Dispatch From Cuba | The Nation

The convoy consists of more than 500 people from more than 30 countries bringing an estimated 20 tons of aid, including food, medicine, solar panels, and bicycles, according to organizers. The venture was originally called a flotilla, until it became clear that an airlift of supplies and supporters made more sense, though three or so boats are still due to arrive in the coming days from Mexico carrying international passengers and cargo. Convoy participants include left-wing legislators from Great Britain, France, Colombia, Chile, and the European Parliament. “Cuba is not a threat to anybody except if you think free medical care, free education, and a culturally diverse population is a threat to the world,” said Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the British Parliament and former head of the Labour Party. “Then it is a threat because it’s a threat by example.”

The convoy borrows its name from the title of a defining 1891 essay by Cuban poet and independence fighter José Martí, in which he warned against the avaricious instincts of the “formidable neighbor” to the north. The neighbor “may begin to covet her,” Martí wrote of US designs on Latin America—accurately foreshadowing a century of hemispheric meddling and President Trump’s boast that “we will be having the honor of taking Cuba.”

“It’s very important to be showing up and taking our US passports and saying, not just ‘Not in our name,’ but we’re going to try to raise the cost politically of any intervention that tries to subjugate and eviscerate the Cuban people,” David Adler, general coordinator of Progressive International, an organizer of the convoy, said in an interview with The Nation. The convoy is designed to be a “spark for a global movement…where we can really make this issue as urgent as it’s felt every hour of every day by the Cuban people.”

The idea for a mass mission to Cuba was conceived in late January right after President Trump vowed that any nation that dared ship oil to Cuba would be punished with sanctions. In fact, no oil has reached Cuba in three months, according to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and it’s been scarce since 2019, when Trump launched a de facto blockade, which President Biden never lifted.

The result has been devastating. The Cuban electrical system depends on oil. Regional or local blackouts happen almost daily. Even national blackouts are becoming more common—there were two in the last six days, including one late Saturday, a day after most convoy participants arrived. No lights also means no water for many people. No cooking. The lack of fuel means no rides to work; the garbage gets collected once a month in some neighborhoods, and some schools have reduced schedules.

American officials “used to say, ‘Oh, there is no blockade; the only blockade is in Cuba itself,’” Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink, said in an interview. “Now they’re openly boasting about the blockade,” and people “are seeing directly that it is the US government, and it’s directly designed to make the Cubans’ lives miserable.”

Code Pink chartered a plane for 100 people to join the convoy. When they got to Havana, they fanned out to neighborhoods to help paint a playground and visit an elders home, among other activities with Havana residents.

The cargo hold of Code Pink’s charter bore 6,300 pounds of medical supplies worth $433,000, shipped by Global Health Partners. “We’ve been through crises in Cuba before but there’s something significantly different in this moment,” said Bob Schwartz, executive director of the health nonprofit.

The supplies for the Code Pink charter had been collected in Orange County, California, by Carl and Tara Eaton, a retired couple who run a chapter of Not Just Tourists, which sends medical supplies to countries in need. “I can’t think of a more desperate situation than Cuba right now,” Carl Eaton said.

Finally, it was members of the Los Angeles Hands Off Cuba committee who helped pack the supplies for trucking to Miami. This diffuse and autonomous organizing was characteristic of how countless groups and people around the world—most of whom didn’t make the trip to Havana—united under the umbrella of the convoy to come to Cuba’s aid.

“Cuba fundraisers don’t do this well ever, but I think a lot of people across the country just feel the urgency of the moment and want to do something concrete to help,” Manolo de los Santos, executive director of the People’s Forum and also an organizer of the convoy, said in an interview with The Nation. His group led a campaign that quickly raised $500,000 for solar panels. “There’s also an element of seeing Cuba as the underdog who is fighting the good fight with nothing but its dignity…to face the full onslaught of the US empire, and I think standing with them gives us a sense of hope for our own struggles here in the US.”

De los Santos brought a group of 40 people on the convoy. Most were in their 20s and many were making their first trip to Cuba. They visited a hospital, a farm, and a state-owned neighborhood bakery, where a daily small loaf of bread costs less than a penny. The administrator of the bakery, Yenis Diaz González, said they couldn’t get parts for their modern oven, so they built another from parts. When the power goes out, workers change their shifts to bake when there’s electricity. Sometimes shipments of flour sit unloaded in the harbor because Cuba, cut off from the international banking system, lacks the cash or credit to pay.

Across the street was a competitor, a privately owned bakery and food production plant, where the bread costs a little more but is higher quality, in the opinion of owner Arnoldo Padrón Sarduy. While his private enterprise is the kind that US officials applaud, the blockade is hurting him, too. Since December, the cost of trucking imported raw materials from the port has quadrupled, and the price of flour has risen 25 percent. “The price of everything has gone up, and the quality has gone down,” he said.

Making her first trip to Cuba with the group was Emi Lockwood, 26, of Los Angeles, who works in higher education. After visiting the two bakeries she said, “I have taken inspiration from the courage of the Cuban people for many years…. As I’m here, I’m seeing and meeting so many hometown heroes. Like everyday people who step up to the plate” for their communities.

Jorge Alvarez, 27, who works for a mental health nonprofit in Jersey City, was also making his first trip. His father had been brought by his parents from Cuba to the US at the age of 4 and had never been back. “What better way to understand Cuba than connecting with Cubans here,” the younger Alvarez said. “That for me was something I was really excited about, and of course just connecting with my culture. My dad didn’t grow up with a lot of Cuban pride, and I wanted to experience what that’s like here—like what does it mean to be proud to be Cuban? I can feel that here.”

Alvarez said he finds the critical attitude of Cuban elders in exile like his father to lack nuance. “They love to say ‘Patria y Vida’”—or, ‘Homeland and Life,’ rather than Fidel Castro’s slogan, ‘Homeland or Death.’ “Does asking Trump to invade and provoking violence lead to a better ‘life’?… Why suffocate a nation and why force them into circumstances that the people who are innocent suffer at the expense of political agendas and leaders who are very out of touch?”

The convoy’s first touchdown in Havana came Thursday when an Italian delegation delivered about five tons of medical supplies to a surgical hospital. The donations and the one-on-one encounters continued through the weekend. There were shipments from Colombia, Brazil, France, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, according to organizers. Distribution across the island was being coordinated by the Cuban Institute for Friendship with People.

San Francisco–based Global Exchange brought a group of 20 along with $20,000 worth of specialized cancer drugs. They also carried other supplies to a school for hearing-impaired children. The teachers explained that the children’s families were having trouble getting the special batteries necessary for the young ones’ hearing aids. Global Exchange put those batteries on its list for the next visit to Cuba. “Trump is framing this as the efforts of a friendly takeover but the reality for Cuban families is this…a brutal campaign of economic strangulation that’s restricting fuel, food, and medicine,” said Corina Nolet, co–executive director of Global Exchange.

The convoy prioritized medical aid because public health is where some of the most dramatic shortcomings have emerged. The Cuban National Office of Statistics and Information reported that infant mortality from 2020 to 2024 rose from six to nearly 10 babies in 1,000 across the island, and to nearly 13 babies in Havana. Experts say it’s only gotten worse in the last year. Doctors have joined the staggering 2 million Cubans who have left the island in the last several years. The number of doctors fell 27 percent from 2020 to 2024, and there was a 40 percent drop in the number of family practitioners. A British medical journal’s survey of the impact of sanctions on child health in Cuba recently reported that survival rates of pediatric cancer patients are falling.

Trump’s targeting of Cuba’s main sources of revenue, including tourism—the number of international visitors dropped from a record 4.75 million in 2018 to 1.8 million in 2025, according to the statistics office—and sending tens of thousands of Cuban doctors around the world has emptied Cuba’s coffers. The country can’t buy enough specialized medicines or medical equipment to complement what it receives in donations. While the US does not officially prohibit shipping medicine to Cuba, though it requires a license, Cuban officials say multinational pharmaceutical companies have cut Cuba off rather than risk running afoul of American law and red tape. Some American medical equipment manufacturers have also stopped doing business with Cuba, while the blockade prevents Cuba from buying foreign equipment if even 10 percent of the components are American-made.

Medical aid carried by the convoy could “be the difference even of life and death for some people,” Vice Minister of Foreign Relations Carlos Fernández de Cossio said in a meeting with reporters, responding to a question from The Nation. “Or the difference in an agonizing illness or having the same illness with less pain, less suffering…. You can’t imagine the pressure on our doctors when they have to decide, as if they were God, this product that I have, should I use it on this individual who might die in a week, or should I use it on this other one who has a longer lifespan?”

Cuba’s customarily disciplined and cautious officials occasionally let their guards down during their encounters with the convoy and reporters. Asked by a reporter how the blockade affected him personally, Cossio said that during the last blackout, his home lost power for 36 hours, and for 14 hours during the one before that. He also lost water. “I leave home without power and I return without power,” he said. A son of his is an electrician. He rides 14 kilometers on a bicycle to work helping to fix electrical systems, then he “goes back home to a blackout. Multiply that with Cuban families.”

After a statistics-laden briefing on electrical generation and Cuba’s rapid shift to solar power, Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy mentioned that he hadn’t been able to finish drafting his presentation until two that morning because there had been no power in his house. Minister of Education Naima Ariatne Trujillo’s voice broke as she described trying to explain cutbacks and shortages to young students. “This is very emotional,” she said. “There are questions I can’t answer to my son, questions I can’t explain to students…. The school in Cuba is so sacred.”

On Friday afternoon, Díaz-Canel welcomed a couple hundred convoy participants to the convention center. “Your presence on the island constitutes a profound demonstration of friendship, sensibility, and human commitment to the Cuban people,” he told them. The crowd chanted, “Cuba no está sola”—Cuba is not alone.

Saturday morning, a few hundred more gathered under massive spreading shade trees on the back patio of a mansion occupied by the friendship institute. There were scattered T-shirts saying “Let Cuba Breathe” among the guayabera shirts. Díaz-Canel seated convoy organizer Adler by his side in the front row. Tabitha Arnold, an artist and organizer from Chattanooga, presented a tapestry she made inspired by a May Day celebration she attended in Cuba. La Colmenita, a renowned children’s theatrical troupe, sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” in English.

That evening, the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap—also part of the convoy—gave a short concert in a pavilion a few blocks from the Malecón. They invited the crowd—mostly convoy visitors—to join “the first ever Kneecap Cuban mosh pit.” Earlier, band member Mo Chara said the Irish and the Cubans share an understanding of colonialism. “We grew up with Cuban and Palestinian flags when we were kids,” he said. “These were countries that always showed solidarity with us, and it’s our duty to return the favor back to these countries.”

In the end, the convoy was a rebuke to the logic of those who say heightened pressure on Cuba is worth the price of short-term suffering to try to force regime change. At a press conference in Miami on the day Trump announced the oil blockade in January, Republican Representative Carlos Giménez likened the Cuban government to a cancer. “Many times, the medicine is hard, but in the end, the patient is cured,” he said. On X that day, Republican Representative Maria Elvira Salazar posted: “And yes, I understand it, it is devastating to think about a mother’s hunger, about a child who needs immediate help…. But that is precisely the brutal dilemma we face as an exile community: to ease suffering in the short term or to free Cuba once and for all.”

However, the convoy didn’t directly take on critiques of the Cuban system—that economic mismanagement has contributed to problems, especially inflation and inefficiency; and the lack of Western-style democracy and free expression. Rather, convoy participants argued that it’s more urgent now to focus on the mass human crisis caused at least in part by intentional US policy.

Adler deflected a question on the matter by suggesting that when an elephant steps on the mouse’s tail, it’s wrong to scrutinize the mouse.

“People can have disagreements with the Cuban system,” de los Santos said. “At the end of the day, it’s actually not about what people think about whether Cuba is democratic or not, but rather about the fact that the US government has been solely focused for decades now, and even more so in this last year of the Trump administration, in starving the Cuban people.”

“I have criticized the Cuban government over lots of things in the past, including economic policies, and now I feel like, all right, I’m not even going to go there now,” said Benjamin, of Code Pink. “Any criticism that we had is just not relevant right now when this level of cruelty is being imposed by this administration.”

Convoy activities were set to continue into early this week. On Sunday, American mural artists including Andy Shallal (owner of Busboys & Poets restaurants in DC) and Francisco Letelier (whose body of work has dealt with imperial oppression in Latin America and the Middle East) were working with Cuban artists and community members on painting a mural on a prominent wall overlooking a plaza on the Malecón. The design includes large letters spelling the word “Humanidad.”

On Monday, designer and author Valerie Landau was planning to deliver 150 pairs of ballet shoes from members of the San Francisco Ballet to the Cuban National Ballet. “I know most people are bringing medicine and food, which are needed,” Landau said. “But I also feel like experiencing joy and culture is important and, to quote Emma Goldman, if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution, so I’m bringing dance shoes.”

Monday was also when the first boat was scheduled to arrive, with convoy passengers and a cargo including solar panels and bicycles.

Meanwhile, future projects are already planned. MEDICC, a public health nonprofit, is raising $62,000 for a private Cuban contractor to install solar panel systems at 10 maternity homes, which are temporary residences for women facing difficult pregnancies. In addition to trying to reverse infant-mortality trends, the idea is to make a donation that won’t wear out or get used up but will keep producing energy for years to come, said Gail Reed, cofounder of MEDICC and a journalist. “It is a real contribution to a stress-freer environment for these women who really need it,” she said.

Global Health Partners is planning upcoming shipments of medical supplies like the one on the convoy, and also a $4 million shipment of sophisticated drugs under climate control for treating rare and devastating genetic metabolic disorders. The group is also preparing to collaborate with Cuba’s public health system on a pilot project to bolster neonatal and maternal health that could be rolled out across the island. “What they need is the equipment to be able to provide the type of services they want,” Schwartz said.

Yet convoy participants realize that all their contributions combined aren’t enough. So they say they’re returning home inspired to push for a new American policy toward Cuba. The Americans among them will be returning at a time when a new YouGov poll found that more Americans disapprove (46 percent) than approve (28 percent) of blocking oil shipments.

“It takes great privilege to be able to travel, to purchase airfare, to be in another country, but certainly then when you come back you have a larger responsibility to support the Cuban people in a different way,” Nolet, of Global Exchange, said. “It’s about ending the blockade. It’s always about ending the blockade because that is where the shift will happen. That’s when the strangulation stops. That’s where we can see real change.”