As the Trump administration intensifies its economic war on Cuba, solidarity with the Cuban people is growing in response.
Now, the administration is using the web of laws and regulations that make up the embargo to target solidarity activists who dare oppose it.
Federal investigators are going after participants of the Nuestra América Convoy for alleged violations of Treasury Department regulations even as a pro-Trump influencer flagrantly violated those same regulations without any apparent repercussions.
Also this week:
“Sanctions Kill. I Have Watched Them Do It.”
Congressional Black Caucus: “Enough is Enough”
China Delivers Aid in Boatloads; U.S. in “Wheelbarrows”
Ex-Intelligence Officials Reject Cuba Threat Narrative
Ex-NATO Analyst: "Absurd” to Claim Cuba Would Attack U.S.
Cuba’s Top Diplomat Calls Out Rubio on Fox News
This Week in Cuba Collapse Forecasting
Cuban-American Hardliners Obsess about Cuba, Ignore Constituents
Thousands March in Havana to Support Raúl Castro
“You Can’t Run a Society Without Oil”
Cuba Publishes Holy Week Amnesty List
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“We Will Not Be Intimidated”
Fox News Digital reported last week that it had “learned” federal officials had served subpoenas to streamer Hasan Piker and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin as part of a “dragnet” targeting as many as 40 U.S. citizens who participated in the Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba last March.
The article, written by pro-Trump journalist Asra Nomani, is a case study in conspiratorial red-baiting masquerading as investigative journalism. Relying on anonymous sources, it's riddled with unsubstantiated claims, loaded language and Trump administration talking points presented as established facts.
Yet beneath Fox News’s sensationalism lies a genuine development: the Trump administration appears to be targeting Cuba solidarity activists.
Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández interviewed Medea Benjamin, who confirmed she had received a “request for information” (not a subpoena) sent to Code Pink via email by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Watch the interview HERE.
“We didn’t even get the letter until after we heard it on Fox News,” Benjamin said. “The [Fox News report] was very sensationalized.”
Benjamin, who has been visiting Cuba since 1979, said this is not the first time she has been harassed by her government for sending humanitarian aid and criticizing U.S. policy.
“[Years ago], we took groups to Cuba openly contesting U.S. government policy. And we had our passports taken away, we had our bank accounts frozen. We fought them in court, and we won the right to get our passports and our money back.”
Code Pink helped organize the March convoy, which delivered humanitarian aid to Cuba, including medicine and medical supplies to children’s hospitals.
“We want to help save babies,” Benjamin said in an Instagram video she posted. “And according to Trump, that’s something that must be investigated.”
“If indeed the charge is that we love the Cuban people: guilty!”
Fox News Digital suggested — without attribution — that convoy participants stayed at hotels on the State Department’s “Cuba Prohibited Accommodations List,” a sanctions blacklist containing more than 400 properties and designed to cut off one of the island’s key sources of foreign currency.
Benjamin says the Convoy’s participants were careful to comply with OFAC regulations, staying at Havana’s Gran Hotel Bristol, one of the few hotels that is not on the State Department blacklist. Weeks later, pro-Trump influencer Nick Shirleystayed at the Hotel Nacional, which is on the blacklist. Shirley has faced no apparent scrutiny from Fox News or OFAC.
For Benjamin, the U.S. government was less concerned about OFAC violations than the impact made by Hasan Piker and other participants.
“[Piker] has millions of viewers and lots of them are young people who have really been educated for the first time about what the U.S. government is doing in Cuba,” she said. “I think it's the kind of social media reach that we had on that trip that is something that irritated a lot of the members of Congress and pushed them to push the Treasury Department to do something.”
Benjamin insists that Code Pink and other solidarity activists will continue fighting against U.S. sanctions and intervention.
“We will keep working and keep pushing and will not be intimidated,” she said. “And those people who think that we are easily intimidated, they don't know Code Pink, they don't know the other groups who have been committed to supporting the Cuban people.”
The following is a firsthand account by an anonymous Cuban surgeon describing the devastating human impact of U.S. sanctions.
Last month, I operated on an elderly man with a perforated peptic ulcer. The surgery was textbook. I closed his abdomen cleanly, without complication. We had antibiotics available that time. What we did not have was intravenous crystalloid fluid for resuscitation. It’s the most basic of solutions, cheap enough to cost almost nothing, yet essential enough to save almost everything. It exists. It is manufactured in Santiago de Cuba, 500 miles away. It could not reach Havana since there was no petroleum to transport it. By the time it arrived, my patient had died.
I want you to sit with that before we discuss politics.
Now I want to tell you about a two-year-old girl, the daughter of friends of mine. Two weeks ago, she developed severe gastroenteritis — vomiting twenty times a day, rapidly dehydrating. Her parents rushed her to a pediatric hospital in Havana. There was not enough intravenous fluid in the Emergency Room. Pediatric hospitals have historically been the last refuge protected from the worst of our shortages. Even in our hardest years, we have tried to protect the children. That night, only the hospital director was authorizing each bottle of fluid as if it were pure gold. It was not gold, was only salt and water, but they only had a few bottles available…
This is not a crisis of governance. This is manufactured ruin: the deliberate application of maximum economic pressure until a nation breaks, then attributing the wreckage to the nation itself. The wreckage is then cited as justification for a military intervention, and the intervention as the path to coveted resources…
Read the full article, originally published in Counterpunch, HERE.
Congressional Black Caucus: “Enough is Enough”
Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY) sent a letter last Friday to Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding an end to the oil blockade and the lifting of sanctions that deny the “Cuban people access to the most basic resources they need to sustain life.”
“Enough is enough,” Clarke wrote. “The Congressional Black Caucus will not stand by and allow this administration to drag out this barbaric policy that generates unimaginable human suffering in Cuba.”
The CBC’s letter is the latest pushback by congressional Democrats to Trump’s Cuba policy. In February, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) introduced the United States-Cuba Trade Act of 2026, which would lift the embargo and restore travel rights. In late March, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) introduced the Prevent an Unconstitutional War in Cuba Act to bar federal funds from any military action against Cuba. In early April, 52 members of Congress signed a letter condemning the administration for "engineering an accelerated energy collapse."
Jayapal and Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), a member of the CBC, traveled to Havana last month to see the conditions on the island firsthand.
“The only way to really understand the impact, the humanitarian crisis we’ve created, is by being here and talking to the Cuban people,” Jayapal said.
Belly of the Beastjournalist Liz Oliva Fernández spoke with Jayapal and Jackson in an exclusive interview during their visit.
China Gives Aid in Boatloads; U.S. in “Wheelbarrows”
China delivered a 15,000-ton shipment of rice this week as part of a larger aid package that includes 60,000 tons of food and $80 million in electrical equipment aimed at stabilizing Cuba’s collapsing energy grid. Beijing had already shipped 15,600 tons of rice and provided $100 million in aid over the past year.
U.S. humanitarian aid, by contrast, which is being distributed through the Catholic organization Caritas, is “small potatoes” due to the fuel crisis, Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski told USA Today.
"Caritas was using almost what I would describe as wheelbarrows to distribute it,” he said.
The U.S. has delivered only a fraction of the $9 million it pledged following last October’s Hurricane Melissa, according to Cuban authorities.
Rubio has offered an additional $100 million “humanitarian” package, which, even if genuine and Caritas capable of distributing it, would represent a fraction of the billions of dollars in annual damages the U.S. blockade inflicts on the Cuban people.
What the country needs much more than aid is fuel. But the Trump administration has blocked all oil from entering the country except one Russian tanker two months ago.
Another Russian tanker carrying 250,000 barrels of diesel that appeared headed toward the island has reportedly changed course.
The Trump administration recently moved to deepen Cuba’s isolation by excluding the island from a U.S. Treasury waiver allowing countries to receive already-sanctioned Russian oil shipments.
UN experts have condemned the U.S. fuel blockade for creating food insecurity across Cuba.
“Energy starvation as a coercive tool is incompatible with international human rights norms,” a UN expert said. “By depriving a population of the energy required to run essential services, this executive order is obstructing Cuban people’s right to development and undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation.”
Watch our video of how the U.S. oil blockade and economic warfare threaten children’s health and pediatric care in Havana.
Ex-Intelligence Officials Reject Cuba Threat Narrative
A group of former U.S. intelligence, military and diplomatic officials is challenging the national security justifications behind the Trump administration’s economic war on Cuba.
In a memorandum published in Consortium News and addressed to the president, members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) argue there is no evidence that Cuba supports terrorist organizations, hosts Chinese or Russian spy bases targeting the United States, or was behind the alleged “microwave attacks” on U.S. diplomats known as Havana Syndrome.
The memo also warned about covert U.S.-funded “democracy promotion” (aka regime change) programs that present a distorted view of Cuba: “We recommend that you review these covert activities closely…The record shows that covert action planners misled President Kennedy about the prospects for the Bay of Pigs operation, and C.I.A. analysts were kept in the dark.”
The former officials warned that currency policy would make a humanitarian disaster in Cuba more likely and that military action would draw the U.S. into “a losing war.”
“U.S.-driven ‘regime collapse’ and occupation or imposition of a government of our choosing will fail badly,” says the memo. “The same people who keep ’57 Chevrolets on the road with a coat hanger will wreak havoc against a foreign-imposed regime.”
Ex-NATO Analyst: Cuba Attack on U.S. "Absurd”
The U.S. government is manufacturing a pretext to attack Cuba, according to Hal Klepak, former NATO strategic analyst and professor emeritus at the Royal Military College of Canada.
“The issue of Cuba being a threat can only be seen as a pretext to prepare U.S. opinion, or at the very least, the MAGA base, for accepting an intervention” said Klepak. “The idea that the Cubans would choose this moment to attack the United States is an absurd assertion.”
According to Klepak, Cuba’s military maintains “exclusively a defensive posture” and would not attack the United States.
During a trip to New York, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez appeared before the UN Security Council and made a rare appearance on Fox News in which he said Rubio was “lying to the American people” about Cuba threatening U.S. national security.
“What would be the logic, the common sense behind the idea that Cuba could threaten a nuclear superpower?” he asked during the Fox News interview.
He added: “Rubio knows nothing about Cuba…He was not born in Cuba.”
At the UN Security Council, Rodríguez called the U.S. energy blockade an “act of war and genocide,” accusing Washington of deliberately provoking fuel shortages, blackouts and suffering on the island. Watch Rodríguez’s statements HERE.
Despite the Trump administration’s hostility, Rodríguez said Cuba remains engaged in diplomatic talks with U.S. officials and continues to seek a “respectful relationship” based on sovereign equality.
This Week in Cuba Collapse Forecasting
In yet another article based on anonymous sources, Axios reported this week that the Trump administration is intensifying economic warfare on Cuba to try to bring about the government’s collapse “as early as this summer.” But "Iran's not finished, and the president is not in a rush," one official told Axios. Another official said: "We don't want to kill off the regime just yet. There's a method to this. It's in stages."
At least one Axios source suggested the administration is expecting conditions in Cuba to deteriorate over the summer, sparking protests that could provide a pretext for Trump to take military action: "It's going to be hot. People won't have electricity. Food spoils without refrigeration. People get angry. They can take to the streets. And then what happens? I can't see the president doing nothing if there's repression.”
The report also revealed that U.S. military planners have conducted exercises preparing for possible intervention in Cuba. Meanwhile, Politico reported that the Pentagon has spent months positioning troops and weapons for a potential attack on Cuba, with one source describing the operation as requiring only “a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.”
Cuba-Obsessed Hardliners Ignore Constituents
During a sit-down interview on “My View with Lara Trump,” Cuban-American Republican legislators ramped up threats against Cuba as the United States intensifies its economic warfare against the island.
Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL) claimed that “we are seeing the beginning of the end” as Cuba is “closer than ever” to collapse. He accused Havana of aligning itself with “America’s greatest adversaries,” including China, Russia and Iran, while neglecting to mention how U.S. hostility forced Cuba to seek out alliances with Washington’s adversaries.
While South Florida’s Republican hardliners obsess about regime change, polling has shown that many Cuban-American voters are less interested in Cuba policy than rising housing costs, healthcare, inflation and immigration.
This last issue could pose a problem for Republican incumbents in upcoming midterms given their silence in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, which has impacted many Cubans living in their districts.
Human Rights Watch warns that deportations of Cubans to Mexico and third countries are exposing deportees to kidnapping, extortion and violence.
Thousands March in Havana to Support Raúl Castro
Thousands gathered Friday at Havana’s José Martí Anti-Imperialist Tribune, in front of the U.S. embassy, following the U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of former president Raúl Castro over the 1996 shoot-down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes.
“We had the right to defend ourselves,” Adalgisa Durán Vargas told Belly of the Beast.
Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based Cuban exile group, carried out provocative flights over Cuban territory in the 1990s, prompting repeated warnings from Cuban officials to U.S. authorities.
Cuba’s Official Gazette has published the decree identifying the 2,010 convicted individuals pardoned by Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel in observance of “religious celebrations” for Holy Week.
The decree was issued as a “humanitarian and sovereign gesture” following April’s meetings between the Cuban government and the Vatican.
Of the 2,010 pardons granted, 96 individuals were implicated for “crimes against state security,” or 4.8% of the total.
Join Us for Our June 4 NYC Premiere!
Washington calls Cuba’s international medical missions "forced labor" even though Cuban doctors volunteer to go on the missions and are paid many times more than their salary in Cuba.
In our latest documentary, From Cuba to Calabria, we travel to southern Italy to speak with the Cuban doctors themselves and to see a medical mission from the inside.
You’re invited to the U.S. debut of From Cuba to Calabria on June 4 at The People’s Forum in New York City! The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the U.S. campaign to discredit Cuban medical internationalism.
Watch the audience reaction to our latest screening!
When: Saturday, June 4, 2026 | 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EST
Where: The People’s Forum (Paul Robeson Theater) | 320 W. 37th Street, New York, NY
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