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Vol.63/No.40       November 15, 1999 
 
 
U.S. hands off Cuba now!  
{editorial} 
 
 
For the past 40 years, Cuba has been the target of an unceasing effort by the rulers of the United States to rid the Americas of the revolutionary government that came to power when Cuban workers and farmers overthrew a U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959. An essential element of this course has been an economic, commercial, and financial embargo aimed at crippling Cuba's economy.

In the first years of their revolution, the workers and peasants of Cuba wrested control of the banks and industries from the hands of U.S. owners and distributed land to the peasants. For 40 years, they have fought shoulder-to-shoulder with toilers across the globe in their struggles against colonialism, imperialist domination, and capitalist exploitation. These are the crimes that have earned the Cuban revolution the unending hatred of the U.S. rulers.

The recent trip to Cuba by Illinois governor George Ryan reflects an increasing debate among capitalists in the United States over how best to approach Cuba. Members of the grain cartel, heavy equipment manufacturers such as Illinois-based Caterpillar, and other corporations are under ever-increasing pressures of international competition. They chafe under any restrictions on their ability to trade, and their owners have spoken out against the embargo imposed on Cuba.

The U.S. rulers are profoundly dismayed that the Cuban revolution has not fallen in the wake of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They continue to underestimate the determination of the Cuban working people and their revolutionary leadership. A minority within the ruling class views the embargo as ineffective and believes that Washington should move away from its policy of trying to isolate Cuba economically in favor of other ways of undercutting the revolution.

Despite such tactical differences, the entire ruling class is united around the goal of overthrowing workers' and farmers' power in Cuba.

The Chicago Tribune editorialized in support of Ryan's call to end the embargo against Cuba while sharply voicing hostility toward the revolutionary government. "Ryan injected some plain-talking Midwestern sense into a policy issue that for too long has been driven by Cuban-American exiles in Miami and elsewhere—who support the embargo even though it has failed to dislodge Castro," the Tribune editors wrote.

But it is a fiction that U.S. policy is written by the former Cuban bourgeoisie. The hostile course against Cuba is charted by the billionaire families who rule the United States. Their policy is not based on the short-term profits of individual capitalists, but on the fact that they cannot tolerate the living example that the Cuban revolution offers to fighting workers the world over. They will not let up in the decades-long policy of economic warfare aimed at strangling the Cuban revolution. In fact, the embargo has been strengthened under the Clinton administration.

Defenders of the Cuban revolution need to get out the truth about the conquests of working people there and explain why Washington's hostility against Cuba does not end. Workers, farmers, and young people around the world need to demand an end to the embargo against Cuba, an end to the ban on travel by U.S. residents to Cuba, and that the U.S. armed forces get out of illegally occupied Guantánamo Bay.  
 
 
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