#cuba

#cuba

U.S. President Donald Trump has intensified the pressure against Cuba, targeting the island's most vulnerable point: its oil supply. After Venezuela halted its shipments, the White House issued an executive order declaring a national emergency with respect to Cuba and announcing tariffs on any countries that provide oil to the island. This move could affect Mexico's ability to resume its own oil shipments to Havana.

Cuba has long been under the effects of a perfect storm that shows no signs of abating. In addition to constant power outages, the high cost of living, persistent unsanitary conditions in the streets, and a tangled economic crisis that Cuban authorities seem incapable of resolving, there are now direct threats from Donald Trump's administration, aimed at the Castro regime which has been in power for nearly 70 years.

Rodriguez made this and other statements in an X post rejecting claims leveled by US President Donald Trump that Venezuela had been paying Cuba for security services. Rodriguez's post also underscored Cuba's right to purchase oil from whatever source it might choose after Trump on Saturday threatened to cut the island off from all money and oil because of his claims that Havana had helped Venezuela's ex-president, Nicolas Maduro.

Cuba, a major beneficiary of Venezuelan oil, has now been cut off from those shipments as U.S. forces continue to seize tankers in an effort to control the production, refining and global distribution of the country's oil products. Trump said on social media that Cuba long lived off Venezuelan oil and money and had offered security in return, "BUT NOT ANYMORE!"

When Nicolas Maduro and his wife were captured and taken out of Venezuela by U.S. military forces in the early hours of Saturday morning, a group of young Cubans were celebrating a birthday at a house in Havana's Vedado neighborhood. They were sharing music, jokes and drinks when the hostess noticed an alert on her phone. News of the U.S. strike on Caracas, part of the operation to capture the Venezuelan leader, sparked a conversation that dominated the rest of the evening.

Cuba is battling a wave of mosquito-borne illnesses, with the country's top epidemiologist warning that nearly one-third of the population has been impacted, with large numbers of workers taken ill. On Thursday, fumigators armed with fogging machines probed alleys and crowded buildings in parts of the capital Havana, among the hardest hit by mosquito-borne viruses including dengue and chikungunya, authorities said.

By the end of the summer months, people in Cuba, especially in the western end of the island, were wondering what rare disease had them bedridden, with body aches and swelling, fevers as high as 40C, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and even skin blemishes. In Matanzas, the epicenter of the disaster, entire families reported infections, which then spread to every neighborhood, then to the entire province, almost encompassing the entire country.

In a letter from prison, the 55-year-old said that since he was re-imprisoned in April after being briefly freed under a deal with former US president Joe Biden, the cruelty of the dictatorship towards me has known no bounds. He cited blows, torture, humiliation, threats and extreme conditions in prison, including the theft of food and hygiene products ordered by the regime's minions.

One day, in early-August, just before 5 p.m., Marta Perez was seen begging for money. She was doing so under the relentless sun that was beating down on San Rafael Boulevard. With her finely-wrinkled skin, striped dress, short hair and very long nails, she was like an apparition on the streets of Havana. The 70-year-old was pushing her one-year-old granddaughter in a stroller.

On Monday, Trump held a press conference with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and made a number of unfounded claims about autism, blamed women for taking Tylenol during pregnancy, misrepresented the current vaccine schedule, and erroneously asserting that the Amish have no autism. Trump made a similar claim about Cuba. I will say there are parts of the world that don't take Tylenol, Trump said. I mean, there's a rumor, and I don't know if it's so or not, that Cuba they don't have Tylenol because they don't have the money for Tylenol. And they have virtually no autism. OK? Tell me about that one.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that sanctions were imposed on officials abetting Cuba's coercive labor export scheme, which enriches the Cuban regime and deprives its people of medical care.

"The punishments inflicted on detainees from the protests that began on July 11, 2021, in Cuba span a wide range of abuses, according to a Human Rights Watch report."