Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) traveled to Cuba last week, delivering an unusually blunt assessment of U.S. policy.
After meeting with Cubans from across the political spectrum, and visiting a hospital impacted by the Trump-imposed oil blockade, they described U.S. policy in stark terms, equating it to warfare against the Cuban people.
Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández sat down with Jayapal and Jackson in an exclusive interview in Havana.
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U.S. Lawmakers: Sanctions Are “Like Dropping Bombs”
U.S. representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) wrapped up a five-day trip to Cuba Saturday with an exclusive sit-down interview with Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández.
“What we’re doing feels like bombing energy infrastructure,” said Jayapal. She described U.S. sanctions on Cuba as “cruel collective punishment.”
Rep. Jackson, who was in Cuba in 1984 accompanying his father Reverend Jesse Jackson as he helped negotiate a prisoner release, said the blockade amounts to “an act of war.”
Liz’s interview with the two lawmakers was featured and cited in international media coverage, from CBS News Miami to Spanish outlet El Salto, and shared by Jayapal herself.
“We are strangling the Cuban people”
The lawmakers’ trip comes as Cuba grapples with the most severe phase yet of a protracted energy crisis precipitated by ramped up U.S. economic warfare over the last eight years.
Last January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order threatening tariffs on any country supplying oil to Cuba. Venezuelan shipments, which had provided a large portion of the island’s fuel, had already stopped following President Nicolás Maduro’s abduction earlier that month. Mexico, a major supplier of fuel to Cuba, also ceased oil deliveries due to U.S. pressure.
Until a Russian-flagged tanker docked at the port of Matanzas on March 31, the island had gone some three months without receiving significant oil deliveries.
Jayapal, a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who visited Cuba in February 2024, said the change since her last trip was striking. “Even then so many of the streets of this beautiful city were deserted. People were already lining up for food. But now you see it even more clearly.”
The moment that seemed to hit hardest for the two members of Congress was a visit to the neonatal intensive care unit of a Havana maternity hospital, where premature babies as light as two pounds lay in incubators dependent on electricity to survive. Power cuts — a daily reality across Cuba — put those machines at risk.
“It was heartbreaking,” Jayapal told Liz. “I don’t think that any American wants to create this kind of devastation for the Cuban children, for the babies, for the moms.”
The lawmakers described the cascade of consequences flowing from the fuel shortage: collapsed food production, water pumps failing, children unable to get to school and cancer patients cut off from treatment.
“We are strangling the Cuban people,” Jayapal said.
“A new moment”
Jayapal and Jackson said they met with a wide range of people during their visit, including President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, members of the Cuban parliament, religious leaders, civil society organizations, entrepreneurs, humanitarian groups, dissidents, and Latin American and African ambassadors.
During the delegation’s visit, the Cuban government announced the release of more than 2,000 prisoners in what it described as a humanitarian gesture. Cuba has also received an FBI team to conduct an independent investigation into a fatal shooting involving a U.S.-registered speedboat. Both, Jayapal argued, signal the Cuban government's openness, a sentiment she said Cuban leaders had echoed in their meetings.
“This is a new moment,” said Jayapal.
“We can talk to Russia, we can talk to China,” said Jackson. “Of course we can talk to the Cubans.”
In late March, Jayapal introduced legislation alongside Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to block Trump from using federal funding to use military force against Cuba without congressional authorization.
In recent years, Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly introduced legislation to ease restrictions on Cuba or lift the embargo. But those efforts have not led to new laws or meaningful changes in policy. Still, Jayapal said she sees signs of growing momentum, driven by wider recognition that decades of sanctions have hurt people both in Cuba and the United States.
“The more we tell the stories of people who are suffering, the more Americans will understand that sanctions don’t just target governments — they hurt ordinary people,” she said.
OAS Rights Commission Joins War on Cuban Doctors
The Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) published a report this week that essentially endorses the Trump administration’s war on Cuba’s medical missions.
The report, titled “Labor rights of healthcare personnel in medical missions from Cuba,” describes the missions as “forced labor” and asks member states of the OAS to abandon their bilateral agreements with Cuba on healthcare.
The IACHR chose the Museum of the Cuban Diaspora as the venue to present the report. The Museum is a stronghold for Cuban-American hardliners who champion Trump’s economic war on Cuba.
The commission's findings bolster the Trump administration’s campaign to smear the missions, part of the larger goal of pressuring countries to cut ties with Cuba. Since last year, the U.S. has succeeded in pressuring at least eight countries in Central America and the Caribbean to pull out of the medical missions, jeopardizing the healthcare of thousands in the region.
Two of the IACHR commissioners partially dissented. Roberta Clarke, a Barbadian lawyer, pointed to “serious methodological limitations,” including using abuses that allegedly occurred in Venezuela to generalize about countries around the region. Andrea Pochak, an Argentine lawyer, criticized the report’s authors for refusing to address ambiguities and generalizations.
“Taking into account publicly available information indicating that some governments in the region may be under pressure to end existing cooperation agreements…the report should have warned much more emphatically about the risks of its instrumentalization for purposes different from those stated by the IACHR in bringing visibility to this human rights situation. This is especially relevant considering the source of funding that made the preparation of this report possible,” wrote Pochak, who did not disclose the report's funding source.
To learn more about how the IACHR seems to have been commandeered by the Trump administration, check out our article “The OAS Caves to U.S. Pressure Yet Again.”
Hundreds of Cuban Women Rally Against U.S. Blockade
Hundreds of Cuban women gathered at Mariana Grajales Park in Havana Tuesday to denounce the Trump administration’s intensification of the U.S. government’s economic war on Cuba.
“Cuban mothers, Cuban women, most of us running our households, we’re the ones dealing directly with the impact of this genocidal policy against our country,” said Mirthia Julia Brossard, member of the Union of Young Communists (UJC).
The rally was organized by the Federation of Cuban Women, a national organization aligned with the government, to pay tribute to the late Vilma Espín, who fought in Cuba’s revolution and was Raúl Castro’s wife.
For Cuban women, the impact is felt both in their professional and personal lives, as many bear the primary responsibility for running households and caring for children and the sick, tasks that have become increasingly difficult as the U.S. government's economic war on Cuba has intensified.
Belly of the Beast Recommends
Streamer and political commentator Hasan Pikerreleased a mini-documentary “The U.S. War Against Cuba” that was produced in collaboration with Belly of the Beast. Check it out HERE.
Cuban-American Journalist Suzy Exposito visited Cuba for the first time during the recent Nuestra América Convoy. She wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times about her experience and how her grandmother in Miami reacted to her visit. Read the article HERE.
Danny Valdes is another Cuban American who wrote about his experience in Cuba during the convoy. Check out his article in Jacobin.
Filmmaker and content creator Brenna Perez breaks down how the Cuban exile lobby was modeled off and trained by AIPAC in this YouTube video.
Teresita’s Dream at Havana Film Festival in NYC
What does it take to build life-saving science under a tightening U.S. blockade?
Our documentary Teresita's Dream takes you inside the lives of Cuban scientists and doctors working under extraordinary constraints — where the search for a treatment for Alzheimer’s becomes deeply personal.
Now, for the first time, you can watch Teresita's Dream on the big screen in New York City.
🎟️ Tickets are now available for the film’s premiere at the Havana Film Festival New York.
🗓️ Sunday May 03, 2026 | 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
📍Quad Cinema, 34 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011
Join us in New York for a film that explores not just a potential breakthrough in Alzheimer’s research, but the conditions under which that work is happening — and what it reveals about healthcare, inequality and resilience.
Belly’s Film on the "Longlist" for One World Award
The documentary we produced for Al Jazeera — Cuba: Health Under Sanction — has made the One World Media Award’s “longlist” for best short documentary film dealing with stories or topics in the Global South.
In 2021, Belly of the Beast won a One World Media Award for our documentary series The War on Cuba.
UN: Blockade Stops Humanitarian Aid
Even as the Trump administration has used economic warfare to destroy the Cuban economy and exact collective punishment on its population, U.S. officials have touted a donation of $6 million in humanitarian aid to Cuba that is being distributed by the Catholic Church and Caritas.
The aid was ostensibly meant for victims of Hurricane Melissa — although it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $74 million the UN estimated that Cuba needed. The U.S. aid did not begin to arrive until months after the hurricane struck.
Meanwhile, the UN Resident Coordinator for Cuba Francisco Pichón said Monday at a press conference that the U.S. oil blockade on the island has prevented humanitarian aid from reaching people in need.
“The implementation of our action plan in response to Hurricane Melissa has been affected severely by the fuel shortages,” he said. “About 170 containers of essential humanitarian goods that have already arrived in Cuba [that] amounts to about $6.3 million are not reaching beneficiaries.”
Mexico Donates $34 Million to Cuban Farmers
Mexico’s Agency for International Development Cooperation has authorized the donation of approximately $34 million to support Cuban agriculture. The donation is part of Sembrando Vida, a program Mexico has been implementing locally and internationally for years that seeks to help small farmers.
Mexico is one of Cuba’s most important allies, but it recently stopped sending oil deliveries due to U.S. pressure. President Claudia Sheinbaum has continued to send humanitarian aid, and she has said her country is trying to find a way to restart oil shipments.
Cuba’s President Díaz-Canel on Media Blitz
Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel has recently given multiple interviews to foreign media outlets, and has delivered the same message: Cuba is willing to engage in dialogue with the United States.
“There are many common areas in which we can work, and not only could we work, but we could reach agreements beneficial to both peoples and both nations,” he told O’Connor, mentioning “investments from U.S. firms” as one example, as well as “migration, security, the environment, science and innovation, trade, education, culture and sports.”
Cuba was already cooperating with the United States in these areas during the Obama-era opening before the Trump administration rolled back normalization and reimposed a hard-line policy of hostility.
Join Us On a Guided Trip to Cuba!
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