On January 29th, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled, “Addressing Threats To The United States By The Government Of Cuba.” The executive order threatened massive tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba, arguing that Cuba somehow poses a serious national security threat to the United States and citing the Cuban government’s alleged ties to Russia, Hamas and Hezbollah.
While Cuba does have oil that it is able to produce, it imports more than 60% of what it consumes. Since its oil supply has been cut off, the Cuban government has had to ration its energy. This has led to daily blackouts of 10 to 15 hours per day, some planned and others not.
Without power, everything collapses. Hospitals cannot function. Medications and food cannot be refrigerated. Factories cannot operate. Garbage trucks cannot pick up the trash that is piling up on the streets. Agriculture cannot be transported to the cities. Airplanes from abroad won’t come into Cuba if they can’t refuel to get out. On parts of the island that have experienced sub-zero temperatures, people are unable to heat their homes.
Meanwhile Cuba had already been in the crosshairs of U.S. military and economic might for over 65 years, and the United States currently has the largest naval buildup in the Caribbean since the Cold War, ready to strike at any time.
What threat does Cuba, a small island of about 10 million people, pose to the U.S.? The only threat that it poses to the United States is the threat of example.
Ever since Fidel Castro’s small group overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Cuba has been a major target of the United States’ hostility. The Castro regime carried out land reform, nationalized the sugar industry and kicked out the mafia, all of which were previously aspects of U.S. domination of the island. They invested enormous amounts of resources into social programs such as healthcare, so much so that Cuba became one of the most prestigious providers of medical care in the entire world and a chief exporter of doctors to other oppressed nations.
To pay for these “sins,” the Cubans have had to pay enormous costs because of a trade embargo imposed by the United States since 1960.
The point of Donald Trump’s intensifying attempts to economically strangle Cuba has nothing to do with fighting a geostrategic threat and certainly not with standing up for human rights. It is only about accomplishing what every single U.S. administration has wanted to do and failed to do since 1959 – to tighten the noose and finish off the last fragments of the Cuban Revolution. While the Trump administration starves out the population of Cuba, they are not even bothering to go through the motions of “winning the hearts and minds” of the people. The point is to punish those who dared to step out of line.
The system that is starving the Cuban people is the same system that is carrying out terror in cities like Minneapolis here in the United States. For those of us in the U.S., we must say “NO” to the imperialist U.S. aggression against the people of Cuba and the rest of the world!
