Blockading the Cuban Peoples’ Right to Self-Determination

For the 25 years that I have been traveling to Cuba, the Cuban people and their Revolution have served as a key inspiration for my political work. Cuba became the proof that a better world is possible, especially for Black and Brown people. Infant mortality and life expectancy were once comparable to the US. Free education resulted in Cuban women being more than equitably represented in professions such as medicine, law, teaching, and elected office. However, today it is painfully clear that 63 years of the US blockade against Cuba is having its intended and devastating impact on this tiny nation located 90 miles off our coast.

According to an internal memorandum written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory, dated April 6, 1960: “...every possible means should be under-taken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba...a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

US presidents have taken various paths trying to achieve this aim of overthrowing the Cuban Revolution, and Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, makes evident the present administration’s aim to establish US hegemony in Cuba and all of Latin America, at any cost. Consider the recent US military aggression in Venezuela and the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. Trump’s redesignation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism has drastically increased the economic isolation of Cuba.

In a report submitted to the UN General Assembly by Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, material damages and losses caused by the US blockade against Cuba were estimated at USD $7.5561 billion for the year March 2024 to February 2025. “The cost of six days of blockade is equivalent to the financing required [annually] to import medical consumables (cotton, gauze, syringes, needles, sutures, catheters, IV equipment, among others) and [chemical agents] needed by the  national health system,” according to the same report.

What this means is that the healthcare system is collapsing. Once a model of what human-centered healthcare could look like, now it is failing. Cuba is unable to purchase medications to treat cancer and heart ailments, materials to produce vaccines and for medical research, and machines as simple as EKG monitors and as complex as x-ray and anesthesia devices. Pharmacy shelves are bare and it can be difficult to find something as simple as an aspirin.

Twenty years ago, the doctor-patient ratio in urban areas was one neighborhood doctor to 100 patients. Our December 2025 delegation visited a small medical clinic in central Havana and met a doctor whose case load is now 3,700 patients. This courageous doctor has no intention of leaving, she says, “because my patients need me.” But over one million people have left Cuba due to economic hardships (10% of Cuba’s population); many are professionals who have benefitted from the free education system—including doctors.

This last year has brought constant electrical blackouts, the spread of mosquito-borne diseases including the variant called chikungunya (more serious and painful than dengue), and a severe gasoline shortage that has impacted transportation and the ability to bring food from the farms to the cities, all creating unbearable hardships on the Cuban people. But, of course, all of this is the intended impact of the US blockade, the longest and most comprehensive and coercive economic sanctions measures ever imposed on a country.

I saw the impact of the blockade on faces of people everywhere, especially older people who are surviving on their small pensions, drastically impacted by inflation. When I went to Cuba in May 2024, $1 USD was equivalent to 45 pesos. Today, $1 USD equals 400 Cuban pesos.

The Cuban people are resilient fighters, however, and pockets of hope I witnessed inspire my continuing fight for them and their right to self-determination. Teresa de Jesus Fernandez Gonzalez, National Coordinator of Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, told me with pride and a smile on her face that their work is expanding because of the new constitution that gave expansive rights to the LGBTQI+ communities. Fernando Funes, leader of Finca Marta, is leading the way for agroecology farming. Norma Guillard, a social psychologist and group leader for Afrodescendents of Latin America and the Caribbean, and Reinier Buceo Libre, who leads a small but enthusiastic environmental conservation organization called Mar vivo Cuba, remind me that the spirit of the Revolution lives on as they celebrate the 100th birthday of Fidel Castro. It is up to us to ensure that we change US policy towards Cuba so that they can determine their own futures and carry on their progressive nation-defining work.