Cuba, situated barely 90 miles away from the US, has been a thorn in the side of the US imperialists since socialism was established in that country following revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959. The US imperialists have used every means at their disposal short of all-out war to strangle the Cuban Revolution: economic sabotage, trade embargo, bacteriological warfare, the economic blockade (which has cost Cuba an estimated £70 bn) and repeated attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. In March 1960, US President Eisenhower gave his approval to a CIA plan to arm and train a group of Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro government. The invasion (known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion) took place on 14 April 1961, during the term of President John F. Kennedy. About 1,400 Cuban exiles disembarked at the Bay of Pigs, but failed in their attempt to overthrow Castro. Brave Cubans defended with all their might the revolution and the dignity of life socialism has achieved. In spite of the heinous attacks of the US imperialists and their allies to completely destroy socialism, Cuba, after demise of Castro in 2017 continues to be socialist in terms of basic class character and emotion among the Cubans about socialism remains very high.
As is known to all, there is a six-decade-old draconian US blockade, tightened multiple times by the Torricelli Act, the Helms-Burton Act and further exacerbated by the Trump administration in the midst of the pandemic. The U.S. blockade or economic sanction is essentially an act of war aimed at destroying Cuba and its socialist reconstruction. Current US President Joe Biden shows no signs of ameliorating the blockade. This web of restrictions under the blockade regime prevents countries from trading with Cuba if they seek trade relations with the US. The pandemic has worsened the situation further. Though the intensity of the infection has not been very high, travel restrictions during the pandemic have devastated Cuba’s tourism sector, a major driver of the economy. Moreover, one of the country’s key exports, sugar, has also witnessed a poor harvest this year amid the pandemic. As a result, there is a depletion of stocks of food items, medicines and other basic needs. Even electricity generation is affected. Cuba, whose doctors and free healthcare system, are in finer fettle than many other affluent countries despite the ravages caused to the economy by the prolonged U.S. blockade. Cuba has a long and heroic track record of shipping medical aid including doctors to other nations. By end March 2020 when covid 19 was spreading fast, Cuba had despatched medical teams to over 59 affected countries including Lombardy region, the epicentre of the epidemic in Italy. Under the blockade regime, US pharmaceutical companies are debarred from selling vaccines to Cuba. But Cuba has developed its own vaccines against Covid-19. Both Abdala, and Soberana 02 in tandem with Soberana Plus, show an efficacy rate of over 90%. The vaccine research has not generated one dollar in profits; all of it was conducted for public good under Cuba’s socialized health care system. Yet Cuba needs syringes to administer the vaccine! And, due to the blockade, the country cannot buy them from US. Cuba solidarity activists in Canada and the US are stated to have launched a campaign to raise funds to make up for a shortfall of 20 million syringes. This is but one example of the innumerable hardships imposed by the blockade that affect every aspect of life, from food production to medical care to combating climate change. Difficulties have been compounded by the pandemic, which in Cuba like everywhere, has made it unsafe to perform many necessary jobs.
Cuba in its resolution moved in the United on ending the blockade stated: “In the last four years, the Government of the United States has added more than 240 coercive measures against the Cuban people and its Government which remain in effect. These measures are not mere actions to tighten the embargo, but new methods, some of them unprecedented, that have escalated the economic war against Cuba to extreme levels, as seen in the shortages that are part of daily life for every Cuban.” Only the US and Zionist Israel opposed the resolution, which for the 29th time left the US isolated on this question, with 184 countries voting to end the blockade. Yet, the blockade was not withdrawn by the Pentagon rulers.
This time, the US imperialists who have long been making efforts long to topple the socialist Cuban government jumped upon the idea that if a bogey of shortages of essential goods and customary lack of individual liberty in socialism could be raised, some commotion might be created in the country, So they resorted to their trademark policy of precipitating disorder in other countries by pressing their infamous global espionage agency, the CIA, and other agents into action with a view to engineering coup d’état and appointing their pliant regimes. Sympathizers of exiled right-wing group Cubalex, members of a dissident artists’ collective who made headlines spearheading a broader protest movement in Cuba in recent years and other so-called ‘manufactured’ rebels against the government trained up, funded and armed by the US imperialists were posed as aggrieved Cubans staging popular movement against the government. On 11 July, a few thousand so called rebels and dissenters were found indulging in vandalism, looting and shouting anti-socialism slogans. Immediately the US rulers and their allies like Brazilian President Bolsonaro came out to express “solidarity” with the protesters and said the country is under a “cruel dictatorship.” US ruling lobby also intended to help the distressed and aggrieved Cuban people. Pointing to the stage-managed protest demonstration, a section of the US ruling clique called for direct US intervention. Miami mayor Francis Suarez has been more explicit on this suggestion. “The people of Cuba,” he said, need “some sort of international help,” including intervention from the US in “some form or fashion, whether it’s food, medicine, or militarily.” By intervention, it can be easily understood, what they meant was orchestrating a coup followed by a counter-revolutionary upsurge.
Anyone who thinks US intervention would lead to better outcomes and not vastly worse ones cannot spared of having lost touch with reality. To see what kind of government US meddling would produce, look at neighbouring Haiti, whose president the US Marines removed in 2004. Anyone who believes US intervention in Cuba would bring about a stable, prosperous liberal democracy first needs to explain why Haiti is wracked by dystopian levels of poverty, inequality, corruption, and political violence. America’s forever war in Afghanistan has been going on for almost two decades. The waves of bloodshed and chaos caused by the 2003 invasion of Iraq are still with us. Syrian war is another case in point. So, believing in 2021, that intervening in Cuba would make things better is a chilling testament to the blinding power of autocratic fascist ideology. If the US government truly want to help the Cuban people, there is an easy and obvious way: end the sanctions. Every single one of the shortages that protesters are talking about has at least been worsened by the US embargo.
So in response to the planted unrest, President Miguel Díaz-Canel addressed the nation in a TV broadcast and blamed the US for the turmoil. “The US is pursuing a “policy of economic suffocation to provoke social unrest in the country”, he mentioned clearly. A minority of counter-revolutionaries were fomenting unrest, he added. Cuban He further said that the protesters were mercenaries hired by the US to destabilise the country, and called for his supporters to go out and defend the revolution – referring to the 1959 uprising which ushered in Communist rule. He called on the people to come into the streets. “We know that there are revolutionary masses confronting anti-revolutionary groups. We will not accept that any mercenaries and sell-outs of the U.S. empire will provoke destabilization in our people,” Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also held US-financed mercenaries for the chaos. Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, a top official in the Communist Party of Cuba, compared the protests to the US-backed demonstrations in 2019 against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a Cuban ally.
Significantly, the capitalist media have turned their focus on anti-government demonstrators in Cuba, which the New York Times claimed to number in the “thousands,” in a country of 11 million people. How many thousands, if there were really that many, is not , however, stated nor have been there any videos of such-sized crowds. A video uploaded by the Cuban foreign minister showing government loyalists marching and shouting “These streets belong to Fidel (Castro, the late Cuban revolutionary leader)” . The anti-Cuba bias is manifested in another way: the media’s failure to address the root cause of the shortages of necessities faced by the Cuban people. Late on the night of 11 July, multiple videos were posted on twitter by Cubans of thousands of revolutionaries taking the streets in Havana and around the island, chanting “I am Fidel.”All Indians having a glorious anti-imperialist tradition stand in solidarity and fraternity with Cuban people and Cuban socialism. US imperialists! Hands off Cuba.
