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Why Cuba Will Win
Their socialist solidarity will outlast the Empire’s sanctions and siege.
Last Friday. I attended an evening of solidarity with Cuba, put on by the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and hosted at the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland. Sulia Paez and a colleague from the Cuban Embassy in Washington D.C. spoke about the USA’s 65 year blockade of Cuba, the longest blockade in human history. Now the Trump administration has intensified the blockade into a total siege by imposing sanctions on any country, company, or ship that dares to bring anything in or out of the island.
Because of the sanctions, Cuba has received a grand total of one shipment of oil all year, where they normally need four shipments each month. Without fuel, the electricity grid shuts down for long periods every day. Refrigerators don’t work, so food goes bad. Electric vehicles can’t be charged, and gasoline can’t be had, so people have to walk or bike everywhere. Hospital equipment doesn’t work; medicines go bad in the tropical heat.
Without gasoline or diesel, trucks can’t bring produce to markets, so food is scarce, and prices are soaring. People are going hungry; old people are dying. Cuba’s infant mortality rate, formerly Latin America’s lowest, is rising rapidly. Paez called the siege a “slow-motion genocide.”
