The Trump administration has escalated the attack on Cuba that will have serious implications in the years to come. Yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” The United States has dealt several crushing blows to the Cuban economy in recent years, with the restrictions on family remittances, the limitation of US visitors to the island, and the restriction of oil shipments; all of this on top of the harshest and longest economic blockade in modern history. Trump has only intensified the economic war against Cuba, which amounted to a staggering $5.6 billion in damages to the island nation from April 2019 to March 2020, some $1.2 billion more than the prior year. The total cost of US-inflicted damages against the Cuban economy amounts to $144 billion since the embargo’s inception. In a time of COVID-19, US-imposed shortages have had grave consequences for everyday Cubans. Trump, who has fanned the flames of settler fascist terrorism in North America and has backed rightwing terror abroad, is trying to set the foreign policy agenda for the incoming Biden administration.
It must be stopped!
The Reagan administration placed Cuba on the “state sponsors of terrorism” list in 1982 but was removed by the Obama administration in 2015. Among the reasons for Trump’s designation is Cuba’s protection of African revolutionary Assata Shakur, and the Cuban government’s support of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The State Department has also recently designated Yemen’s Houthi movement a “terrorist organization.” These actions set a precedent not only to amplify US hybrid wars against socialist and left governments in Latin America, which has resulted in coup attempts and the deaths of tens of thousands, but also to intensify a Saudi-backed, genocidal war in Yemen that has killed hundreds of thousands and contributed to more than 85,000 children dying from starvation. Rather than helping people facing evictions, unemployment, and lack of medical care, the United States prioritizes bombs and death, giving away nearly a billion dollars for weapons to the Saudi-led coalition in the most recent defense bill.
Despite more than six decades of what can only be described as a US-led war, Cuba has advanced a successful socialist project that has benefitted everyday Cubans—and the world. More than 28,000 Cuban doctors in dozens of countries are currently providing life-saving services to poor and marginalized communities. Thousands of organizations and individuals have joined a campaign calling for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to the Henry Reeve Brigade for their heroic efforts in deploying Cuban doctors to 39 countries to help fight the coronavirus.
In recent years, Indigenous leaders from North America have asked settler governments to lift restrictions for medical exchange programs to provide relief to poor reservation and Indigenous communities who suffer from inadequate access to healthcare. Last year, the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, representing Dakota and Anishnaabe nations in Southern Manitoba, petitioned the Trudeau administration to allow Cuban doctors into Indigenous communities to help with medical shortages exacerbated by coronavirus. US belligerence against the sovereignty and integrity of the Cuban people sets these projects back and may cut off Indigenous nations from participating in medical humanitarianism and health practices that could potentially save the lives of Indigenous people, who have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus among other health-related conditions that are the result of imposed poverty and colonialism.
Cuba represents a political alternative to imperialism for the Caribbean, one that directly threatens larger colonial projects, such as Puerto Rico and Martinique, and is the reason why the US government utilizes all available resources to wipe out any social advances. It is similar to how colonizers have attempted to wipe out Indigenous nations—because we represent a political alternative to the imperialist state.
We salute the courage of the Cuban Revolution, and we call on all progressive and left forces to reverse these genocidal policies towards Cuba and to remove Cuba from this hypocritical designation by a country that has brought untold violence, suffering, and terror to Black and Indigenous people in our homelands and has exported that project abroad. The Biden administration must end this heinous war against Cuba and recommit to former President-elect Obama’s 2008 promise, of which Joe Biden was the Vice President-elect, of closing the military prison and returning the occupied land at Guantánamo Bay in order to demilitarize the Caribbean. The future of the planet and humanity hangs in the balance.
¡Viva la Revolución!
