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Vol. 81/No. 23 June 12, 2017
(feature article)
In Cuba, ‘There is no future without the past’
Revolutionary Cuba responds to US White House
BY JIM BRADLEY
“Someone failed to tell Donald Trump the truth before the U.S. president
congratulated the Cuban people for its Independence Day May 20,” wrote
Oscar Sánchez Serra in Granma, the official voice of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba May 23.
“The only independence Cubans celebrate is that one we achieved
definitively on Jan. 1, 1959, with the leadership of our undefeated
Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz,” Sánchez said.
He was replying to a “Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Cuban
Independence Day” marking May 20, 1902, which attacked and slandered the
socialist revolution.
“Independence was not won 115 years ago,” states Sánchez emphatically.
“The story is a bit longer.”
Sánchez tells the real story of Washington’s colonial rule over Cuba and
Cuba’s victorious struggle for independence led by Fidel Castro and the
July 26 Movement that led workers and farmers to power in 1959.
And Sánchez explains the continuity of revolutionary leadership in Cuba,
from José Martí to Castro. The editorial is titled, “There Is No Future
Without the Past.”
He quotes Martí, a leader of the Cuban independence struggle against
Spain, who warned his co-combatants that they should beware of
Washington. “I lived in the monster and know its entrails,” said Martí,
who lived in the U.S. for 14 years.
Sánchez explains that by 1898 the Cuban Liberation Army had “practically
won the war against Spain. The colonial forces were defeated, and
physically and morally exhausted.”
The USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor Feb. 15, 1898.
Washington used this pretext to declare war on Spain. Sánchez quoted
Vladimir Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, who
described the Spanish-American War as “the first imperialist war of the
modern era.”
Cuban independence fighters didn’t know that the U.S. War Department had
sent a letter, Sánchez noted, which called for “applying a blockade to
cause hunger and disease — its eternal companion — to weaken the
population and decimate the Cuban army. … We should create difficulties
for the independent government” to force submission to U.S. demands, to
weaken all contenders for power and eventually annex Cuba.
“This is the prelude to May 20, 1902,” states Sánchez. “Can this
independence be celebrated? Do these events call for congratulations?”
The Dec. 10, 1898, Treaty of Paris, which decreed the end of Spanish
colonial rule in the Caribbean, committed “a grievous offense against
the dignity of Cubans who were not included in the talks,” he says,
handing Cuba to Washington as spoils of war.
As a condition for the withdrawal of its military forces from Cuba four
years later, Washington insisted that a piece of U.S. legislation called
the Platt Amendment be incorporated into the Cuban Constitution
guaranteeing U.S. control over the island’s affairs. The rider included
granting Washington the right to build a naval base at Guantánamo Bay.
“The Platt Amendment established a de facto neocolonial republic,” says
Sánchez.
“We are not going to celebrate May 20, 1902, but we are going to
commemorate it, we are going to remember,” Sánchez says, quoting Havana
City Historian Eusebio Leal Spengler. “We must deeply analyze the
republic to understand this revolution we have. There is no future
without the past.”
During his visit to Cuba in March 2016, President Barack Obama — like
President Trump now — arrogantly advised the Cubans to forget about
their past under the bloody domination of U.S. imperialism.
And to forget Washington’s more than 50-year history of efforts to
overthrow the Cuban Revolution. These included attempted invasions,
backing attacks by counterrevolutionary Cuban exiles, economic sabotage,
multiple attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and more.
“Obama made a speech in which he uses the most sugar-coated words to
express: ‘It is time, now, to forget the past, leave the past behind,
let us look to the future together, a future of hope,’” Fidel Castro
wrote after Obama’s visit.
Despite Washington’s grudging re-establishment of diplomatic relations
in 2015, the U.S. rulers continue to press to overturn Cuba’s socialist
revolution. This is why millions of Cubans marched on May Day, to honor
Fidel Castro’s historic legacy and to demand Washington end its
punishing economic embargo, get out of Guantánamo and end its
regime-change interventions into Cuba’s internal affairs.
Related articles:
Chicago brigadistas explain ‘What we saw in Cuba’
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