Cuba Is Prepared to Offer Compensation to Americans Who Lost Property in the 1959 Revolution

Cuba is willing to put the “lump sum” compensation measure on the table in talks with the U.S., a Cuban official told Drop Site.

The story below was reported over the weekend from Havana, Cuba, where I traveled with a delegation organized by Progressive International (though we paid our own way).

On Saturday, I sat down with Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio. We’ll post video of the interview later this week, but I wanted to share portions of it here, because what he said bears heavily on the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Cuba.

The U.S. has fully blocked oil from reaching the island for three months—both an act of war and a war crime—producing dire shortages. On Friday night, power went out throughout much of Havana, and on Saturday night, power went out again, this time across the entire nation. This morning, as power was being restored, I visited William Soler Pediatric Hospital, and spoke with doctors, nurses, and the parents of children in intensive care about what it’s like to suffer a blackout in an ICU.

Hospitals by design are the last to lose power in Cuba, but with a nationwide blackout, even they go down. Each hospital has a generator, but there’s a dangerous lag between the power going out and the generator kicking in, and the nurses described racing to the babies and children on ventilators to hand pump the machine until the generator kicked in.

A special thanks to independent U.S. news organization Belly of the Beast, whose reporters based in Cuba helped us get access to hospitals and other facilities so we could get a better understanding of how the full-spectrum oil blockade is impacting the health system. (Sign up for their newsletter here and/or join their Patreon and send them a donation.) I’ll be back home tomorrow and will have more to say on what I saw here in the coming days, but for now I wanted to share the dispatch below.