Photo courtesy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation via duma.gov.ru
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Cuban-American relations have been a lifelong concern.
By Anna Goodman ’28
Staff Writer
Across the United States last month, people bore witness to the devastating effects of Hurricane Milton, from the flooding of Asheville, North Carolina to the destructive storm that hit Florida in the first few weeks of October. But the place hit the hardest may have been an island almost the size of Florida with almost half as many people just 90 miles from Key West: Cuba.
Cuba was battered by Hurricane Oscar from mid to late October. “[The hurricane] caused landslides, and winds of 75 mph tore the roofs off houses, making work even more difficult for the engineers trying to get Cuba’s electricity grid up and running again, after a weekend when the entire country of about 10 million people was plunged into darkness,” according to the Guardian.
To answer the question of why it was Cuba that faced the worst of a recent wave of hurricanes that caused widespread damage, it is important to note that the story of Cuba goes far beyond this specific crisis. As the American outlet Morning Brew put it, the current situation was “a blackout years in the making.”
In 1962, President Kennedy began the embargo on Cuba, at the height of the Cold War in response to the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Washington Office on Latin America reported. It was strengthened under former president Donald Trump, who replaced Cuba on the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list, a list that includes only three other countries: Syria, Iran and North Korea. According to the U.S. government, inclusion on the list “includes restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.”
Critics of the embargo point to this incredibly long timespan as evidence of U.S. hypocrisy regarding Cuba. Current Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel stated in 2023 in his first interview with a U.S. outlet, The Nation, “My generation was born with the Revolution. I was born in 1960 and celebrated my first birthday the day after the victory at Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs]. The birth and life of the revolution marked my generation.”
Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, reflected on the same feeling in his address to the U.N., as reported by UN News in 2023, demanding an end to the blockade. “How different could [the Cuban people’s] lives have been, if Cuba was not prevented from acquiring directly from the U.S. market the [medications] to prevent the spasms,” he asked the U.N. at the very same meeting last year, in the wake of the devastation of COVID-19.
According to Reuters, his speech marked the 31st consecutive year that the U.N. sat down to vote on the U.S.’ blockade of Cuba, a proposition which has long been overwhelmingly accepted. In both 2022 and 2023, 187 countries voted for an end to the blockade, with only the U.S. and Israel against, and Ukraine abstaining. On Oct. 29, 2024, the exact same results were announced by the U.N. Press.
At the 2011 meeting of the U.N., which saw 186 countries voting to end the blockade, the U.S. and Israel spoke against the decision while representatives from Vietnam, Bolivia, China, Mexico and India, among many others, all spoke in Cuba’s defense, U.N. News reported. The Egyptian delegate, Maged A. Abdelaziz, questioned, “Why should the Cuban people continue to suffer when the international community is almost unanimous in its conviction that the cause of their anguish is unjustified and illegal?”
“We have to be clear,” the Interreligious Foundation For Community Organization’s Pastors For Peace delegation stated in their Oct. 28, 2024 newsletter. “The blockade is a form of violence, a deliberate strategy to inflict suffering on the Cuban people … We must push for Cuba to be removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List and for the U.S. to lift its deadly blockade. The Cuban people have the right to live, to thrive, and to determine their own future.”
Gabby Tonn ’27 contributed fact-checking.