Cuba’s humanitarian crisis has reached an alarming stage. Chronic blackouts and shortages of fuel, food, medicine, and other basic goods are placing extraordinary burdens on Cuban families and severely constraining the ability of churches, humanitarian organizations, private businesses, and others to respond.
The Cuban government bears great responsibility for the structural economic and political failures that have left the country so vulnerable to external pressure. But the United States bears responsibility for a de facto fuel blockade and other new sanctions policies intended to extract concessions from Havana or precipitate political change, but which have so far failed to achieve those objectives while compounding the Cuban people’s suffering.
Humanitarian assistance should never be treated as a bargaining chip. If the goal of the United States is to focus its pressure on those responsible for repression or whose activities pose a threat to U.S. national interests, it should create more workable, consistent sanctions exceptions that allow food, medicine, energy, financing, and other essential resources to reach the Cuban people effectively. The more than $100 million in humanitarian assistance committed by the U.S. government, which is being delivered gradually in coordination with religious organizations on the ground, remains woefully insufficient relative to the scale of the island’s needs.
The Departments of the Treasury and Commerce already possess the tools to create broader humanitarian carve-outs, including authorities to license transactions that channel resources directly to the Cuban people and independent actors outside the state system. The Cuban government, for its part, should remove the regulatory, financial, and logistical obstacles that prevent available assistance from reaching those who need it. Taken together, these steps would also help mobilize greater international assistance by reducing regulatory uncertainty and creating clearer, more reliable channels for delivering aid.
Forward progress in this area is even more urgent in light of recent comments from U.S. officials suggesting that both military escalation and a brokered grand bargain are likely off the table for the time being.
The scope of these recommendations is deliberately limited to immediate humanitarian needs; they do not supersede the Cuba Study Group’s longstanding positions on improving U.S.-Cuba relations. We urge both governments to act immediately so that sanctions and bureaucratic obstacles no longer impede urgently needed relief for the Cuban people. All these measures can be implemented through executive and regulatory action without new legislation.
