Washington besieges Cuba. Rome refuses to look away. How sixty years of Church history stopped an American Secretary of State in his tracks.
A Global Exchange Communiqué | May 8, 2026
By Ted Lewis.
When Marco Rubio walked into the Apostolic Palace on Thursday morning to meet Pope Leo XIV, he carried with him the full weight of an administration that has made the deliberate suffering of the Cuban people a cornerstone of its foreign policy. What he encountered, by all accounts, was a pope who was not interested in providing cover for it.
The contrast could not be more stark, or more historically instructive. On one side of that meeting room sat the Secretary of State of a superpower that has spent sixty-five years trying to break Cuba through isolation, embargo, and now an oil blockade so severe it has plunged the island into darkness for up to 24 hours a day. On the other sat the first American pope in history, the inheritor of an institution that chose a radically different path and, by any honest measure, achieved far more.
A Road Trip, a Mother and a Daughter, and What Actually Works
In 1999, a year after Pope John Paul II made his historic visit to Havana, I drove across Cuba — one of several trips I have made to an island I have come to love. I have talked with Cubans in every corner of that country: farmers, musicians, doctors, teachers, party officials, dissidents, believers, atheists, and people who held all of those identities simultaneously and without apology. I have come away every time with the same conviction: the Cuban people are among the most dignified, resilient, and historically clear-eyed people on earth, and they deserve infinitely better than what American policy has delivered to them.
On that 1999 road trip I made my way to Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second city, in its magnificent and revolutionary southeast, the place where Fidel Castro declared victory in January 1959. I stayed with a mother and daughter I had been connected to through friends in Havana. The mother was a nurse. The daughter was a physician. They were, without contradiction or apparent discomfort, both lifelong committed members of the Communist Party and devout Catholic believers. For most of their adult lives those two identities had to be held separately, the faith concealed, the practice private, the cross kept out of sight. To display religious belief openly was to invite suspicion, career consequences, the quiet withdrawal of the state’s approval.
But something had shifted. John Paul II had come to Cuba the year before, and his visit had done something that decades of American embargo had utterly failed to do: it had opened a space. Not regime change. Not geopolitical realignment. Something quieter and more durable than either, the simple dignity of being able to be fully oneself. The mother and daughter I sat with in Santiago spoke about this with a kind of cautious, still tender relief. They could be who they were. The faith that had lived entirely in private could begin, carefully, to breathe in public.
That is what engagement produces. That is what presence, patient, consistent, deeply human presence, actually achieves. Remember it the next time an American politician tells you that maximum pressure is the path to freedom for the Cuban people.
Sixty Years of the Church Getting It Right
The history here is not complicated, though Washington has preferred to ignore it.
When Castro came to power in 1959, the Catholic Church in Cuba was associated with the old colonial elite. By 1961, the revolution had expelled hundreds of priests, nationalized Catholic schools, and declared Cuba an atheist state. The hostility was genuine and severe. The Church could have walked away, could have joined the chorus of condemnation and isolation that the United States was already organizing. It did not.
For three decades the Church stayed. It kept its buildings, its sacraments, its quiet presence. It was marginalized, restricted, watched, and it stayed. When Cuba’s constitution was revised in 1992 to remove the atheist state designation, the Church was there. When John Paul II arrived in Havana in January 1998, drawing crowds that stunned the world and delivering a homily that called simultaneously on Cuba to open to the world and on the world to open to Cuba, the Church had earned that moment through forty years of not leaving.
Pope Benedict XVI came in 2012, met with both Fidel and Raúl Castro, and pressed quietly for the release of political prisoners and for greater religious freedom. Pope Francis took the Church’s sixty-year investment and turned it into the most consequential act of Cuba diplomacy in the modern era: the secret negotiations he hosted inside the Vatican that produced, on December 17, 2014, the Obama-Castro normalization agreement. Francis wrote personal letters to both heads of state. He provided the moral framework that made the deal possible. He did what sixty-five years of American embargo had failed to do, moving the needle measurably in the direction of the Cuban people’s dignity and welfare.
The lesson is plain. Engagement works. Presence works. Treating people as human beings rather than as leverage works. The Church knew this and practiced it. Washington, with the notable and too brief exception of the Obama opening, refused to learn it.
The Global Exchange Moment: May 8, 2014
Twelve years ago tonight, May 8, 2014, Global Exchange held its 12th Annual Human Rights Awards at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The People’s Choice Award went to the Cuban Five: Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, René González, and Fernando González, Cuban intelligence agents who had been arrested in the United States in 1998, convicted in a Miami court in a climate of prejudice and hysteria, and imprisoned for years while the United States simultaneously harbored Luis Posada Carriles, a man credibly accused of bombing a Cuban civilian aircraft and killing seventy-three people.
It was the first time the Cuban Five had been recognized on American soil. It was the first time a family member, María Eugenia Guerrero Rodríguez, sister of Antonio Guerrero, had spoken publicly in the United States on their behalf. The room understood the weight of the moment. I spoke that night about what I had seen in Cuba, about the people I had met across the country, about the chasm between the Cuba that American policy pretended existed and the Cuba that actually did: a country of enormous complexity, genuine suffering, considerable achievement, and a people who had earned the right to be seen as something more than an ideological battleground for the politics of Miami.
Within six months, Obama moved. The Vatican’s work in the back channel and the moral pressure sustained for years by organizations like Global Exchange converged into the December 2014 opening. These things are connected. Witness matters. Solidarity matters. Naming injustice in public, in a room full of people who will carry it forward, matters.
Betrayal, Siege, and Starvation
Then came Trump. And with Trump came Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American politician who built his entire political identity on the grievances of the exile community, and who views the island not as a place where people live but as an ideological debt to be collected.
The Obama normalization was dismantled. Not because it had failed, it had barely been given time to breathe. Not because there was evidence that maximum pressure was producing democratic reform, there was none. It was dismantled because Marco Rubio wanted Florida, and Trump wanted Marco Rubio. The Cuban people paid for that transaction with their electricity, their fuel, their food, their futures.
The oil embargo now in force has cut Cuba’s crude imports by somewhere between eighty and ninety percent. Power outages last up to 24 hours a day. The economy has contracted by more than seven percent. The United Nations Secretary-General has stated he is extremely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Cuba, warning it will worsen or even collapse. This is not a policy aimed at the Cuban government. The people in Santiago de Cuba, the nurses, the physicians, the mothers and daughters trying to live their lives with dignity, they are sitting in the dark.
And now there is something worse in the air. The Pentagon has been drawing up contingency plans for possible military action against Cuba. President Trump has mused publicly about stopping in Cuba once the United States finishes whatever it is doing in the Strait of Hormuz, where it is already mired, already draining its arsenal, already hollowing out whatever moral authority it once possessed.
This is also the president who, on the eve of his own Secretary of State’s visit to the Vatican, went on the radio and attacked the Pope again. For the second time in weeks he accused Leo XIV falsely of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon and declared that the first American pope in history was endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people. Vatican officials have described US-Vatican relations as being at an unprecedented low. Italy’s Foreign Minister, from Giorgia Meloni’s own government and one of Trump’s last remaining European allies, publicly broke with Washington to defend Leo, writing that his words are a testament to dialogue, the value of human life, and freedom.
The American people have noticed. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted in late April found that nearly six in ten Americans reacted negatively to Trump’s false claim about the pope and nuclear weapons, including majorities of his own voters. Trump’s approval rating among Catholics has dropped ten points since February 2025, to 38 percent. Two thirds of Americans reacted positively to Leo asking people to contact Congress to work for peace and reject war. The administration that flew to Rome on Thursday to seek the Church’s partnership on Cuba does not speak for American Catholics, for American Christians, or by any honest reading of these numbers, for the American people.
This is what Rubio brought to Rome. This is what he placed before a pope.
They Are Coming for the Aid Now
On May 1st, International Workers’ Day, as Cubans marched through the streets of Havana, Donald Trump signed a new executive order escalating his economic war against the island to a new and uglier level.
The order freezes American held assets of anyone deemed to be operating in Cuba’s key economic sectors, sanctions foreign banks that process transactions for designated Cuban entities, and extends those sanctions to the adult family members of anyone already targeted, a collective punishment mechanism that would be immediately recognizable to any student of authoritarian statecraft. Since January 2025, the administration has enacted over 240 sanctions against Cuba and intercepted at least seven oil tankers en route to the island.
But the provision that most directly concerns humanitarian organizations, and should concern anyone engaged in solidarity work, is this: the order criminalizes the making or receiving of any contribution of funds, goods, or services to sanctioned entities, and explicitly reserves the right to prohibit donations of food, clothing, and medicine if they are deemed to seriously impair United States policy objectives.
Read that carefully. Food. Clothing. Medicine. Potentially prohibited, if a presidential administration decides that an act of basic human decency interferes with its political objectives.
Before Rubio even arrived at the Apostolic Palace, he had already revealed his hand. At Tuesday’s White House press briefing, he announced that the United States had given $6 million in humanitarian aid to Cuba, distributed through the Catholic Church via Caritas Cuba and the parish network, and was willing to give more, provided the Cuban regime allowed it. It was a carefully constructed argument: we are the humanitarians here; it is the Cuban government that is blocking relief to its own people.
The argument deserves a direct response. The United States is simultaneously imposing an oil blockade that has cut Cuba’s energy imports by 80 to 90 percent, causing 24-hour blackouts, contracting the economy by more than seven percent, threatening military intervention, and signing an executive order that explicitly reserves the right to prohibit humanitarian donations on political grounds, while offering $6 million in Church-channeled aid as evidence of its benevolence. Six million dollars in aid does not cancel a siege. A trickle of medicine does not compensate for the deliberate destruction of an economy. And the use of the Church as a delivery mechanism for what is functionally a regime change strategy is precisely the kind of manipulation that Vatican analysts warned Leo XIV would be wary of.
The pope has visited Cuba twice. He does not need a briefing from Marco Rubio on the condition of the Cuban people.
This is not a targeted sanctions regime. It is a siege. And a siege, let us use the word that history demands, is an act of collective punishment against a civilian population. It is medieval in its conception and its execution: a 13th century tactic deployed with 21st century financial instruments against a small island nation of eleven million people whose great offense, in the eyes of this administration, is that they have refused to surrender their sovereignty on Donald Trump’s preferred timeline.
UN human rights experts have already condemned the blockade as a serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order. The international community, Canada, Chile, the African Union, the United Nations, has responded with unusual clarity and unusual unanimity. We add our voice without reservation: this blockade is barbaric, and we condemn it.
The Capillaries of Solidarity: Open, and Legally Grounded
Global Exchange is not bearing witness from a distance. We are acting.
In March, we joined the Nuestra América Convoy as movements from across the hemisphere converged on Havana by air, land, and sea, delivering more than 20 tons of humanitarian aid. Our delegation carried over 1,700 pounds of supplies, medicines, medical equipment, and essentials that Cuban families can no longer obtain because of a tightening blockade designed in Washington and enforced on the high seas.
We have launched a Bay Area Humanitarian Aid Hub in San Francisco’s Mission District, collecting and shipping medical supplies, basic medicines, and hygiene products to communities facing acute shortages. We have already delivered more than $40,000 worth of specialized cancer medicines to hospitals in Cuba and transported over 2,000 pounds of humanitarian aid collected through local donations. As our Co-Executive Director Corina Nolet has said: what the Trump administration is inflicting on Cuban families is a brutal campaign of economic strangulation that is restricting fuel, food, and medicine.
Every shipment we send is both an act of solidarity and a statement: we refuse to accept policies that inflict suffering on innocent communities.
On the question of the May 1st order’s attempt to extend the blockade to humanitarian relief organizations, Global Exchange’s position rests on a layered foundation of international law that no executive order can simply wish away.
The foundation is Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, fully ratified by the United States and binding without qualification. It obliges parties to allow free passage of relief shipments specifically including medicines, medical supplies, and objects necessary for religious worship destined for civilian populations, including those of an adversary. It further requires free passage of foodstuffs, clothing, and essential supplies for children under fifteen, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. The May 1st order, which explicitly reserves the right to prohibit such donations on political grounds, is in direct conflict with a treaty obligation the United States signed and ratified over seventy years ago.
The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions extend that legal architecture further. The United States signed but has not ratified Protocols I and II, a distinction the administration might invoke, but one that provides less shelter than it appears. The protections enshrined in those Protocols, including the explicit prohibition on using the starvation of civilians as a method of coercion and the denial of food sources and essential supplies necessary for survival, have achieved the status of customary international law, binding on all states regardless of ratification. Furthermore, 168 nations have ratified Protocol I, including every NATO ally of the United States except Turkey. In its failure to ratify, as in so much of its current conduct, this administration places the United States in a category of its own.
Beyond Geneva, Washington itself championed and co-authored UN Security Council Resolution 2664, becoming the first country in the world to implement it, a resolution that explicitly affirms that the provision of humanitarian aid is not a violation of sanctions regimes. The Trump administration is now using unilateral executive action to contradict commitments its own government negotiated, ratified, and was first to honor.
Global Exchange’s humanitarian work is consistent with international humanitarian law and with the United States’ own treaty commitments. We intend to continue.
The Pope as Mirror
Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago, missionary in Peru, the son of a man whose maternal roots trace back to 18th century Havana, inheritor of a Church that chose presence over punishment in Cuba for sixty years, was apparently not moved by what Rubio brought to Rome.
The State Department’s readout of Thursday’s meeting was three sentences long. Rubio and Leo discussed the situation in the Middle East and topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere. The meeting, it said, underscored the strong relationship between the United States and the Holy See and their shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.
Cuba was not mentioned by name. No partnership on humanitarian aid was announced. No joint statement was issued. The Vatican released no readout of its own.
Rubio spent two and a half hours inside the Apostolic Palace. The pope arrived 40 minutes late to his next appointment. Whatever was said in that room, the administration that flew to Rome seeking moral cover for its Cuba policy left without it. The language of the communiqué, peace and human dignity, is Leo’s language, not Trump’s. The White House borrowed the pope’s vocabulary and brought home nothing else.
The studied neutrality of Thursday’s communiqué is, read against sixty years of the Church’s consistent position on Cuba, itself a refusal.
This should surprise no one who has listened carefully to what Leo has already said publicly: that the issue is not whether there is regime change or not, but how to promote the values we believe in without the death of so many innocent people.
That sentence contains the entire argument. It is what the Church practiced in Cuba from 1961 onward. It is what Global Exchange has practiced since its founding. It is what I witnessed in Santiago de Cuba in 1999, in a home where a mother and a daughter had finally been given permission, not by Washington, not by an embargo, not by a threat of military force, but by a pope who simply showed up, to be fully themselves.
Leo is the first American pope. He cannot pretend not to know what his country is doing ninety miles from its own shores to people who have done nothing to deserve it. He has visited Cuba three times. He knows the island not from exile politics or think tank briefings but from the inside, from the parishes and the people. The administration sent its Secretary of State to borrow his moral authority. He did not lend it.
What We Stand For
Global Exchange has always operated from a simple premise: that the American people, given the actual chance to meet Cubans, to travel to Cuba, to sit with a nurse and a doctor in Santiago and hear their stories, would not choose this. Would not choose the embargo. Would not choose the oil blockade. Would not choose the threat of military force against a small country whose great historical offense is having refused to be owned.
The Catholic Church took sixty years, held its ground through expulsion and atheist constitutions and cold war paranoia, and built a bridge patient enough to carry the weight of two governments finally talking to each other. That bridge was built not with sanctions but with presence. Not with threats but with witness.
The Trump administration, quagmired in the Gulf, morally overdrawn, spending what remains of American credibility on feuds and transactions that serve no one but its own political survival, is trying again to burn it.
We have been to Cuba. We have sat at Cuban tables and looked into Cuban faces and recognized there the full dignity of human beings who have endured more than most of us can imagine, and who are still there, still dignified, still refusing the role of victim that American policy has assigned them for sixty-five years.
They deserve better. They have always deserved better. And there are enough of us who know this to say so clearly, loudly, and without apology.
How to Help Right Now
Global Exchange’s Bay Area Humanitarian Aid Hub is actively collecting and shipping supplies to Cuba. Here is how to act today:
Donate supplies at our Mission District collection hub in San Francisco, medical supplies, basic medicines, hygiene products. Full donation list at globalexchange.org/humanitarianaidhub
Donate online to support ongoing humanitarian aid shipments. Every dollar goes directly toward medicines and essential goods reaching Cuban communities.
Join a solidarity delegation. People to people travel to Cuba remains one of the most powerful acts of resistance to a policy built on dehumanization. See current trip options at globalexchange.org
Share this piece. Make sure the people in your networks understand what is actually happening in Cuba, and what Global Exchange is doing about it.
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 United States blockade. To support that work, visit globalexchange.org.
— Ted Lewis, Global Exchange | San Francisco | May 8, 2026