Hoy Cuba-USA Today. Blockade, Humanitarian Crisis, Solidarity
First Venezuela, then Iran—will Cuba be next? Recent threats against Havana by Donald Trump add to an arsenal of sanctions that has been in place for more than six decades and further strengthened since January 2026 with the tightening of the U.S. oil blockade.
Electrical collapse, regular blackouts, food scarcity, and medicine shortages: the crisis in Cuba has worsened dramatically in recent months. What is the reality of Cuba today? How is the Cuban government reacting to the current situation? And how is the humanitarian crisis affecting the lives of the population?
A Conversation between Zaida Capote Cruz (Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística José Antonio Portuondo Valdor, La Habana), Lucas Poy (VU Amsterdam/IISG) and Jean-Baptiste Thomas (École Polytechnique Paris/IISG).
The event is organised by Marxism-NL.
Practical information
Date: 6 May 2026
Time: 17:00
Location: IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam
Admission: Free entry, but sign up via event@iisg.nl
Language: English/Spanish
Zaida Capote Cruz works as a senior researcher at the José Antonio Portuondo Valdor Institute of Literature and Linguistics and leads, amongst other research projects, the projects ‘Universes of Feminism in the 20th Century’ and ‘Critical Thought of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Origins, Dialogues and Institutionalisation. 1870–1970”, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is the author of works such as El ensayo y la crítica literarios de la diáspora cubana. Índice bibliográfico (2023), Estado crítico (2023), Tribulaciones de España en América. Tres episodios de historia y ficción (2021), Loynacianas (2017), La nación íntima (2007), Contra el silencio. Otra lectura de Dulce María Loynaz (2005) y Tres ensayos ajenos (1994).
Lucas Poy is a social and labour historian specializing in the Second International and the early labour movement in Argentina and Latin America. His research examines labour, migration, and socialism from a global perspective, with particular attention to transnational connections, the Global South, and questions of race and solidarity. He is Assistant Professor in Global Economic and Social History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a fellow of the International Institute of Social History, where he edits the Revista Latinoamericana de Trabajo y Trabajadores (REVLATT).
Jean-Baptiste Thomas is a lecturer in contemporary Latin American studies and history at the University of Poitiers and at École polytechnique–IP Paris and fellow at the IISH. His research focuses on the social and political history of Cuba in the twentieth century, on the history of the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of workers’ insubordination, as well as on the history of protest during the “Global 68.” He is the author of two monographs, Révolutions à Cuba de 1868 à nos jours (Paris, Syllepses, 2020, co-written with Thomas Posado) and Découvrir la Commune de Paris (Paris, Éditions sociales, 2021). He is currently working on an anthology of texts by Ernesto Guevara (Découvrir Guevara, Paris, Éditions sociales, 2027).
