The Cuban Handshake

September 10, 2026 — Belly of the Beast

At a maternity hospital in Cuba, anesthesiologist Dr. Yudmila Rodríguez Verdecia describes what happens when electricity fails during an operation.

“The surgery cannot be stopped. We have had to keep operating under the glow of cell phone flashlights,” she says in Cuba’s latest annual report to the United Nations.

The Cuban government calculates that U.S. economic warfare caused $8.083 billion in damage between March 2025 and February 2026, bringing its estimate of the cumulative cost of U.S. policy since Cuba’s 1959 revolution to $178.7 billion.

Watch Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla explain the damages HERE.

In addition to the six-decade-old embargo, the report points to a web of financial restrictions, the State Sponsors of Terrorism designation, the 1996 Helms-Burton Act and a de facto oil blockade that restrict access to essential goods and services.

Licet Rodríguez Alonso, who accompanies her son Diego between Villa Clara and Havana for cancer care, says fuel shortages from the U.S. oil blockade make her worry if his treatment can continue.

“Diego is in radiation [therapy], but there’s no fuel,” she says. “How will those machines run?”

Other medical supplies are already in Cuba but cannot reliably reach patients. According to the report, more than 30,000 children have been unable to receive vaccinations on schedule because fuel shortages have disrupted refrigerated transport, leaving medications stuck in warehouses.

The lack of fuel also affects food production. During the growing season ending in early 2026, irrigation operated for an average of just two hours a day rather than the 16 hours needed, the report says.

Meanwhile, UN agencies cited in the report describe disrupted shipments of more than 2,900 metric tons of food aid and $630,000 worth of medical supplies.

Shipping companies Hapag-Lloyd (Germany) and CMA CGM (France) stopped accepting new shipments to Cuba following Trump’s May 1 executive order threatening “secondary sanctions” on foreign companies doing business with blacklisted Cuban entities.

The report also identifies obstacles to buying and maintaining medical equipment. It says that due to payment restrictions and sanctions threats, the price of Japanese-made Olympus endoscopy equipment costs ten times more in Cuba than in other Latin American countries.

Baxter Healthcare (U.S.) and Vitalmex Interamericana (Mexico) cited the blockade in refusing to continue doing business with Cuba, while U.S.-made cardiac pumps remain “out of reach” to children with severe heart conditions.

The report describes a shortage of working Braille machines for blind students. Meanwhile, deaf students are unable to access cochlear implants because of broken components or missing batteries.

Read the full report HERE.

September 3, 2026 — Belly of the Beast

The impact of the Trump administration’s oil blockade now reaches into every aspect of Cuban life, including how children prepare for school and what teachers can offer once they arrive.

Still, students returned to their classrooms excited to begin a new year.

“I haven’t seen my classmates for about two months,” said Samuel Orta Pacheco, a middle school student in Havana. “Honestly, I’m really happy to be back here.”

The beginning of the new school year required families and educators to navigate blackouts, shortages and a transportation system starved of fuel.

Without fuel for school buses, many teachers and students have to walk long distances to attend their classes.

Getting to school is only the first hurdle. Cuba’s deepening food crisis is affecting students once they arrive.

The UN says Cuba’s food production has declined 60% since the Trump administration imposed an oil blockade earlier this year, while the cost of basic foods has spiked. As food grows scarcer and fuel shortages disrupt deliveries, feeding students at school cafeterias has become another daily challenge.

“Do you have any idea what it has meant for a country that was once accustomed to guaranteeing a properly balanced and adequate protein intake to now have to figure out how to even transport the food children need from one place to another?” asked Education Minister Naima Trujillo Barreto.

The effort required to keep children in school does not end when they leave the classroom. At home, families work around the blackouts, taking uniforms to neighbors with electricity to iron them and finding rechargeable lamps so children can study.

“Despite all the shortages because of the blockade,” said Zulema Rodríguez Leyva, a preschool principal, “we’re a country willing to give it our all.”

​Watch our new video to see how Cuban families and educators are keeping children learning through blackouts and shortages.

August 26 — Belly of the Beast

Marco Rubio’s State Department accuses Cuba of fueling “far-left terror” in the United States and recruiting solidarity activists to “turn America against itself.”

According to Teishan Latner, a leading scholar of U.S.-Cuba left solidarity, the claims are the same ones the FBI and CIA made in the 1960s and 1970s. They were as spurious then, he says, as they are now.

This week, Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez speaks with Latner about how the State Department twisted his scholarship into a sweeping McCarthyite conspiracy theory to criminalize U.S. social justice movements and justify possible military action against Cuba.

When the State Department released its report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” last month, historian Teishan Latner recognized the material — some of it seemed to be drawn directly from his own writing.

Latner, a history professor at Thomas Jefferson University, has spent over a decade researching the ties between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. left. His 2018 book on the subject, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992, is the first multi-decade scholarly account on the subject.

According to Latner, the State Department report regurgitates false claims the FBI and CIA made about U.S.-based activists in the 1960s and 1970s, when the agencies alleged that U.S. solidarity delegations served as a recruiting pipeline for Cuban intelligence.

“There’s no evidence that Cuba has actually successfully recruited anyone who has been a member of a U.S. solidarity brigade,” Latner said.

Asked how he’d grade the report if a student submitted it as a paper, Latner said: “It would probably be a very poor grade, especially on the basis of evidence.”

While the report may be laughable as a work of scholarship, Latner says it serves a political purpose: to crack down on progressive organizations and leaders, and to strengthen the case for the administration’s hostile policy against Cuba.

Watch Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez’s interview with Latner HERE.

Paris, August 26 (Prensa Latina) One of the achievements of the Triumph of the Revolution was the dignity of the Cuban people and the end of their humiliation; hence the spirit of resistance that Fidel Castro instilled, Salim Lamrani declared today.By Antonio Rondón

• August 26, 2026 | 07:22

The French writer and professor noted that the Italian Gianni Minà, in an interview with Fidel, asked him what quality in a human being he most appreciated, and Fidel replied that it was loyalty to principles.

When asked what he detested most, Fidel replied that it was the betrayal of principles, recalled the specialist on the dispute between Cuba and the United States, in statements to Prensa Latina.

Therefore, the resistance of the Cuban people today is based on adherence to the principles of national sovereignty, social justice, socialism, internationalism, and the basic dignity of the human being, he commented.

Cubans are willing to engage in dialogue, but not to have the conditions for good relations dictated to them, noted the doctor and researcher from the Sorbonne University.

That’s why the United States is wrong in its political projection, from an operational point of view, because the Cubans have already shown that they will not give in on matters of principle and will remain faithful to them, the specialist argued.

We must recognize the resilience of the Cuban people. No one expected that when the oil embargo was introduced last December—it was imposed at the end of January, but no tanker had arrived since December—Cuba would hold out for more than two months, he commented.

But Cuba has already been resisting a medieval measure for almost nine months, an energy blockade that has a dramatic impact on all aspects of society, Lamrani said.

“This is because Cuba knows what it would mean to give up, because giving up would mean returning to the era of humiliation,” he said.

“It would be a return to the era when the President of the United States sends a special envoy to Cuba, without notifying the President of the Republic, to publicly humiliate you,” the researcher emphasized.

It is often said that after life, the most important thing is dignity, “although sometimes dignity is more important than life because living without that condition is living on your knees, something that makes no sense and Cuba has demonstrated that,” the specialist stated.

That has also been one of the achievements of the Cuban Revolution. That is why Fidel Castro obtained unanimous support. He managed to express the people’s deep yearning for dignity, he said.

The first conquest of the 1959 Revolution is the conquest of dignity, to definitively end the era of humiliation. That is why the Cuban people resist, because defending dignity is part of the Cuban people’s identity, Lamrani affirmed.

Few countries in the world had to fight for independence under such adverse conditions, and it was a 30-year struggle for that independence, the longest war in the Latin American region, the expert noted.

After an American intervention, which led to 60 years of a pseudo-republic, and despite that, despite the geographical fatalism and despite the fact that the United States dominated the Cuban economy and controlled the political situation, Cuba managed to achieve its independence, he pointed out.

This indicates that the core of resistance existing in the Cuban people is very strong, and that is why they have not managed to create a division in the revolutionary unity, an ever-present objective of the US government to end the Revolution, he explained.

They have not achieved that goal, and there is that legacy of what Fidel taught about not giving in, even in the most adverse circumstances, he stressed.

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