How to slander a humanitarian mission

from Alex Skopic and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs magazine

The two of us just returned this week to New Orleans from Havana, Cuba. We had traveled there alongside hundreds of volunteers from around the world on the Nuestra América aid mission, delivering tons of desperately-needed supplies to a country suffering under a U.S. blockade of fuel (in addition to the preexisting U.S. trade embargo).

Current Affairs went along to report on the convoy and to document firsthand the effects of the blockade on ordinary Cubans. A longer report will be appearing in the next print edition of our magazine, but what we saw was harrowing. The whole country plunged into a blackout while we were there, because the fuel shortage brought down the national electrical grid. The entire city of Havana was in almost total darkness, with only a handful of solar or generator lamps shining out.

We have both seen things that will be permanently burned into our minds. People moving around in the shadows like ghosts. Mounds of foul-smelling trash in the street, with sanitation workers in the few running trucks overwhelmed by the task of collecting it—and worse, old men picking through the heaps, looking for anything they can use or sell.

Live fish dying slowly in tanks filled with stagnant green water. Shopkeepers losing all of their refrigerated and frozen food. Taxi drivers calling out desperately for a fare, because tourism to the island has shrunk to a trickle.

Restaurants having to close in the middle of a busy dinner service after losing power mid-meal. The look of worry on medical workers’ faces, as they contemplate rationing their remaining antibiotics or painkillers.

Our government is systematically torturing the Cuban people. It is doing so purposefully in order to extract concessions from the Cuban government. (Not human rights concessions, mind you, but favorable investment terms.) For a rich country to punish a poor country like this is morally grotesque. The issue is not difficult to grasp.

The Nuestra América convoy, organized by multiple groups including the Progressive International, CODEPINK, and Global Health Partners, is a noble effort to both relieve some of Cubans’ pain and draw attention to the basic obscenity of the U.S. fuel blockade. The people we met on the convoy were sincere, principled humanitarians who acted because they were angered by the unnecessary suffering the U.S. government is inflicting on Cubans.

Some U.S. media coverage has been fair in representing the Nuestra América mission. ABC News ran a straightforward story documenting that “solar panels, food and medicine to treat cancer are among the products donated to the island, which has been brought to a near standstill since Trump imposed an energy embargo in January, exacerbating a five-year economic crisis.”

The Associated Press, too, has done solid factual reporting on the part of the mission traveling by sea: “A ship bringing humanitarian aid to Cuba arrived in Havana on Tuesday loaded with solar panels, bicycles, food and medicine as the island’s economic and energy crises deepen.”

But on social media and in the right-wing press (as well as supposedly respectable liberal papers), the story of the convoy’s work was totally distorted. In the sporadic periods when we had internet access in Cuba, we realized that conservative media had spun the aid mission into a vanity trip, ignoring the issue of the fuel embargo and its effects…

The good news is, the propagandists are losing. A new YouGov poll released on March 16 shows that 46% of people in the U.S. disapprove of the Trump administration’s oil blockade on Cuba, while only 28% support it—and that was before the Nuestra América mission and the journalists aboard showed the world what U.S. sanctions are really doing to the Cuban people.

That mirrors the results we’ve been seeing in polls about Gaza, where more Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis, and about the war on Iran, which the majority opposes. 

Aggression and imperialism are losing across the board. And so, like any cornered animal, their supporters in the media are lashing out. But the lies and distractions don’t hold up to scrutiny, because the facts are so stark and obvious on their face. It doesn’t matter how you spin it: the fuel blockade is an indefensible crime, and we should all be glad that people are going to Cuba and doing their best to oppose it. The time when you could write a newspaper column and convince people that the activists, and not the U.S. government, are the problem, is over.

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