Barbados has contributed food supplies, mainly powdered milk, to a CARICOM humanitarian shipment delivered to Cuba with Mexico’s assistance amid severe shortages caused by the intensified American blockade of the island.
The delivery is the 13th shipment of its kind to reach Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment in Havana. Among the assistance from CARICOM, Barbados contributed food to help Cuban families facing food shortages.
The shipment fulfills a commitment made by the bloc’s leaders earlier this year to support Havana as its economic difficulties worsened.
Barbados Ambassador to CARICOM David Commissiong told Barbados TODAY: “It will be recalled that at the February 2026 CARICOM Heads of Government meeting in St. Kitts, our heads of government made a decision to send supplies of humanitarian aid to the people of Cuba who are suffering terribly under this enhanced US blockade.”
Moving the supplies proved difficult because of restrictions affecting trade and banking with Cuba.
“It took CARICOM some time to implement that decision because the American blockade has made it very, very difficult to send anything into Cuba,” Ambassador Comissiong said. “However, we finally achieved it with a little help from Mexico, so the CARICOM humanitarian supplies have landed in Cuba. I can tell you that Barbados’s contribution consisted of food supplies and primarily powdered milk.”
Describing the Cuban people as “Caribbean kith and kin”, he pointed to CARICOM’s years-old opposition to United States measures against Cuba, which he described as cruel, unjust and contrary to international law.
The latest restrictions imposed by the Donald Trump administration and driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a descendant of Cuban exiles in Florida, ignored lessons from the past, according to the envoy who noted that the US had previously supported the ending of Organisation of American States sanctions.
Ambassador Comissiong said: “What is so remarkable is that way back in 1975, the government of the United States actually voted at the Organisation of American States to terminate the OAS’s almost identical sanctions regime against Cuba.
“And the Americans said at the time that they were voting because having this sanctions regime in place was only diverting our hemisphere away from the really serious developmental issues that we need to be facing. So the US was able to see the wisdom of terminating the OAS blockade way back in 1975, but pretends that it cannot see the wisdom of terminating its own illicit blockade of our Cuban brothers and sisters.”
CARICOM’s relationship with Cuba began in 1972, when Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago established diplomatic relations with Havana despite pressure from the United States and the OAS to isolate Fidel Castro’s communist-led regime.
For more than 50 years, CARICOM countries have maintained their support for Cuba. Since 1992, they have voted as a united bloc at the United Nations in support of an annual call by the UN General Assembly for an end to the US embargo which dates back to 1962 and has intensified into a near-total blockade of energy supplies and financial transactions under Trump.
Ambassador Commissiong said the assistance was not based solely on long-standing political ties, but also on humanitarian considerations: “In any event, the humanitarian crisis that now exists in Cuba, where this tremendous collective punishment of the Cuban people has been inflicted—outside of even a traditional CARICOM policy of solidarity with Cuba, our humanitarian instincts by themselves will say to us that we need to respond to that kind of human situation in our Caribbean region.
Asked whether the assistance could continue, he said each CARICOM government would have to consider its own financial and supply circumstances, but noted the Caribbean’s gratitude for Cuban support over several decades, particularly in health care and education.
He pointed to Cuba’s assistance to Barbados during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Havana sent more than 100 nurses and doctors here despite challenges at home.
Ambassador Comissiong added: “How many Barbadian lives did those Cuban medical personnel save?
“There was even a time when Cuba itself was reeling from the COVID virus and had made a decision not to send out any more of their medical personnel. That decision coincided with Barbados requesting additional personnel, and Cuba made an exception in our case and did send them.
“Cuba is a country that has given its heart to the world for decades now, and therefore it is only right that in Cuba’s time of need, right-thinking governments step up and make sure that we respond.”
The collaboration with Mexico also demonstrated the value of joint action among Latin American and Caribbean countries, the CARICOM envoy said, referring to the 2019 Montevideo Mechanism, involving CARICOM, Mexico and Uruguay during the Venezuelan crisis, as another example of cooperation in the global South.
“The more we can come together in joint or collective mechanisms across the global South, the more effective we will be,” Ambassador Commissiong said, pointing to similar emerging partnerships with the African Union.
(RR)
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