Darkness hangs over Havana like a ghost.

At a moment’s notice, entire streets plunge into pitch black — the predictable result of a US siege designed to punish the Cuban people into submission.

But light is on the way.

In March, planes, boats, and delegations from across the world converged on Cuba’s capital. At José Martí airport, suitcases packed with antibiotics, cancer drugs, and surgical supplies were stacked in long rows across the arrival hall. At sea, boats crossed the Caribbean, delayed by the weather before finally docking in Havana. On arrival, solar panels and generators were unloaded and rushed to hospitals struggling to keep essential services running.

The Nuestra América Convoy had arrived.

From Milan to Mexico City, from Caribbean ports to the streets of Havana, more than 600 delegates carried over 35 tonnes of aid — medicines, food, and energy equipment — to an island pushed to the edge by months of intensified economic warfare. Supplies reached clinics and wards already rationing care. Doctors received equipment to keep lights on through the next blackout.

As the delegates converged in Havana on Saturday 21 March, more than a dozen cities around the world moved in parallel. Outside US embassies and in public squares — London, Dublin, Madrid, Mexico City, Athens, Vienna, Sydney, Johannesburg and more — demonstrators gathered with a shared demand: end the siege.

At the same time, the Convoy travelled further than any single demonstration could.

In Milan, rows of suitcases filled with medicine stretched across the airport floor, filmed and shared as delegates prepared to depart by charter flight. Days later, boats appeared on the horizon in Havana, their arrival picked up by broadcasters and replayed far beyond the island. Across Havana — at press conferences, concerts, and hospitals — interviews with organisers and participants moved quickly across feeds, carrying the story into spaces where Cuba rarely appears.

The images accumulated.

For several days in March, the Convoy broke through the information blockade that so often isolates the island. Analysts in Cuba recorded a surge in digital engagement as the story circulated — not as crisis alone, but as action.

And it did not remain there.

Wire services carried it worldwide. Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse reported on the scale of the aid and the coalition behind it. Major outlets across Europe, Latin and North American followed the boats, planes, and their convergence in Havana. When delegates returned to the United States, authorities confiscated phones and questioned participants — a response that revealed how the mission was being understood.

The Convoy had shifted something. For months, Cuba had been framed as a place of collapse — shortages, blackouts, crisis — with the policies producing that crisis treated as distant background. The Convoy helped make those policies visible again and contestable. It reframed the situation not as a humanitarian emergency alone, but as a political question: who is enforcing the siege, and who is prepared to break it?

Days later, that question moved from rhetoric to reality.

At the port of Matanzas, a Russian tanker — the Anatoly Kolodkin — docked with more than 700,000 barrels of crude oil, the first major fuel delivery to reach Cuba in months. After weeks in which fuel shortages had brought the island to a standstill, the vessel was allowed through.

The explanation from Washington was careful: a humanitarian exception, not a policy change.

But elsewhere, the implications were drawn more openly. President Claudia Sheinbaum affirmed that Mexico reserves the right to supply fuel to Cuba — whether as humanitarian assistance or through normal commercial arrangements. Other governments signalled similar positions more quietly. The line that had seemed fixed — “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil. There’s no money. There’s no anything,” Trump had bragged aboard Air Force One on 16 February — began to blur.

At a press conference days earlier in Havana, Jeremy Corbyn had posed the question:

“If France, Germany and Britain instructed an oil tanker to go to Cuba to deliver oil, would the US really bomb that oil tanker? Would they really stop that oil tanker going through?”

At Matanzas, the question did not need answering in words. A ship had crossed. Its cargo was being pumped ashore. Workers moved across the docks, hoses running from tanker to terminal, as if this were an ordinary delivery. In one sense, it was. In another, it was something else entirely: a test that had not been stopped.

None of this resolves the crisis. The shipment will last days, not months. Hospitals still ration electricity. Pharmacies remain understocked. The architecture of the blockade — designed, as a 1960 US memorandum put it, to produce “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of government” — continues to structure daily life. But the terrain has shifted.

In Havana, the lights will still go out. But they come back on, now, in a different political atmosphere — one in which the siege is contested. Aid arrives not as charity, but as defiance. Fuel shipments are no longer hypothetical, but precedented. Governments weigh their options against an example already set.

At the docks in Matanzas, oil flows into storage tanks. In hospital corridors, generators kick in and fail and kick in again. On phones — where they have not been confiscated — videos of suitcases, boats, and crowds continue to circulate.

Piece by piece, the sense of inevitability that sustained the blockade begins to erode. Because it has been shown, in practice, to be breakable.

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Art of the Week

Progressive International is honoured to reissue posters commissioned by the Palestinian-Cuban Friendship Association from the 1980’s by Marc Rudin (1945–2023) to coincide with the Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba, inspired by the Global Sumud Flotilla. Made by Rudin during his exile in Damascus, the poster, titled Viva La Solidaridad Cubano-Palestina, is emblematic of the long-standing solidarity between Cuba and Palestine.

Motivated by Palestinian comrades he met in Italy in the late 1970s, Rudin travelled to Lebanon by fishing boat. In Beirut, he worked under the pseudonym Jihad Mansour for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), learned Arabic and developed his understanding of symbols, fonts and forms of Islamic culture. The re-edition of the poster was granted by those who were close to him to support Progressive International’s solidarity work.

Buy yours at: https://workshop.progressive.international/collections/limited-editions