A Cuban journalist is looking to spread awareness of the US trade embargo in two illuminating documentaries arriving in early 2024.
Liz Oliva Fernández says whenever she covered news or events on the island, be it the push for democratic reforms, or the private businesses springing up after the Castros loosened their grip on power, they always intersected with the sanctions.
Those sanctions, first imposed six decades ago, are the subject of Uphill on the Hill, and Hardliner on the Hudson.
Oliva Fernández, who traveled to the US to promote the films she co-created, says the sanctions “have a huge impact”.
“We’re not talking about a small country in the Caribbean sanctioning another one,” she said. “We’re talking [about] an empire like the United States that not only stops Cuba having normal relations with the United States, but also stops it having normal relations with the rest of the world.”
She elaborated on the “really desperate situation” of the Cuban economy.
“If you can’t do business with any country, if you have to pay three or four times the regular cost of everything because you’re buying from faraway countries, if you can’t use dollars, if you can’t create bank accounts, if you can’t pay with credit cards, there is nothing you can do,” she explained.
The sanctions were first imposed by President John F Kennedy in February 1962, three years after Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries came to power in an armed uprising that ousted the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Almost a year earlier, the CIA had tried to kill the nascent revolution in the military debacle known as the Bay of Pigs. It had been one of dozens of attempts to kill Castro.
In October 1962, the world held its breath for 13 days during a standoff between the US and the Soviet Union over Nikita Khrushchev’s plans to install nuclear missiles on the island, which would have been in easy range of the US. The crisis was resolved peacefully, but it set in place a strategic antagonism from Washington towards Havana that has never been resolved.
The sanctions have had a devastating impact. Cuba’s current GDP per capita is less than $10,000, twice that of Jamaica but a lot less than in the US, where it is $70,000. Because the sanctions are so wide-reaching, countries across the world who choose to trade with Cuba can find themselves punished. The UN general assembly has voted many times for the sanctions to be lifted. Outside a brief period when they were loosened as part of a diplomatic breakthrough with Barack Obama, they remain more pervasive than ever.
To widespread outcry on the island, Donald Trump added Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism during his administration. President Joe Biden has barely changed that policy.
“When you talk about the US’s Cuba policy, you’re really talking about the Trump-Biden Cuba policy because they’re the same,” says Oliva Fernández.
Despite its challenges, she says, Cuba has long managed to achieve healthcare results better or on a par with the US, become a major producer of drugs and vaccines, and is known for sending doctors and nurses to countries including Venezuela and Haiti, which suffer from a lack of health infra