Cuba’s Crisis Requires Humanitarian Response

The island nation, denied relief from the Biden Administration, is looking to U.S. and Canadian citizens for help.

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While other disasters occupy world attention, a humanitarian crisis has unfolded in Cuba. It has also unfolded on my phone and my email, in distressing text messages, emails, and Whatsapp video chats I receive from friends and contacts there—that is, whenever the power is on and the Internet works for them.

The pandemic’s chilling effect on travel, Washington, D.C.’s ideological war against the island nation, and the Cuban government’s own obsession with information control have taken their toll. Food is now scarce, inflation rampant, medicines nearly impossible to get, the health system close to collapse, the electrical power system unreliable, and many consumer goods practically impossible to find.

Cuba has largely gone out of the news since the unprecedented public protests there on July 11. These protests were probably aided and abetted by the United States, as the Cuban government claims, but they certainly were also fueled by public despair.

“It’s a nightmare. Every minute that passes, the despair increases,” a friend in Santa Clara tells me. (I’m mostly avoiding using the names of my correspondents out of concern they could run afoul of new laws that restrict online dissent.) For Cubans who get COVID-19, he says, “there are no antibiotics so if you get a pneumonia, you do not have medication to lower the fever, you do not have a transport to go to the polyclinic so that you can see a doctor, and it is very possible that you have to wait many hours to be attended by the doctor.”

Such health care chaos is shocking to my friend. “We have always been a poor country but with a fairly good health system if we compare it with other poor countries,” he tells me. “We were not used to seeing or listening to news of so many people sick and dying.”

Although the U.S. trade embargo has impacted Cuba since 1960, Donald Trump’s 243 sanctions and hostile actions, all still maintained by President Joe Biden, have knee-capped Cuba’s economy. My friends wait in line for hours in the hot Cuban sun to get the basics. Black market prices, especially for antibiotics and other medicines, are soaring. One friend tells me that even beans, a Cuban dietary staple, can cost several dollars a pound, and meat is now a rarity.

There is a growing and worrisome divide between the fairly small number of Cubans who can get foreign currency—which is harder than ever to obtain now that the United States has cut off money transfers and other remittances—and those who can not. This is especially important because many consumer goods are only available in stores that don’t accept the national currency, which is used to pay salaries and pensions.

Tourism, the country’s main source of income and employment, has collapsed. One friend blames an attempt last winter to revive tourism for the current onslaught of the COVID-19 Delta variant currently overwhelming the island. With little to no work being offered, unemployed Cubans have had to rely on the scarce resources of an exhausted state.

Until just a few months ago, Cuba was doing relatively well in keeping COVID-19 numbers down. But the number of new daily cases reported neared 10,000 for a few days in August and averaged around 7,000 to 8,000 cases each day for the next month. On September 27, Cuba reported what could be a positive trend, with 6,009 new cases and fifty-one deaths in the past day. Then more good news came on October 1, with the count of new cases was down to 4,873. Overall, the island nation with about 11 million people has seen a total of 887,350  COVID-19 cases and 7,534 deaths.

This is still far more than Cuba’s health system can manage. And a doctor I know tells me the actual infection rate and death toll is much higher than the government admits. Constant blackouts, combined with disasters like a recent weeks-long shutdown of the country’s main medical oxygen plant, have generated more chaos.

The Trump Administration’s sanctions have played a large role in the country’s electrical power woes by blockading oil imports from Venezuela and embargoing parts needed to fix the country’s aging electrical system. Outages are usually scheduled to last four hours, but often go on for much longer.

Going to the hospital is frightening, as hospitals lack basic supplies and drugs. My friend in Santa Clara is still suffering the aftermath of recovering from hernia surgery without painkillers. Many of his friends, he tells me, have died of COVID-19. 

Rene Gonzalez is a national hero in Cuba. He is a member of the “Cuban Five”—a group of Cuban secret agents who had been operating in Florida in the 1990s to monitor and impede the many U.S.-based terrorist plots against their country. For this, he spent thirteen years in a U.S. prison. He blames U.S. policy for many of the island’s woes. The restriction of medical supplies to Cuba amounts to a “crime against humanity,” Gonzalez says. 

Yet Gonzalez remains optimistic that Cuba can eventually overtake the infection rate with its home-grown, as well as imported, vaccines and that tourism will eventually return. Already, the government says, much of Havana’s population has been vaccinated at least once with Cuba’s three-dose vaccine. By December, Cuba plans to have more than 90 percent of its people, including children, fully vaccinated. My Cuban friends tell me they are eager to get vaccinated, with no anti-vax movement or sentiments as have been seen in the United States.

Cubans had been hopeful that Joe Biden’s victory would restore the more liberal relations—and the relative prosperity and political openings—of the Obama era. But Biden hasn’t loosened any of Trump’s sanctions, and has even imposed some new ones in response to the mass arrests of protesters in July.

Once Barack Obama opened up relations with Cuba, millions of U.S. citizens went there to visit. Many got to know and even made friends with people in this unique place. Now, these people need help, and are looking to people in the United States to provide it. Here are some ways to do so:

  • Global Health Partners sends medical supplies to Cuba to support Cuba’s front-line health care workers and offers charitable donation receipts for U.S. taxpayers. 
  • Code Pink recently raised more than $500,000 to purchase six million syringes for Cuba's vaccination drive. Now, the group is raising money to send massive quantities of canned tuna and condensed milk.
  • The Canadian Network on Cuba has been sending syringes and antibiotics by air freight on an ongoing basis. It sent 1.9 million syringes in July. You can donate via cheque payable to CNC with “medical supplies” on the memo line. Address: CNC c/o Sharon Skup, 56 Riverwood Terrace, Bolton,  ON  L7E 1S4 CANADA.
  • The Dubois Charitable Foundation provides humanitarian aid in the form of medical equipment and supplies, as well as clothing, bedding, footwear, and household goods, primarily to the people of Cuba and to other countries, including Haiti.

“International solidarity in conditions like this is essential,” Gonzalez says. “No solidarity action is too small, and sustaining that spirit is important for us to face this. The international fight against the genocidal North American blockade is another way to help. We must demand that the governments of the world respect the majority vote in the United Nations, which demands year after year in the General Assembly, by almost unanimous vote, the end of the blockade."

Every day, Cuban news media report the deaths of well-known locals, including musicians, artists, writers, doctors, and community leaders. In their hour of need, Cubans are looking to their friends around the world to help them.