'Cuba Has the Right to Live Without a Gun To Its Head'
Rob Miller from the Cuba Solidarity Campaign talks to Adrian Goldberg for the Byline Times Podcast.
"Cuba has the right to live in peace, without a gun to its head from this bullying, aggressive, cowboy state..."
Rob Miller, director of the UK-based Cuba Solidarity Campaign, doesn’t need much prompting to mount a passionate defence of the tiny Caribbean island he loves, 90 miles south of the US coast, which is currently choking in the grip of a vicious economic stranglehold by its mighty neighbour. Miller has seen first hand the effects of the oil embargo imposed by President Trump in January, which built on more than six decades of US sanctions.
“I was there with a study group, visiting schools and hospitals in Havana and in the provinces,” Miller said, in an interview with the Byline Times Podcast. “There are power cuts which are 22 hours a day, because they’ve completely run out of oil now. If you think about a very, very hot Caribbean country, air conditioning is not working, food is going off, [there are] supply issues because you haven’t got transport, so it’s incredibly challenging. And it’s particularly challenging in the medical sphere, where, if you don’t have electricity in hospitals, life support systems shut down, incubators shut down, you can’t do operations.”
The ban on oil exports was followed by a new raft of sanctions earlier this month; all part of Trump’s ‘Maximum Pressure’ strategy, designed to engineer regime change in Havana – a project endorsed by his hawkish Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the child of Cuban émigrés.
“The only fuel that has gone through was one Russian tanker, about six weeks ago, so Cuba is struggling,” Miller says, but the population – inured to hardship after decades of US-enforced economic isolation – is already finding workarounds. “They are moving incredibly quickly to solar. When I was there, I was amazed by the amount of transport on the roads. Lots of little electric trikes that can move goods around, buzzing about here, there and everywhere, many of them with solar panels on the top. But you have to remember, although the growth in solar is massive, it’s starting from an incredibly small number.”
This is all part of a wider resistance movement to Trump, who – somewhat implausibly – insists that Cuba represents a national security threat to the US. Miller witnessed the pushback against the President: “I was there for May Day. Nearly 5 million Cubans marched across the island, half a million in Havana. They issued a call, which they pulled together in about three weeks, which was to defend their homeland. Six and a half million people signed that physical petition – something like 85% of the adult population – in community centres and workplaces. The British would resist; the Iranians are resisting, the Vietnamese resisted. If an external country is threatening to invade, to bomb, to kidnap your president, you will resist. Anybody in any country will resist. And we’ve seen that the Cubans are prepared to resist - and I hope that they do.”
The White House has sought to destabilise Cuba for a variety of geopolitical and domestic reasons, ever since the revolution in 1959, led by Fidel Castro, which overthrew the corrupt Batista government – a regime propped up by the US and the Mafia. Millions of Cubans fled to Florida, traditionally a ‘swing state’ in presidential elections. The presence of these exiles, many from the previously privileged Havana elite, encouraged both Republican and Democrat candidates to take a hardline stance against Castro. The US also feared that a successful socialist state on its doorstep might trigger a more widespread backlash in the region against “The American Way of Life”. Cuba’s close relationship with the Soviet Union did little to soothe US jitters, although Miller argues that the tie-up with Moscow was borne of necessity, rather than ideology.
“In the early years of the revolution, Russia was nowhere to be seen,” he declares. “The Cubans wanted to carry on trading with the United States. Fidel [Castro] and [revolutionary leader] Che {Guevera] famously went over to the United States. They were blanked and, really, that’s what led Cuba into trading with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, because they had to trade with somebody.”
Whatever the merits of their overtures to the States – which did include a meeting with then Vice-President Richard Nixon – the Cubans quickly became embroiled in the Cold War. In 1961, Castro survived the infamous, CIA-backed Bay Of Pigs invasion, only for diplomatic relations to deteriorate further when Soviet missiles were deployed to Cuba (in retaliation for the positioning of US weapons in Turkey and Italy) taking the world to the brink of nuclear armageddon.
A period of relative stability ensued, during which Cuba’s literacy rates boomed, and life expectancy rapidly rose. This era of relative prosperity collapsed following the fall of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which ushered in the ‘Special Period’ – years of severe economic privation when, as Miller recalls, “people were on the verge of starvation. They navigated their way through that incredibly difficult situation, primarily by developing tourism, and they managed slowly to crawl out of that huge crisis, having lost 70% of their trade overnight in the 1990s.”
The resilience of this nation of 10 million people is certainly formidable and should not be under-estimated – least of all by Trump – but are progressives in the West in danger of romanticising Cuba’s struggle to survive? The World Report for 2025, published by Human Rights Watch, reported that the Havana government, “continues to repress and punish virtually all forms of dissent and public criticism”. More than 650 people arrested during protests in 2021 remain behind bars. This hardly sounds like the kind of free speech and democracy cherished in the West.
Miller pushes back, insisting that Cuba is a democracy; just a different kind compared to that in the US and UK. “They have a participatory system. Cuba has so many meetings, discussions, elections in workplaces, in schools, in the community. It’s quite an incredible system they have over there. It’s their system, right? It’s not the same as Britain. It’s not one the same as the United States, where you need billions and billions of pounds to become President. It’s a system that I don’t recognise as particularly a great model, but the key point in all this is, it is up to the Cuban people to determine how they run their country, how they organise their lives, and how they want to change it.
“When people around the world, particularly in the United States, wag a finger at the Cubans and say, well, ‘you should do this and you should do that’, they’re not just wagging a finger – they’re pointing guns and bombs and aeroplanes. If Trump concentrated on solving some of the problems in his own country, instead of trying to be some sort of messianic leader – policing the world as he tries to paint himself as some kind of superhero who knows what’s best for us all – I think the world could be a much better place."
Watch or listen to the Byline Times Podcast interview with Rob Miller here.