Following a media photo op of the aid before takeoff in Miami, stage management of the delivery continued outside Havana where Mike Hammer, the chief of mission of the US Embassy in Cuba, visited some of the first families to receive the aid; he then posted his interactions on social media. The aid kits were branded with American flag stickers and the words, in Spanish, “Donation from the people of the United States of America to the citizens of Cuba.”
Everything about this modest gesture of US goodwill seems designed to win the hearts and minds of the Cuban people—and deflect attention from American policies contributing to the hunger and misery that the food boxes are meant to alleviate. The aid shipment happened to arrive the day after the State Department issued a 100-page report accusing Cuba of leading “a revolution against Western civilization itself,” to justify America’s escalating war of economic aggression and attrition.
For the fraction of the Cuban population lucky enough to receive an aid kit, the rice, beans, cooking oil, sugar, toothpaste, soap, and other items will barely last 10 days. Many will lack running water to use the soap because electrical blackouts affect the water system, and they will cook the rice and beans with wood or charcoal in the dark, as intensifying sanctions imposed by the Trump administration impede access to fuel, electricity, food, and cash on the island.
The Cuban government has accepted the assistance, but officials there have pointed out the hypocrisy of the US economic blockade that has created the need for humanitarian aid.
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To circumvent the Cuban authorities, the State Department assigned $60 million of the aid to Catholic Relief Services to distribute through its church-led Cuban counterpart, Cáritas Cuba. The money will provide kits for nearly 200,000 families, or more than 500,000 people, according to the group. Cuba’s population is more than 9 million.
By using sanctions and new rules to promote US-approved channels of aid and commerce, the Trump administration appears to be attempting to increase Cuba’s dependence on the US government as a way of undermining the Cuban government, says Lee Schlenker, a research associate with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
“It’s this engineered process of making the [Cuban] state sort of irrelevant in dealing with the few resources that are coming in from the US, at the same time as we’re cutting off Cuba’s independent trade and foreign relations with other countries,” he says. The food boxes “are a Band-Aid,” Schlenker adds, but they’re “an important PR and communications tool that can be wielded against the government to show how ‘incompetent’ it is and that it’s the one standing in the way, when we know it has its hands tied” by the US.
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