As the United States tightens the screws, Cuba’s supposed allies respond with empty gestures and selective solidarity.


Belén Fernández is the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers UP, 2025), Inside Siglo X...XI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She has written for The New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, The Baffler, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications.
As the United States tightens the screws, Cuba’s supposed allies respond with empty gestures and selective solidarity.

Europe is quick to denounce Trump’s imperial fantasies while defending its own colonial past and present.

As talk of nuclear threats gives way to promises of ‘help’, the Bush-era logic of regime change re-emerges.

Trump has added a particular layer of dementedness to the latest unprovoked US aggression.

The US has waged its ‘war on terror’ for 25 years now, sowing death and destruction across the world.

This holiday season, Americans are getting a bad economy, redacted Epstein files and even more war abroad.

Trump’s violent new tactics build on years of US sanctions and intervention that have devastated ordinary Venezuelans.

In Guadalajara, the road to the World Cup is paved with erasure of the missing.

Venezuela doesn’t even produce fentanyl, but Washington is still going forward with regime change efforts in Caracas.

Trump’s breakup with some Republicans may entertain, but it won’t pull American politics out of the plutocratic bog.
