Protests are needed now in the U.S. and worldwide against suffocating new sanctions Washington has imposed on Cuba, and to demand an immediate end to the U.S. rulers’ oil blockade. These new measures intensify Washington’s relentless economic and political war aimed at humbling the Cuban people and overturning the Cuban government.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order May 1 with broad new sanctions on any “people, entities and affiliates that support the Cuban government’s security apparatus or are complicit in corruption or serious human rights violations, as well as agents, officials or supporters of the government,” the White House told Reuters.
These wide-ranging measures come on top of the administration’s oil blockade of Cuba, imposed Jan. 29, that has severely aggravated hardships on working people across the island. And the U.S. rulers’ despicable campaign to pressure other governments to expel volunteer Cuban doctors and medical missions from their countries. They follow decades of attacks by every U.S. administration — Democrat and Republican alike.
Washington aims to advance the profit-driven interests of the U.S. capitalist rulers, the same class that puts the crisis of their system on the backs of workers here at home.
Working people in Cuba are determined to defend their country’s sovereignty. Hundreds of thousands marched on May Day to show this. They don’t wish to live again under the rule of dog-eat-dog capitalist exploitation and the dictates of the imperialist rulers in Washington.
“Every show of international support, every expression of solidarity, is a seed that strengthens our conviction,” explained Roberto Morales Ojeda, a member of the Cuban Communist Party’s Political Bureau.
Washington does not reveal the names of those “to be designated under this punitive measure, precisely to amplify the effect of intimidation and fear on everyone else,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla said May 2.
Building broad, public actions against the U.S. rulers’ assaults is an important act of working-class solidarity. Urge your co-workers, fellow unionists and others to join you.
The roots of the U.S. rulers’ assaults on Cuban toilers lie in their class hatred for the socialist revolution working people made there 67 years ago. Led by Fidel Castro, they brought down the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship and took political power into their own hands.
As working people in Cuba mobilized in the streets to take control of the country’s industries, banks and land, Castro made a forthright defense of the right to revolution at the United Nations in September 1960. His speech can be read in To Speak the Truth: Why Washington’s ‘Cold War’ against Cuba Doesn’t End.
What he describes — how working people overturned capitalist exploitation and oppression — is a powerful example for workers in the U.S. and elsewhere today as they seek a road forward in the face of the financial crises, social upheavals and spreading wars generated by the workings of capitalism.