On May 20, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro on charges of murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens. These absurd charges are part of the Trump administration’s campaign to asphyxiate Cuba, including threats of military assault, in order to topple the Cuban Revolution.
Women in Cuba are among those most directly affected by Washington’s criminal blockade of the island’s access to fuel. The U.S. blockade of oil shipments has strained the Cuban electrical grid to the breaking point, limiting critical services such as medical care and delivery of medications, transportation of food and other essential commodities, access to clean water, and education. This article and video from Belly of the Beast illustrate the hardships, but also the resilience and fighting spirit, of Cuban women today.
In this post, Belly of the Beast reports on a rousing bicycle rally that took over Malecón, the seaside promenade of Havana, Cuba’s capital, on April 2, 2026, to denounce Washington’s economic war — which the Trump administration escalated in January by blockading virtually all fuel oil from entering the island nation — and to defend Cuba’s sovereignty. Belly of the Beast also reports on the first Russian oil tanker that broke the U.S. blockade on March 31, delivering “more than 700,000 barrels of oil, the first shipment in three months to reach the island,” and on the effects on the Cuban people of the ongoing U.S. siege.
This is a Cuban American’s story from the Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba. “I traveled to Cuba this month,” writes Gerardo Delgado. “As a Cuban American, that sentence carries the weight of longing born of an estrangement from my roots. For much of my life, Cuba existed as a distant story, a place I knew only through descriptions from my father. I was there as part of an international solidarity convoy; over 500 representatives from more than 30 countries, united by a simple conviction: no country has the right to strangle another simply because it chose a different path. I cannot stand by while the island of my family’s heritage is suffocated.”
Over the last month, the U.S. government has intensified its decades-long aggression against Cuba. Oil shipments to the island from Venezuela have been cut off since Washington’s January 3, 2026, attack on that country. On January 22, the Trump administration threatened a full naval blockade of the island nation. And on January 29, Trump signed an executive order labeling Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States and declaring that Washington will impose punitive tariffs on any country trading oil with Cuba. In a statement published here, Isaac Saney, a Cuba specialist and Black studies professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, takes apart Trump’s latest imperial edict.
On January 29, 2026, U.S. president Donald Trump issued a new executive order declaring a “national emergency” because of the “unusual and extraordinary threat” the island nation allegedly poses to the United States. Trump declared his administration would impose punitive tariffs on any country sending oil to Cuba. Earlier, Trump had threatened to impose a naval blockade around Cuba to completely cut off the supply of oil to the island. We publish in this post the response by Cuban leader Ernesto Limia Diaz and other Cuban revolutionaries to the latest Yankee assault on Cuba.
We are pleased to publish below an interview with Ernesto Limia Díaz (EL), a historian, writer, member of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (known as UNEAC, its Spanish-language acronym), and director of the TV program MARCAS. He is also the author of the bilingual book Patria y cultura en Revolución (Homeland and Culture in Revolution).