New Report: Cuban Babies Killed by U.S. Sanctions
A new report from the D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has found that increased U.S. sanctions were likely the primary cause of a 148% rise in Cuban infant mortality from 2018 to 2025.
“If the rate of infant mortality had remained unchanged, then approximately 1,800 fewer babies would have died since 2018,” according to CEPR.
The report explains that up until the first Trump administration, Cuba’s health indicators paralleled European numbers, and often exceeded U.S. figures.
“The Trump policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Cuba has killed a lot of babies — and, although we don’t yet have data for the last few months, it’s highly likely that more babies are dying now, and at an even higher rate than last year as a result of the current U.S. fuel blockade targeting Cuba,” said CEPR’s Director of International Policy Alexander Main, one of the report’s coauthors.
This sharp rise in infant deaths is part of a healthcare crisis that has been driven by U.S.-imposed economic strangulation.
On the ground, beleaguered medics are fighting to keep their patients alive.
“The decline in the survival rate of our children with cancer corresponds with astonishing accuracy with the hardest years for Cuba, with the increasingly severe measures that have been suffocating us,” Dr. Mariuska Forteza, who heads the pediatrics wing at Cuba’s National Institute of Oncology, wrote last week on Facebook. “Now it's the energy blockade. Without electricity and transportation, it's impossible to provide medical assistance. A child's life cannot be jeopardized in the name of anything. We doctors don't perform miracles. Infrastructure, resources, medicine and fuel are needed.”
To learn more about the impact of the U.S. government’s economic war on Cuba’s hospitals, watch the documentary Healthcare Under Sanction, which we produced last year for Al Jazeera.
