A US-chartered aircraft carrying food and hygiene kits for 700 Cuban families departed Miami on Tuesday, marking the first humanitarian flight under a $100m assistance package announced in May by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The shipment, delivered by Catholic Relief Services and local parishes, is designed, according to the State Department, to ensure aid reaches ordinary Cubans “without any possibility of diversion or theft by the regime”. The flight follows an earlier $9m distribution through the Church and comes as Washington maintains an oil blockade that Havana says has paralysed the island’s energy grid and triggered prolonged blackouts.

The aid operation unfolded hours after the State Department published a 100-page report, “Cuba: Capital of 21st-Century Communism”, which alleges that Cuban intelligence spent decades penetrating US government agencies, cultivating activist groups, and using universities as recruiting grounds. The document, whose author was not named, links Havana to movements ranging from the Black Panthers to Antifa and frames the relationship as “a revolution against western civilisation itself”. Secretary Rubio, a Cuban-American, wrote that the report exposes “the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion”. Havana’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, dismissed it as a “fallacy” and accused the Trump administration of manufacturing a pretext for its “cruel and criminal economic war”.

Viewed from Havana, the aid package is inseparable from the sanctions that have deepened the country’s worst economic crisis in decades. Since January, the US has blocked most petroleum shipments from Venezuela and Mexico, a measure the United Nations has described as contrary to international law. Cuban officials initially called the $100m offer a “fable” but later engaged in talks, even as they continued to blame Washington for electricity shortages and scarcity of basic goods. The Catholic Relief Services president, Sean Callahan, said the regime had “rejected the aid” at first, but distribution through church networks is now proceeding. The first consignment, containing rice, beans, cooking oil and lanterns, is intended to reach 196,000 families across the island, with officials hoping for near-weekly deliveries from next year.

Analysts in Washington note that the aid and the report serve parallel functions in a maximum-pressure strategy aimed at toppling the communist government. The report’s emphasis on domestic US protest movements and its release ahead of November’s midterm elections suggest, according to European diplomatic observers, an attempt to link left-wing activism to a foreign adversary. Meanwhile, the humanitarian channel, routed through the Catholic Church, allows the administration to project concern for the Cuban people while tightening the economic vise. No date has been set for the next flight, and diplomatic channels between the two capitals show no sign of progress, leaving the dossier in a state of frozen confrontation.