By Victor M. Quintana on February 25, 2026
foto: Bill Hackwell
The Cuban people are today the epicenter of resistance to Donald Trump’s insane neocolonialism. Resistance built over more than six decades of having the noose of the U.S. blockade around their necks. Resistance with enormous conviction and discipline and, at the same time, with a great collective heart that is indignant, celebrates, and struggles with optimism.
This is made very clear in the series of solid and engaging reports and interviews that Luis Hernández Navarro conducted for La Jornada while traveling around Cuba, with photographs by Jair Cabrera. Luis Hernández’s journalistic work could not be more timely: when Trumpian despotism unleashes an offensive that, while bloodless, is nonetheless very violent, by blocking the supply of oil to Cuba.
On the one hand, he recounts the consequences of the blockade on various aspects of the Cuban people’s lives: the shortage of oil and gasoline that hinders, slows down, or outright prevents the movement of people and goods.
The difficulties households face in cooking and cleaning, the reduction or suspension of in-person classes in the education system, the slowdown in productive activity. The lack of electricity for wells and fertilizers reduces food production. Most painful of all is the impact on health services, with insufficient energy for operating rooms, hemodialysis, and surgical procedures, and a lack of crucial medications for diseases such as childhood cancer.
Through interviews with housewives, engineers, thermoelectric plant operators, teachers, students, health professionals, intellectuals, and farmers, Hernández Navarro’s reports go beyond documenting the damage caused by the blockade: they explore the various forms of resistance, adaptation, and inventiveness in the face of the crisis generated by Trump.
The Cuban people’s resistance is rational and strategic: it prioritizes the supply of energy to key areas of production and to the most vulnerable people. It is led by the government, but with significant participation from people working in the energy, health, agricultural production, education, and transportation sectors. This allows solutions and courses of action to be designed not from a desk, but by those who put them into practice.
Thermal power plant workers participate in maintaining and repairing the plants; health professionals manage to replace missing medicines by planting medicinal herbs that can substitute them so that those who suffer most do not go without. In the face of a relentless blockade, there is a planned and participatory resistance that makes it efficient.
Beyond that, the resistance of the Cuban people has a lot of heart, as the bolero would say. Faced with a crisis imposed from outside, Cubans are certain that they will prevail.
There is a mystique that was born and has been cultivated after blockades, offensives, and emergency situations, such as those of the 1990s. It is a resistance that strengthens cooperation and solidarity: a woman with cancer who stopped receiving her medication because of the blockade and has been supported by a whole network of friends declares that there is a shortage of medicines, but that “solidarity heals.” In the children’s cancer hospital, there is a shortage of medicine, but there is no shortage of color and loving care. In the streets, the music and dancing continue, and baseball goes on in endless extra innings.
Women are the heart of the resistance: they care for their homes, hospitals, and schools; they run agricultural cooperatives and research institutes.
They persist, they resist, they set an example, as joyful as they are strong, capable, and determined. The resistance of the Cuban people is full of values: courage, solidarity, love for their country and their model of society; intense and cooperative work, care for the most vulnerable. Commitment to food sovereignty as a pillar of their social project; agroecological production, confidence in their own strengths.
Solidarity with other peoples and causes outside Cuba. A former combatant in Angola points out: “…more than 50,000 Cubans went to fight in Angola and came back with nothing but the bones of our people.” “The Cuban people send doctors to countries in disaster and receive nothing but bullets,” says someone else.
Frugality, care for nature, coexistence, and a spirit of celebration are values that come up again and again in Luis Hernández’s texts. These values give great ethical depth to the actions of the Cuban people, which contrasts dramatically with the moral deterioration of today’s capitalism, revealed by the Epstein Files. This public, everyday ethic, practiced in the midst of difficulty, sets a benchmark for humanism, a horizon of possibility for another world in the context of the multiple global crises we are experiencing: climatic, economic, psychosocial, civilizational.
Dignity and heart in the midst of a state of siege, optimism of will, and the experience of the values of the revolution make the Cuban people a benchmark for the future and a heritage for humanity that has lost its way, a spell against despair, says Luis Hernández Navarro. This is what Trump vainly seeks to destroy with his slow-motion sociocide. But the Cuban people will resist until victory.
Source: La Jornada translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English