamas, Guyana, and Jamaica have also terminated long-standing medical partnerships, including programs serving Indigenous and rural communities. These closures mean fewer doctors in clinics, longer travel distances for patients, and reduced access to basic healthcare for millions of people who depend on these services.
Silence Is Not an Option
The suffering caused by the U.S. blockade against Cuba is not hidden. It is visible to anyone willing to look closely, in hospital wards, in pharmacies with empty shelves, and in the daily calculations families make about survival.
As I told The Nation, the policies imposed on Cuba are not just economic measures; they are conditions that shape whether hospitals can function, whether patients receive treatment, and whether families can meet their most basic needs.
It is measurable in lives interrupted, treatments delayed, and systems stretched to their limits.
And it is why silence is not an option.
Until the Blockade Ends
In response to the requests of our Cuban partners and the communities we met, we are taking the following steps:
Organizing additional solidarity delegations to Cuba in April, June, and September, with more to follow. Each delegation carrying humanitarian aid. Again and again, Cubans told us the same thing: Come if you can. Come see for yourselves. Come stand with us. Return home with the truth to share.
Send monthly shipments of aid to Cuba. These shipments will reach hospitals, community projects, and families facing ongoing shortages.
Building a local hub of solidarity in San Francisco. We are beginning the collection of donated items at our office, connecting neighbors here with families there.
Raising funds nationwide to purchase and deliver urgently needed supplies. For those who are not in the Bay Area, online contributions will help sustain this ongoing humanitarian effort. You can donate here.
Bring our call directly to Washington, D.C. Congress must demand an end to the blockade. In the weeks ahead, we will share ways for supporters to stand with us in this effort.
And this work will continue.
End all the blockades. Break the sieges that starve nations and fracture communities. Feed the people. From Cuba to Palestine to Haiti, we all deserve dignity, sovereignty, and the chance to live.
There is enough for everyone.
Global Exchange arrives in Havana today as movements from across the hemisphere come together by air, land, and sea with the Nuestra América Convoy, delivering humanitarian aid while challenging the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
On March 21, international delegations and solidarity movements from across the Americas and around the world will converge in Cuba as part of the convoy, bringing more than 20 tons of humanitarian aid and standing together against the policies that are deepening this humanitarian crisis.
The ongoing blockade has plunged the island nation into a severe energy crisis, with many parts of Cuba experiencing up to 16 hours without power each day. United States President Donald Trump has also suggested the possibility of military action and regime change, and has publicly expressed a desire for the United States to “own” Cuba.
Yesterday, Global Exchange co-director Corina Nolet and Board Chair Walter Turner spoke with Hard Knock Radio on KPFA about the current crisis in Cuba, the tightening U.S. blockade, and why this humanitarian convoy is so urgent. Read / listen here.
“We stand in solidarity with the people of Cuba. People around the world are coming together to make clear that Cuba is not alone, and that the inhumane blockade will not stop us from carrying out this vital people-to-people mission,” said Corina Nolet, co-director of Global Exchange
For nearly four decades, Global Exchange has organized people-to-people delegations to Cuba and led grassroots advocacy efforts to end the blockade and normalize relations between Cuba and the United States. Thanks to supporters like you, Global Exchange and our international partners have already secured nearly $23,000 worth of urgently needed cancer medicines. These treatments are critically needed as shortages of basic medicines continue to affect patients across the island.
This effort brings together participants from more than a dozen countries. At a time when the Trump administration is escalating the economic war against Cuba, tightening sanctions, and deepening shortages across the island, people across the Americas are stepping forward in solidarity. Together, we refuse to stand by while an entire nation is punished.
Members of our delegation are also carrying 34 large suitcases filled with humanitarian supplies — more than 1,700 pounds of aid. These bags are packed with over-the-counter medicines, medical supplies, and essential items that Cuban families are increasingly unable to obtain because of the tightening economic blockade.
And this is just the beginning.
In April, Global Exchange will launch a Bay Area Humanitarian Aid Hub in San Francisco to continue this work, organizing regular shipments of medical supplies, food, and essential goods to the people of Cuba.
We will share updates, photos, and stories from Cuba as the convoy arrives and the aid begins reaching communities. For up-to-the-moment updates, follow us on social media.
Thank you for making this work possible.
The lights are going out in Cuba, and instead of relief, Washington is talking about takeover.
Earlier today, President Donald Trump suggested that the United States might pursue a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, claiming the country has “no money, no oil, no food.” This language, layered atop intensified sanctions and fuel restrictions, signals a dangerous escalation.
At the same time, tightened restrictions on fuel and energy imports have severely strained Cuba’s electricity grid. Blackouts are spreading. Hospitals are operating under extreme pressure. Transportation and food distribution systems are destabilized. These measures have real, immediate human consequences.
Cuba needs an end to the U.S. Blockade. Cuba does not need a U.S. takeover.
We refuse to stand by while economic warfare deepens and a nation’s sovereignty is undermined.
There are still a few spaces available to travel with us. Learn more here.
Traveling with Global Exchange means delivering humanitarian aid directly to the Cuban people, engaging with health workers, educators, and community leaders, and witnessing firsthand the impacts of sanctions and fuel shortages. It means standing for sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination at a critical moment.
Our friends in Cuba are asking us to come and bear witness at a moment when isolation is being weaponized against them. Join the Global Exchange delegation.
Global Exchange is mobilizing a humanitarian aid campaign to send essential supplies and funds with the convoy. When power grids collapse, intensive care units are at risk. When fuel disappears, food distribution breaks down, and entire neighborhoods are plunged into darkness. These policies are designed to create pressure through deprivation. Your contribution helps us counter that pressure with solidarity, material support, and presence.
For nearly 40 years, Global Exchange has brought people to Cuba to break the isolation imposed by the U.S. blockade and to build direct, people-to-people ties across borders. That commitment remains firm.
We are returning to Cuba in April, in June, and again in September with additional solidarity delegations — with more to follow. We are organizing monthly humanitarian shipments to ensure that material support continues beyond any single visit.
We will keep showing up, in solidarity.
Solidarity With Cuba in the Face of Economic Warfare
We are writing at a moment of grave urgency.
On January 29, the U.S. government took a dangerous step toward open economic warfare against the people of Cuba. President Trump declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and authorized sweeping new measures designed to cut the island off from fuel — the lifeblood of electricity, water, transportation, food systems, and hospitals.
This is an emergency.
It is now widely reported that Cuba has as little as 15–20 days of oil remaining. As a result of direct U.S. threats and economic coercion, Venezuelan shipments have been halted, Mexico’s state oil company has suspended deliveries, and other countries are being threatened with punitive tariffs if they continue fuel transfers. The consequences are already unfolding: prolonged blackouts, fuel rationing, stalled transportation, and deepening hardship across the island.
This is economic warfare waged through hunger, darkness, and the collapse of life-sustaining systems.
For more than six decades, the U.S. blockade has sought to break Cuba through economic strangulation. What we are witnessing now is not a departure from that strategy, but its most dangerous escalation yet, deliberately leveraging systemic breakdown in the hope that desperation will succeed where decades of coercion have failed.
Since 1990, Global Exchange has been at the forefront of the movement to normalize U.S.–Cuba relations and end the blockade (bloqueo). That same year, we launched our first travel challenge to Cuba under the Freedom to Travel campaign, demanding that the U.S. government: End the U.S. blockade on Cuba; End travel restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba; Remove Cuba from the U.S. list of terrorist countries
Through education, publications, speaking tours, campaigns, and our Cuba Reality Tours program, we have accompanied thousands of people to Cuba, breaking the blockade of information and building people-to-people solidarity grounded in truth, dignity, and mutual respect.
And yet, more than thirty years later, most of these demands remain unmet. Instead of normalization, we are witnessing renewed escalation. Instead of dialogue, coercion and the deliberate manufacture of crisis.
Global Exchange stands in unwavering solidarity with the people of Cuba. No nation should be starved into submission for refusing U.S. domination. Cuba is not a threat. What threatens peace and stability is the use of economic warfare as foreign policy.
Secondary sanctions criminalize trade and cooperation, using force and threat to bring the entire international community into line and making solidarity itself a punishable act. At the same time, the U.S. government is intensifying violence at home — against immigrants, workers, and communities demanding dignity and democracy. These are not separate struggles. They are rooted in the same system of militarism and coercion.
Cuba’s people know this reality intimately. And still, they organize, sustaining systems of collective care that have ensured universal health care, near-universal literacy, and strong community networks even under relentless pressure. Neighborhoods share resources, doctors continue to serve without basic supplies, educators keep schools open, and communities care for one another under conditions the U.S. government is actively trying to make unbearable. This is organized, collective resistance.
Year after year, the overwhelming majority of the world condemns the U.S. blockade at the United Nations. Washington persists — not because this policy brings peace, but because diplomacy has been replaced with economic war.
Ending the blockade is a legal and moral obligation. Solidarity with Cuba is inseparable from the fight against militarism, racism, and economic violence everywhere.
As the U.S. escalates economic war, we must deepen solidarity.
Join us this Thursday at 2 PM PT / 5 PM ET for La Encrucijada, featuring Elena Gutiérrez, Global Exchange’s Mexico–U.S. Program Director, who recently returned from Cuba after meeting with delegation partners and community organizers.
Elena will share reflections from her trip, what she witnessed firsthand, and voices from Cuban people navigating the deepening impacts of the blockade. Join here.
Another powerful way to act in solidarity is to travel with Global Exchange on one of our upcoming Cuba Reality Tours. Participants bring life-saving donations, meet directly with community organizers, health workers, and cultural leaders, and help strengthen the people-to-people ties the U.S. government has worked for decades to sever. Traveling to Cuba is a way to break the blockade of information, bear witness to what communities are facing, and return with deeper relationships and responsibility.
Cuba’s surgeons are facing severe shortages of basic medical supplies. Without a steady supply of sutures, doctors are unable to perform critical, life-saving surgeries.
One immediate way to act in solidarity is to support efforts to get surgical sutures to Cuban hospitals: https://ghpartners.org/sutures/
