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Milan, Italy – As Cuba faces a nationwide blackout and energy crisis, the first members of a global aid mission with more than 20 tonnes of food, medical supplies and solar panel equipment arrived in Havana on Wednesday.
Organised by an alliance of progressive groups, Nuestra America Convoy to Cuba (NACC) is being pitched as an act of humanitarian support for the island nation and a one-off protest against the United States’ total oil blockade on Cuba.
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The convoy includes representatives of European left-wing political parties, trade unions and advocacy groups, who left from Milan on Tuesday.
Since the US’s January operation to remove the Venezuelan president and Cuban ally, Nicolas Maduro, Washington has piled maximum economic pressure on Havana with a complete oil blockade, meaning that no foreign fuel shipment has reached the country in the last three months.
The activists say this dramatic escalation, which intensifies Washington’s decades-long embargo, has been largely ignored by its traditional allies across the Atlantic.
“The European Union, the Italian government, and the British government alike should oppose and put pressure on President Trump to lift this embargo on Cuba,” said Mauro Trombin, one of the delegates who is affiliated with the Italian political party Europa Verde (Green Europe).
Prior to the current crisis, the EU had urged the US to end the embargo against Cuba, with most European countries voting against sanctions during last year’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
Iain Wallace, a Scottish member of the Public and Commercial (PCS) trade union and NACC participant, said the oil blockade is “illegal by every measure”.
“I would have expected [European] countries to … reify trade relations and cultural exchange with Cuba,” he told Al Jazeera. “Cuba needs fuel … We can take as much humanitarian aid as we can, but that is masking symptoms, not treating the cause.”
As it suffers from a severe fuel shortage, Cuba faces total humanitarian collapse, the UN has warned.
The governments of China, Chile, Mexico and Canada have either sent or pledged to send humanitarian aid to the island. Spain has also promised to channel aid.
The Cuban crisis comes at a time when European powers are questioning their relationship with the US, as it, along with Israel, wages war on Iran.
Maria Giovanna Tamborello, an NACC delegate and member of the Switzerland-Cuba association, said European governments “condemn the blockade” every year at the UNGA, “and then nothing happens”.
Jose Luis Darias Suarez, the Cuban consul general in Milan who met NACC members at Malpensa airport before their departure, struck a more conciliatory tone.
“At present our relationship with the European Union is maintained by the dialogue agreement, which was implemented some years ago and lays a foundation for, above all, a cooperative relationship between good [diplomatic] partners, which we, Cuba and the European Union, are,” he said.
The agreement refers to the 2016 EU-Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement (PDCA), a legal framework designed to promote Cuban and European human rights and democracy that has governed EU-Cuba relations for the last decade.
But the European Parliament recently approved an amendment to its foreign policy report that called for the PDCA to be suspended because of Cuba’s alleged worsening human rights record.
The amendment was tabled by the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR).
Suspending the PDCA could mean halting humanitarian funds.
Between 1993 and 2020, the EU provided Cuba with 94 million euros ($109m) in humanitarian aid and set aside an additional 125 million euros ($144m) for cooperation with Cuba for the 2021-27 period.
According to the European Commission, the funds are designed to boost Cuba’s private sector, help its renewable energy transition and further economic modernisation.
Polish MEP Arkadiusz Mularczyk, one of the authors of the parliamentary amendment, told Al Jazeera, “Cuba had fundamentally failed to uphold the commitments that form [the PDCA’s] legal and moral foundation.
“Instead, the Cuban regime has grown more authoritarian and repressive.”
He added that the EU should “not get in the US’s way”.
Suspension of the PDCA “would signal that the EU’s partnerships are conditional on genuine respect for democracy and human rights”, he said.
In February, Amnesty International warned that “political prisoners” and their family members were subject to harassment in Cuba.
In its annual report on Cuba, Human Rights Watch said, the government “continues to repress and punish dissent and public criticism”.
The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights documented at least 390 incidents of repression within civil society in January, including 42 arbitrary detentions – an increase compared with previous months.
The piece was published in collaboration with Espacio.
