In 2026, US imperialism is on the prowl again. At the start of the year, it illegally kidnapped Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife and they now face drug trafficking charges in a New York prison.
Then, at the end of February, US military forces began an illegal war, in alliance with genocidal Israel, against Iran. Despite Trump’s claims, this war may be far from over (and has spread to Lebanon by Israel) and the whole world continues to pay the price and we will do so for years.
Now Cuba, in the latest outing for what is becoming known as the ‘Donroe Doctrine’, is once again in the crosshairs of the US military machine and its commander in chief.
Who knows? By the time you read this piece, US military aircraft may have begun initial strafing missions against this Caribbean island located just 90 miles south of Florida and a socialist country which the US has been trying to crush since its successful revolution in 1959.
As a State Department official warned that year: “There are indications that if the Cuban revolution is successful, other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban revolution succeed.”
Just over 67 years later, Trump doesn’t. He is still trying to crush the US’s southern neighbour and follow his own updated version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which said that the western hemisphere is a US-supervised hemisphere.
Last week, on 20 May, the US government charged former Cuban president Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, with conspiracy to kill US nationals over a fatal attack on two planes in 1996. He was also indicted on four counts of murder.
Going after Castro obviously appeals to Trump
The idea of charging a 94-year-old retired left-wing Cuban politician over a much-contested event of 30 years ago obviously appeals to Trump whose popularity with US voters is slumping badly. In the US, he now has only a 37% approval rating and that’s far below his disapproval numbers. But here’s some consolation for him – in Israel, Trump is polling at 99%.
Among the many details of the 1996 incident omitted in mainstream media coverage last week, were several telling facts about the leader of the group organising this so-called ‘rescue’. He was a veteran of the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion with a long history of anti-Cuban militancy. He openly admitted, “I was trained as a terrorist by the United States” as Medea Benjamin reported in the US magazine Counterpunch.
The weekend edition of Counterpunch (some content is free, but, like all cash strapped left-wing publications, they do need paid subscriptions to keep afloat) also has a really insightful article that we reprint, in part, below. It gives you a very good idea about the human toll on medical patients caused directly by Trump’s latest embargo/sanctions against Cuba – the blockade of any oil or petrol reaching that country. It means huge transport problems and Cuba’s electrical power grid now failing for up to 22 hours a day, even in Havana.
Written by an anonymous Cuban surgeon (and aimed at its mostly US readers) extracts from the article, headlined Sanctions Kill. I Have Watched Them Do It, appear below.
“I am a surgeon in Havana, Cuba. I will not use my name – not because I fear my government, but because I fear yours and what it can do to those I love.
“Last month, I operated on an elderly man with a perforated peptic ulcer. The surgery was textbook. I closed his abdomen cleanly, without complication. We had antibiotics available that time. What we did not have was intravenous crystalloid fluid for resuscitation. It’s the most basic of solutions, cheap enough to cost almost nothing, yet essential enough to save almost everything. It exists. It is manufactured in Santiago de Cuba, 500 miles away. It could not reach Havana since there was no petroleum to transport it. By the time it arrived, my patient had died.
“I want you to sit with that before we discuss politics.
“Now I want to tell you about a two-year-old girl, the daughter of friends of mine. Two weeks ago, she developed severe gastroenteritis – vomiting 20 times a day, rapidly dehydrating. Her parents rushed her to a paediatric hospital in Havana. There was not enough intravenous fluid in the emergency room. Paediatric hospitals have historically been the last refuge protected from the worst of our shortages. Even in our hardest years, we have tried to protect the children. That night, only the hospital director was authorising each bottle of fluid as if it were pure gold. It was not gold, was only salt and water, but they only had a few bottles available.
“These are not isolated tragedies. They are the intended outcomes.
“Cuba’s infant mortality rate, once lower than that of the United States, a genuine achievement of our public health system, has been climbing from five to over 7.1 per 1,000 live births, starting in 2019. Two-thirds of essential medicines are either unavailable or in short supply. Arboviruses such as dengue, oropouche and chikungunya have been surging.
“According to Cuba’s own statistics office, the country has seen the exodus of more than 1.4 million inhabitants since 2020 – among them thousands of physicians – and recorded its fewest births in 65 years. In 2024-2025 alone, the US blockade cost Cuba $7.5bn. Over 65 years, its cumulative damages have surpassed more than $170bn.
“This is not a crisis of governance. This is manufactured ruin – the deliberate application of maximum economic pressure until a nation breaks, then attributing the wreckage to the nation itself. The wreckage is then cited as justification for a military intervention, and the intervention as the path to coveted resources.”
You can read the remainder of the article in Counterpunch here. You will learn, for example, that this quite poor nation has “sent more than 605,000 health workers to over 165 countries since 1963” and how Cubans are working together in the face of the face of adversity – we are “a people refusing to let each other go hungry”.
The pain and humanity ooze out from this doctor’s writing.
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