Since making the first socialist revolution in the Americas more than 67 years ago, Cuban workers and farmers have held U.S. imperialism at bay. They continue to do so, despite Washington’s blockade since January that has severely increased the damage from the U.S. rulers’ decadeslong drive to strangle Cuba’s economy, crush its people and topple their government.
The Cuban Revolution changed world history. Led by Fidel Castro, working people not only ended capitalist exploitation, setting an example for workers in the U.S. and worldwide. They transformed themselves, joining historic independence struggles in Africa that ended colonial domination and opened the door to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa. Their actions remain a powerful example of what the working class is capable of accomplishing when it wields political power and has the leadership it deserves.
Today, emboldened by its intervention in Venezuela and war against Iran, the U.S. imperialists are threatening military action against Cuba.
“I built this great military,” President Donald Trump boasted March 27, “sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba’s next, by the way.”
The U.S. government blatantly lies about Cuba and its revolution. “Their system doesn’t work,” declared Secretary of State Marco Rubio March 30. He claimed, “We’ve done nothing punitive against the Cuban regime.”
But ever since 1960, the U.S. government has attempted to punish the Cuban people and their government. A memo for U.S. President John F. Kennedy by State Department official Lester Mallory said that Washington is “denying money and supplies to Cuba to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” A year later the U.S. rulers orchestrated the failed mercenary invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, before imposing their brutal trade embargo in 1962.
Today the Trump administration is escalating that course. It hopes that by tightening its squeeze on Cuba it can pave the way for the revolution’s overthrow. The U.S. rulers have never forgiven working people in Cuba for making a revolution and nationalizing their countries patrimony. Nor will they.
Washington’s attacks against Cuba are driven by the same capitalist class that is stepping up its assaults on working people at home to defend their dog-eat-dog profit system. Bosses are assaulting wages, conditions and unions and trying to set native-born and foreign-born workers against one another. You can see this clearly in their attacks on workers at JBS in Colorado and the BP refinery in Indiana.
“Workers in the United States have no interest in the rulers’ brutalization of a small nation and its people simply for exercising their sovereign right to make a socialist revolution to improve their conditions of life and work,” explains a statement released by the Socialist Workers Party National Committee on the heels of Washington imposing its blockade.
“Instead, workers, unionists, and others among the exploited and oppressed in the US have an interest in demanding, ‘US hands off Cuba! End Washington’s economic blockade!’”
Join with Socialist Workers Party members who are building protests against the U.S. rulers’ blockade and war threats, and answering Washington’s slanders about Cuba by getting out the truth about its socialist revolution and the example it sets for a road forward for all toiling humanity.