Rubio's Cynical Aid Charade
At the Vatican last Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the self-proclaimed architect of Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the island, claimed the U.S. had offered Cuba $100 million in humanitarian aid, but the Cuban government allegedly refused to “distribute it to the people."
On Wednesday, the State Department reiterated Rubio’s offer, which would be distributed through the Catholic Church and other humanitarian organizations.
Rubio’s $100 million offer rings hollow. The U.S. has yet to deliver much of a far smaller aid package promised months ago. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to impose an oil blockade that has slowed aid deliveries and deepened the hardship suffered by the Cuban people.
The Trump administration took three months to begin delivering $3 million in pledged aid (around 4% of what the UN estimated Cuba needed) after Hurricane Melissa devastated eastern Cuba last October. The U.S. announced an additional $6 million in aid in February, four months after the storm. Last week, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío said that only $2.5 million worth of “bags of food and toiletries” from the initial package had arrived, while the additional $6 million was still pending.
One possible reason for the delay is the Trump administration’s insistence on bypassing the one entity in Cuba capable of delivering large amounts of humanitarian aid: the Cuban government.
Meanwhile, the U.S. oil blockade is playing a role in preventing aid from being delivered, according to Francisco Pichón, a UN official in Cuba.
Even if fully implemented, Rubio’s $100 million aid offer would pale in comparison to the billions of dollars in annual losses Cuba says are caused by U.S. sanctions. It is also unclear whether the aid could realistically be distributed at scale through the Church and private NGOs alone.
“The best aid that the U.S. government could provide to the noble Cuban people at this or any time is to de-escalate the measures of the energy, economic, commercial and financial blockade,” Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez posted Thursday.
As the U.S. plays politics with aid, other countries have been stepping up. Last October, a Vietnamese Red Cross campaign raised more than $20 million through over 2 million individual donations. On Monday, Japan donated $6.5 million to install solar panels across ten hospitals on the island. Last month, Mexico donated $34 million to support Cuba’s farmers, while China contributed $80 million in electrical equipment and rice. Earlier this year, Canada and Spain pledged $6.7 million and $1.1 million, respectively.