Demand Washington end its economic war on Cuba! Now!
https://themilitant.com/2022/10/15/demand-washington-end-its-economic-war-on-cuba-now/
SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY NATIONAL COMMITTEE STATEMENT
Vol. 86/No. 39
October 24, 2022
Crews repair electrical grid Sept. 30 in Pinar del Rió after Hurricane
Ian. There is no better moment to explain the facts and win working
people to oppose U.S. economic war on Cuba.
CUBAHORA
Crews repair electrical grid Sept. 30 in Pinar del Rió after Hurricane
Ian. There is no better moment to explain the facts and win working
people to oppose U.S. economic war on Cuba.
Click below for downloadable pdfs of this article in English or Spanish
The following statement was released Oct. 11 by Jack Barnes, national
secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.
The Socialist Workers Party demands that the U.S. government end its
63-year-long economic, trade, and financial war against the people of
Cuba. Immediately. No strings attached.
This brutal policy has been carried out by every one of the 13
Democratic and Republican administrations since 1959. The U.S. rulers’
aim has been to crush the spirit of Cuba’s working people, the socialist
revolution they made and have defended for more than six decades, and
the example it sets for toilers in the United States, across the
Americas and worldwide.
The cumulative toll of this all-encompassing imperialist assault is
magnified in recent weeks by the effects of Hurricane Ian, which damaged
or demolished tens of thousands of homes and farms in western Pinar del
Río and Artemisa provinces, contaminated water supplies, and plunged
most of the country into darkness for more than a day.
This made-in-Washington social disaster comes on top of the raging
petroleum fire Aug. 5 in Matanzas, which destroyed half the storage
capacity at Cuba’s largest oil distribution facility. Due to
longstanding trade bans and suffocating international banking sanctions,
Cubans continue to face severe shortages of medicine and medical
supplies, fuel and other vital necessities. The impact of these
imperialist measures is multiplied by exploding prices, rising interest
rates, and stagflation due to world capitalism’s production and trade
crisis, as well as by the consequences of the COVID pandemic and
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
For working people and our allies in the United States — the imperialist
powerhouse of this unrelenting assault — there could be no more urgent
time for every opponent of Washington’s embargo to demand of the Biden
White House and Congress: End the economic war against Cuba NOW! Every
aspect of it. And forswear its reimposition!
March by New York-New Jersey Cuba Sí coalition in New York’s Harlem
neighborhood Aug. 28, demands complete end to U.S. rulers’ economic,
financial and trade embargo against Cuba.
MILITANT/SARA LOBMAN
March by New York-New Jersey Cuba Sí coalition in New York’s Harlem
neighborhood Aug. 28, demands complete end to U.S. rulers’ economic,
financial and trade embargo against Cuba.
There could be no better moment to explain the facts and win growing
numbers of working people and youth to this decisive political battle.
Instead, the New York-based People’s Forum placed a full-page “Urgent
Appeal to President Biden” in the Oct. 2 Sunday edition of the New York
Times begging the Biden administration to suspend the embargo, “even if
just for the next six months, to purchase the necessary construction
materials to REBUILD” [italics added].
What a betrayal of the elementary obligation of those of us here in the
United States who oppose Washington’s assault on Cuban sovereignty. What
a betrayal of the interests of working people on both sides of the
Florida Straits.
Whatever our views on other issues, now is the time to come together in
calling on Washington to immediately and unconditionally end the
embargo. Not lift it for a few months. Not make it a bit more bearable,
before the U.S. rulers again inflict it. End it!
For those living in the U.S. to demand anything short of that lends
political legitimacy to Washington’s decadeslong economic war against
the Cuban Revolution. We demand that the U.S. government halt every
diplomatic and political manifestation of that hostile course as well.
The U.S. imperialist rulers and their two political parties don’t need
advice on how to do so. They don’t need lessons on the deaths and
destruction caused by the embargo — that’s the rulers’ aim, and has been
for more than six decades. As the State Department’s infamous “Mallory
memorandum” put it in April 1960: “The majority of Cubans support” the
revolution. For the U.S. government, therefore, the necessary state
policy must be one that “makes the greatest inroads in denying money and
supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about
hunger, desperation and overthrow of [the] government.”
Cuban workers and farmers in arms rapidly put to rest Washington’s goal
of instigating the “overthrow of the government.” Those efforts by the
U.S. rulers were dealt lasting political and military blows in April
1961 by the defeat of U.S.-organized mercenaries during the Bay of Pigs
invasion at the hands of Cuba’s revolutionary militias, armed forces and
police. At a mobilization of hundreds of thousands in Havana to prepare
to crush that aggression, Fidel Castro confirmed what Cuban toilers’ own
class-struggle experience had already taught them. “This is the
socialist and democratic revolution of the working people, by the
working people, and for the working people,” Fidel said. “And for this
revolution, we are prepared to give our lives.”
Addressing President Biden, the People’s Forum pleads: “The people of
Cuba are part of our family — the human family. Don’t let outdated Cold
War politics prevent peace-loving people from helping the Cubans to
rebuild. … The United States loses nothing by being a good neighbor and
allowing Cuba to recover fully from this tragic moment.”
Opponents of Washington’s economic war on Cuba here in the U.S., unlike
New York Times ad above, must not give even a tip of their finger to any
infringement of Cuba’s sovereignty.
Opponents of Washington’s economic war on Cuba here in the U.S., unlike
New York Times ad above, must not give even a tip of their finger to any
infringement of Cuba’s sovereignty.
But there’s no such thing as a politically homogeneous “United States”;
it’s class divided. Unlike working people in this country, the
propertied ruling families represented by the imperialist Democratic and
Republican parties have a great deal to lose by “allowing Cuba to
recover.” That’s why the Biden White House has doubled down on the most
punishing package of sanctions yet imposed on Cuba. The capitalists hope
their decadeslong inhumane policy is working.
Their actions — ever since the subjugation of Cuba during the
Spanish-American War — prove they don’t care about “the human family.”
They care about raising profit rates and intensifying the exploitation
of working people, whatever the consequences for our families. And
Washington’s course has nothing to do with “outdated Cold War politics.”
It has to do with Cuba’s socialist revolution: with the example set by
the workers and farmers who made that revolution and defend it to this day.
The U.S. rulers are determined to bury that revolution in a mountain of
lies and smother any political interest among workers and farmers in
emulating what our brothers and sisters in Cuba have achieved. It’s what
the bosses try to do to every strike and struggle by working people in
the U.S.
Their hatred — and fear — of the working people of Cuba is in fact an
extension of their contempt for workers here fighting to defend our
constitutional freedoms against assaults by the White House, the FBI,
and other institutions of repression of the capitalist state. Their fear
of rail workers, coal miners, bakery workers, and other working people
organizing to strengthen our trade unions as we fight for safe job
conditions, for wages that grow faster than inflation, and for shorter
hours that enable us to share in the lives of our families and take part
in union and political activity. Their contempt for tens of millions
fighting exploitation, the oppression of African Americans and women,
and the wars produced by capitalism’s dog-eat-dog social relations.
When Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez was in New York this fall to
address the United Nations General Assembly, he was asked whether the
Cuban government, in face of the imposition of hundreds of new U.S.
sanctions in recent years, would “negotiate anything with America ever
again.”
“We will have to,” the foreign minister pointed out, as the Cuban
government has always done when there’s an opening “to reestablish
dialogue” on the basis of mutual sovereignty and respect. Cuban
diplomatic personnel press for every advance in this direction they can
wrench through talks with Washington and other governments regarding the
brutal embargo, Cuba’s removal from the contemptible “State Sponsors of
Terrorism” list, the status of occupied Cuban territory at Guantánamo,
migratory issues, drug trafficking and environmental disasters. That’s
the obligation of the Cuban government to the Cuban people, an
obligation they’ve met with dignity and honor since the first days of
the revolution.
The responsibility of the working-class movement and others in this
country who defend Cuba’s national sovereignty and independence,
however, is not the same. It is Washington, which falsely claims to
speak in the name of the people of the United States, that has waged a
nonstop assault on the Cuban Revolution since 1959. Opponents of that
reactionary course here in the U.S., unlike the proposals in the New
York Times ad, must not give an inch, even the tip of a finger, to any
encroachment on Cuba’s sovereignty.
The revolutionary program, confidence, proletarian conduct, and activity
of the Socialist Workers Party have been renewed and strengthened over
decades by the steadfastness of Cuban working people and the Cuban
government in defending what they’ve conquered. Both in word and above
all in deeds, we will continue getting out the truth about their
socialist revolution to working people in the U.S. and wherever else we
can reach.
End Washington’s economic, trade, financial and diplomatic war against
the people of Cuba! Now!