As Cuba endures rolling blackouts and a plunging standard of living, more than 100 artists, curators, and cultural workers have issued a public appeal for international intervention, arguing that the longstanding US oil blockade has made efforts to stabilize the island’s spiraling humanitarian crisis all but impossible.
The letter, titled “Cuba is Not a Threat” and published February 16 on the website Peoples Dispatch, was signed by scores of nationally recognized Cuban intellectuals, including Culture Minister Alpidio Alonso Grau, the poet and academic Miguel Barnet Lanza, visual artist Lesvia Vent Dumois, and Viengsay Valdés, director of the National Ballet of Cuba.
“Cuba’s greatest wealth lies in its people,” the letter reads. “We possess no oil reserves or other highly coveted natural resources, but we have developed human capital capable of shaping resilience through creativity and knowledge. Cuba does not foster terrorism, although we have been victims of it. We love peace, inseparably tied to our independence, and have always sought to build a just and supportive society.”
The Caribbean island has been under a US economic embargo for more than 60 years, with the full blockade enacted by President John F. Kennedy in February 1962. Critics of the policy say its restrictions on oil and fuel shipments have caused widespread shortages and severe disruptions to the island’s power grid, paralyzing its health care, education, and transportation sectors.
Cuba’s access to oil has been increasingly strained by the second Trump presidency. After US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Venezuela, which had been Cuba’s key oil supplier up until then, effectively halted fuel shipments to the island. The Trump administration has also issued an executive order permitting tariffs on countries that supply Cuba with oil, a policy critics say could have dire impacts on Cuban civilians.
“Cuba resists and will resist this inhumane aggression, but it counts on the active solidarity of all honest, humanist, and good-willed men and women of the world,” the letter adds. “It is about preventing a genocidal act and saving a heroic people whose only ‘crime and threat’ has been to defend their sovereignty.”
Cuba has faced a saga of social and political upheaval since the pandemic, when the erosion of essential services and government crackdowns on free expression sparked historic, island-wide demonstrations. Nearly two years ago, hundreds of Cubans were arrested for protesting what they described as an ineffective government—a civic crisis further compounded by foreign policy pressures. At the time, a public letter criticized members of the Western art world for collaborating with Cuban government-funded cultural events amid the national turmoil. The letter also noted what it viewed as disproportionate international attention to the Russian invasion of Ukraine over the the current crisis in Cuba.
The Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), which organized the February 16 letter, closed with a call to action and the words of Cuban poet and patriot José Martí: “Whoever rises up today for Cuba, rises up for all time.”
