The embargo is part of the policy of aggression--from military attack to attempts at political isolation--that all nine U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have waged since the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959. The Clinton administration is no exception. If anything, William Clinton, who signed the 1996 Helms-Burton law to tighten the trade ban, has a more aggressive record than others.

This embargo is not the product of an "irrational" policy somehow detrimental to "U.S. interests." It's an expression of cold-blooded moves to protect the class interests of the billionaires that Clinton and other U.S. officeholders loyally serve.

The debate is not about easing Washington's implacable hostility toward revolutionary Cuba--over which there is no disagreement among the rulers--but about how to do it. Some argue for the Big Stick. Others hope to undermine the revolution by fostering pro-capitalist forces within Cuba that would be lured by the dollar and the dog-eat-dog mentality that goes with it.

But the U.S. rulers face a dilemma: Cuba has a revolutionary leadership that the U.S. empire has been unable to buy off, intimidate, divide, or divert from responding to the interests of working people. And Cuban workers and farmers in their millions are organized politically and militarily to defend their state power, as they have done repeatedly.

The U.S. rulers' giddy predictions a decade ago that the Cuban government would crumble like the Soviet Union have become ashes in their mouths. They now grudgingly acknowledge that the Cuban people have weathered the worst of the world economic crisis of the past decade. Cuban economic production continues its gradual recovery. For workers and farmers engaged in struggle here, the question is different: How have the Cuban people succeeded in standing up to the mightiest power on earth? These fighters are increasingly receptive to read books that truthfully answer that question, and to hear from others like themselves--such as recent groups of fighting U.S. farmers who have visited Cuba--who are explaining what they have learned from fellow fighters in Cuba for our own struggles here.  
 
 
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