PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  The Cuban government is talking with us. They’re in a big deal of trouble, as you know. They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking with us. And maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba. We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Cuba is facing the greatest existential threat it has seen in decades.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Cubans say they are in survival mode, enduring frequent blackouts and soaring food prices as the United States continues to block fuel from reaching the island.

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  Well, we don’t have electricity … For example, last week I was 16, 14, 18 hours without power.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s Liz Oliva Fernández. She’s a Cuban journalist from Havana. She works with the independent media outlet Belly of the Beast. We’ll be hearing a lot from her in this episode.

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  We don’t have public transportation. Only private ones. They cut classes at the university. Now they’re online. But the problem is when the electricity is out, when we are in a blackout, the connection is also terrible. So I don’t have any idea how the kids are going to have online classes without internet or electricity.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Liz says since the gasoline shortage began in January, the streets have been increasingly empty of cars. 

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Piled high all around Havana, uncollected rubbish is rotting in the open air, much to the despair of residents.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Trash is filling streets because garbage trucks can’t make the rounds.

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  They cut the service in the hospitals that are not essential. And that’s complicated because there are a lot of people that are waiting for appointments.

In the last Donald Trump administration, the health care care system has really [been] impacted by the sanctions. Then, Biden don’t do nothing, just maintaining the sanctions. So it’s the Trump-Biden sanctions. So, the health care care system in Cuba has been affected so hard in the last 10 years. And now with this, it’s just, it’s just dying…

The banks are also closing. A lot of people doesn’t have gas to cook, but they don’t have also electricity. This is something that is not new, but has been aggravated in the last couple of weeks. So people are cooking with wood, whatever they can find to prepare the food for the kids, for the elders.

And migration really hit this country in the last past years. So there’s a lot of moms, dads, and grandmothers and grandfathers that are just here alone because their kids just left the country two, three years ago.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Things are bad. They haven’t been this bad in decades. And… it’s on purpose.

This is a humanitarian crisis… made in the United States.

President Donald Trump spoke to reporters about Cuba in mid February.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don’t even have jet fuel for airplanes to take off. They’re clogging up their runway. Marco Rubio is talking to Cuba right now. And they should absolutely make a deal, because it’s really a humanitarian threat.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  But Trump, Rubio, and other officials have made it clear that they aren’t interested in anything less than regime change. And they’re going after that goal full throttle. The United States is now imposing an intensified economic blockade on the island nation that is pushing it to the brink — And hitting its most vulnerable residents the hardest.

CAMILA PINEIRO:  We can say that already people are dying because of the sanctions. I cannot tell you a number, but whoever is behind these sanctions, they have blood on their hands.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  All of that… in a minute.

[THEME MUSIC]

This is Under the Shadow — An investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present.

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts Brazil on Fire and Stories of Resistance. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does.

This is Season 2 of Under the Shadow: “Trump’s Attack.”

Episode 7 — “Cuba’s Crisis: Made in USA.”

[MUSIC]

Today, we’re headed to Cuba, the next country on Trump’s hit list after Venezuela… Over the last month, the Trump administration has ratcheted up its actions against the country — With devastating effects. 

On Jan. 29, Trump issued an executive order declaring that Cuba constituted a quote “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the “national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

The order accused the Cuban government of supporting terrorism and destabilizing the region. Trump declared a “national emergency” in response to the so-called Cuban threat.

He threatened to levy tariffs on any country, quote, “found to directly or indirectly sell or otherwise provide any oil to Cuba.”

Now… cutting all oil to Cuba might not seem like such a big deal, unless you remember that Cuba is a nearly 800-mile-long island in the Caribbean, 90 miles from the US coast. It does have an oil refinery. But no way to access crude. And… like in many countries on the planet, oil runs just about everything.

Fuel for gas. Cars. Trucks. The electrical grid… and therefore also the water system. In other words, shut off the oil pump and you essentially strangle the country. Which is exactly what the United States is trying to do.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Cuba will be failing pretty soon. Cuba’s really a nation that’s close to failing. You know they got their money from Venezuela. They got their oil from Venezuela. They’re not getting that anymore.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That was Trump speaking just two days before issuing his executive order.

Francesca Emmanuel is with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, or CEPR, in Washington, DC.

FRANCESCA EMMANUEL:  The current energy siege cannot be understood apart from its explicit political objective to force the island’s economic collapse in order to precipitate the overthrow of the Cuban government, a regime change strategy that the United States has pursued for decades.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And that’s just it… This is just the latest iteration of an embargo, or blockade, that the United States has held against the island in the name of toppling its government for more than 60 years.

A blockade that for decades has been denounced, nearly unanimously, by almost every country in the world at the UN General Assembly.

FRANÇOIS BLACKMAN:  The unilateral economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against the Republic of Cuba remains a clear violation of the UN Charter and international law.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  François Blackman is the Barbados Ambassador to the UN. He spoke to the assembly in 2025 before the annual vote denouncing the US embargo.

FRANÇOIS BLACKMAN:  For more than three decades, the General Assembly, guided by the Charter, has spoken with clarity and consistency: This embargo must end.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Sometimes the idea of sanctions is hard to wrap your head around. And I want to just take a moment to put this blockade into perspective. I’m bringing in an old friend to give some context. I met her 20 years ago when we were both researching cooperatives in Venezuela. Her name is Camila Pineiro.

CAMILA PINEIRO:  I’m a Cuban American based in Maryland. And I have dedicated my life to advance the social solidarity economy in Cuba and also in other countries around the world. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  We spoke over Zoom in mid-February.

CAMILA PINEIRO:  One way of putting it is if you have [two] swimmers and you chain one swimmer to the bottom of the pool, and you make that chain shorter and shorter and shorter, like there is no way that swimmer can swim and at some point is going to drown, right?

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That is Cuba drowning under US sanctions — The new ones and the ones that have been imposed on it since the 1960s.

It’s like a medieval siege. And over the last month, the United States has tightened the screws, particularly around oil. But that siege has been in place for a long time… 

Imposed shortly after the victory of the Cuban revolution on Jan. 1, 1959.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Baring 26 of July banners, joyous followers of Fidel Castro sweep triumphantly through the Cuban capital hours after their rebellion had toppled the regime of Fulgencio Batista.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Such was the scene just before Castro’s advance guard approached. They had marched right across the island in a triumphant progress, joyfully acclaimed all the way. At last, Dr. Fidel Castro himself arrived. Time and again he was held up by the crowds. He spoke to them of the new regime now being inaugurated, a regime, by the way, now formally recognized by Britain.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Peter Kornbluh runs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He’s also co-author of the book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.

PETER KORNBLUH:  You know, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was really one of the most significant, if not the most significant, kind of David versus Goliaths in the history of the Western Hemisphere. This small island off the coast of the United States took on the colossus of the North.

HISTORIC REEL:  Cuba, pearl of the Antilles, playground of the Caribbean, with a charm both old and exciting.

PETER KORNBLUH:  US economic interests and US political interests and US mafia interests, crime interests, had controlled Cuba since the 1930s, essentially. And the United States actually had controlled Cuba under a special law that the US Congress passed at the turn of the 20th century called the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to basically tell the Cubans what to do, control their economy, control their military, control their politics… Take Guantanamo as US property in perpetuity, et cetera, et cetera. So it was a symbol of US imperial and imperialist interests in the Caribbean and Latin American region.

And here comes this bearded, uniformed revolutionary who stands up to the United States, leads a rather unbelievable campaign revolution, it’s because of the nationalism the Cuban people, the Cuban people were so angry with the brutality and ruthlessness of the general that the United States controlled Cuba through, General Batista, that they were all willing to rise up, the middle classes, lower classes, upper-middle classes.

Castro was kind of a romantic figure. And he eventually turned to the Soviet Union as the threat, as his reforms teed off US officials, as well as his rhetoric.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Cuba’s plan: Offer another road to development. They rolled out literacy programs and trained doctors. They also nationalized land and agriculture, expropriating foreign companies with the goal of redistributing wealth inside Cuba. It did not sit well with the United States.

PETER KORNBLUH:  At his White House press conference, President Eisenhower announces that Cuba’s assigned share of the United States sugar market has been cut by 95% for the balance of 1960, in reply to what Ike calls Fidel Castro’s deliberate policy of hostility… Cuba is expected to respond by new seizures of American properties.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That was a big deal for Cuba. At the time, the island nation was the largest sugar-producing country in the world. Sugar was its largest export. Most of it went to the United States. Suddenly, Cuba had to pivot to new markets like China and the Soviet Union from the communist bloc.

On Oct. 19, 1960, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower announced a trade embargo on Cuba. It banned most US exports to the island except for medicine and food.

PETER KORNBLUH:  The Eisenhower decision to foster deprivation on the island through a cutoff of exports was in response to Fidel Castro’s decision to expropriate US properties… The oil refineries, some of the fallow lands by the sugar companies, agricultural reform, and also to receive a delegation, an economic delegation from the Soviet Union that the United States found to be a big problem. I mean, the whole point of the revolution was that Cuba would become independent of US economic and political control. And obviously to do that, it needed to develop alliances with other major countries.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Peter found the original copy of what’s known as the “Mallory memo.” It essentially outlined the strategy for the trade embargo with Cuba. It’s declassified and up on the National Security Archives website. It’s dated April 6, 1960, about six months before Eisenhower imposed the embargo. Subject: “The Decline and Fall of Castro.” 

PETER KORNBLUH:  It talks about the strategy of cutting off US economic ties to Cuba because Fidel Castro was too popular. And the way to make him unpopular was to create hunger and deprivation. And somehow the Cuban people would blame Fidel rather than blame the United States. And that has always been considered the general original logic of the trade embargo.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The document was written by US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory. It literally says, quote… “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

The goal, it says, is to, quote, “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”

It’s the same thing we would hear a decade later from President Richard Nixon after socialist President Salvador Allende took office in Chile: “Make the economy scream.”

And thus was born the Cuban embargo.

Or… part of it….

PETER KORNBLUH:  The US trade embargo was half started by Eisenhower in 1960 and then completed by President John F. Kennedy in very early 1962, well before the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Eisenhower cut off all US exports to Cuba, and Kennedy then cut off all US imports from Cuba and expanded the embargo to cover third countries and other Cuban goods that might come from elsewhere. The embargo became a symbol that endured. It endured past the CIA covert operation plots, the assassination plots, the Bay of Pigs invasion. All of that.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  There is so much more history I’d like to dive into here today… The Cuban Missile crisis. The US terror campaign against Cuba. The 1976 CIA-backed bombing of Flight 455, which killed all 73 people on board, including the Cuban national fencing team. Clearly… I need to produce an entire season of Under the Shadow just on Cuba. But for now, I’m gonna bring us back to the present and the ever-present embargo, or blockade.

CAMILA PINEIRO:  Basically, a blockade is you are blocking anything from coming in and from coming out, and of course they, at some point it wasn’t 100% effective because Cuba found ways, but the US every time has made it harder and harder, and from the easy times of the embargo or blockade, Cuba could not buy anything, even buy any company anywhere in the world, if a product had 10% of US component, Cuba could not buy it. That was when the times were good for Cuba, you know, that’s the minimum of the embargo, so you can imagine every technology pretty much in the world has at least 10% of US component.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Camila also says that ships that travel to Cuba to trade can’t go back to the United States for at least six months. Six months. And that is not new. That rule has been in place since 1962.

CAMILA PINEIRO:  There is no ship that is going to come to Cuba that is not going to want to go to the US.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And Camila says US efforts to undermine Cuba at every turn go well beyond the sanctions: Threatening other countries or companies. Blocking purchases from abroad even over medicine and supplies to fight COVID during the pandemic.

CAMILA PINEIRO:  It’s also all the undercover actions that they do to stop anything that the Cuban institutions try to do to develop or satisfy the needs of the people. If they know that the Cuban government is buying some part somewhere to fix a thermoelectric, they’re going to sabotage that.

They do everything in their power to make our lives and the lives of Cubans as bad as they can.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Everyone I spoke to for this episode told me the same thing: The closest comparison to the crisis facing Cuba today is the special period in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, which for decades had been Cuba’s top trading partner and economic lifeline.

CAMILA PINEIRO:  So, it’s like the worst time of the special period with the difference that now you can find stuff, but it’s very expensive. And then it was like, you could not find stuff, like people, it was more equal, so the pain was distributed more equally. Now the people that are most vulnerable, the people who don’t have any income in foreign currency or all people who don’t have anyone to care for, or sick people, are seeing it really, really bad.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The US blockade against Cuba is the longest-running embargo, blockade, or economic sanctions against any country in the world.

I want to just pause for a minute to let that sink in. A Cuban born any time after 1960 has never lived a day without US sanctions on the island. In other words, anyone younger than retirement age in Cuba has always felt the direct or indirect impact of the United States on their lives.

But journalist Liz Oliva Fernández says that’s hard to put into perspective when you are struggling to get by from one day to the next. 

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  The sanctions [are] so big and people are so busy surviving the day by day life that they don’t have enough time to pay attention to today. OK, let me see the political picture, the big picture. People are trying to, oh my god, the price of the chicken. Oh my god, we don’t have eggs. Oh my god, it’s impossible for me to pay to buy eggs and to pay transportation or buy chicken. I need to decide. I’m thinking about a circumstance or to buy medications. People are really doing triage right now.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Here’s the thing: It didn’t have to be like this. 

BARACK OBAMA [CLIP]:  I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I know this seems like ancient history, but President Barack Obama made huge strides toward renewing relations with Cuba. When he was in office, exactly a decade ago this month, he was the first US president to travel to Cuba in almost 90 years.

Peter Kornbluh.

PETER KORNBLUH:  And that was to create momentum for the breakthrough in normalized relations. And at the time, he brought a whole entourage of US businessmen. People wanted to start to invest in Cuba. Cuban entrepreneurs felt supported for the first time and an opening for the first time. Yes, that situation didn’t work out, but it didn’t work out because Donald Trump came in and abrogated the deal with Cuba that President Obama had made. And cutting off that relationship, which was creating significant change both in US-Cuban relations and on the island in terms of economic development, was a major contribution to the situation right now.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Instead…

PETER KORNBLUH:  There’s still some food in the farmers markets, and people who have access to dollars and are in the private sector are still able to get food. Other parts of the country are not, however, and that is the majority of Cubans.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Peter Kornbluh was in Cuba in late February on a fact-finding trip to get a sense of the reality on the ground.

PETER KORNBLUH:  Transportation is hampered. Trucks are not on the highways any longer. The tourism sector is quickly shutting down…. And this is having not just a ripple effect in the economy, but a tsunami effect on the economy in a very short period of time. So Cuba is in a dire economic position, which is what Donald Trump wants. He wants to pressure Cuba to cry uncle and basically come to the negotiating table ready to concede their sovereignty.

We have the president of the United States beginning to imagine and declare that we’re going to have some sort of US friendly takeover of Cuba. Hopefully there will be some kind of agreement that benefits both the Cuban people and US interests, but nobody should forget that agreement is going to come at the end of a very threatening, coercive dagger emanating from Washington, pointing right at the heart of the nation of Cuba.

MEDEA BENJAMIN:  Well, over the last 60 years, the US has methodically made it very difficult for Cuba to have normal trade relations in the world.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Medea Benjamin is the founder of the peace group CODEPINK. She’s traveled to Cuba twice over the last month to bring humanitarian aid to the country.

MEDEA BENJAMIN:  This gets better in certain times, like when Barack Obama was president, and then it goes back again, and Trump has tightened the screws. But what it means is that Cuba was never able to really try to reach its potential because it always came up against US efforts to sabotage.

The sanctions, when they’re at their worst, don’t let Cuba deal with the international financial system. They make it impossible for Cuba to use what’s called the SWIFT system. So Cuba doesn’t have the ability to have credit. When it buys anything it has to do it in cash. People in Cuba now don’t have access to things that have, for example, you can’t use Zoom, you can’t use PayPal, you can’t use GoFundMe, you can’t use these kinds of things that other people around the world use.

It’s hard to send remittances back to your family, very hard. Other countries, poor countries, their number one source of income is money that people who’ve left the country send back to their families, remittances. Cuba, it used to be you could send through Western Union. Now the US closed that down. They closed down other avenues. So people literally have to carry the money to take to relatives. 

So you look at any area where Cuba has tried to either act like a normal country with normal trade relations or has tried to find different ways to get income like that medical missions program that became, at one point, the source, the number one source of hard currency to the country, these sanctions have made it impossible.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández says she was recently speaking with the Cuban American lawyer Alfred de Zayas, and he told her we shouldn’t be using the term “sanctions.”

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  He would say, don’t say sanctions anymore, because sanctions are legal. These are unilateral coercive measures against one country. And this is illegal [according to] international law. 

And don’t say anything like “compliance,” because you can’t comply with something that is illegal, that makes you [an] accomplice [to] it.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  It’s hard to describe  the very real impact US sanctions have on people and communities in Cuba or anyplace. The narratives we hear usually downplay the damage or skew the story. We’re told the financial or humanitarian crises caused in large part by the sanctions are really to be blamed on the Cuban government’s poor management or quote “repressive apparatus.” This is what we’re hearing from many US news outlets, analysts, and lawmakers. 

Florida Republican Congressman Carlos Giménez spoke to Fox News in early February.

REP. CARLOS GIMÉNEZ [CLIP]:  That regime is a cancer. A cancer to the Cuban people. A cancer to the Western Hemisphere. We need some harsh medicine to cure the patient Cuba. We need some harsh medicine to cure the patient Cuba so we can get rid of this cancer which is the communist regime that has basically oppressed its only people for over 65 years… So they’ve been a real thorn in our side for a long time, and I’m very glad that the president is taking decisive action.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I saw the direct impact of sanctions first hand in Venezuela in 2019. I traveled there to investigate how ramped-up US sanctions under Trump were impacting the lives of everyday residents. What I found was shocking.

Entire shelves of pharmacies were empty. Parents couldn’t get even basic medicine for their kids. The little medicine that was there was too expensive for most people. Much like the case with Cuba, US sanctions had blocked Venezuela from using international banking systems and  threatened actions against other countries that would trade with Venezuela.

One day, I traveled up into a maze of cinderblock homes in the poor barrio of Caucaguita, in eastern Caracas. I was there to meet Carolina Subero, who lived with her mother, sister, and three kids in a minuscule 2-bedroom home. Her youngest daughter, then 5-year-old Jenjerlys, needed four different medications for her epilepsy. But Carolina could only find one of the drugs, and she could only afford it some of the time. 

“She has seizures every day,” Carolina told me. “I’ve had to trade food for the medicine.”

Hers was one of countless stories I heard.

According to a 2019 report by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, Jenjerlys was one of an estimated 300,000 people at risk because of a lack of medicines or treatment due to the US sanctions on the country.

In Caracas, broken vehicles lined the winding roadsides of the poor barrios because parts largely came from abroad… and they were either impossible to find, or too expensive. The same went for broken water pumps and pipes, leaving entire residential water systems out of commission.

The line from the US government and the mainstream media was that the Maduro administration had run the country into the ground. The reality, however, was that the United States was blocking Venezuela from both buying products abroad and selling its oil — The country’s top source of income. The United States threatened repercussions on anyone who dared to trade with Caracas, and it forced many US businesses out of Venezuela. During a meeting between Trump and executives of US oil companies this January, the director of the oil company Halliburton underscored this point.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  When did you leave Venezuela?

HALLIBURTON EXECUTIVE [CLIP]:  As a company, we left under the sanctions in 2019. So we had intended to stay, and then when the sanctions went into place we were required to leave.

GREG WILPERT:  Actually, the sanctions have a tremendous impact on Venezuela’s economy and its ability to import essential goods.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Greg Wilpert is the founder of the independent new site Venezuelanalysis and the author of the 2007 book about then-President Hugo Chávez, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power.

GREG WILPERT:  I would estimate that something like 80% of the economic problems, whether it’s the decline in GDP or the increase in inflation, are attributable basically to the sanctions.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In other words… the United States was slowly strangling Venezuela… and not just the government. The people. The nation. According to that report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research that I mentioned earlier, between 2017 and 2019 the US sanctions on Venezuela killed 40,000 people. 

A study co-authored by the same organization in 2025 and published in The Lancet Global Health journal estimated that more than half a million people die around the world each year from sanctions. 

Put another way… more people are killed each year by sanctions than by wars across the planet.

[SILENCE]

The authors of the report found that most of the sanctions-related deaths over the last five decades were children under the age of five.

By far… the United States is the top country in the world that uses sanctions as coercive measures against its political adversaries and their populations. In fact, according to Barnard College American studies professor Manu Karuka, the United States has imposed roughly two-thirds of the world’s sanctions since the 1990s. In other words, double all of the sanctions imposed by the entire rest of the planet combined.

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB [CLIP]:  The people of Cuba are starving because of our country. They are cutting them off from the rest of the world through sanctions and total blockade of fuel. A country of 11 million people without fuel.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Michigan Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib spoke out in defense of Cuba in mid February.

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB [CLIP]:  Think about that. Homes, schools, hospitals without power. Children without food or medicine. The forced starvation of entire, again, Cuban people. This is pure cruelty. And we all say it together: let Cuba live.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Back in Cuba… following Trump’s Jan. 29 executive order, journalist Liz Oliva Fernández went to the streets to ask people in Havana what they thought about the US measures against them.

“Who do these sanctions affect the most?” asks Liz.

“The people,” says a woman holding a baby. 

“What about the blackouts?” asks Liz. 

“Oh… that’s the worst of it,” says the woman. 

Liz goes to a taxi stand in Havana, where rows of old classic yellow and black Peugeot 504 sedans are lined up along the side of the road. 

“Why are there so many cars waiting?” she asks. 

“Because we don’t have gas to be able to work,” says one driver.

“We are here waiting to get gas,” says another, “so we can fulfill our social duties, which includes taking people to dialysis, working with the funeral homes, and the schools that don’t have parental support. That’s the main purpose of these vehicles.”

“And how long have you been waiting for gas?” Liz asks.

“Well, on average, we’ve been waiting 24 to 72 hours,” says the man. 

She did that story at the end of January. It’s become so much worse now. 

“These measures are hurting families,” the taxi driver tells Liz. “That’s where we’re hurting. That’s what’s bleeding, due to all these measures.”

“But the US says they are doing this for the good of Cubans,” says Liz. 

“It’s not for the good of Cubans,” says a woman in a striped shirt and a winter hat. “It’s what’s harming all Cubans. What I don’t understand is how a country like the United States tells the whole world what to do. They want to be the rulers, trying to destroy Cuba.

“They’re not going to destroy Cuba,” the woman says. “But it’s always been like this. Because I’m 61 years old, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt the blockade, the blockade, the blockade. When will this blockade end?” she asks.

When will this blockade end.

Liz told me she was surprised by the defiant reaction of the people she interviewed.

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  People were really angry. They were really angry, but they weren’t really angry with the government. They were really angry with the US government. And I was surprised of that because even when the sanctions [have] a huge impact [on] the life of people in Cuba, there is a lot of people, the most of them, they don’t really understand. So when you talk to them about the impact of the sanctions, they say, yeah, well yeah the blockade is true, but the government, the Cuban government.

So people, [it is] really difficult [for] them [to] understand how this has to [do] with my life, with my family, with me, because this is not sanctions against Liz Oliva Fernández or her family. This is a sanctions against just a country. 

And also the narrative on the Internet, like they repeat US government, repeat US politicians, Cuban Americans, repeat all the time… the sanctions just affect the government, the sanctions don’t affect the Cuban people. If you get affected, it’s because the blockade in your own country. Well, this is the biggest lie and also misleading.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In other words… the line from the Trump administration and in the mainstream media is that if things are bad, it’s because of the Cuban government, not the United States.

The US ambassador to Cuba Mike Hammer has said this outright on numerous occasions recently.

“The financial situation in Cuba has deteriorated,” he told the Miami-based Spanish-language television station Telemundo in early February. “The situation of the energy infrastructure is collapsing. Everything is getting worse. Tourism is clearly impacted. Because who’s going to go to a country without electricity and where crime is rising little by little? Where there are no services?”

This, he explained, was why Cuba needed regime change. And he said that would come some time this year. In another interview with the same outlet roughly a week after Trump’s new sanctions, he denied the blockade had any impact on the island.

MIKE HAMMER [CLIP]:  The only blockade here, in Cuba, is internal. Because they know. They eat chicken from the United States. They receive medicine from their relatives in the United States. There is trade between the two countries. Cuba can trade with all the countries in the world it wants, and this about the blockade just isn’t true. It’s not true.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Journalist Liz Oliva Fernández watched the interviews.

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  And I say, oh my God, shut up. You can’t be serious. You’re talking about the biggest country of the world, the most powerful country of the world, [the] United States, that you always praise about it, are imposing an oil blockade on an entire, a small nation [in] the Caribbean with 9 million something of population. And you’re saying that they’re not having any effects?

Where [are we] going to get the oil for [keeping] the country running? And we don’t think about this, but the entire countries, not just Cuba, around the world run by oil. So how [are we] going to survive this if everyone is so afraid of the United States?

How [can we] stop the US government? Because I don’t feel that no one in this world can feel safe. Because yesterday, Greenland, before yesterday, Venezuela, then Cuba, then what? Who’s it gonna be tomorrow? 

And I feel like many people feel safe because, it’s like, well, only it’s not Cuba, it’s not Venezuela, it’s not Greenland. But do you know, maybe when it’s your turn, there’s no one left to help you.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Now… I want to clarify something here that I think is important. Under normal circumstances, when there is not an oil embargo on the country… despite the blockade, Cuba does buy food from the United States. Millions of dollars worth each year. Poultry, swine, milk, and even coffee. These and other products are exempted. They began to be permitted in 2000 after the United States passed a trade bill which allowed for the export of certain food and medicine.

This is likely, in part, what US Ambassador Mike Hammer was talking about. But Cuba can only purchase these products with cash. Not credit. And everything else regarding the blockade that Medea Benjamin talked about earlier remains in place.

If all of this weren’t confusing enough, Trump in late February said he would now begin to allow some US companies to send fuel to businesses in Cuba, just as long as they are not tied to the Cuban government.

The goal in other words… isolate the Cuban government. Support the private sector. 

Peter Kornbluh. 

PETER KORNBLUH:  The Trump administration is trying to bolster that part of the society. They want to keep the private sector going because, of course, they see the private sector as key to the future of Cuba and Cuba’s evolution to a capitalist and prosperous society.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  As for the blockade, historian William LeoGrande wrote on the 60th anniversary of its implementation, the US economic embargo against Cuba — Or ‘el bloqueo,’ as Cubans refer to it — Is not a single law, but a complex patchwork of laws, presidential proclamations, and regulations that Fidel Castro once called ‘a tangled ball of yarn.’

The goal today, as it was nearly 65 years ago… force Cuba and its people to their knees, with the goal of removing the Cuban government. Members of the Cuban American community in the United States are applauding.

Here’s just one example.

MARIA SALAZAR:  We are in Miami. We’re the Cuban Americans in Miami, and we’re delighted that we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Maria Salazar is a Cuban American congresswoman from Florida. She was interviewed by Fox News in mid-February.

MARIA SALAZAR:  These are glorious, momentous times for the Cubans in Miami that I represent and for the Western Hemisphere. So, Trump, bravo. Venezuela first. Cuba second.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Journalist Liz Oliva Fernández.

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  I really get surprised when I read in social media people that are really glad and they are celebrating this situation about how now Cuba’s gonna be free. And I just think about, like, I don’t believe that the United States can bring some freedom, any freedom to Cuba or to [any] country of the world, because first you need to be free yourself. And that’s something that the United States needs to work on. But then how is it possible that you feel like a victory when some people have to die or some people have to suffer? That’s not a victory at all.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Liz says she thinks that people in Cuba are, for the first time, really grasping not only the real impact of the blockade but also how US and Cuban American politicians are quick to use Cuban people on the island as bargaining chips in their political gambles on regime change. 

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  Because they are saying, oh, oh well, if a mother [has] to be hungry and a kid doesn’t have access to medication, and this is the price that we need to pay, well, we need to pay in in order to get freedom.

And people are like, wait, what? It’s not your kid, it’s not your mom, it’s not your people. You’re saying that you’re Cuba, but you never put a foot in Cuba. And also you are not here to pay the price. So, who actually are the people who are paying the price? The people, and for the first time they really understand the whole thing. I think this thing has always been real, but for the first time in decades, I think it’s crystal clear.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Crystal clear that the United States is forcing the island and its residents to their knees. And it’s not messing around. It wants the Cuban leadership out. And it doesn’t matter if it causes people to suffer there.

Trump’s Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this explicitly during a Senate foreign relations committee hearing in late January, after Democrat Senator Brian Schatz pushed him on this issue.

SEN. BRIAN SCHATZ:  I’m not asking you whether we would prefer a different kind of government. I’m asking whether you are trying to precipitate the fall of the current regime.

MARCO RUBIO:  Yeah, but that’s statutory. The Helms-Burton Act, the US embargo on Cuba is codified. It was codified in law and it requires regime change in order for us to lift the embargo.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The Helms-Burton Act was passed in 1996 under the Clinton administration. It essentially strengthened the US embargo on Cuba by placing sanctions on foreign companies trading or doing business with the island nation. 

We have rarely seen such a candid remark from a top US official openly admitting to pushing to overthrow another nation’s government, including Cuba.

And the United States is taking everything to a whole new level. 

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Tonight, an elite Coast Guard team rappelling out of helicopters onto the deck of an oil tanker off of the Venezuelan coast, executing a seizure warrant, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  We’ve just seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. Large tanker. Very larger. Largest one ever seized, actually.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The seizure of this oil tanker in December was the first of many. The goal… Stopping Venezuelan oil shipments. And now blocking oil from Cuba.

This news report was from late February.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  A tanker full of fuel from Russia that was headed to Cuba appears to have been diverted.

PETER KORNBLUH:  There was a Russian tanker that was on its way to Cuba. It is stopped in the middle of the Atlantic and apparently is being rerouted someplace else. One can only presume that there was a threat that it might be intercepted by the US Coast Guard, creating the first superpower conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Trump and Rubio want to actually control the spigot of oil that can go to Cuba so that they have basically the ultimate negotiating tool. We will turn the lights back on in your country if you agree to the economic terms and economic reforms that we want to start with.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this about Cuba in late February.

MARCO RUBIO:  That is not a system that’s working. That’s a system that’s in collapse. And they need to make dramatic reforms. And if they wanna make those dramatic reforms… that open the space for both economic and eventually political freedom for the people of Cuba, obviously the United States would love to see that and would be helpful.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin.

MEDEA BENJAMIN:  Marco Rubio and Trump and these right-wing people in Southern Florida smell blood and they feel like this is the time that they can really overturn the government. Cuba still has a lot of friends around the world, as you see in the votes in the United Nations where the world comes together and denounces the US policies.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And some of Cuba’s friends are responding to the nation’s crisis. 

SPEAKER [CLIP]:  Canada has announced an additional $8 million to support Cuba.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Two navy vessels carrying humanitarian aid set sail from Mexico. The shipments are loaded with powdered milk, beans, and other non-perishable goods.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  While oil, for now, is off the table, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum says Mexico will continue to send humanitarian aid.

In Mexico City’s Zócalo, and other city squares around the country, groups are collecting aid to bring to Cuba. 

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  “We’re here from 11am to 6pm,” says one of the organizers of the humanitarian aid collection center in the Zócalo. “We invite everyone to put their little grain, a huge grain of sand, to break this siege, that the blockade has become more severe in this Trump era, and we need to support Cuba, which has given us so much, particularly to the Mexican people.”

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  She mentioned the more than 3,000 Cuban doctors who are still serving in medical missions in impoverished communities across Mexico. 

Though the United States has been pressuring other countries, like Guatemala, to send the Cuban doctors home, there are still more than 24,000 Cuban doctors working in more than 50 countries around the world in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe. 

Solidarity groups from the United States have also taken aid to Cuba.

CODEPINK founder Medea Benjamin has been there twice recently.

MEDEA BENJAMIN:  I went first a month ago to Havana, and then I went more recently to the eastern part of the country to Holguín. Both times was bringing humanitarian aid, food, powdered milk, and dried legumes like lentils.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  A total of 7,500 pounds worth. She says the situation outside of Havana, in eastern Cuba, is dire. 

MEDEA BENJAMIN:  There is less fuel available. There were very few gas-guzzling cars on the road. The buses were not running. The electricity was much more infrequent than in Havana. In fact, it was three to six hours a day that they had electricity. And what you could see really was the cascading effects. It’s hard to comprehend everything that happens when you don’t have fuel. But we’re seeing it happening in Cuba right now.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  She says people need to stand for Cuba. Because it has always suffered retaliation for trying to offer an alternative.

MEDEA BENJAMIN:  Cuba was a country that tried to do something different when people are seeing that the model of vulture capitalism is really not one that is providing even the basic needs for people around the world. In the United States, where I live, it’s so difficult to even get health care. Young people can’t afford an education. We have ICE thugs on our streets that are just grabbing people and terrorizing communities here in Washington, DC. We have National Guard troops with guns walking around our streets. 

So, Cuba was trying to do something different, and it managed to achieve a lot at some point in its history. This health care system that Cuba not only took care of its own people but exported health care workers around the world is a model for the world and what we should be doing, taking care of people, training people, and then sending them out to the poorest communities or communities that are hit by earthquakes and hurricanes and natural disasters.

So I think that in itself is one major reason. The other is just, you know, how much is the world going to let the big bully of Trump just trample over other countries’ sovereignty. We just saw it happen in Venezuela, which is such an unbelievably corrupt and convoluted situation right now with the US stealing its oil. What the US is still doing in the Middle East and threatening to do. 

So, you know, somebody’s got to stand up to the big bully, and Cuba’s always been the one doing it. So, you know, God bless them. We should be thankful that there’s somebody standing up.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In March, inspired by the humanitarian aid flotillas to Gaza, Medea Benjamin’s CODEPINK and Progressive International are planning to set sail from Mexico with what they are calling the “Nuestra América Flotilla” to send aid to Cuba…. 

Also… it might seem a little contradictory….  Someone else has been delivering aid to Cuba…

The United States.

That’s right. The country that is the most responsible for the crisis in Cuba right now is also sending humanitarian aid. $6 million worth, through the Catholic Church and a Catholic NGO. Yes, it’s hypocritical… but it’s also a strategic way of making it seem like the United States isn’t to blame.

“I’ve been traveling around the region to make sure the aid is arriving,” US ambassador to Cuba Mike Hammer said in a video posted over social media in mid-February, “to alleviate the suffering and to improve the conditions a little bit for the people.”

Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández.

LIZ OLIVIA FERNÁNDEZ:  We don’t want nothing from the United States. Please be quiet. Be in your own country, doing your own things. We don’t care about that. But please don’t come here to pretend that you actually want to help us, because we don’t need your help. I feel like maybe that’s contradictory and that’s just me, and lot of people say, well, we want United States’ help. But historically, I think history has shown that whatever the United States [enters into] the game to help, things end really [badly].

[THEME MUSIC]

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That is all for today. 

Next time… We go to Mexico.

SPEAKER [CLIP]:  They left the whole front facade here… all along the wall here is just pockmarked with these holes that are left from the gunshots and the firings by the US soldiers when they attacked.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  To look at the US threats on the country just the other side of the Rio Grande, the long history of US intervention in the US’ closest neighbor to the south, and the impact it’s having today… 

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Mexico on edge. Following the Mexico government operation that killed the cartel kingpin known as “El Mencho.”

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s next time on Under the Shadow…

I’m your host, Michael Fox. 

Thanks for listening. 

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show.

Also…  I really want to thank everyone who took the time to speak with me for today’s episode. Peter Kornbluh, Medea Benjamin, Camila Pineiro, Greg Wilpert, and Liz Oliva Fernández.

I’m adding links to them, their organizations, and their work in the show notes.

A huge shout out to Liz and Belly of the Beast in particular. You can find more of their work at Belly of the Beast…. Either on their website or on YouTube. They are doing incredible work, and they were a huge help for this episode. As you heard, I used clips of numerous videos for this episode. Thank you so much again to both Liz and Belly of the Beast. Please check them out.

The Eisenhower document I mentioned that Peter Kornbluh found the original of, Mallory’s memo… it’s on the website of the National Security Archives. There’s so much more there about the US covert war on Cuba over the last 60 years. If you have a chance, please take a look at Peter Kornbluh’s book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. It’s extremely relevant today. 

As always… if you are looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad… please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting.

If you are new to this podcast series, you might want to consider checking out the first season of Under the Shadow. It looks at US intervention in Central America, in particular throughout the 1980s. I highly recommend you go back and give it a listen. It’s still super relevant today. I’ll add links in the show notes, or you can find that by searching for Under the Shadow wherever you get your podcasts. 

The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. 

Finally, if you like what you hear, please head over to my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There you can support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work.

Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.

This episode script was edited by Heather Gies.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.