https://archive.is/6lDzT

Duration - 2:06 [a video about Cuba from the news collective Belly Of The Beast]

Justine Medina is a barista and Cuban-American activist opposed to the embargo imposed by the U.S. government on Cuba, the island she considers her other homeland.

After multiple visits to Cuba, she says conditions have worsened: food shortages, scarcity of medicine and constant blackouts that make daily life harder.

According to Justine, this war, which has lasted 66 years and has intensified over time, only causes more suffering for the people.

“I grew up hearing criticism of the Cuban government,” says Justine, who was raised in Florida. “But I also learned that the embargo should end.”

Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators.

Opinion - Nicholas Kristof May 11, 2026

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

https://archive.ph/28nAd

May 11, 2026

By Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan L. Jackson

Ms. Jayapal, of Washington’s Seventh Congressional District, and Mr. Jackson, of Illinois’s First Congressional District, are Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Alejandro, a premature baby born in Havana’s Eusebio Hernández Pérez maternity hospital, weighed only two pounds when we met him in April. We watched him as he lay in an incubator, one of the few in the building whose delicate electronic components hadn’t been damaged by the high-voltage electricity surges that follow nationwide blackouts. Far-reaching U.S. sanctions make importing replacement parts for the other, broken incubators nearly impossible.

Touring the hospital, we saw women in the final days of their pregnancies trudging up flights of stairs, the elevators inoperable without power. The hospital staff members struggle to get to work without fuel for their cars. During blackouts, doctors sometimes have to manually pump ventilators to keep babies alive. They say the hospital has managed to avoid an increase in infant mortality over the past several months, but other facilities around the country have not been so lucky. From 2018 to 2025, as U.S. sanctions grew more punitive, Cuba’s once-impressive infant mortality rate skyrocketed by 148 percent.