Challenging Biden’s Cuba Policy From the Belly of the Beast
US sanctions are shaping every facet of life in Cuba today. We talked to Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernández about two new documentaries exploring the roots of these destructive policies and what can be done to challenge them.
A couple walks in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami, Florida, on May 17, 2022. (Photo by Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Kian Seara Rey
Over the past seven years, the US government has hammered Cuba with sanctions, devastating the island’s economy and fueling a massive uptick in migration to the United States. But there has been little in-depth reporting on this intensification of the six-decade-old embargo on Cuba.
Belly of the Beast, an independent media organization composed of US and Cuban reporters and filmmakers, is a prominent exception. This month, the outlet released two new documentaries that look into what — and who — is behind the US government’s bipartisan, hard-line policy toward Cuba.
In Uphill on the Hill, Liz Oliva Fernández travels to Washington, DC, where she investigates why the Biden administration has continued Trump’s strategy of using sanctions to bring about regime change. She also exposes the hypocrisy behind Cuba’s designation by both Trump and Biden as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” a label that has ravaged the island’s economy by cutting it off from credit and investment.
In Hardliner on the Hudson, Liz looks into disgraced New Jersey senator Bob Menendez’s rise to power, his past connections to Cuban-American terrorists, and the disconnect between his New Jersey constituents and his hard-line position on Cuba. Menendez has had an outsize influence over Cuba policy since Joe Biden, his longtime ally in the Senate, became president.
Uphill on the Hill and Hardliner on the Hudson represent interesting examples of “parachute journalism” in reverse, as Liz, a Cuban journalist who had never previously set foot in the United States, ventures into the halls of Congress and onto the streets of Union City, New Jersey, to question powerful politicians on the policies that have ravaged her country.
These documentaries have a particular significance for me, because as a Cuban American originally from Miami, I grew up surrounded by far-right, pro-embargo politics. I had the privilege of working on preproduction for Hardliner on the Hudson, a deep dive into Cuban American politics in New Jersey, where much of my family has lived for decades.
I recently had the opportunity to talk to Liz about her experience working with Belly of the Beast and the challenges she faced as a Cuban journalist reporting in the United States.
In Uphill on the Hill, you were in Washington, DC to look into the shift from Obama’s opening to Trump’s crackdown to Biden’s current strategy of mostly leaving Trump’s Cuba policy in place — if not making the sanctions worse. What were you able to learn about that?
One thing I noticed is that US politicians know about the effects that the sanctions have on the Cuban people. At first, I was thinking, well, maybe they just don’t know. But they know. So, the fact that they know about the effects of the sanctions on Cuba’s people, and they are not doing anything to try to alleviate it in some way was really shocking.
The whole purpose of the sanctions is to try to overthrow the Cuban government, to suffocate the Cuban people to make them go against the government. So, we are part of a political game they’re trying to play.
On the other hand, I was surprised by how much so many of the ordinary people I met knew about Cuba. They know that it is a lie that Cuba sponsors terrorism. And they also understand that the sanctions are unfair.
On the ground in Cuba, how are Cubans feeling the effects of the sanctions?
People in Cuba don’t think much about US policy at all. In fact, it’s pretty difficult to get someone to talk about US policy and how it affects their everyday life because they don’t normally think about it like that. People hear about the blockade all the time, but they don’t know the specifics of how it all works. People are also very much exposed to US media, especially on social media. They bombard us with a lot of biased or inaccurate information about how the Cuban government is doing everything so wrong and how the United States is trying to save us from dictatorship and communism.
For example, I never talk with my neighbors about the US blockade. We talk about the scarcity of medicines and eggs, or that we can’t find chicken, but we don’t talk about sanctions. Sanctions are too abstract. When you have to deal with crisis and scarcity, you’re not really thinking about a policy that is far, far away from you in the United States, which you don’t have any agency to vote for or against. It’s too external.
I think one of the main things that makes Belly of the Beast so interesting is that it is unique among Cuba-focused media. A lot of media related to Cuba — especially from the Cuban exile community — is just outright propaganda. In Cuba, the media is state-run and also biased. What is your opinion on the way Cuba has been covered by different types of media outlets, and what is Belly of the Beast doing differently?
I think we are doing everything differently. What you described is not something that you see only in Cuba. The way they portray Latin America is colonialist. Why can’t you talk about Cuba in a balanced way? Why aren’t there more stories about how interesting people are here? Or on all the positive things that we have achieved in the last decades? That’s why I’m so proud to work with Belly of the Beast. We’re trying to tell the untold stories about Cuba and its people: positive stories, stories that talk about resilience, access to culture, health care, or education. It is very difficult to find those kinds of stories in the US media.
In Uphill on the Hill, you spoke with Carlos Gutierrez, the former commerce secretary under George W. Bush and a hard-line proponent of regime change in Cuba. He later had a change of heart. In your interview, he said he “inherited talking points” from his father. In South Florida, that is incredibly common, and it is not unusual to encounter young people with very right-wing, anti-communist beliefs, which seem almost anachronistic, imparted to them by their families. For example, Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez were both born in the United States to parents who left Cuba before the 1959 Cuban Revolution even happened. What do you make of this Cuba obsession from Cuban Americans and the politicians who claim to represent them?
Well, I wanted to believe that this obsession about Cuba comes from actually having genuine strong feelings about it, but I don’t buy it. For me, it’s difficult to believe because strong feelings like that come from something that actually hurt you or hurt your family, not something as abstract as Cuba is to them. And to go sixty years with that kind of frustration or anger . . . it’s difficult for me to understand that. I don’t get it. How are any of these things that happened in your family the fault of average Cubans who actually live in Cuba? And why do you want to hurt them? For me that doesn’t make any sense. So I don’t buy that this is genuinely the way that they feel.
Is it that they have something to gain from it?
I think so. I lean more toward thinking that it’s about economic and political interests. They have to create something that people are afraid of. They need to create a fear of something. So in this case, it’s a fear of socialism or communism. They have to create that fear in order to gain peoples’ support, because you are promising to face and confront that fear. They have to first create a monster to then portray themselves as a savior.
For Cubans abroad, everybody has a different relationship with Cuba, but most of them who have some type of bad experience with Cuba, they don’t have that sort of bitterness and anger. For example, when I was in New Jersey talking to Cubans who live there, I noticed a sort of sadness because they are far from their home country. But they’re not angry. Sure, there are people that suffered at the hands of the Cuban government who might have those strong feelings of bitterness. But the people whom I talked to about this are just sad and frustrated. They might be old now and thinking about how they don’t want to die in a country that is not their country.
In Hardliner on the Hudson, there is a focus on Cuban American terrorism throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Some of these groups like Omega 7 and Alpha 66 were linked to mafias in New Jersey and New York City. In 1980, they killed Félix García Rodríguez, a Cuban official with the Cuban Permanent Mission to the United Nations, the first UN official to be assassinated in New York City, and one of many other such assassinations. But this isn’t all ancient history either: the Cuban embassy in Washington, DC was attacked twice just last year. In Uphill on the Hill, you showed how the bullet holes are still there. What did you learn about Cuban American terrorism in your reporting, and did any of it surprise you?
In Cuba, we suffered from many terrorist attacks going back to the beginning of the revolution. Terrorism is not new for me, so I wasn’t surprised in that regard. But what is surprising is when you realize that politics are involved in that terrorism. Some politicians were tied to terrorists who attacked Cuba or people who are close to Cuba, even in the United States. Yet it’s Cuba that the United States considers a “state sponsor of terrorism.”
When I was at a State Department press conference, I asked about the terrorism list and why Cuba is on it. The spokesperson refused to give specific examples of the supposed terrorism that justifies that designation, yet none of the other journalists did a follow-up on my question. How is it possible that you’re in a room full of journalists and not a single one wants to follow up on that?
You mentioned Cuba being on the US state sponsors of terrorism list. Just last week, the United States removed Cuba from a short list of countries that it considers are “not cooperating fully” in the fight against terrorism, which is (confusingly) not the same designation. Cuba expert William LeoGrande was quoted by NBC as saying that this move “could well be a prelude to the State Department reviewing Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.” How do you see that unfolding and what effect would it have on average Cubans?
It seems clear that Cuba is cooperating with the United States. Last year, I spoke with an American official with the US Coast Guard at a meeting between the US and Cuban Coast Guards held in Holguin. They have been cooperating for years now against narcotrafficking and terrorism. If you review the State Department documents, they talk about how useful the Cuban government is in their mission to stop drug trafficking, human trafficking, and even in counterterrorism. The US Coast Guard can just call the Cuban Coast Guard to alert them to a drug shipment and the Cuban Coast Guard will intervene, essentially acting on US national security interests.
As far as taking Cuba off the state sponsors of terrorism list: it would be huge because being on the list causes a lot of problems, both for people in Cuba and Cubans living abroad. Even Cubans who have residency in another country are not allowed to travel freely to the United States now because their first country is Cuba, which is considered a state sponsor of terrorism. My friend living in Spain right now got a scholarship, but she has suffered so much just trying to open a bank account to get the money from the scholarship to pay her tuition. That’s just because she comes from a country that is on a US terrorism list, so the banks weren’t able to open an account for her. It’s crazy!
You have mentioned before that you see yourself as not just a journalist, but also an activist. You are of course Cuban and feel the effects of US policy firsthand. What effect do your personal experiences have on your approach to journalism?
I’m also an anti-racist activist and a feminist, so there is a lot linking my activism and my journalism. But working with Belly of the Beast and diving into the issue of sanctions changed my perspective. Before I started working on that, I knew sanctions were real, but I thought they were just another part of the equation. But then I realized how big of an issue it is, and it affects all aspects of Cuban peoples’ lives. So it’s impossible for me, knowing what I know now, to focus on anything other than sanctions, because the sanctions are like an umbrella. Everything else, including racism, is under that umbrella. For me, US sanctions are the biggest issue for Cubans’ lives and for the Cuban economy.
One moment I particularly enjoyed in the episode focusing on Washington, DC was when you took a break from chasing after the officials that guide Cuba policy — who are overwhelmingly white — to talk to average black people on the street in that city, which is very much a black city. You have also previously interviewed figures like legendary novelist Alice Walker and Francia Márquez, Colombia’s first Afro-Colombian Vice President. Can you speak a little bit on the African diaspora and the relation to Cuba?
The Cuban Revolution was a revolution that was able to achieve social and racial justice for black people. So, that’s an example that people around the globe have as a reference. So they get it. Black people in Washington, DC get it because sadly, they know what the US government is capable of doing to them. For example, it was their people whom Cuba gave asylum to: African-American fugitives [from the US Black Power movement].