The U.S. embargo on Cuba, aimed at crippling the Caribbean nation's economy, is part of Washington's four-decade-long war against the Cuban people and their revolutionary leadership. The goal of this economic, military, and political aggression is to try to punish the working people of Cuba for the crime of breaking free from U.S. control, making a socialist revolution, and refusing to subordinate the interests of working people to the dictates of the overlords of the American empire to the north.

The U.S. rulers were horrified when, after sweeping out a U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959, workers and farmers established their own government, mobilized youth to wipe out illiteracy, guaranteed farmers their right to the land, took the factories out of the hands of the exploiters, uprooted racist discrimination, expanded women's rights, and sent volunteers to join in anti-imperialist freedom struggles from Algeria to Angola.

Above all, Cuba sets a "dangerous" example to workers and farmers throughout Latin America and the world--including in the United States. The U.S. embargo is a cold-blooded course in the interests of the tiny class of billionaire families who rule this country. That is why the U.S. cold war against Cuba does not end, and in fact has been intensified through measures such as the 1996 Helms-Burton law signed by William Clinton.

The U.S. government responded with typical imperial insolence to the destruction caused by the hurricane. Instead of offering whatever material assistance Cuba needed with no strings attached--as Cuba's revolutionary government itself has done many times in response to natural disasters in other countries--Washington sent a diplomatic note saying it would first make its own "assessment" of what the island needed. Then White House spokesman Ari Fleischer had the nerve to insist that any U.S. aid would be sent through "third parties" in order to be "certain that the Cuban people, and not the Castro regime, will benefit."

Cuba calmly rejected this arrogance, and was able to work out an arrangement to purchase specific amounts of food, medicine, and raw materials from U.S. companies to help reestablish Cuba's reserves.

In contrast with the terrible human and social toll of hurricanes in Central America and the Caribbean in 1998--from which those nations have still not recovered--Cuba was able to organize and mobilize its population to minimize the losses. Some 750,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and only five people died. This could only happen in a country where workers and farmers have made a revolution and are in power.

The most important act of solidarity that working people in the United States can offer Cuba in response to the critical conditions caused by the hurricane is to demand that Washington end its barbaric embargo and travel ban on Cuba, and to tell the truth about the Cuban Revolution and its example for workers, farmers, and young people in this country.
 
 
Related article:
Cubans confront hurricane disaster  
 
 
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