Report from Havana: How Cubans Survived Decades of US Sanctions

After the Iran war, will the US strike Cuba next? Upgrade your subscription to unlock full access to this interview.

Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial)

FEATURING ED AUGUSTIN - Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has declared that the US’s launch of a war against Iran will soon be followed by a direct assault on Cuba. The Caribbean island, which had faced the longest economic sanctions by the US against any single country in history, has been crippled after the Trump administration kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and cut off Venezuelan oil sales. Trump has essentially deputized US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, to oversee regime change in Cuba.  

Ed Augustin is an independent journalist based in Havana, Cuba. His work has regularly been featured in the New York Times, Financial Times, NBC News, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and beyond. His recent work includes a documentary short on how US sanctions impact Cuba’s health care system. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar from Havana about how Cubans are coping with decades of sanctions and whether there could be a US war on Cuba.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: As I mentioned, the Venezuelan regime change that the US has essentially engineered, had this very direct ripple effect on Cuba, but even before that, Cuba was suffering. Is it fair to say that Cuba is at the point that it is today as a direct result of the US essentially squeezing its government for decades and refusing to allow the island to flourish? 

Ed Augustin: Well, there's a massive ideological effort, well-financed by the way, by US taxpayers to try and make us say ‘No’ to that, to make the answer to that question ‘No.’ But the answer to the question from any objective, balanced, serious analytical point of view has to be ‘Yes.’ 

Cuba has been pushed to this point by US sanctions. So, Cuba has been sanctioned longer than any other country in modern history. It's been under a US sanctions regime for 67 years, two thirds of a century. And the sanctions on Cuba are among the most powerful sanctions in the world. The only country that could really compete with that in terms of a target that suffers sanctions is the other country that's in the international headlines today: Iran.