This is the first article in a two-part series on US interventions in island nations across the Caribbean Sea.Half a million Cubans gathered in Havana joining five million nationwide who rallied to commemorate International Workers’ Day on May 1. Defiant in the face of intensified US blockade after POTUS Trump’s January takeover of Venezuela, half the population of the island nation hit the streets along with President Miguel Diaz-Canel, ex-President Raul Castro, and other leaders. Fearlessly embodying Cuban Independence Movement leader Jose Marti’s notion of “Nuestra America” (“Our America”) as these Cubans may be, the US picked the historic occasion to hit the Cuban government and citizens alike with another wave of sanctions.Trump’s new Executive Order extends sanctions from previously mainly applying to the Cuban government and affiliates to now including anybody who has worked in energy, defence, mining, financial services or security sectors. Even if “Cuban officials judged to have engaged in “serious human rights abuses” or “corruption” are also thrown in there among those sanctioned, the US government can no longer pretend human rights or democracy have anything to do with the kind of imperialist adventure that the sitting POTUS thinks can be carried out in one afternoon by docking the aircraft carrier SS Gerald Ford in Havana on its way back from being chased out of the Strait of Hormuz.Nuestra America (Our America)Certainly due to President Trump’s mad king proclamations about preparing for military action against Cuba, but the island nation has also been under the spotlight in US media in the past few weeks as delegations of the Nuestra America Convoy to Cuba from over a dozen countries around the world delivered 20,000+ tonnes of humanitarian aid including “food, medicines, medical equipment, renewable energy systems, and essential household goods to support hospitals, clinics, and families across the island as fuel shortages and restrictions on imports strain everyday life and critical infrastructure”.Sadly US papers of record led this coverage with sensationalism and smears, keen on pointing out how celebrity participants of the aid convoy such as American political influencer Hasan Piker, and Irish punk band Kneecap stayed, and played concerts, in generator-powered five-star hotels and venues while the rest of Havana suffered blackouts. The next day, the Times corrected course publishing a piece about the embargo’s squeeze on Cuba’s healthcare, but by then the damage had been done and Piker’s hotel room became the centrepiece of the story, trumping the delivery of crucial aid such as cancer medicines.Also buried in the coverage is the detail that the establishments the delegation patronised were among the few that were not state-run and therefore not US-sanctioned. “People from other countries can use credit cards in Cuba or stay at whatever hotels,” says Gerard Dalbon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee who travelled as part of the CODEPINK delegation, clarifying that “the US is the strictest with the requirements it imposes with its blockade”.Restrictions on where they could go and who they could talk to are only US-imposed, Dalbon says, clearing the “misinformation that everything is The Truman Show in Cuba”. Describing how he had to walk with aid suitcases everywhere as taxis and buses were expensive, the New York-based activist went about Havana unrestricted by the Cuban government, observing trash pileups due to the fuel blockade that has been preventing garbage pickups. Even walking through pitch black streets at night, Dalbon says that he saw Cubans going about their lives, powered by solar panels of various sizes ranging from those that charge batteries and small devices to others that can run generators.“The foreign minister said that the largest investment that Cuba has made in the last year was in solar panels,” Dalbon says. “About 20% of Cuba’s energy capacity now comes from solar and renewables.” As Ex-UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn also concurs in his account of his visit to Cuba as part of the convoy, the legacy of the 26th of July Movement rests on rapidly scaling up its renewable energy production along the lines of its acclaimed Tarea Vida (Life’s Task) Climate Plan to subvert the oil blockade, notwithstanding the Russian oil tankers bringing much needed temporary respite.All said, even as deputy finance minister Fernández de Cossío and President Diaz-Canel receive US media attention, the questioning seldom touches on those aspects, instead remaining hinged on imperialist interests, with such naked instances as NBC News asking Cuba’s leader whether he would “step down to save his country” if the US otherwise threatens military force, without any examination of why a peaceful island nation that simply seeks to educate, feed and provide healthcare for its people has to contend with a superpower’s saber-rattling.Id of imperialismHaving convened the convoy to Cuba as well as a peace brigade to Venezuela that surveyed the damage done by the US’s January 3 assault after a half a year of bombing “fishermen in small boats,” Progressive International’s James Schneider sees “the MAGA foreign policy aim” as to “pull back from providing military support for international trade and no longer seek to be a liberal global hegemon, but have fiercer control over the western hemisphere over key countries and supply chains”. However, what has begun to be known as the Donroe Doctrine or as in the map Secretary of War Pete Hegseth unfurled, the Greater North America project, is not drastically different from trade strategies such as friendshoring and nearshoring, says Schneider, which were “friendlier ways laid out under the Biden administration”.“Trump operates a bit like the Id of capitalist imperialism,” the ex-Corbyn staffer says, which “has a surface irrationality, but follows a much deeper pre-set logic.” The abduction of Maduro, he reminds us, is the culmination of a US campaign to “economically isolate and overthrow the government in order to secure more favourable terms on the oil,” going back to Chavez’s election at the turn of the century. What’s different with Trump, Schneider says, is “he deliberately operates within chaos, because he’s faster-moving and has a louder voice than other players, and therefore can shape the terrain within the chaos.”The downside of The Donald’s Jack Nicholson unravelling at the end of The Shining school of foreign policy is “he can’t consider that his opponent has a move”. Schneider cites examples of China retaliating against Trump’s tariffs and Iran blockading the Strait of Hormuz as taking the Art of the Deal author by surprise. Leaders of sovereign states making decisions going against his interests seem to shock Trump, even in the cases of allies such as Italy or Spain refusing to participate in the Iran invasion.Yet the rest of the US’s European partners had stronger reactions to the pirate’s empty threats of taking Greenland, Schneider argues, than his actual illegal invasion of Venezuela and abduction of the President. “Thoroughly enmeshed in the US system,” European including British military imports rose 125% between 2022 and 24, two-thirds of which come from the US. “Even if the countries say the war in Iran was a war of choice and it wasn’t our war,” he shrugs, saying planes still fly from British and other NATO bases; Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are still part of the Five Eyes intelligence network that includes the US.“If you look at Hegseth’s statements about what he’s trying to do with the US military and its capacities, he’s talking again and again about force projection,” Schneider says, translating the term to mean “making people afraid of what the US might do.” Actions of resistance against that strategy, he says, must push the boundaries of what’s possible; it’s not a coincidence that the Cuba convoy was “followed swiftly by the Russian tanker,” as well as other countries “making sovereign decisions with the resumption of fuel deliveries.” Envisioning a scenario in which Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Spain deliver fuel to Cuba as not far out, Schneider hopes for the convoy and other internationalist missions “not only to send the message of solidarity that the Cuban people are not alone, but also expand the zone of possibility for action for those who might not accept Trump’s Might Makes Right terrorist violence.”Karthik Puru is a writer and musician from Chennai, India, now based in New Jersey. His writing has been in Dropsite News, LA Review of Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, and The Wire among other places. You can keep up with his work on Substack, Bandcamp and YouTube.