Washington is relentlessly ratcheting up its political, economic and trade blockade against Cuba, raising the stakes for workers the world over to protest its drive to break the Cuban people. The U.S. government is making it harder and harder to live, to get food, medicine and other basic human necessities.

At the same time, the U.S. rulers are coupling their assault on Cuba with an attack on constitutional freedoms here at home. They’re attacking groups who speak out in defense of Cuba, threatening them with intrusive probes and prosecution. They’re especially targeting unions like the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers that have joined in actions to defend Cuba.

Workers and farmers in Cuba refuse to bow down. They’re fighting not only to survive, but insist on living with dignity and ensuring the most vulnerable don’t go without.

That is only possible because they made a socialist revolution, overturning dog-eat-dog capitalist exploitation and transforming themselves as they joined together to change their conditions of life and work.

They offered solidarity — arms in hand — to people fighting for independence, from Guinea-Bissau, Angola and South Africa to Bolivia and Vietnam.

The response of working people in Cuba to the brutal impact of Washington’s offensive today is captured in the “Reporter’s Notebook from Havana” starting on the front page of this issue.

For more than six decades the U.S. propertied rulers have tried to wipe out the powerful example set by the first socialist revolution in the Americas for the exploited and oppressed in the U.S. and the world over.

We need to step up our efforts to build more and larger protests against Washington’s war on Cuba. And we should help aid programs like the Global Health Partners Neonatal and Maternal Healthcare Initiative get needed medical supplies to Cubans.

The U.S. ruling class that is leading the brutal assault on the Cuban people is the same class driving to put the brunt of today’s capitalist crisis onto the backs of workers in the U.S. It’s attacking our wages, slashing jobs and targeting groups of undocumented workers for deportation. Like its attacks on Cuba, the profit-driven offensive here is being met with resistance by workers and our unions.

The rulers’ moves are bipartisan, under Democrats or Republicans alike. Both parties govern for the tiny handful of capitalist bosses and bankers seeking to defend their class rule. The foreign policy of the U.S. government is simply an extension of the capitalists’ assaults on workers at home.

The rulers try to turn workers here against toilers in Cuba, but their slanders have little effect. Without a shred of evidence, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made outlandish claims that the Cuban government is “exporting Marxism, racial resentment and Communist violence across the world.”

Among Cubans sanctioned by Washington is the leadership of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples — an organization “that for over six decades has promoted friendship, international solidarity and peace — the exact opposite of what the secretary of state has always championed,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez has explained.

Side by side with mounting aggression abroad, the State Department is targeting organizations in the U.S. that defend Cuba, providing a hit list in its report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”

The government is also demanding The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research turn over their financial records and lists of contributors, claiming they are “foreign agents.”

These attacks are a blow to free speech and association — rights all working people have a vital interest in defending.

The U.S. imperialists’ assaults on Cuba are part and parcel of their broader moves to prepare for new and bloodier wars on the horizon. Capitalist rulers worldwide are doing the same amid today’s sharpening competition for markets, resources and labor to exploit. They’re moving fast to rearm and prepare for more wars. The U.S. rulers increasingly act as if the world is simply theirs to take, from Venezuela to Greenland, Cuba and the Strait of Hormuz.

The fact is, far from being a danger to U.S. workers, Cuba’s socialist revolution is an example we can learn from to use in our class struggle. It’s crucial we get out the truth about what the Cuban Revolution has accomplished and how it shows what working people in power can do.

A key part of this is expanding the readership of the Militant and circulation of books by the revolution’s leaders. Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Víctor Dreke is a wonderful example. It’s a firsthand account of the international solidarity extended by working people in Cuba to the historic independence struggle there that also helped bring down the fascist regime in Portugal.

Join us in this battle — a battle with serious consequences for working people everywhere.