The Real News Podcast · The Real News Network

Trump’s War on Cuba: Crisis Made in the USA

·1 hr 2 min·3 clips

If you chain one swimmer to the bottom of the pool and make that chain shorter, at some point they're going to drown.

It begins with Trump. His talk of a friendly takeover sets a confrontational frame before the reporting settles into what that pressure looks like inside Cuba, where blackouts, empty shelves, and broken routines shape daily life. Liz Oliva Fernandez anchors the story. She describes getting by for 14 to 18 hours without power, watching transportation shrink to private cars, and worrying about students who cannot count on online classes when electricity and internet both fail. The streets are emptier now. Since the gasoline shortage began in January, Havana has seen fewer cars, more garbage left to rot, and a sense that basic municipal systems are fraying at the same time. The episode stays out of the abstract. It keeps circling back to concrete disruptions like public transportation cuts, university classes pushed online, and the simple fact that a blackout can knock out the connection needed to attend them. Medea Benjamin brings in the policy argument. She says that over the last 60 years, U.S. sanctions have been tightened and relaxed across administrations, but the basic structure has consistently made ordinary trade much harder for Cuba to sustain. Money is a choke point. She says Cuba is pushed outside the SWIFT system, forced toward cash transactions, and cut off from familiar payment tools that much of the world treats as routine. Remittances matter here. The episode explains that families who once relied on formal transfer channels now face fewer options, while people sometimes have to carry cash by hand just to get support to relatives. The point is political, not decorative. Cuba's hardship is presented as the result of a long campaign to block normal trade relations, limit access to credit, and keep the island from functioning like a normal country on its own terms. The reporting stays grounded in lived damage. It uses witnesses, activists, and practical examples to show how sanctions become blackouts, shortages, broken transport, and the slow humiliation of scarcity. The tone stays sharp. Rather than softening the conflict into generic foreign-policy talk, the episode names coercion, traces the systems behind it, and keeps returning to the people absorbing the cost.

As heard by us

A direct sanctions story that keeps its focus on daily life in Cuba.

The episode treats Cuba's crisis as something driven from Washington, then brings that pressure down to street level in Havana. Liz Oliva Fernandez, a Havana journalist with Belly of the Beast, gives the picture local weight: long blackouts, fuel shortages, thin public transit,…

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Why you'd press play

You want Cuba policy explained through daily life, not abstract geopolitics.

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