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Omar Condemns Trump Oil Blockade of Cuba as 'Cruel and Despotic' Regime Change Ploy
"Innocent civilians will pay with their lives to force regime change," warned US Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Feb 12, 2026
US Rep. Ilhan Omar on Wednesday condemned the Trump administration's oil blockade against Cuba as part of an "economic war designed to suffocate an island" and force regime change, a longtime goal of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other right-wing American officials.
"The US oil blockade on Cuba is cruel and despotic," Omar (D-Minn.), the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in a social media post as fuel and food shortages and public health outcomes in Cuba continued to worsen due to the Trump administration's ramping up of the decades-long strangulation of the island nation's economy.
Omar, who visited Cuba along with other progressive lawmakers in 2024, warned that "innocent civilians will pay with their lives to force regime change," and called for the immediate lifting of the US blockade, which most of the international community views as illegal.
Omar's demand came after the Wall Street Journal reported that "children are being sent home from school early, people can barely afford basic food like milk and chicken, and long lines have sprung up at gas stations" as the Cuban people reel from the Trump administration's decision to deprive the country of oil from Venezuela—previously Cuba's largest supplier—and threaten economic retaliation against any nation that sends fuel to the Caribbean island.
"The last oil delivery to the country was a January 9 shipment from Mexico, which has since halted supplies under US pressure," the Journal noted. "President Trump’s executive order on January 29 called Cuba 'an unusual and extraordinary threat' and warned of new tariffs for any country that supplies oil to the island. The new measures go on top of a comprehensive set of US sanctions on Cuba that began in the early 1960s."
One Cuban, 36-year-old Raydén Decoro, told the Cuba-based Belly of the Beast that "the future is extremely uncertain, but something has to happen, somehow, because we’re the ones suffering the most."
"Electricity is impossible to get, food is getting more and more expensive," said Decoro. "Right now, fuel is only available in dollars, and inflation keeps rising."
Earlier this week, Omar joined other progressives in the US House in introducing a resolution calling for the annulment of the Monroe Doctrine, an assertion of US dominance of the Western Hemisphere that the Trump administration has openly embraced and expanded.
The resolution, led by Reps. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), calls for "the termination of all unilateral economic sanctions imposed through executive orders, and working with Congress to terminate all unilateral sanctions, such as the Cuba embargo, mandated by law."
“This administration's aggressive stance toward Latin America makes this resolution critical," said Velázquez. "Their 'Donroe Doctrine' is simply a more grotesque version of the interventionist policies that have failed us for two centuries."
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Don Lemon’s Travail Is a Warning of Rising Authoritarianism; I Would Know
My experience as a university professor in Congo demonstrates that repressive governments may go after a variety of observers sympathizing with militant protesters by purveying false or distorted reports of their actions.
Feb 12, 2026
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is under federal indictment for participating in a Minnesota protest group’s obstruction of a church service. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday. News of his prosecution took me back more than five decades to when I was a young university professor in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). At that time, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s government threatened to arrest me for my alleged involvement in student disruptions.
In both cases, increasingly authoritarian governments decided to clamp down on independent observers—journalists or others—who sympathized with community activists. To do so, they distorted what actually happened to serve their political interests. Yet, I suspect that the last person President Donald Trump wants to be compared to is a corrupt, fallen, disgraced African dictator.
In December 1970, my university screeched to a halt as the entire student body boycotted classes. With support from Zairian professors and staff, the students called for the replacement of the Protestant missionary rector, criticized for incompetence and racism. From afar, I sympathized with their position. One day, with the university offering no information on the conflict, I accepted an invitation to hop onto a student bus. As a curious political scientist, I hoped to learn more about what my students were thinking. Arriving at a dormitory, I found myself enveloped in a crowd slowly moving forward. Suddenly, I found myself standing before a mock coffin for the rector emblazoned, “Rest in Peace.” Reaching for humor, I tossed a vine I had picked up onto the coffin. Then I walked away, seeing no opportunity for discussion.
Encountering one of my best students on campus a day or two later, I asked him what was happening with his movement. We discussed the students’ perspective and actions. I posed questions in the style of a neutral reporter or scholar. At a certain point, he reiterated the students’ expressed belief that the rector had discouraged his better qualified, potential replacement. Out of sympathy with the student demands and wanting to equalize our exchange, I shared relevant information I had, which appeared to confirm their suspicion. In doing so, I later realized, I yielded to an impulse that deserved more scrutiny.
Whether or not Lemon is convicted, the Trump administration’s approach of pursuing individuals who can be loosely linked to disruptive demonstrations is likely to continue.
Soon, I was surprised to learn that the rector’s supporters in the university were spreading exaggerated and false versions of my involvement in the protests. I was said to have knelt before the coffin, worked to replace a Protestant rector with a Jewish one, and actively participated in students’ subsequent siege, including minor violence, of university trustees’ meeting in a private home. Declassified State Department records show that Mobutu, his minister of the interior, and the American ambassador believed these baseless reports. I was ordered to fly with my family 800 miles to the capital and report to the minister. Over 10 anxious days, I finally managed to persuade the minister that my case should be “closed.”
Last month, Don Lemon live streamed a community protest group’s disruption of a religious service in a St. Paul, Minnesota church. In the context of community resistance to Immigration and Custom Enforcement abuses, the group had discovered that one of the pastors was an important ICE official. Lemon and eight others were charged under the federal FACE Act with conspiring “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate” (including chants, yelling, and physical obstruction) multiple persons in the free exercise of religion—causing termination of the service, parishioners’ flight, emergency planning, and children’s fears.
Lemon himself was accused of certain “overt acts“ in and around the church:
- Reporting on parishioners' responses to the mayhem, including a young man crying and congregants departing, he called them understandable since the “whole point [of the operation is to disrupt;”
- Physically obstructing, along with two other protesters, the pastor on three sides while peppering him with questions and ignoring his request to leave immediately; and
- Physically obstructing some parishioners attempting to leave.
Some MAGA activists condemned Lemon and the others for “storming” the church and committing an anti-Christian hate crime.
Yet, a detailed examination of Lemon’s hour-long live-stream video of the event shows a far different reality. He is mainly observing and interviewing—as I was in the Congo—plus publicly reporting on what he sees. Inside the church, he tells parishioners and viewers several times that he is “chronicling and reporting” and “not part of the activists.” He interviews protesters, the pastor, and parishioners, generally seeking their views in a neutral way. Sometimes his questioning cites protesters’ grievances, but he generally does not insist upon them. It is also clear from the video that he and nearby protesters are not obstructing the pastor, nor are they preventing parishioners from leaving the church.
Like me, Lemon indicates sympathy with the protesters, invoking the history of the US civil rights movement. At one point he tells viewers—but not others—that he supports the disruption because “you have to make people uncomfortable in these times [when ICE is committing abuses during operations against illegal immigrants].” “I believe…, he declares, "everyone has to be willing to sacrifice something.” Only once though does he seem to depart from neutrality with a parishioner. After an interchange in which he states ICE’s excesses are powering protests and his interlocutor maintains ICE is keeping America safe, he asks the latter, “Do you really believe that?” Then, as the man starts to walk away, Lemon persists by trying to present him with “facts” that immigrants have lower crime rates than natives and most detainees were not convicted of crimes.
Lemon also presents an alternative to the conflict: He suggests to both the pastor and a parishioner that they move from confrontation to calm discussion with the protesters, for that might reveal areas of agreement.
These are however minor chords in Lemon’s overall conventional reporting style. We might consider whether, in an age of flagging journalist legitimacy, a reporter’s acknowledgement of his personal perspective amid an effort to tell a story objectively can enhance audience trust.
Either way, Lemon’s remarks did not transform him into a member of the group besieging the church any more than my two encounters with student protesters made me into a member of the group besieging the trustees.
Together these cases warn that repressive governments may go after a variety of observers sympathizing with militant protesters by purveying false or distorted reports of their actions. Whether or not Lemon is convicted, the Trump administration’s approach of pursuing individuals who can be loosely linked to disruptive demonstrations is likely to continue. Worryingly, the head of the FBI has announced investigations of “paid protest campaigns” throughout the country including “organizers, protesters, and funding sources that drive illicit activities.”
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Trump's Racist Post Made Friday a Difficult Day at My School
My students weren’t angry; they were frustrated. They’d been stripped of their dignity by their own president.
Feb 12, 2026
I teach 12th-grade English at an urban high school in upstate New York. The poverty rate here is high. And violent crime is a common occurrence. When people ask what I’ve learned from doing this job for 18 years, I tell them I’ve come to see how hard it is to be a Black or brown person in America. And the president is making that even harder, which in turn makes my job as an urban educator harder.
February 6, on his Truth Social platform, Donald Trump posted a 62-second clip of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces imposed over the bodies of apes. As word of this got around school on Friday, multiple students of color came to me. They wanted to know—needed to know—if Trump’s “Truth” was real. I gave it to ‘em straight. Yes, the Commander-in-Chief had trafficked in one of the oldest, most-painful tropes against African Americans. These students weren’t angry. They were frustrated. They’d been stripped of their dignity by their own president. Friday was a very difficult day at my school.
Regarding the post, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, "Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
This Trumpian brand of race-baiting is nothing new. You might remember Trump’s opening salvo to the citizenry was Birtherism. To enter political life by asserting Barack Obama was born in Kenya, Trump signaled an alliance with those who despised Obama because of his skin color. Trump’s depraved conspiracy was meant to make us see Obama—a self-made, sophisticated Black man—as a savage, running around some mud-hut village in loin cloth and war paint. It wasn’t a dog whistle. It was a bullhorn.
In the end, Biff Tannen always crashes his car into manure. And that’s what’s going to happen to Trump.
Do I think Trump hates Black people? No, I think Trump thrives on division, and racial division is a provocateur every time. I harken back to what then-VP Kamala Harris said about Trump on the debate stage in 2024, “It's a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people."
Whether it’s race or some other subject, Trump never misses a chance to pit the electorate against itself. Anything from Rob Reiner to the Superbowl halftime show, it’s all fodder for a good fight. Our country has never been more divided. Don’t believe me? Scroll through Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), etc. The knives are out. The name calling is ugly. And it’s all about Trump. As long as Trump controls the bully pulpit, we have no hope for unity. He’ll never stop fanning the flames.
This, I suppose, is the Shakespearean flaw of a president (and a person) who must be the center of attention at all times, even if it’s manufactured attention. You might remember, in his pre-political life, Trump routinely planted stories about himself in the New York papers and tabloid magazines, using the alias John Barron to brag about “Trump’s” celebrity connections and romantic relationships.
Maybe Trump suffers from what columnist Maureen Dowd called “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” While I’m certain that’s true, or sort of true, Trump targets migrants, women, and his perceived opponents with equal cruelty. Trump’s ascension to the top of our federal government is akin to Biff Tannen winning Lorraine at the end of Back to the Future. “What’re you lookin’ at, butthead?” Who’d root for that? Apparently 77 million Americans would.
The thing about bullies, even powerful ones like Trump: Deep down, they’re cowards who lack accountability. A few hours after Ms. Leavitt claimed the public didn’t care about Trump’s post, the administration changed its story: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.” Pinning this on a make-pretend staffer? It simply doesn’t get more Biff Tannen than that.
John F. Kennedy once said, “A rising tide lifts all ships,” meaning when something good happens to the system, everyone benefits. So what’s the net result of a president who tells lies, violates the law, uses the Oval Office to enrich himself and his family, orders the Justice Department to punish his enemies? Who “benefits” inside that system?
As a teacher of 12th graders, I wish we hadn’t heaped such a seismic amount of chaos upon the next generation. But I’m also optimistic. I believe these young people will guide our broken country out of the darkness, perhaps fueled by the dignity-stripping frustration they felt when they realized Trump’s “Truth” was real.
In the end, Biff Tannen always crashes his car into manure. And that’s what’s going to happen to Trump. History will regard the Trump Era as malignantly divisive, and Trump as nothing but a two-bit bully. Bullies never win. They don’t know how to win.
Needless to say, if anyone else, from a CEO to a cashier, had posted the Obamas as apes on their social media, they’d be out of a job before breakfast.
Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump was asked if he’d apologize for his “racist” post. The president replied, "No, I didn't make a mistake."
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