The following statement was released May 26 by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, on behalf of the party’s National Committee.
The Socialist Workers Party, in the strongest possible terms, condemns the U.S. rulers’ accelerating acts of aggression against the Cuban people and their government. We condemn the total oil blockade designed to punish every man, woman and child on the island.
The SWP calls on working people in the United States and worldwide to organize emergency picket lines, rallies and other public protests now to demonstrate our rejection of the U.S. government’s decadeslong bipartisan attacks that are aimed at strangling the Cuban people and dismembering their socialist revolution.
Washington’s sharply escalating economic and military measures against the Cuban people also target the working class and others among the oppressed and exploited in the United States. Our hard-won constitutional rights to organize, speak out and act against the U.S. rulers’ policies, including their expanding war moves, are under assault.
Actions must be organized now to demand U.S. Hands Off Cuba!
- Withdraw the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, its accompanying warships, and all other U.S. military forces from the Caribbean and South America.
- Throw out the “Justice” Department’s May 20 trumped-up indictment of Cuban Army General and former President Raúl Castro and five other Cubans on charges of “conspiracy” to murder four U.S.-based counterrevolutionaries as they were dangerously violating Cuba’s airspace. “It is a despicable and infamous act of political provocation,” as Cuba’s Foreign Ministry immediately responded. A provocation intended to be used as a pretext for U.S. military action in Cuba to capture a “wanted criminal.”
- End the U.S. government’s brutal oil blockade and all trade, banking and other commercial, financial and diplomatic measures enacted over decades to deprive every Cuban resident of the basic necessities of life.
- Withdraw the unconstitutional federal subpoenas served in late May by the U.S. “Justice” Department on organizers of activities in support of the Cuban people and their freely elected government.
As we organize and build the broadest possible actions in the streets, we also need to get out the truth about Cuba. We must clearly and effectively expose and refute the seven decades of poison targeting the minds of working people in the U.S., painting Cuba as a brutal “communist dictatorship,” and today “a failed state.”
The battle for those of us who live in the U.S. is first and foremost a political battle to win the hearts and minds of working people here. That’s what we and only we can do to combat the lies we are fed daily by the U.S. capitalist media, including its “social media” format. Our job is to explain the real history and working-class roots of the Cuban Revolution and the stakes we have in defending that revolution against the U.S. capitalist class, which Cuban workers and farmers drove out of their country 67 years ago.
Talk with your co-workers, fellow unionists, students and others. Win their help in mounting opposition to Washington’s course. Introduce them to books and pamphlets in which they can read for themselves the words of Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Vilma Espín and other Cuban revolutionaries, so they can make up their own minds.
Show them the tributes paid by leaders of working people and the oppressed the world over to the selfless internationalist solidarity of the Cuban people — from Malcolm X in this country, to Maurice Bishop, to Amílcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara and others across the Americas, Africa and far beyond.
The goal of the U.S. capitalist rulers in seeking to crush the socialist revolution in Cuba is to advance their imperialist interests at home and abroad. That’s true of the Democratic and Republican parties alike. Aggression abroad, in fact, begins at home, with capital’s drive to wring higher profits from exploiting our labor and plundering nature here. The bosses who this year locked out workers at British Petroleum in Indiana and Cargill in Colorado, who create ever-more-dangerous job conditions on the railroads, in the mines, factories and other workplaces — they are the same class that’s trying to starve the Cuban people into submission.
That is the truth we have to bring to working people across the United States.
With imperial arrogance, U.S. President Donald Trump says he can do “whatever I want with Cuba,” as if it’s just another piece of real estate he owns.
And Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that Cuba “has always posed a national security threat” to the people of the United States. That turns reality on its head.
As the Cuban Foreign Ministry pointed out, Washington’s charge that Cuba poses a threat to peace is gross hypocrisy. Its allegations about the Cuban leadership are being “made by the same government that has murdered nearly 200 people and destroyed 57 vessels in international waters” in the Caribbean in recent months.
Washington picked May 20 to unseal its official indictment of Raúl Castro. That was the 124th anniversary of U.S. imperialism’s imposition on Cuba — newly independent from Spain — of the infamous Platt Amendment. With U.S. armed forces occupying the island, this so-called amendment to Cuba’s 1901 constitution declared Washington’s “right,” at will, “to intervene” in Cuba to maintain “a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty,” and to prohibit the Cuban government from entering into any international treaty that in the U.S. rulers’ opinion would “impair the independence of Cuba.”
The Platt Amendment also permitted Washington to station troops on Cuban soil at any time, as well as to buy or lease “coaling or naval stations.” In 1903 the U.S. rulers compelled the Cuban government to grant, “in perpetuity,” a 45-square-mile naval base at Guantánamo Bay on the island’s southeastern coast.
The Platt Amendment, which was annulled in 1934, reads as a virtual blueprint for the sweeping demands Washington is making today: that the Cuban people must install a government that will carry out the wishes of U.S. imperialism or Washington will do it for them.
The U.S. government’s May 20 frame-up of Raúl Castro and other Cubans was reinforced the next day by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing the former capitalist owners of a business in the port of Havana to sue the Cuban government for compensation when the shipping company leasing the piers was nationalized in 1960. The U.S. court ruled that Cuba is today using property “tainted by a past confiscation.”
In fact, the nationalization was the action of workers and farmers who mobilized to take back control of Cuba’s land, factories, banks, public utilities and resources in the early 1960s in order to use them to meet the needs of the Cuban people, not line the pockets of wealthy U.S. and Cuban capitalist families. The Cuban government offered compensation at the U.S. company’s self-assessed tax valuation, an offer refused by the cruise-ship barons and other capitalist owners of vast properties on the island.
“What they cannot forgive is that we made a socialist revolution right under the very nose of the United States,” Fidel Castro declared in 1961, a revolution “of the working people, by the working people and for the working people.” He was speaking that truth just days before volunteer Cuban militias and Revolutionary Armed Forces defeated an invasion by U.S.-armed and -financed counterrevolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs ordered by Democratic Party President John F. Kennedy.
Working people in Cuba were transformed in the course of making a revolution. In the decades since, they joined internationalist volunteer missions across the world — from assisting anti-imperialist freedom fighters in Vietnam, to Angolans resisting repeated invasions by U.S.-backed South African apartheid forces. Cuba has organized thousands of volunteer medical missions in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and elsewhere, even Europe! During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa they provided what no other country would: medical volunteers on the ground, who put their own lives on the line to fight to eradicate the disease.
Today working people in Cuba face enormous difficulties produced by cumulative damage from decades of U.S. economic sanctions and other assaults, now topped by escalating military threats and five months of a near 100% naval blockade of oil deliveries.
Contrary to lies by the U.S. rulers and capitalist media, millions in Cuba are determined to fight Washington’s brazen effort to impose a new Platt Amendment on their sovereign country. That was the message conveyed by the hundreds of thousands across Cuba who marched on May Day and again May 22. Cubans are working shoulder to shoulder, defying countless hours of daily electrical blackouts to use the scarce resources available to them today to meet the most essential needs of medical care, education and production.
Our job here and elsewhere the world over is to take action alongside them. To refute every one of Washington’s lies. To mobilize the widest possible opposition in the streets.
Join us in building these actions.
U.S. hands off Cuba! Defend the Cuban Revolution!