Nearly 1.4 million Cuban students returned to school Tuesday after a long, sweltering summer.
Parents rose before dawn, packed lunches and ironed school uniforms while navigating shortages and hours-long blackouts caused by the Trump administration’s oil blockade.
This week, we take you inside Cuba’s first day of school — and the extraordinary effort families and teachers are making to keep children learning.
Also:
Portraits of Life in a Country Under Blockade
Bahamas Won't Renew Contracts of 31 Cuban Teachers
Expedia Beats Another Title III Lawsuit
Cuba Says There Are No Talks With U.S.
Cuba Under Siege: A Round Table Discussion
Cuba's School Year Starts Under U.S. Blockade
The impact of the Trump administration’s oil blockade now reaches into every aspect of Cuban life, including how children prepare for school and what teachers can offer once they arrive.
Still, students returned to their classrooms excited to begin a new year.
“I haven’t seen my classmates for about two months,” said Samuel Orta Pacheco, a middle school student in Havana. “Honestly, I’m really happy to be back here.”
The beginning of the new school year required families and educators to navigate blackouts, shortages and a transportation system starved of fuel.
Without fuel for school buses, many teachers and students have to walk long distances to attend their classes.
Getting to school is only the first hurdle. Cuba’s deepening food crisis is affecting students once they arrive.
The UN says Cuba’s food production has declined 60% since the Trump administration imposed an oil blockade earlier this year, while the cost of basic foods has spiked. As food grows scarcer and fuel shortages disrupt deliveries, feeding students at school cafeterias has become another daily challenge.
“Do you have any idea what it has meant for a country that was once accustomed to guaranteeing a properly balanced and adequate protein intake to now have to figure out how to even transport the food children need from one place to another?” asked Education Minister Naima Trujillo Barreto.
The effort required to keep children in school does not end when they leave the classroom. At home, families work around the blackouts, taking uniforms to neighbors with electricity to iron them and finding rechargeable lamps so children can study.
"Despite all the shortages because of the blockade," said Zulema Rodríguez Leyva, a preschool principal, "we're a country willing to give it our all."
Watch our new video to see how Cuban families and educators are keeping children learning through blackouts and shortages.
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Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández handed markers to Cubans she met across Havana and asked them to write down, in their own words, what this moment means to them.
Photographer Moník Molinet turned the responses into a portrait series — a collaboration with Belly of the Beast — shot as blackouts, fuel shortages and food scarcity deepen under U.S. economic warfare.
“There are no medicines because of the blockade,” one Havana resident said. “That’s why I ask for healthcare, so people don’t have to go searching for medicine. It’s essential in a society.”
“They’re making us mentally ill,” another person said, regarding the blackouts. “It’s psychological.”
While students and teachers in Cuba return to class this week, Cuban educators in the Bahamas learned that their own school year will not begin as planned.
The Bahamian government announced it will not renew contracts for 31 Cuban teachers this school year — the latest in a string of Cuban overseas South-South collaboration programs to fall victim to U.S. pressure.
The Bahamas’ Ministry of Education said the priority is hiring domestic educators, though it acknowledged staffing shortages in specialized fields like welding and agriculture that Cuban teachers had been filling.
One Cuban teacher told a local outlet they learned their contracts were ending in a meeting shortly after they'd arrived in The Bahamas.
The cancellation of the teachers’ contracts follows the termination of similar agreements across the region for Cuba's medical missions, an important source of foreign revenue for the Cuban government.
The Bahamas suspended recruitment of Cuban healthcare workers entirely, as have multiple other countries across Latin America and the Caribbean since the first Trump administration began targeting the missions in 2019.
Washington equates the programs to “forced labor” — although the doctors volunteer to go on the missions and are paid many times more than what they earn in Cuba.
Bahamian Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell declined to say whether U.S. pressure influenced the decision on the Cuban teachers.
Expedia Beats Another Title III Lawsuit
A Miami federal jury rejected a Title III Helms-Burton lawsuit from two Cuban-American families who claimed that Expedia profited from land expropriated shortly after the Cuban Revolution.
Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act allows U.S. claimants whose property was nationalized during the Cuban Revolution to sue companies for doing business on that property.
Suspended for two decades by both Republican and Democratic administrations, Trump's activation of Title III in 2019 dissuaded companies and investors from doing business in Cuba for fear of being sued in the U.S.
Read our article about the lobbying campaign that helped persuade Trump to activate the provision.
Jurors in the Expedia case found the claimants couldn't prove they owned the land upon which five hotels had been built. Maricela Mata, seeking $6 million, offered a 1928 business registry for a hotel she claims her grandfather owned in Cienfuegos. Ultimately, the jury was more convinced by Expedia's attorney, who dismissed the document as proof of who ran a company, not "who owned the dirt."
Mario Echevarria sought nearly $10 million, claiming he inherited a 12.5% stake in the island of Cayo Coco and that Expedia profited by booking rooms at resorts built there. But he couldn’t establish who in his family actually held the property claim.
This is Expedia’s second victory over a Cuba-related property claim in as many years. The company defeated a lawsuit seeking more than $1.7 billion in 2025 over hotel bookings on land formerly owned by the Sánchez Hill family.
The claim was brought by Central Santa Lucía, a company created to hold the family’s property rights with the help of Miami attorney Nick Gutiérrez.
Expedia accused Gutiérrez of creating and notarizing documents in 2000 that were backdated to March 7, 1996 — five days before the Helms-Burton cutoff for new claims. Jurors ultimately found that Central Santa Lucía failed to prove it acquired the claims before the cutoff.
Expedia’s most recent Title III battle comes months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Helms-Burton claimants on two major legal questions.
In May, the justices revived a lawsuit seeking nearly $440 million from four U.S. cruise operators for using docks in Havana after the Obama administration authorized travel to the island. The Court ruled that the companies could be held liable to the heirs of a Nazi-linked tycoon for using the physical docks even though the lease behind their claim would have expired in 2004.
A month later, the Court allowed ExxonMobil to pursue more than $1 billion from Cuban state-owned companies, ruling that they are not protected by sovereign immunity. Foreign governments are typically shielded from lawsuits in U.S. courts unless a specific exception applies. But the justices ruled that Helms-Burton itself strips Cuban state entities of that immunity in Title III cases.
Both cases now return to lower courts: the cruise-line lawsuit to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and ExxonMobil's case to the D.C. Circuit.
Cuba Says There Are No Talks With U.S.
For months, U.S. media reports citing anonymous officials have fueled speculation that Washington and Havana are quietly negotiating. Yet no evidence has emerged that the Trump administration has made a good-faith effort to reach an agreement.
Cuban officials, meanwhile, have consistently expressed a willingness to engage in dialogue — and frustration that the U.S. has not reciprocated.
Lianys Torres Rivera, Cuba’s top diplomat in Washington, recently confirmed that no talks are currently underway.
"The channel for dialogue is at a complete standstill," she told Bloomberg Tuesday. "There are no negotiations."
As the Trump administration spurns talks with Cuba, it has ramped up its economic war on the island.
Torres told the outlet that U.S. sanctions and the oil blockade have left more than 100,000 people waiting for surgeries, 34,000 pregnant women waiting for ultrasounds and over 3,000 dialysis patients missing treatment as blackouts last more than 20 hours a day.
"This is collective punishment," she said. "This is a war without bombs."
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Monday with Mike Hammer, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, to discuss the Trump administration’s commitment to Cubans' "aspirations to live in freedom and with dignity."
Rubio and Hammer also discussed the $100 million in humanitarian aid the administration has routed through private charities like Caritas Cuba. The aid delivery is designed to bypass the Cuban state even though working with the government is “essential for identifying the people who are most vulnerable," according to the UN's resident coordinator in Cuba.
Needless to say, the U.S. aid delivery has been slow to get to its beneficiaries. Even when it does, the amounts are "a joke" compared to the destructive impact of the U.S. oil blockade, according to one economist.
At the time, only 700 aid kits had been delivered, including 380 kits in Bejucal, a town of roughly 22,000 people. Each box contained enough supplies to sustain a family of four for about 10 days — temporary relief from a crisis Washington helped create.
Read about the limitations and the hypocrisy of the U.S. aid to Cuba HERE.
Belly of the Beast journalist Reed Lindsay joins historian Helen Yaffe, Cuban-American organizer Justine Medina and author Peter Kornbluh for a panel on the state of U.S.-Cuba relations this Sunday, September 6, at 12pm CT.
The discussion, hosted by the Chicago Cuba Coalition, will dig into the history behind the current crisis, what recent economic reforms mean for Cuba's future and how the U.S. government's policy toward Cuba may affect First Amendment rights in the United States.
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