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.
