Vol. 80/No. 37 October 3, 2016
Florida SWP: Follow Cuban example in fight
against Zika
“Do they think we’re idiots?” asked Maria Gonzalez, standing by her apartment in the Wynwood neighborhood.
The city has designated a square mile of Wynwood as a site of Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Although Gonzalez’s home is a few blocks away, she doesn’t believe government statements that she is safe from the disease.
Her daughter, who is pregnant, was visiting when the zone was declared. The virus can cause severe brain damage and other impairments to infants born to infected women.
Cynthia Jaquith, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida, talked to Gonzalez when she and campaign supporters visited workers on their doorsteps there. She pointed to how revolutionary Cuba has organized to control the virus.
Gonzalez, an airport worker and Teamsters union member, said her landlord had just told her she was being booted out and gave her one month to find a new place to live. Wynwood, a historically Puerto Rican neighborhood, has become a lucrative art and tourist scene, and many buildings are being replaced with housing for wealthier tenants.
Gonzalez’s suspicion that the government is not telling the truth is shared by many workers here.
The Miami Herald reported Sept. 10 that as Zika infections spread to Miami Beach and nearby counties, Florida officials stopped providing detailed information on where the infections were originating and underreported the number of local Zika infections by excluding anyone who is not a state resident.
The City of Miami has conducted aerial fumigation, dropping toxic chemicals on Wynwood, along with using trucks that spread pesticide. But they have not organized fumigation inside homes, where the Aegis mosquitoes often live. There has been no door-to-door education to remove breeding grounds.
Fear of contracting the virus has sparked a drop in tourism. Thousands of workers at hotels, restaurants and other businesses have had their work hours reduced. Luis Taranto, who also lives in Wynwood, drives limousines for a living. He told socialist campaigners that he’s barely working right now.
There have been protests against the city’s decision to use aerial spraying of the chemical Naled, banned in some countries because of its toxicity. Some Miami Beach high school students boycotted school the day after spraying.
The situation here is not as severe as in Puerto Rico, a colony of Washington, where U.S. government authorities callously say over 25 percent of the population will contract the disease, yet are doing little to prevent it. The virus continues to spread around the Caribbean, into Florida and elsewhere in the U.S.
Jaquith campaigns for a massive, federally funded program to eradicate Zika. She demands cancellation of Puerto Rico’s debt to U.S. banks and an end to Washington’s colonial domination.
By contrast, in Cuba the island’s revolutionary government responded immediately to the threat by mobilizing thousands of soldiers, health workers, unionists and students to go house by house fumigating and educating on how to eliminate mosquito breeding grounds. There have been only a few cases of locally caused Zika infections there.
“On the ball,” Nature magazine called the Cuban campaign. “That success was the result of its excellent health-care system and an extensive surveillance programme for vector-borne diseases that the government set up 35 years ago.”
The reason Cuba has responded differently is rooted in the different priorities and mobilization of working people there. This is possible because under the leadership of Fidel Castro the July 26th Movement mobilized toilers to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and put the workers and peasants in power.
Obdulia, a Wynwood dishwasher originally from Cuba, told campaigners this is always the way Cuba deals with potential threats: “We identify the source and then we eliminate it.”
“The Socialist Workers Party fights to unify working people here to emulate the Cuban example and take political power ourselves,” Jaquith says.
Steve Warshell contributed to this article.
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