The Global Convoy to Cuba: Response to Washington’s Strangling of Cuba

By Stansfield Smith – Mar 17, 2026

Stansfield Smith, ChicagoALBASolidarity.org. Stan has worked in the Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua solidarity movements for close to half a century. He also has put out the Venezuela & ALBA Weekly News since 2013.

In 1962 the US imposed an economic blockade on Cuba designed “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Until 1990 this brutality was greatly alleviated by the solidarity of the socialist countries which provided the Cuban people with essential trade and aid. That provided some protection, but as 638 Ways to Kill Castro illustrates, the US had other tools, including many acts of terrorism and biological warfare.

Despite decades of resistance to the blockade by solidarity organizations in the US, despite polls consistently showing most people being against the blockade, despite the United Nations General Assembly votes for the last 33 years to demand the lifting of the US blockade, Washington has not only been oblivious, but has ramped up the economic warfare. Washington again declared Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, providing no basis for this allegation. This designation allows the US to use its control over the world financial system (e.g., SWIFT, IMF, World Bank, and the US dollar as the international currency) to sanction or block trade and transactions with Cuba. Countries, banks, and companies having business relations with Cuba face sanctions for supporting “terrorism.” This severely restricts Cuba’s ability to trade, receive foreign investment and credit.

The blockade cost Cuba $7.5 billion in 2025, $20.5 million per day. Since 1960, this de facto fine for exercising its right to national self-determination has cost Cuba $170 billion. On January 29, the US squeezed Cuba much more, imposing a blockade on all oil to Cuba, ready to economically punish any country that ships oil. Because of US world economic power, no country challenges this. Last year Mexico supplied 44% of Cuba’s imported crude oil, and Venezuela 34%. Cuba has received no oil since mid-December.

Obviously, these US actions violate international law, as did the attack on Venezuela, the kidnapping of President Maduro, and imposing control over its oil exports. And as did the slaughter in Gaza, the war on Iran and assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. But, like the yearly UN vote calling for removal of the US blockade on Cuba, the US feels powerful enough to simply ignore this.

Without living there, we still cannot really grasp how all-encompassing this US war on Cuba is. Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Holguín, explained the present oil blockade on Cuba to CodePink’s Medea Benjamin:

“You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives. It’s a vicious, all-encompassing spiral downward. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity for only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood and charcoal in our apartments. It’s like going back 100 years. The blockade is suffocating us — especially single mothers … and no one is stopping these demons, Trump and Marco Rubio.”

Now, the US is even working on criminal indictments against Cuban leaders, not before the International Criminal Court for violating international law, but in US courts for breaking US laws, as it is doing to President Nicolas Maduro right now. The US Treasury is even looking into charging Cuban leaders with violation of the US blockade on their country!

Having visited Cuba about 15 times between 1979 and 2019, I have seen how US economic warfare on the island has devastated Cubans’ standard of living after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. It has seriously undermined many aspects of the inspiring example of their socialist model. Compared to 1979, the tightening US blockade has brought much more inequality, fewer social services, and more poverty. The US delivers Cubans deteriorating general health by denying medicines and medical materials. Even hunger, long ago eliminated, the US has reintroduced. The oil blockade aims to disable the electrical system, all transport, and water pumping equipment, recreating the desperation the US and Israel inflicted on Gaza.

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Cuban President Díaz-Canel added, “Right now in the country there are tens of thousands of people waiting for surgery that cannot be performed due to the lack of electricity.” Mothers now see their babies fighting for their lives in incubators that have been turned off because of the oil blockade. Diesel runs short, garbage trucks stop. Trash piles up. Mosquitoes spread. Disease follows. This, Washington says, will bring freedom and democracy to Cuba.

Raúl Antonio Capote, the Cuban state security agent who infiltrated the CIA, recently wrote that the Cuban economy now faces a deep crisis. But does that mean that the collapse of the Cuban government is imminent or that “regime change” is about to occur? Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Perez-Oliva Fraga says absolutely not: “This is an opportunity and a challenge that we have no doubt we will overcome. We are not going to collapse.”

Cuba does carry unresolved problems from the past that the US weaponizes against them. Cuba succeeded little in becoming self-sufficient in food, unlike Nicaragua and even Venezuela, which imported 80% of its food 15 years ago. A country that must import its basic food – and we now witness, energy – hands the US powerful tools for control and “regime change.” Henry Kissinger noted, “Control oil and you control nations. Control food and you control people.” Cuba still spends more than $2 billion a year to import 70-80% of its food, even sugar and coffee.

Today Cuba struggles with the US empire using the energy weapon against them, having relied heavily on imported oil. Cuba belatedly turned to solar power, whose production has jumped from 5.8% in early 2025 to over 20% of its total energy generation, most thanks to China’s aid. Renewable energy now accounts for 50% of daytime electricity generation.

Another problem President Diaz-Canel recently spoke out against: “we are still held back too much by centralism, the excessive centralization that stifles the creative initiative of individuals, groups, and municipalities.” Decentralization of planning is a priority, moving toward a more market-based set of production decisions and incentives.

Now Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Perez-Oliva Fraga says Cuba is open to allow those of Cuban origin living abroad to open and invest in private business on the island. This hardly means restoring capitalism. A socialist economic system does not demand the abolition of the market nor private property. It means the abolition of the hegemony of capital. The socialist economic system of the Soviet Union (and Cuba during the Soviet period), the state planning and control of all production and distribution, represented only one model. In the present Chinese or Vietnamese model, the “commanding heights of the economy” lie in the nationalized state sector, under control of the Communist Party. Widespread non-state sector business flourish in other spheres. Cuba itself, since 2021, has slowly moved in this direction, and now over 11,000 private and state-owned Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) to revive a struggling economy. Today about 38% of the Cuban workforce are said to be in private MSMEs and cooperatives.

Yet the overwhelming problem for Cuba remains the genocidal US oil blockade, on top of the US State Sponsor of Terrorism listing that criminalizes all trade, on top of the 65 year US blockade. Today many organizations are stepping up to counter US strangulation. Organizations around the world are raising funds and materials for Cuba. In the US, prominent among them are Global Health Partners, Medicc, Peoples Forum, Code Pink, and Hatuey Project. Probably thousands, like Greta Thunberg, are coming with the Global Convoy to Cuba, arriving March 21, bringing desperately needed material aid. This will be a rebuke to Washington’s brutality and will hopefully inspire nations around the world to act.

David Adler, Progressive International organizer of the Global Convoy, explained:

“When governments enforce collective punishment, ordinary people have a responsibility to act…break the siege, bring food and medicine, and show that solidarity can cross any border, land, or sea. The first aim is to deliver critical aid to the Cuban people that can redress the humanitarian consequences of the January 29 US executive order, which establishes a fuel blockade around the island.” For instance, “the executive order means that if a fire broke out, there’d be no fire truck to reach it. It’s a crisis with consequences that rise exponentially as its effects multiply across sectors.”

“The primary threat that Cuba represents [to Washington] is its example to the world, about the nature of solidarity and the nature of self-determination.” The US “actively seeks retribution on those who dare to rebel. And no country, no revolution, no political project has been more rebellious in the face of that imperial violence than Cuba…So the resistance against this, the solidarity with Cuba, is also about stopping the US government’s ability to isolate and punish anyone who dares to stand up against it.”

The Cuban Revolution represents an example for our human future: it nationalized the country’s wealth and resources and placed them under the rule of the direct representatives of workers and peasants and has stood up to imperialism for over 65 years. It played a world historic role in dismantling Israel’s twin apartheid state, South Africa. The destruction of the Cuban Revolution would be a painful setback for the world movement against imperialism, for the world anti-war movement, for the world human rights movement. It would embolden US imperial aggression even more, everywhere. For our own self-preservation, we must do what we can to aid Cuba.

SS/OT

Stansfield Smith

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Stansfield Smith is a Chicago-based anti-imperialist activist. He was active for over a decade in the Chicago Committee to Free the Cuban 5. His work is now on ChicagoALBASolidarity.wordpress.com. He has written on Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and on North Korea for Counterpunch and others.

Stansfield Smith

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