Cuban Envoy Draws ‘Red Lines’ Amid Specter of US Invasion and DOJ Targeting Castro Like Maduro
By Brett Wilkins
May 15, 2026
Cuba’s top diplomat in the United States on Friday underscored the inviolability of her country’s sovereignty amid tenuous negotiations with the Trump administration and mounting fears that the US is planning to criminally indict a former Cuban president and possibly invade the island to abduct him.
Cuban Chargé d’Affaires Lianys Torres Rivera told The Hill that her country’s socialist government is open to negotiating with the US, but that “the only exception is our sovereignty, independence, and right to self-determination,” adding that “those are the red lines.”
Torres Rivera acknowledged that ramped-up US pressure—including President Donald Trump’s invasion threats and tightening of the internationally condemned 65-year economic embargo—is inflicting tremendous suffering on the Cuban people.
“It’s difficult. What the Cuban people are enduring these days is difficult,” she said. “They are under a collective punishment from the US.”
The Cuban government said Thursday that Trump’s oil blockade has left the island and its 11 million people without fuel—a situation United Nations experts last week described as illegal “energy starvation.”
“We have reorganized the whole country, the healthcare system, the education system, the transportation system, to keep the basic services running,” Torres Rivera told The Hill. “But it doesn’t mean that they are running normally. They are running under huge stress.”
Continue reading at www.commondreams.org
This Has to Stop: The Criminal U.S. Blockade of Cuba
By Eve Ottenberg
Mar 13, 2026
He has blockaded Cuba, and now he’s expanded the sanctions. Donald “Uber-Capitalist” Trump is relentless in his war on this tiny nation of 11 million people, whose courage, solidarity and grit has inspired all ends of the global political spectrum, from Claudia Scheinbaum’s left-leaning Mexico to Vladimir Putin’s traditional-values-championing Russia. Fortunately, some of these onlookers have even been inspired to act. Moscow already broke the blockade by dispatching one enormous oil tanker to Havana and is sending another, while other nations have donated various necessities. Beijing has been especially generous with everything from rice to thousands of solar panels. It kinda invites the comparison between Trump and Ebeneezer Scrouge. Not a good look for a man obsessed with his appearance.
On May 1, Trump’s new sanctions took aim at “officials, entities…as well as people operating in Cuba’s energy, defense, mining and financial sectors,” reported Democracy Now! “Foreign banks and companies that do business with sanctioned Cuban entities could also be cut off from U.S. markets.” Never has the planet’s need for a new, non-U.S. financial architecture glared more apparently, because Washington wages relentless, endless economic war on any nation anywhere that refuses to bow to it. Though U.S. financial assaults on Cuba are not, unlike those on BRICS countries, liable to catapult the dollar into its grave as the world’s chief reserve currency, you can be sure China and Russia have taken note. It’s one more nail in the coffin of dollar supremacy, one more argument, come the next BRICS summit – and BRICS, by the way, speaks for 45 to 55 percent of the world’s population and holds 40 to 44 percent of the world’s purchasing power parity – for expanding the yuan as a reserve currency and, even, for BRICS creating its OWN currency.
In other words, American sanctions, which have already backfired spectacularly in certain corners of the globe (think Russia), are still used as promiscuously by Mr. Trump as by his predecessors, to the fury of just about everybody, a fury that’s far from impotent. The irony here is that Trump periodically erupts with threats against anyone who harms the almighty dollar; but with his refusal to kick the sanctions habit, he’s got the same self-defeating addiction as all his predecessors. His sanctions temper-tantrums, like those of every other recent president, kill people in the global south. This is a form of warfare, leading everyone who can quite rightly to shun the dollar. So sooner rather than later, the dollar will no longer hold the world reserve currency prize, and we lucky dogs in the heart of the Empire will get smacked with eye-popping inflation.
Continue reading at
counterpunch.org
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.