*Washington besieges Cuba. Rome refuses to look the other way. How sixty years of Church history brought a U.S. Secretary of State to a halt.
By Ted Lewis. Global Exchange. Terra 360. Península 360 Press.
When Marco Rubio entered the Apostolic Palace on the morning of Thursday, May 7, to meet with Pope Leo XIV, he carried with him the full weight of an administration that has turned the deliberate suffering of the Cuban people into a cornerstone of its foreign policy. What he found, by all indications, was a Pope who was not willing to give him the endorsement he was seeking.
The contrast could not have been more revealing. On one side of that meeting room was the Secretary of State of a superpower that has spent sixty-five years trying to break Cuba through isolation, embargo, and now a petroleum blockade so severe that it has plunged the island into darkness for up to 24 hours a day. On the other side was the first American Pope in history, heir to an institution that chose a radically different path and that, by any honest measure, achieved far more.
A Road Trip, A Mother and A Daughter
In 1999, a year after Pope John Paul II made his historic visit to Havana, I traveled across Cuba by road, one of several trips I have made to an island I have come to love. I have spoken with Cubans in every corner of the country: farmers, musicians, doctors, teachers, party officials, dissidents, believers, atheists, and people who held all those identities simultaneously. I have come away from each trip with the same conviction: the Cuban people are among the most dignified, resilient, and clear-eyed on earth, and they deserve infinitely more than what U.S. policy has given them.
On that 1999 trip, I arrived in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second city, in its magnificent and revolutionary east, the place where Fidel Castro declared victory in January 1959. I stayed with a mother and a daughter whom friends in Havana had introduced me to. The mother was a nurse. The daughter, a doctor. They were, without apparent contradiction, lifelong Communist militants and devout Catholic believers. For most of their adult lives, those two identities had to remain separate—faith hidden, practice private, the cross out of sight. Displaying religious belief openly was to invite suspicion, workplace consequences, and the quiet withdrawal of state approval.
But something had changed. John Paul II had arrived in Cuba the year before, and his visit had achieved something that decades of the U.S. embargo had not been able to produce: it had opened a space. Not regime change. Not geopolitical realignment. Something quieter and more lasting than any of those things—the simple dignity of being fully oneself. The mother and daughter with whom I sat in Santiago spoke about it with cautious relief, still tender. They could be who they were. The faith that had lived entirely in private could begin, carefully, to breathe in public.
That is engagement. That is what presence achieves—patient, consistent, deeply human. Remember it the next time a U.S. politician tells you that maximum oppression is the path to the freedom of the Cuban people.
Sixty Years of the Church Getting It Right
The history is not complicated, although Washington has preferred to ignore it.
When Castro came to power in 1959, the Catholic Church in Cuba was associated with the old colonial elite. By 1961, the revolution had expelled hundreds of priests, nationalized Catholic schools, and declared Cuba an atheist state. The hostility was real and severe. The Church could have left, could have joined the chorus of condemnation and isolation that the United States was already organizing. It did not.
For three decades the Church stayed. It maintained its buildings, its sacraments, its quiet presence. It was marginalized, restricted, and monitored, and even so, it stayed. When the Cuban Constitution was revised in 1992 to remove the designation of an atheist state, the Church was there. When John Paul II arrived in Havana in January 1998, summoning crowds that astonished the world and delivering a homily that simultaneously called for Cuba to open to the world and for the world to open to Cuba, the Church had earned that moment through forty years of not leaving.
Pope Benedict XVI came in 2012, met with Fidel and Raúl Castro, and quietly pressed for the release of political prisoners and for greater religious freedom. Pope Francis took the Church’s sixty-year investment and turned it into the most consequential act of Cuban diplomacy of the modern era: the secret negotiations he facilitated within the Vatican that produced, on December 17, 2014, the Obama-Castro normalization agreement. Francis wrote personal letters to both heads of state. He provided the moral framework that made the agreement possible. He did what sixty-five years of the U.S. embargo had not been able to achieve—move the needle in a measurable way toward the dignity and well-being of the Cuban people.
The lesson is clear. Engagement works. Presence works. Treating people as human beings and not as instruments of pressure works. The Church understood this and practiced it. Washington, with the notable and all-too-brief exception of Obama’s opening, refused to learn it.
Betrayal, Siege, and Hunger
Then Trump arrived. And with Trump came Marco Rubio, a Cuban American politician who built his entire political identity on the grievances of the exile community, and who sees the island not as a place where people live but as an ideological debt to be collected.
Obama’s normalization was dismantled by the Cuban American politician. Not because it had failed—it had barely had time to breathe. Not because there was evidence that maximum pressure was producing democratic reform—there was none. It was dismantled because Marco Rubio wanted Florida, and Trump wanted Marco Rubio. The Cuban people paid for that transaction with their electricity, their fuel, their food, and their future.
The oil embargo now in force has reduced Cuba’s crude imports by between eighty and ninety percent. As of today, blackouts last up to 24 hours. The economy has contracted by more than seven percent. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, has declared himself extremely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Cuba, warning that it will worsen or even collapse. This is not a policy directed at the Cuban government. The Cuban government has generators. The people of Santiago de Cuba—the nurses, the doctors, the mothers and daughters trying to live their lives with dignity—are sitting in the dark.
And now there is something worse in the air. The Pentagon has been developing contingency plans for possible actions against Cuba. President Trump has publicly speculated about stopping in Cuba once the United States finishes whatever it is doing in the Strait of Hormuz, where it is already stuck, draining its arsenal and emptying the moral authority it once possessed.
This is also the president who, on the eve of his own Secretary of State’s visit to the Vatican, went on the radio and once again attacked the Pope. For the second time in weeks, he falsely accused Leo XIV of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon and declared that the first American Pope in history was putting many Catholics and many people at risk. Vatican officials have described relations between the United States and the Holy See as at a historic and unprecedented low. Italy’s foreign minister, from the government of Giorgia Meloni and one of Trump’s last European allies, publicly broke with Washington to defend Leo, writing that his words are a testimony to dialogue, the value of human life, and freedom.
The American people have taken notice. A Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos poll conducted at the end of April found that nearly six out of ten Americans reacted negatively to Trump’s false claim about the Pope and nuclear weapons, including majorities of his own voters. Trump’s popularity among Catholics has fallen ten points since February 2025, reaching 38 percent. Two-thirds of Americans reacted positively to Leo calling on people to contact Congress to work for peace and reject war. The administration that flew to Rome on Thursday seeking the Church’s complicity in its policy on Cuba does not speak on behalf of American Catholics, nor American Christians, nor, by any honest reading of these figures, the American people.
This is what Rubio brought to Rome. This is what he placed before a Pope.
Mexico: The Courage That Is Being Lost
There is another story to tell here, and it is closer to home.
For decades, Mexico maintained a position that was both principle and practice: no to the blockade, no to intervention, yes to Cuban sovereignty. Under the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, that position took concrete and costly form: Pemex supplied oil to Cuba when almost no one else would, defying U.S. pressure in line with Mexico’s diplomatic tradition of non-intervention rooted in the Estrada Doctrine.
It was an act of hemispheric courage. It was Mexico being Mexico—the country that never broke diplomatic relations with Cuba throughout all the years of the embargo, the country that has historically understood that the sovereignty of a small nation is the sovereignty of all.
That courage is fading.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has quietly stepped back from that commitment. Without dramatic declaration, without public debate, without honest acknowledgment of what is being abandoned—just a gradual distancing, in the context of a relationship with Washington that demands more and offers less. The energy supply that kept Cuba’s lights on has been reduced. The voice Mexico could be raising in international forums against the blockade has grown quieter.
We understand the pressures. We know that governing Mexico at this moment, with Donald Trump in the White House and Marco Rubio shaping foreign policy toward the hemisphere, is no easy task. But we also know this: there are moments when history judges governments not by the difficulties they faced but by the choices they made when things became difficult.
This is one of those moments. We ask President Sheinbaum to reconsider.
The Cuban people, who have endured more than sixty years of blockade with a dignity that should shame those who impose it, deserve for Mexico to be Mexico. They deserve that the country that never abandoned them in the worst years does not abandon them now, when darkness lasts 24 hours a day and hospitals are running out of medicine.
Going After Humanitarian Aid
On May 1, International Workers’ Day, as Cubans marched through the streets of Havana, Donald Trump signed a new executive order escalating his economic war against the island to a new and uglier level.
The order freezes assets in the United States of anyone operating in key sectors of the Cuban economy, sanctions foreign banks that process transactions for designated Cuban entities, and extends those sanctions to the adult family members of anyone already targeted—a mechanism of collective punishment that any student of authoritarianism would immediately recognize. Since January 2025, the administration has imposed more than 240 sanctions on Cuba and intercepted at least seven oil tankers in route to the island.
But the provision that most directly affects humanitarian organizations is this: the order criminalizes the making or receiving of any contribution of funds, goods, or services to sanctioned entities, and explicitly reserves the right to prohibit donations of food, clothing, and medicine if they are deemed to seriously undermine U.S. foreign policy objectives.
Read that carefully. Food. Clothing. Medicine. Potentially prohibited, if a presidential administration decides that an act of basic human decency interferes with its political goals.
Before Rubio even arrived at the Apostolic Palace, he had already shown his hand. At a Tuesday press conference at the White House, he announced that the United States had provided six million dollars in humanitarian aid to Cuba, distributed through the Catholic Church via Caritas Cuba and the parish network, and that it was willing to give more, as long as the Cuban regime allowed it. It was a carefully constructed argument: we are the humanitarians; it is the Cuban government that blocks aid to its own people.
The argument deserves a direct response. The United States is simultaneously imposing a petroleum blockade that has reduced Cuba’s energy imports by 80 to 90 percent, causing 24-hour blackouts, contracting the economy by more than seven percent, threatening military intervention, and signing an executive order that explicitly reserves the right to prohibit humanitarian donations for political reasons—while offering six million dollars in aid channeled through the Church as evidence of its benevolence. Six million dollars in aid does not cancel a siege. A trickle of medicine does not compensate for the deliberate destruction of an economy.
This is not a targeted sanctions regime. It is a siege. And a siege—let us use the word history demands—is an act of collective punishment against a civilian population. It is medieval in its conception and execution: a thirteenth-century tactic deployed with twenty-first-century financial instruments against a small island nation of eleven million people whose great crime, in the eyes of this administration, is having refused to surrender.
United Nations human rights experts have already condemned the blockade as a serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order. The international community—Canada, Chile, the African Union, the United Nations—has responded with unusual clarity and unanimity. We add our voice without reservation: this blockade is barbaric, and we condemn it.
The Capillaries of Solidarity: Open and on Legal Ground
Global Exchange is not watching from a distance. We are acting.
In March, we joined the Nuestra América Convoy as movements from across the hemisphere converged in Havana by air, land, and sea, delivering more than 20 tons of humanitarian aid. Our delegation brought more than 770 kilograms of supplies, medicines, medical equipment, and essential items that Cuban families can no longer obtain due to a blockade designed in Washington and enforced on the high seas.
We have launched a Humanitarian Aid Center in San Francisco’s Mission District, collecting and sending medical supplies, basic medicines, and hygiene products to communities facing acute shortages. We have already delivered more than $40,000 in specialized cancer medications to hospitals in Cuba and transported more than 900 kilograms of humanitarian aid collected through local donations. As our Co-Executive Director Corina Nolet has said: what the Trump administration is inflicting on Cuban families is a brutal campaign of economic strangulation that restricts fuel, food, and medicine.
Every shipment we make is both an act of solidarity and a statement: we refuse to accept policies that inflict suffering on innocent communities.
Our legal position is solid. Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, fully ratified by the United States and unequivocally binding, obligates parties to allow the free passage of relief consignments, specifically medicines, medical supplies, and objects necessary for religious worship, intended for the civilian population, including that of an adversary. It also requires the free passage of food, clothing, and essential supplies for children under fifteen, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. The May 1 executive order, which explicitly reserves the right to prohibit such donations for political reasons, is in direct conflict with a treaty obligation that the United States signed and ratified more than seventy years ago.
The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions extend that legal architecture. The protections enshrined in those Protocols, including the explicit prohibition of using the starvation of civilians as a method of coercion, have attained the status of customary international law, binding on all states regardless of ratification. Furthermore, 168 nations have ratified Protocol I, including all of the United States’ NATO allies except Turkey.
And beyond Geneva: Washington itself co-sponsored and was the first country to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 2664, which explicitly affirms that the provision of humanitarian assistance does not constitute a violation of sanctions regimes. The Trump administration is now using unilateral executive action to contradict commitments that its own government negotiated, ratified, and was the first to honor.
Global Exchange’s humanitarian work is consistent with international humanitarian law and with the United States’ own commitments. We will continue.
The Pope as Mirror
Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago, a missionary in Peru, the son of a man whose maternal roots trace back to eighteenth-century Havana, heir to a Church that chose presence over punishment in Cuba for sixty years, apparently was not persuaded by what Rubio brought to Rome.
The U.S. State Department’s statement on Thursday’s meeting contained three sentences. Rubio and Leo discussed the situation in the Middle East and issues of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere. The meeting, it said, underscored the strong relationship between the United States and the Holy See and their shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.
Cuba was not mentioned by name. No partnership on humanitarian aid was announced. No joint statement was issued. The Vatican released no statement of its own.
Rubio spent two and a half hours inside the Apostolic Palace. The Pope arrived 40 minutes late to his next appointment. Whatever was said in that room, the administration that flew to Rome seeking moral cover for its policy on Cuba left without it. The language of the statement—peace and human dignity—is Leo’s language, not Trump’s. The White House borrowed the Pope’s vocabulary and brought nothing else home.
The studied neutrality of Thursday’s statement, read against sixty years of the Church’s consistent position on Cuba, is in itself a refusal.
This should not surprise anyone who has listened to what Leo has already said publicly: that the question is not whether there is regime change or not, but how to promote the values we believe in without the death of so many innocent people.
That sentence contains the entire argument. It is what the Church practiced in Cuba since 1961. It is what Global Exchange has practiced since its founding. It is what I witnessed in Santiago de Cuba in 1999, in a home where a mother and daughter had finally been given permission—not by Washington, not by an embargo, not by a threat of military force, but by a pope who simply showed up—to be fully themselves.
Leo is the first American pope. He cannot pretend not to know what his country is doing, ninety miles from its own shores, to people who have done nothing to deserve it. He has visited Cuba three times. He knows the island not from exile politics or think tank reports, but from within, from the parishes and the people. The administration sent its Secretary of State to borrow his moral authority. He did not lend it.
What We Stand For
Global Exchange has always operated from a simple premise: that the peoples of the hemisphere, given a real chance to know Cubans, to travel to Cuba, to sit with a nurse and a doctor in Santiago and listen to their stories, would not choose this. They would not choose the embargo. They would not choose the petroleum blockade. They would not choose the threat of military force against a small country whose great historical “crime” has been refusing to be possessed.
The Catholic Church took sixty years, held its ground through expulsions, atheist constitutions, and Cold War paranoia, and built a bridge patient enough to bear the weight of two governments finally speaking to each other. That bridge was built not with sanctions but with presence. Not with threats but with witness.
The Trump administration, mired in the Gulf, morally bankrupt, spending what remains of U.S. credibility on disputes and transactions that serve no one but its own political survival, is trying, once again, to burn it.
We have been to Cuba. We have sat at Cuban tables and looked into Cuban faces and recognized there the full dignity of human beings who have endured more than most of us can imagine, and who are still there, still dignified, still rejecting the role of victims that U.S. policy has assigned them for sixty-five years.
They deserve better. They have always deserved better. And there are enough of us who know this to say it clearly, out loud, and without apology.
What You Can Do Right Now
The situation in Cuba is not a distant issue. It is a hemispheric one. And there are concrete actions that anyone in Mexico and Latin America can take today.
Comparte este texto. Share this text. Disinformation about Cuba is systematic and deliberate. Every person who reads an honest account of what is happening on the island is a small but real victory against the information blockade that accompanies the economic blockade.
Donate online to support Global Exchange’s humanitarian shipments directly to Cuban communities. Every dollar goes toward medicines and essential goods that reach families on the island. You can do so from anywhere in the world at globalexchange.org
Demand that Mexico reclaim its historical stance. For decades, Mexico was the country that never abandoned Cuba, that maintained diplomatic relations when no one else did, that supplied energy when the blockade tightened. That tradition is being quietly abandoned under pressure from Washington. Write to your representative. Sign petitions. Publicly demand that President Sheinbaum recover the courage that characterized Mexican foreign policy at its best. The Estrada Doctrine is not a historical ornament. It is a living commitment to the sovereignty of peoples, and Cuba needs it now.
Support solidarity organizations in your country that maintain ties with the Cuban people. Hemispheric civil society is the fabric that no blockade can fully sever, as long as we choose to keep it alive.
For nearly 40 years, Global Exchange has worked in solidarity with the Cuban people, organizing educational delegations, people-to-people exchanges, and humanitarian efforts, while calling for an end to the U.S. blockade. To support that work, visit globalexchange.org.
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