Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces attend a rally in support of former President Raul Castro in front of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, May 22, 2026
ROGER D HARRIS and SARA FLOUNDERS challenge propaganda against the blockaded socialist island
MAY Day is the most important public celebration in Cuba. This year, which marked the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth, carried special significance in light of heightened US aggression. Over 5 million Cubans reportedly mobilised island-wide under the slogan of la patria se defiende (the homeland must be defended). The largest demonstration took place in Havana in front of the US embassy.
The symbolism of International Workers’ Day was not lost on the White House. President Trump chose that day, May 1, to impose yet more sanctions on top of the already draconian illegal measures immiserating Cuba. Cuban journalist Norland Rosendo Gonzalez called this latest escalation Trump’s “imperial order to kill the Cuban people without bullets.”
The world’s leading imperial power falsely claims that Cuba poses “threats to United States national security.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently announced additional measures to “defend” the US homeland from its peaceful neighbour.
Jill Clark-Gollub with the Americas Without Sanctions Campaign explains the underlying reason for Washington’s animosity: “Cuba is sanctioned for the crime of being a good example.” A small, formerly colonised country, Cuba simply claims its sovereign right to determine its own destiny without foreign interference.
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In 1976, Cuban voters ratified a constitutional referendum with a reported 97 per cent approval rate and high voter turnout, which formally defined Cuba as a socialist state. Last year in the United States, the House of Representatives passed a resolution “denouncing the horrors of socialism” by a lopsided bipartisan margin of 285–98.
Capitalism itself, however, has never been subject to a democratic vote of the American people. Perhaps for good reason: recent polls show a growing popularity for socialism, especially among the youth.
Shortly before May Day, President Miguel Diaz-Canel addressed the Cuban nation: “The socialist character of our revolution is not a phrase from the past; it is the shield of the present and the guarantee of the future.” With characteristic Cuban humility, he acknowledged “our own mistakes in this process of social construction” but added that “the main cause of our problems is the genocidal blockade.”
Directly addressing Washington – “gentlemen of manipulation and lies” – Díaz-Canel proclaimed: “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.”
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It linked the “multidimensional economic, financial, political, security and environmental crises” engulfing the planet — and noted that the “aggressive escalation of American imperialism” is intensifying them all.
It identified the United States as “the primary threat to global peace and security,” not so much a world policeman, as it has often thought of itself, but a global gangster that bullies, steals and destroys.
It connected US aggression against Cuba and Venezuela in the western hemisphere with its violence in the Middle East, and the genocide perpetrated by its ally Israel against the Palestinians.
And it brought together grassroots organisations, trade unions, peace campaigns and youth groups on an international basis to plan co-ordinated resistance.
No festival is so international as May Day, the workers’ day, with marches in Havana and Chicago, London and Rome, Baghdad and Beijing.
Rallies took up the message of defiance everywhere. Over 100 US unions took up the call “no work, no school, no shopping” for May Day, with specific marches like New York’s highlighting the connection between corporate power and state brutality under the slogan “Amazon delivers Ice.”
The Israeli police raided youth club premises to snatch Palestinian flags ahead of the demos, fearing any show of solidarity with the victims of their state’s relentless terror. In Cuba, electricity and energy workers took centre stage, as a whole nation saluted those trying to keep the lights on and the power flowing in the face of a brutal US siege.
So it was fitting that the International Meeting of Solidarity with Anti-Imperialism, dubbed 100 Years With Fidel, called on the world to stand with Cuba just as Cuba — exporter of medical care and education, valiant ally of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, beacon of socialism on the doorstep of the world’s most aggressive capitalist power — has so often stood with the world.
It made important commitments. One, to keep promoting convoys to breach the blockade and deliver essential supplies to Cuba. This is practical solidarity, like that organised in Britain by the Cuba Solidarity Campaign through its Cuba Vive appeal.
Two, to build links between left media organisations to counter the labyrinth of lies built up by the news and opinion monopolies that dominate global communications.
Three, international mobilisation and protest. The ceasefire in Gaza — hugely inadequate and regularly violated as it is — was brought about by the global scale of protest for Palestine. Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, “you can’t fight the world.” The US should be made to feel, through protests at embassies and pressure on governments, that to attack Cuba is to fight the world.
The US threat to Cuba is urgent — Donald Trump reiterated military threats on May Day itself. It is not something we can’t do anything about.
The US needs to know it will pay a heavy price for attacking Cuba, and that means pressure on our own government to grow a backbone. Britain votes against the illegal US blockade of Cuba every year — why can’t it stick up for its own sovereignty and protect British companies that trade with Cuba from extraterritorial US punishment, as China has just done for its companies sanctioned for trading with Iran?
As we saw in Havana, building ties across borders provides the surest defence against the world war Trump threatens, which our own rulers seem willing to join.
With the most reactionary racist, climate-denialist, violence-worshipping zealots taking US imperialism on a global rampage, winning that world is not just an existential question for Cubans, but for us all.
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Demonstrators attend a May Day rally marking International Workers’ Day in New York, on May 1, 2026. (Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for,” said one organizer.
In thousands of locations across the United States, workers and students are taking off from work and school and swearing off shopping on Friday as part of a national May Day protest.
May Day Strong, a coalition of activist groups and unions organizing the events, said more than 4,000 actions, from marches to pickets to displays of peaceful civil disobedience, were underway.
It is yet another nationwide display of coordinated resistance to the Trump administration’s agenda, including its war in Iran and its use of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to attack immigrant communities, issues that were at the forefront of March’s “No Kings” protests.
Six young protesters with the Sunrise Movement were taken into custody after blocking a bridge in Minneapolis in what they said was an act of “nonviolent noncooperation” to “stand up to the war in Iran and against ICE terrorizing our neighbors and our cities.”
Dozens more Sunrise protesters in Portland held a sit-in in the lobby of a Hilton hotel that was housing top officials with the Department of Homeland Security, leading to eight arrests.
“It’s May 1st, it’s workers’ day,” one of the protesters was recorded saying while being led away by police. “Don’t forget that you have power.”
In New York, over 100 activists lined up outside every entrance to the New York Stock Exchange in downtown Manhattan, banging drums and chanting “No ICE, no war!” where they were met by a flood of cops.
“The rich get richer off the backs of poor and working class people.” A May Day protester outside the NY Stock Exchange calls for taxing the rich to fund healthcare and support for the most vulnerable.
In the spirit of May Day, a global day of solidarity among workers, Sulma Arias, the executive director of the social justice organization People’s Action, said Friday’s “Workers Over Billionaires” protests are just as much about confronting injustices as about building an alternative.
“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for,” Arias said. “We are for affordable housing for low-income people. We are for free healthcare for all. We are for utility laws that ensure every home stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer at costs that a person on a fixed income can afford. We are for the right to a fair and equal vote for Americans from every race and in every state. May Day is our day to assert and defend our rights.”
“They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse.”
Despite claims by President Donald Trump that the US is entering an economic “golden age” under his leadership, a Gallup poll released this week found that 55% of Americans said their finances were getting worse, the highest number ever recorded in more than 20 years of polling, and even higher than in the doldrums of the Great Recession.
"Workers over billionaires!"
Chicago Teachers Union president @stacydavisgates urges workers to take back their power to assemble at the city's May Day rally.
A coalition of labor unions across several major cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, has coordinated what has been called an “economic blackout,” which includes avoiding buying from private sector retailers.
“When we say ‘workers over billionaires,’ ‘billionaires’ is not just this amorphous figure, right? They’re real people,” said Jana Korn, the chief of staff for the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO, in an interview with The Real News Network. “In Philadelphia, we’re kind of a poor city. We don’t have that many billionaires, but we have one. The CEO of Comcast is the only billionaire that lives in the city.”
“So why should we, as a city, accept that they take and take from us? And then with that money, what do they do? They donate to Trump’s ballroom project,” she continued. “People in Philadelphia are struggling… Our transportation system barely works. We’re at risk of having 17 schools close down this year.”
Some labor organizers have described economic boycotts, undertaken as part of prior mass protest movements against the second Trump administration, as an act of building strength for something larger, such as a future general strike.
“I think really for us in the labor movement,” Korn said, “[the boycott is] about how do we build the capacity to really disrupt, to strike when necessary, to shut things down when we have to. And that’s something that we have not been called to do as a labor movement in a very long time.”
Happy #MayDay!☀️✊ It's a good day to speak out and show the power of working people.
Across the country, union nurses are standing up to say:
🧊 Abolish ICE, 💣 Stop war, ❌ End harm, and 🏥 Fund care!
— National Nurses United (@NationalNurses) May 1, 2026
Other unions have used May Day to confront their own employers directly. In New Orleans, hundreds of nurses at University Medical Center announced that they were beginning a five-day strike after attempting to negotiate a contract for more than two years.
In New York City, Amazon workers unionized with the Teamsters assembled on the steps of the public library before marching to Amazon’s corporate offices to demand the company cut its contracts with ICE, which has used its cloud computing services to target immigrants, including some Amazon workers and contractors.
Matt Multari, who has worked as an Amazon driver for a year and a half, told Mother Jones that he joined the protest to “demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect.”
Masih Fouladi, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said, “May Day is a moment of reckoning.”
“Immigrant communities—from farmworkers in our fields to nurses in our hospitals, from refugees fleeing war to families who have built their lives here for generations—are under siege,” she said. “They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse.”
“Workers and immigrants—documented and undocumented, native-born and newly arrived,” she said, “will stand together in the streets because we know the truth: there is no workers’ rights without immigrant rights, and there is no justice for working people here while our tax dollars fund devastation abroad.”
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Defense of the homeland will be the central theme of May Day rallies in Cuba this year, in accordance with a call by the country’s main labor federation. | AP
HAVANA—As the Trump administration tightens its energy blockade on Cuba and threatens war and regime change, the Cuban labor movement—along with all of Cuban society—is gearing up for a mass mobilization on May 1. The Workers’ Central Union of Cuba (CTC) and its affiliates have issued a call for this year’s May Day, International Workers’ Day, to “defend the homeland.”
Their labor movement’s call comes at a moment of maximum pressure. On Jan. 29, the White House imposed a total oil blockade on Cuba, cutting off nearly all fuel supplies to the island of 11 million people. Countries that dare to send oil face extreme sanctions. Combined with the intensified economic, commercial, and financial blockade that has suffocated Cuba for more than 65 years, the new measures aim to starve the Revolution into submission.
Now, the U.S.’ economic war is also poised to possibly become a fighting war. On April 15, USA Today reported that the Pentagon is speeding up plans for a potential U.S. military operation against Cuba, awaiting a directive from President Donald Trump as to when they might strike. The threat comes amid recent statements by Trump that “Cuba is next” after Iran and that he will “take” the island.
Cuban workers are not backing down
“Faced with the growing threats from the U.S. government, reinforced by the executive order of Jan. 29, which added an energy blockade to the already intensified embargo that has been imposed on us for more than 65 years simply for wanting to build a dignified, sovereign, and independent nation, there is nothing more important and decisive today than to work together and grow as a country,” the CTC declared in their May Day call.
The labor federation urged workers to celebrate May Day in militant parades and events in every workplace, town, municipality, and province.
“It is a call to defend the country, from the fields, the factories, the classrooms, the scientific centers, thermoelectric plants, hospitals, culture, sports; from every battle trench.”
‘We have not collapsed’
Cuba is facing its worst energy crisis in decades. Before the energy blockade, the country consumed about 110,000 barrels of oil per day, with 40,000 produced domestically and the rest imported from partners like Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia. Since January, that supply has virtually dried up. Only one Russian tanker has reached Cuban ports in three months, covering barely a third of monthly fuel demand.
The result is devastating, with major cities at a standstill, industry paralyzed, food becoming scarce, and hospitals struggling. Power blackouts have now become routine. Yet the Cuban people, their government, and the Communist Party refuse to break.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel and former President Raúl Castro lead a march in Havana on Dec. 20, 2025. | Marcelino Vázquez / Cubadebate
In an extensive interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, President Miguel Díaz-Canel rejected the narrative of collapse.
“What country in the world would be capable, as Cuba has done, of enduring 67 years of sustained aggression from the most powerful nation in the world, with more than 60 years of blockade, with the last six or seven years of an intensified blockade, and now with an energy blockade, and not collapse? We have not collapsed.”
Díaz-Canel pointed to Cuba’s universal healthcare, free education from primary school to university, advances in biotechnology, and a safe society free of drug trafficking and organized crime.
“They are trying to impose a narrative of collapse on us when, through an aggressive, genocidal policy of blockade, they are leading us to live through a complex situation.”
Prepared to defend the revolution
When asked if Cuba is actively preparing for a possible U.S. attack, Díaz-Canel was direct: “Yes, we are preparing for defense.”
He recalled the words of 19th-century independence hero Antonio Maceo: “He will only gather the dust of his blood-soaked soil if he does not perish in the struggle.” Díaz-Canel added, “If you go out on the street now and say the first part of that phrase to a child, an elderly person, a young Cuban, they will immediately complete it. That is how we have been raised.”
Díaz-Canel also dismissed any notion that removing him, which the Trump administration and particularly Secretary of State Marco Rubio demand, would break the revolution.
“We have a collective leadership characterized by unity, cohesion, ideological unity, and revolutionary discipline. Removing one person solves nothing. There are hundreds of people capable of assuming that responsibility.
“The United States cannot impose change on us, nor can they demand it. The U.S. government has no moral authority to demand anything from Cuba.”
The Trump administration’s objectives remain murky. While Rubio — himself the son of Cuban migrants — has signaled a desire for regime change, the White House may be pursuing a more “pragmatic” goal: forced economic “liberalization” that benefits U.S. monopolies and billionaires.
According to reports, Washington seeks access to Cuba’s energy, ports, tourism, and telecom sectors, along with larger private enterprise, banking opening, and dismantling of state-owned enterprises.
‘Hands off Cuba!’
International solidarity with Cuba, a principle of working-class internationalism, continues to grow. The World Federation of Trade Unions’ (WFTU) week of action in solidarity with Cuba just concluded, and the international labor federation will continue to organize and mobilize its affiliates and members to stand in solidarity with Cuban workers.
Countries such as Mexico, Russia, China, Vietnam, and Spain have also expressed support for Cuba. More than 100 activists, trade unionists, and even European Parliament members recently arrived in Havana with half-a-million euros in humanitarian aid.
The Communist Party USA has also weighed in, demanding an immediate end to the criminal blockade and Cuba’s removal from the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. In the party’s May Day call, it declared: “Hands off Cuba! No war on Iran! Cut the military budget! End the forever wars! U.S. imperialism must be defeated!
“The same monopolies that drive down our wages and bust our unions operate internationally,” the party said. “They consciously pit workers of different countries against each other, including in wars, to maximize profits. Our resistance must reflect international solidarity.”
May Day as resistance
For this May Day, the CTC is invoking the legacy of independence hero José Martí, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in his centennial year, and Army General Raúl Castro.
“We invite Cuba’s friends around the world to join us, as they do every year, in celebrating International Workers’ Day,” the CTC said.
“We thank them in advance for their solidarity and for having the courage to share our fate amidst a real military threat, which, far from intimidating us, makes us repeat, with optimism and confidence in victory, the glorious verse of our national anthem: ‘To die for the Fatherland is to live.’”
Díaz-Canel echoed that: “If the time comes, there will be a fight, there will be a battle. We will defend ourselves, and if we must die, we will die.”
But he also held out hope for dialogue. “What both the American and Cuban people deserve is peace—a peace that allows us to have an atmosphere of trust, cooperation, collaboration, solidarity, and understanding. Lift the embargo, and see what we can do.”
As May Day approaches, Cuban workers are preparing to march—not in desperation, but in determination. The homeland, they insist, will be defended.
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A large crowd of demonstrators gather outside the Minnesota State Capitol during the “No Kings” national day of protest in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on March 28, 2026. (Photo by Kerem Yucel / AFP via Getty Images)
“No work, no school, no shopping. We’re going to show up and say we’re putting workers over billionaires and kings.”
Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, said on Saturday that a nationwide general strike is being planned for May 1 that will be modeled on the day of action residents of Minnesota organized in January against the brutality carried out by federal immigration enforcement officials.
Appearing at the flagship No Kings rally in Minneapolis, Levin praised the strength shown by the Minnesota protesters in the face of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) siege of their city this year, and said his organization wanted to replicate it across the country.
“The next major national action of this movement is not just going to be another protest,” Levin said. “It is a tactical escalation… It is an economic show of force, inspired by Minnesota’s own day of truth and action.”
Levin then outlined what the event would entail.
“On May 1, on May Day, we are saying, ‘No business as usual,’” he said. “No work, no school, no shopping. We’re going to show up and say we’re putting workers over billionaires and kings.”
Levin: This is the largest protest in Minnesota history… The next major national action of this movement is not just gonna be another protest. On May 1st, across the country, we are saying no business as usual. No work, no school, no shopping. We're gonna show up and say we're… pic.twitter.com/bRPR7K5DuP
Levin added that “we are going to build on that courage, that sacrifice” that Minnesota residents showed during their day of action in January, and vowed “to demonstrate that regular people are the greatest threat to fascism in this country.”
In an interview with Payday Report published Saturday, Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg said that the goal of the nationwide strike action would be to send “a clear message: we demand a government that invests in our communities, not one that enriches billionaires, fuels endless war, or deploys masked agents to intimidate our neighbors.”
The No Kings protests against President Donald Trump’s authoritarian government, which Indivisible has been central in organizing, have brought millions of Americans into the streets.
Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris estimated that the previous No Kings event, held in October, drew at least 5 million people nationwide, making it likely “the largest single-day political protest ever.”
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Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces attend a rally in support of former President Raul Castro in front of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, May 22, 2026
