Cuba is running out of fuel and time

Cuba is in crisis as a global convoy and new alliances move to break a decades-old US blockade, writes Yuki Lindley.

WHILE THE MIDDLE EAST was on fire and all eyes were on Iran, we could easily overlook the disastrous siege imposed on the Cuban people. Long a target of US imperialism, Cuba became the tiny island in the shadow of US’s crippling trade embargoes that challenged the world’s largest empire, quietly building an alternative to capitalism’s creeping economy.

Since liberating themselves from the US-backed Batista regime in the 1960s, Cubans have driven out US companies, nationalized their resources and created a population with a higher literacy rate than their wealthy neighbors. Because education is free, Cuba has one of the highest number of doctors per capita and is known for sending their doctors to help after disasters like Hurricane Katrina, during the COVID pandemic, and during Ebola outbreaks in West Africa.

The current fuel blockade began when the United States seized control of Venezuela, Cuba’s main oil supplier, plunging the country into darkness and the United States threatening any country supplying oil to the beleaguered country. Trump confidently announced that he would appoint a new US-friendly president by the end of this year, completing his long-standing US desire to destroy Cuban sovereignty.

Despite Cubans’ heavy fuel rationing, the country came to a standstill; Garbage is piling up in the streets, water stations are unable to pump water, and food transport and cooling capacity is collapsing. Now that hospitals have run out of fuel, the most vulnerable Cubans face an imminent threat.

But something was bubbling beneath the mainstream media attention: a growing solidarity between ordinary citizens in the West, horrified by live coverage of the genocide in Gaza, and ordinary citizens connecting with those in the global south to take matters into their own hands. Seeing that their own states and international organizations were failing to hold Israel and the United States accountable, ordinary citizens were forced to take action.

The Nuestra América Convoy, representing more than 30 countries, is heading to Cuba to distribute food, medicine and solar panels to the beleaguered country and break the US blockade. On board will be politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, celebrities such as Kneecap and a wide range of humanitarian, media and commercial organizations hoping to draw the world’s attention to the criminal punishment meted out to the Cuban people.

While oil tankers initially diverted oil deliveries to Cuba under threats from the United States, it is now reported that Russia will challenge the United States on the delivery of oil to the Cuban people by making such shipments for the first time in months.

Although this pattern of subjugation by starving Cubans began in the 1960s as punishment for Castro’s nationalization of Cuban industries, this latest escalation further demonstrates the lengths to which the United States will go to cling to its waning power.

The weakening empire, its economic power weakening, becomes most dangerous as it resorts to its military might to regain what it has lost; by doing so it hastens its own demise, for when an empire can no longer feed its own people, the cost of endless war becomes a destabilizing force within its own borders.

The Romans, Ottomans and Soviets learned these lessons, and now we see the last gasp of the US empire, heralding an era of global destruction against a backdrop of ecological collapse.

What this period of rupture offers us is taking back our collective power; It is an opportunity to move beyond borders, identities and political positions to create space for global solidarity, led by those who have long had to understand the contours of empire, colonialism and capitalism.

The world’s largest democracy has always served the interests of corporate elites, and what they fear most is our collective power.

True social cohesion begins when we recognize who is suffering and expand our concern beyond borders to people we will never meet, because beyond rising fuel costs there is another story that has the potential to shape who we become and what kind of world we create.