Cubalex will participate this Saturday, September 26, in the 36th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE), at Florida International University (Miami). Its executive director, Laritza Diversent, will present the paper «Legal Obstacles to Humanitarian Assistance in Cuba and Their Impact on Social Policies,» on a panel alongside Elaine Acosta González (FIU) and Sergio Ángel Baquero (Food Monitor Program), with sociologist Silvia Pedraza (University of Michigan) serving as commentator.
The presentation is based on documentation from Cubalex: since 2022, the organization has registered 300 events related to humanitarian aid in Cuba, including 20 seizures of aid or assistance — figures that constitute verified minimums.
The report puts forward five theses:
- Humanitarian assistance in Cuba has four channels —state, religious, independent civic and family/diaspora— and the legal framework only fully recognizes the first; the other three operate tolerated, taxed or criminalized.
- The obstruction is not circumstantial: it has been documented at least since the Havana tornado of January 2019, when the police It prevented and dispersed the self-organized solidarity of the Cubans themselves., before Decree-Law 16/2020 existed.
- Cubalex monitoring systematically records the phenomenon: 300 events classified as «Humanitarian Aid» between 2022 and September 2026 —with an escalation from 2 events in 2022 to 134 so far in 2026— and 20 seizures of aid or assistance.
- The UN's largest food assistance plan for Cuba—the World Food Programme 2026–2030 plan, approved in June 2026 for $116.4 million—will operate within that same framework, with monitoring dependent on state channels and without independent oversight.
- The impact falls on social policies: the State has turned international aid into a substitute for social policy and a control mechanism, with a differentiated impact on the elderly, women, people deprived of their liberty, impoverished families and racialized communities.
In a changing scenario, the report concludes, the central challenge will not be attracting aid, but dismantling the monopoly: legal guarantees for independent humanitarian action, freedom of association, auditable transparency, and effective judicial protection.