Protests against shortages of food and fuel in Cuba’s eastern provinces on March 18 brought the corporate media spotlight back to the island, which is currently experiencing a major economic crisis. True to form, much US reporting on the protests attempted to construct a familiar narrative of Cuba as a failed state on the brink of collapse, with no mention of the 62-year US blockade. This is particularly striking given how Cuba’s current crisis is a direct outcome of the intensification of the blockade under Trump—which President Biden has upheld throughout his term despite promises to relieve the strangulation of Cuba.

So what’s really going on in Cuba today? How severe is the crisis, and where did it come from? What sort of future do the Cuban people envision for themselves, and what role does the US have to play in it? To address these questions and more, The Real News speaks with Manolo de los Santos of The People’s Forum, and Liz Oliva Fernandez of Belly of the Beast.

Studio Production: Ju-Hyun Park
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich, Cameron Granadino

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Transcript

Ju-Hyun:  Welcome back, one and all, to The Real News podcast. My name is Ju-Hyun Park, engagement editor here at The Real News, and your host for today’s episode, where we’ll be talking about the current challenges facing the Cuban Revolution with two very special guests: Liz Olivia Fernandez of Belly of the Beast and Manolo De Los Santos of The People’s Forum.

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Since the COVID pandemic, Cuba has been thrust into an acute economic crisis that is among the worst in its history. The economic turmoil of the pandemic was intensified by the isolation imposed on Cuba by the decades-long US blockade, which then-president Trump strengthened by slapping Cuba with an additional 243 sanctions during his first term. The Biden administration has refused to loosen the noose that’s been placed around Cuba.

The result for the people of the island has been years of crisis, oil and food shortages, power outages, shocks to the medical system, and a crisis of emigration that is steadily draining Cuba of talented youth. On March 17, a rare series of protests broke out in Cuba’s eastern provinces. In typical fashion, the international media shone a harsh spotlight on the protests as a rare visible sign of dissatisfaction with the socialist government.

Little has been done, however, to explain the roots of the crisis in the US’s long war on the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban people, or to highlight the ways that Cuba continues to try and provide for its people while advancing its socialism.

Today we’re fortunate to be joined by two deeply knowledgeable guests, both of whom can be described as among the leading public communicators on Cuba in the English-speaking world.

Liz Olivia Fernandez is an award-winning Cuban journalist with Belly of the Beast, a US-based outlet dedicated to covering Cuba’s untold stories. Manolo De Los Santos is a popular educator and organizer as well as the founding director of The People’s Forum, a movement incubator in New York City for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He also collaborates as a researcher with the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research.

Liz, Manolo, welcome back to The Real News.

Manolo De Los Santos:  It’s a pleasure. I’m happy to join back with Liz.

Liz Oliva Fernández:  The same here.

Ju-Hyun:  Amazing. Thank you so much again for joining us.

Let’s start with the basics. Could you give our audience a very brief overview of what happened during the recent protests and what the issues were that were at the center of these mobilizations?

Liz Oliva Fernández:  Well, recently, Cuba has been facing different protests because of the situation. Most of them are because of blackouts, scarcity of food and medicine. This is not new. This is something that started in 2019, even before the pandemic, with the Trump administration sanctions against Cuba that went from bad to worse, and this situation is from that.

After that, we faced the COVID pandemic, and Cubans have been trying to survive from then. And the situation is getting worse and worse with time. Even in, well in the city, I live in Havana, you can feel the sensation of desperation and frustration that people have.

In rural areas, that is where the most recent protests broke out, the situation is worse because we barely have access to fuel. They are facing blackouts for more than 18 hours. Some of them have 20 hours of blackouts in a day. The scarcity of food is getting worse because the government barely has access to buy the most basic food.

I was reading the other day the report that they have about the sanctions on Cuba, and they say that even because… I don’t know if you know about the rationed food the Cuban government gives to the people in order to have the basics. Well even that kind of thing has been delayed because the government is not allowed, they don’t have access to food or card or credit or nothing because of the sanctions. So the situation of the food and the medicine, of the fuel in Cuba, and basic things is getting worse and worse with time.

Ju-Hyun:  Thank you for that. Manolo, I’m curious if you want to jump in here and add anything to Liz’s addressing of the situation.

Manolo De Los Santos:  No, I would think I would start from the same place as Liz, that protests in Cuba are not something new. They’re not like an exceptional phenomenon. That’s actually something that’s happening quite regularly. It doesn’t often make it to the news, but people are protesting across the island in different ways, in different moments, over what is the continuous pressure of what US sanctions mean in people’s lives on the island.

It’s not about the numbers. Yes, we could cite that Cuba loses about $4.8 billion a year due to sanctions and due to the US blockade. But concretely in terms of people’s lives right now, it means major shortages that are essentially creating a food crisis in the fact that Cuba not only is it not able to import major food commodities, but it’s not even able to import raw materials that allow them to produce basic things like bread, for example.

Eastern provinces like in Santiago, but also in Guantanamo and others, you have the added element that because of the scarcity of fuel, it becomes even harder for the country to transport most of the food that does come in and the supplies that do come in that arrive, usually through the port of Mariel. Transporting them to the other side of the island is already a major endeavor that makes it even more difficult. So it affects the rationing system. It affects even just the basic life, daily life of millions of people on the island.

Ju-Hyun:  Thank you. I think this background context of the blockade and the multi-level crisis that Cuban society is undergoing currently as a result of that is some pretty crucial information for us to have before proceeding further.

I think, focusing in on that a little more finely, it’s often said by supporters of the US embargo or the blockade against Cuba that because it doesn’t officially include food and medicine, therefore the reality of food crisis in Cuba is not something that can be attributed to the blockade. How would you respond to or counter these claims?

Manolo De Los Santos:  Well, I think the US often claims several things. One, that food and medicine are exempted, and at the same time they claim that the US is one of the largest exporters of food to Cuba. And I think there’s not just a question of the fine print that is missing in these declarations, but I would say overall context.

The reality is, and I can share a personal experience about it in a few, but the gist of it is that even with certain exemptions, the conditions on which Cuba is allowed to purchase food or medicine in the US are quite onerous. Primarily, Cuba is the only country that is forced to purchase goods from the United States directly having to pay fully in advance with no guarantees or security of being able to receive the product that they’ve paid for. This is one major element.

And we have to raise that this is an anomaly in international trade. No other country on the planet has to actually engage in trade on these terms. Most of it is done through credit. Most of this is done through legitimate banks that are able to guarantee to both the vendor and the customer that goods will arrive.

And in the case of Cuba, it’s almost like a lottery. Cuba is forced to pay in cash many times and then left wondering if they will receive what they paid for. That happens often in the case of Cuba-US economic exchange.

But then there’s another element which I think is even more prevalent in the last five years, which is that because Cuba was placed on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, most banks around the world are very much unwilling to do the financial transactions necessary for Cuba to make these purchases. Automatically seeing Cuba in any transaction already creates a series of red flags that banks are, in fact, required to investigate and look deeper into and often stalls the process of any purchases.

And I’ll just tell you from a very personal experience. For the last four weeks, I’ve reached out to 16 different grain distributors in the United States asking them, we’re willing to buy at market price over 1,000 tons of flour, of wheat flour to send to Cuba and not one of them was able to give a positive response to our requests.

Most of them mentioned immediately the limitations that they face and the fear that they face of engaging in any trade of this type of Cuba. Even if there could be an exemption, just the state of paranoia and the state of fear that even if they were to do this, somehow they would be fined, like many companies have been, by the US government is enough to impede this so-called exemption from actually allowing Cubans to buy.

Liz Oliva Fernández:  And I would like to add… Because it’s funny. They say, okay, food and medicines, they are under exemption. Have you tried to send food and medicine from the United States to Cuba? The people who say this, trying to send food and medicine to Cuba is easy. But they have to hire someone from a Cuban-American enterprise in Miami, who are making a lot of money, a lot of profit from that business.

I’m asking the people that are trying to send to Cuba medicine equipment, trying to give a little bit of solidarity. A lot of groups that are trying to get food and medicine in Cuba are facing so many problems.

Also, senators and congresspeople in the US say, okay, but Cuba spent $300 million in 2023 for just food in Cuba. Okay, that’s true. $300 million, that’s true. How much money does it represent in those terms? And this is because, as Manolo said and explained a few minutes ago, is because of exemptions. Why give any exemptions to processing food or medicine or whatever to the United States?

But for example, DR. In the same period of time, 2023, DR spent $1.3 billion for such and food in the US. And just in food. This is just in food. What is the difference between $300 million and $1.3 billion? That’s DR. Guatemala, just in food — And also I’m trying to remember the data — $70 billion for the same.

And these are countries that have even less population than Cuba. So what that kind of money represents to a government in order to get food to all the families in Cuba, to all the people who live in Cuba, that’s nothing. But they use the number.

And this is the thing that people in the US don’t know about math. What kind of money that represents in a country that has a population of 11 million Cubans living in the same place.

So okay, you can get food and sometimes medicine from the United States, but at what cost? What cost? Because it’s not about money, it’s about time, it’s about obstacles. It’s about overcoming things the entire time.

So what… Ask the farmers in the US, it’s easy for them to try to sell food or whatever to Cuba? Chicken. Everybody’s talking about how Cuban people are consuming US chickens. It’s not US chickens, it’s legs. It’s because the US doesn’t like legs. You enjoy more breasts. So the kind of chicken that is so cheap for Cuba to buy, that kind of chicken in the US, they don’t have the popularity to pursue that kind of thing.

And we can pay for it, but we have to pay in advance for a product that we haven’t seen and for a product that is going to take maybe two weeks to ship to Cuba.

So the people who say that kind of thing, they rarely understand the complexity of everything. They rarely understand the difficult amount of obstacles that people have to face in order to deliver or to ship to Cuba food or medicines, or they just are repeating, as usual.

Ju-Hyun:  Thank you. I think you’ve both really effectively demonstrated how the sanctions regime is not about just a simple list of products that are or are not allowed in Cuba. It’s really attacking Cuba’s ability to make any transactions at all, to be able to engage in trade in a timely and smooth way which is required in order to maintain its systems, in order to have inputs that are going to go into the mouths of the people, into their cars, into generating power, and things of this nature.

I want to pivot a little bit to talking a little about the political situation, particularly with the Biden administration, which has made several promises on different occasions to reverse Trump’s sanctions on Cuba, particularly reconsidering Cuba’s placement on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. That’s a promise that is yet to be fulfilled. And with time running out in the Biden administration, it doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s going to be a priority for this presidency.

Liz, I know that you and Belly of the Beast are coming out with some new documentaries that approach this topic, so I’m wondering if you can educate our audience a little bit on why exactly the Biden administration has adopted the stance as it has. And Manolo, I’m curious as well if you can speak a little bit from your experience in attempting to get this current administration to change its policies.

Liz Oliva Fernández:  Well, I can’t talk about why the administration is keeping Cuba in the State Sponsors of Terrorism list because I don’t know why, because they haven’t explained why. They say the thing is on their review, but it has been on the review since the beginning of the Biden administration. And also they don’t have any proof, any evidence that Cuba actually sponsored terrorism.

And the excuse that they give to journalists, they’re really big, and they’re talking about US political prisoners that Cuba gave asylum in the ’80s. And Cuba, as any other country around the world, is privileged to give asylum, whatever citizen and asking for, we consider that this is the right thing to do. And we did in the ’80s. So back to now, from then to now we haven’t given asylum to any other US citizens, and they never explained.

But in fact, it is something that is funny. And I say funny because for the last year I was covering the cooperation between Cuba and the United States. I had the opportunity to interview the Coast Guard, the person who represents the US Coast Guard and US Embassy here in Havana, and they talk wonderfully about Cuba.

In fact, if you review the documents from the State Department to talk about the counterterrorism support cooperation between Cuba the United States, they give Cuba excellent qualifications because Cuba is the main ally to the United States in the Caribbean and South America in order to fight terrorism, drug trafficking, and human trafficking, smuggling, everything.

So how is it possible that you start collaboration and cooperation with a country that supports terrorism is the same country that is helping the United States to fight terrorism? Is this not an irony? Is it not something that is lacking an argument? When you ask someone what is going on, you are collaborating, you have cooperation with someone that you say is a terrorist and supports terrorism but are helping you to fight against terrorism?

I think that’s the biggest question that the Biden administration has to answer at some point. Because so far we haven’t heard a single argument that really gives evidence about why Cuba is on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

Manolo De Los Santos:  Well, I think that the US, to begin with, has over a two-centuries-long obsession with dominating Cuba. It has been a premise for almost every US president, in one way or another, to seize Cuba, dominate Cuba, occupy Cuba, control Cuba, confront Cuba, all on the basis that it’s seen to be a territory that should always be in the sphere of influence of the United States, if not directly a part of it. There have even been attempts at annexation in these last 200 years.

But if we were to look at what’s been happening in the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, I think there was this false idea that the Cuban revolution was on its last legs, that if there was enough of a push, the Cuban government would fall, and again, 200 years of dreams of dominating Cuba could be finally realized.

And therefore there’s been, for the past five years, I would say, a bipartisan consensus on maintaining harsh, I would say, quite cruel and inhumane strength in sanctions against Cuba. I don’t think anyone in Washington, on either side of the bench, Republicans or Democrats, really believe that Cuba actually belongs on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. I don’t think anyone actually, even people who hate Cuba or are anti-Cuba within Congress, don’t actually believe that Cuba is engaging in any activity that supports terrorism.

But ultimately the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, not just from regards to Cuba but to any of the countries that are listed on it, has always been used as a political tool in order to campaign publicly against the so-called enemies of US interests.

The bigger question, I think, that’s yet to be seen is, regardless of what Biden does in this new period, is when will US politicians realize that the Cubans do not want to give up on their political independence? That no matter every attempt that the US has made over the last six decades to overthrow the Cuban government, to starve its people, to create so much deprivation and so much suffering that people have no other option. Even in those circumstances, even among Cubans who do not agree with the Cuban revolution, who do not agree with the socialist project, there’s a strong fervor for maintaining their political independence.

And that should always be the basis for any serious conversation between the Cuban government and the US government. When will the US government actually wise up to this? That is the question that is yet to be seen.

Ju-Hyun:  Thank you both so much for setting that up for us. I want to briefly detour to bringing up this memorandum from the State Department from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Mallory to his colleague [inaudible]. This was outlining the program for the sanctions regime or the beginning of the blockade against Cuba.

This is a memo from 1960. And it very clearly states that the goal of the blockade was to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow government.

So really just highlighting that last point that you’re making here, Manolo, that this is part of a long-standing political project with very specific goals from the United States in terms of establishing influence over Cuba, in terms of undermining its independent project.

I want to pivot a little bit as we reach a good halfway point in this conversation to talk about what the efforts of the Cuban people and government look like in the face of these challenges.

We’ve outlined what exactly the challenge is, where it comes from in the form of the blockade, and talked a bit about how it’s quite unlikely that we’re going to see a sudden about-face from the US government given the conditions that are prevailing at this time.

So can you tell us a little bit more about the efforts that are being made by the Cuban people, by the Cuban government to establish resilience to resolve the issues of hunger and energy that they’re facing? And maybe if you can also tie in some of the work that you are doing as well to support those efforts, that would be great.

Manolo De Los Santos:  So I think considering the difficult circumstances that the Cuban people and the government face in which essentially their hands are being tied behind their backs, to be able to respond to any of these challenges is incredibly difficult.

But what I have noticed consistently, and I think it is remarkable when you compare to other countries around the world who have gone through similar situations, is that the first premise of the Cuban government and its people has been to not engage in any internal neoliberal package to dismantle the state of social welfare that has existed on the island for 60 years.

The pressure always in these circumstances is to privatize. The pressure is always to leave as many people out of a project that has prided itself on including everyone in its provision of healthcare, of education, of housing, and so on for so many people.

Of course Cuba has had to deal with all these provisions but with very severe limitations. But you could say for the most part that it has provided for the well-being of its people, and I think the fact that it wants to continue doing that at all costs, even with the delays, even with the severe limitations under these cruel sanctions, is remarkable.

 I think the other challenge that it faces is finding partners on the world stage that are willing and able to take sacrifices and actually challenge US hegemony in providing alternative sources of development for Cuba. And I think this is the case of countries like China and Russia that are actively now working with Cuba to build alternative sources of renewable fuel that allow Cuba to sustain itself without having to depend as much on the import of diesel and oil and other sources of fuels.

There are other areas, which is self-sustainability of its agriculture. There are many partners around the world, again, China, Russia but many others, including movements, including the landless workers movements of Brazil, who are actively working with the Cuban people to develop the capacity, for example, for Cuba to produce its own fertilizers rather than have to continue to import at such a high cost from other parts of the world. These are many things that ultimately do not fix the whole scenario, but that begin to allow the Cuban people to develop, at their own pace, under these extreme pressures.

And I think our responsibility as people living in the United States is not to provide charity to the Cuban people, but, on the contrary, to help them in their process of standing up on their own two feet. I think the Cuban people are a proud people. They are people who have proven to the world not once, but many times over, their incredible capacity to create, to build, to actually show us what an alternative in a future society could look like.

But they need our support to get there. And any effort of solidarity, whether we’re sending food aid to support at this moment, but also supporting their biotechnological development, and many other areas of their development, is crucially important.

Liz Oliva Fernández:  And I come back to the beginning when you talk about the protests. If you want to know about what the situation in Cuba looks like, just see the protests, when the people are asking for food and electricity during the protests. I think that that shows you the scenario. 

Also, I can’t talk about the government, but I can talk about me and my neighbors how it’s difficult, even having an incredible healthcare system like we have in Cuba, access to treatments. We have the best doctors and physicians and nurses. And all the physicians that we teach and we grow here in Cuba, and we can’t have access to treatment. 

Why? Because we don’t have access to medicines because the biggest pharmacies are in the United States or belong to someone that is related to the United States. It’s illegal for Cuba to have access to biotechnology. That’s why we started to develop our own biotechnology in the ‘90s. And we did it quite successfully, because we were able to create not one but two vaccines against COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

For example, why do the protests in Cuba make it to the mainstream media outlets? Why do the protests in Cuba, even when they’re small or big or medium, no matter the size, make it to the mainstream media? Why are they so hungry about the scarcity of the necessities that we have in Cuba? 

Why are they covering that instead of covering Palestine, what is happening there? Or covering what is happening in Haiti and the role that the United States has been playing in Haiti and [inaudible] DR or whatever? Because the situation in Cuba is no different, in so many aspects, from the rest of Latin America or the Caribbean. 

But why do they care? Why do they cover the protests, but they never care about the sanctions? They never report about how the sanctions affect us. Or how these groups of Cuban Americans, that they have a powerful group in Congress trying to talk about Cubans, but they haven’t put a foot in Cuba so far and they don’t understand our reality here. So why? 

And I think I don’t have just one answer for that, but for me it is about the way that they want to portray us. They don’t care about freedom or freedom of speech or whatever in Cuba. They don’t care. It’s the same people that are trying to criminalize social justice in Florida. They’re criminalizing Black protesters in the United States. They’re supporting having access to guns and the NRA in the United States. They don’t care about social justice or equality or whatever. They’re just trying to portray us as a failed state. They need to portray that, and the media is helping a lot with this.

For example, why the ministry is not covering what has happened with Havana syndrome? Two new studies, two new studies from the NIH say that there is no evidence that these people that were US diplomats here in Havana have brain damage. That blows apart the whole theory that they have brain damage. And that’s the beginning of a series of sanctions, increases of sanctions on the Cuban people and on Cuba, and they never cover that. 

And we have to watch 60 Minutes from last week, and they say that they have new evidence. New evidence from what? New evidence from where? Why is the media covering that instead of doing journalism from the beginning and trying to get to what is behind all these policies that the United States have been wanting for more than 60 years now on Cuba?

Ju-Hyun:  Thank you so much for those explanations. For our audience members who may be unfamiliar, Havana syndrome, what Liz was referring to, was a theorized syndrome that was exclusively afflicting US diplomatic personnel stationed in Havana. And at the time that this was reported, the State Department alleged that the Cubans were using an unknown sonic weapon to specifically target their personnel. 

In repeated medical examinations since then, it’s been proven time and again that there likely were no such actual physical symptoms that people were experiencing, and consequently, there’s just no basis that these US diplomatic staffs were the victims of a Cuban sonic attack, as was described at the time. 

I want to close us out by looking at this headline from Bloomberg Media from Juan Pablo Spinetto. It says “Communist Cuba Is on the Brink of Collapse”. I wanted to bring this in because this is the dominant narrative that we’re seeing from corporate media in this moment, that the crisis in Cuba is reaching a point of no return. 

Shortly after the protests on March 17 or 18, there were a number of social media accounts alleging that the protests were specifically targeted at getting rid of the socialist system altogether. And some of the other media coverage has also tied in recent price hikes, which were announced in Cuba earlier this year in response to the crisis of food and fuel that is currently taking place. 

I’m wondering if you two can provide us with a little bit more information, shine a little light on the real situation. What is the real level of political thinking and satisfaction in Cuba at the moment despite all these challenges? And is there any merit to the claims that we are seeing in US-based media that the Cuban government is reneging on socialism, it’s pursuing austerity, and that it’s ultimately going to be unable to fix this economic crisis or preserve itself politically?

Liz Oliva Fernández:  Well, the level of satisfaction is really low. But I just want to come back to the title because they say communist Cuba is about to collapse or something like that. I can’t remember exactly the words that they use. And I say this, but I’m so sorry I haven’t had an opportunity to read the entire article. 

But I don’t know if they explain why. I always say the situation in Cuba is very bad. People are really frustrated and angry. You can see the numbers of migration, people trying to leave the country if they have the opportunity. If they don’t, they are angry. 

We don’t know about the future. We don’t know if what is going on in Cuba and what has happened is going to happen in the next few years because most of these answers we can’t answer back here. Most of this question we cannot answer here in Cuba because it does not depend on us.

The situation in Cuba nowadays does not just depend on us. It mostly depends on the United States, on the United States’s policy on Cuba. That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole question. 

And it’s curious because maybe when you go down here and you talk to the people and you ask them, okay, what do you think about what is going on? What do you think about US sanctions? 

Most of them, maybe, I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about percent, but maybe a small percent of people, they want to talk to you about, okay, this is the way the sanctions affect us. Because the sanctions are too far away from us. You can point with your finger to the sanctions, you can point with your fingers to someone that is not against Manolo. The sanctions are not against Manolo, it’s not against Liz Oliva. So you need to have the big picture, have the big understanding of how the sanctions affect you and your family. Because they don’t want to point, they want solutions. And the solutions, many of them are not in Cuba. They don’t depend on Cuba. 

So how do you feel if your entire life depends on the actions of someone else. How do you feel? Frustrated, angry? I can’t understand the whole thing. I just want solutions. I just want to start to survive. 

People now used to say we were happy and we didn’t know. We were happy and we didn’t know because the situation is getting worse. We have always had a scarcity of so many things. I think that we live in a bubble, because we always have had access to basic things, small things, but are they things that we need to survive, to live, to live a happy life? Not with many things, with many material things. But we are people that have a strong spirit and we take care of each other even with the hard menu to offer to the other one. 

But we are happy. That’s why you understand that so many children in the US have mental problems and so many children in Cuba, even when they don’t have candies or chocolate or whatever, or toys, they’re so happy, and they laugh the whole time because we have a different society. And to understand that you need to be able to live and to experience Cuba, the whole thing. So now we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s the reality, and that’s sad.

People who have the privilege, like me, of having traveled to the United States to study, taking time to dedicate to study how the sanctions have been affecting not just me and my family, but the whole country. Everybody is paying attention to the next elections in the US, who is going to win? Because most of the people, they think that Biden is going to do something in the second term, if they have a second term. But oh, is Biden going to win the second term? Is Donald Trump going to win the second term? What is going on in the United States, and how are the elections in the United States going to affect the lives of 11 million people in Cuba?

Manolo De Los Santos:  Well, I fully agree with Liz. I would just add that headlines like that are a sign of Washington’s wishful thinking, but it also has dangerous connotations, and it’s a connotation that we have to defeat in many ways. 

One, the idea that the crisis that Cuba is facing is Cuban made. It is of their own doing. I think that has to be corrected as much as possible because always these headlines, but generally US mainstream media, always seeks to hide the hand of how the empire works day and night to destroy the livelihoods of the Cuban people. And we know of it through US documents. We know it through the Mallory Memorandum. But we see it concretely in the policies that the US government takes. 

The other element that I think is important to clarify is that this is not the first time that the US government and the US media talk about a collapse in Cuba. They were saying the same thing in the early ‘90s, when I would say Cuba faced an even worse scenario because they had effectively lost their major trading partners in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, they lost most of their income overnight. The country was reduced in what we now describe as a peak oil crisis, meaning very little to no fuel was entering the country. In fact, a level of food crisis unprecedented. And yet the Cuban people survived. 

And I think they survived, in part, to what Liz mentions, which is a different ethic, a different approach to collective well-being. A society that ultimately puts human beings first, and is, despite all the odds and all the challenges, is trying to figure out how to maintain a certain quality of life within the possible for the majority of its people without sacrificing anyone. And I think that makes a difference. 

I don’t know if in the United States we would be able to respond to a crisis of this type if all of a sudden millions of people in the United States lost access to food, fuel, and medicine at major scale. I’m talking about, let’s say more than half of the US population, would our society be able to respond so collectively, so calmly, so grounded in their humanity to such a level of crisis? I would think not.

Liz Oliva Fernández:  I just want to add that you have your own crisis to resolve, and there is still [inaudible]. Just look at the situation of Black people in the United States in general, the access to food, to real food, not just snack food, to medicines, to the healthcare system, to everything. The mortality of Black moms in the United States. That’s another point you have to face off. 

That’s the thing for me, when people say, okay, but what kind of things does the United States have to do in order to help Cuba? And I always respond the same. We don’t need help. Just leave us alone. That’s the only thing that the United States has to do. We have to deal with our own problems and our own stuff, but you can’t intervene with us, not for good, not for bad. Just don’t intervene at all.

Ju-Hyun:  Precisely. And as you’re both saying, we can look at the state of the United States today and see a number of crises that are already taking place. There is a crisis of hunger, there is a crisis of Black maternal mortality, there is a crisis of education, of healthcare. And we can also see the ways that our government is actually responding, which is, in most cases, to simply leave people out in the cold. 

For regular listeners of The Real News, you’ll be familiar with our coverage of the recent bridge collapse in Baltimore, of the train derailment in East Palestine, all the ways that the workers and communities that are left behind after those catastrophes have been left to twist in the wind. And that really speaks to the different ethical social approaches that the two of you are talking about. 

Now, before we say goodbye, I’m hoping that you can close us out by just talking about the work that you’re currently engaged in, how listeners can continue to support you and stay involved.

Manolo De Los Santos:  Well, out of The People’s Forum, we’re actively engaging in political education about what’s taking place in Cuba, and overall trying to build awareness, not just about Cuba itself, but obviously the history and the context that comes into what we know as US-Cuba relations today. 

We’re also engaging in major initiatives to support the Cuban people. One of the latest examples of that is our Let Cuba Live: Bread for our Neighbors campaign, which has the goal of sending 800 tons of wheat flour to Cuba within the next month, with the aspiration of being able to give at least 5 million Cubans a piece of bread every day for a month in order to help support them through this difficult moment. Not as a sign of charity, but actually as a sign of encouragement to their people as they continue to struggle and fight, but also to raise light on what the Marco Rubios of our world are constantly saying and raising as truth, but that we know are actually lies when it comes to the extent of this blockade and how it affects the Cuban people on a day-to-day basis.

Liz Oliva Fernández:  Well, in the case of Belly of the Beast, we are coming with two new documentaries: Hardliner on the Hudson that focuses on Bob Menendez and the role that he played during the Biden administration to support the sanctions against Cuba and all the corruption scandals that involve him. 

The other one is Uphill on the Hill that focuses on the Biden administration and the politics that are taking place in Washington. They’re trying to maintain the sanctions on Cuba. We interview Congress people, we interview the people who actually live in Washington DC and what they think about not only the sanctions against Cuba, but also about Cuba being on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, and what does that mean. 

If you want to know more about these two new documentaries, you can stay tuned and subscribe to Belly of the Beast’s Cuba YouTube channel, and you can see the premiere in the upcoming months, May.

Ju-Hyun:  Wonderful. We’ll make sure to share the links to both of those initiatives that you mentioned in the show notes. So if you’re listening to this, go ahead and jump into the podcast description and you’ll be able to find a link to help support the drive to deliver much needed flour to our comrades in Cuba, and also to keep up with Belly of the Beast in anticipation of their soon to be released documentaries. 

That’ll be all for today. Thank you so much again, Manolo and Liz. Before we close, I’d like to give a shout-out to The Real News Studio team: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara for making this episode possible. And finally, to you, our audience. Thank you for listening, and we’ll catch you next time here on The Real News.

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Ju-Hyun Park is the engagement editor at The Real News.