Washington’s punishing oil blockade against Cuba, as well as military threats against the Cuban people by President Donald Trump’s administration, are a sharp escalation of the bipartisan course followed by the U.S. capitalist rulers for over 60 years. It’s not a “Trump” thing, but a policy championed under every U.S. government — both Democratic and Republican — since Cuba’s working people took power into their own hands in 1959.
The U.S. rulers’ moves are aimed at inflicting more hardship on Cuban working people in hopes of achieving one of the key foreign policy goals of the U.S. capitalist rulers ever since working people in Cuba made the first socialist revolution in our hemisphere.
Washington’s decadeslong economic and political war against Cuba involved orchestrating a failed mercenary invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. It involved numerous attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders of the revolution. And brought the world to the brink of a nuclear disaster in the October “Missile” Crisis in 1962.
The U.S. rulers’ policy toward Cuba isn’t an option. They can never forgive working people there for acting in their millions to overturn capitalist exploitation, and providing a powerful example to workers and the oppressed the world over. There is an alternative to the indignities, misery and wars we face under capitalism.
All 12 U.S. presidents have maintained that policy since Democrat John F. Kennedy initiated the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba in 1962 to try to starve the Cuban people into submission. The Democrats and Republicans are the twin parties of the ruling rich, whose wealth and power comes from exploiting working people. They have political differences, but on all decisive questions — from imperialist war to the drive to overturn the Cuban Revolution — they are one.
And the mouthpieces in the Trump-hating liberal press overwhelmingly back the administration’s moves.
“Washington’s pressure on Havana is working,” the editors of the Washington Post claim Feb. 6. “It would be unwise to settle for anything less than dramatic change on America’s terms.” They echo the White House’s lies about Cuba, claiming “the 67-year experiment with communism has been an abject failure” — without mentioning the devastating impact of the U.S. blockade — before urging Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who they claim is a dictator, to flee the country.
The New York Times turned a column over to Cuban counterrevolutionary blogger Yoani Sánchez Jan. 16. She lauded the U.S. forces killing of Cuban security guards in Venezuela during Washington’s bloody Jan. 3 intervention there. She said the operation showed Cuban forces “are not invincible” and claimed it “undermined the power” of the Cuban government.
The lies told by the capitalist press — of whatever political hue — about the Cuban Revolution and about Washington’s war moves against it, underline the importance of working people having a newspaper like the Militant and a party like the Socialist Workers Party campaigning to get out the truth about Cuba as widely as possible. Join us in demanding “U.S. Hands Off Cuba! End Washington’s Economic Blockade!”