“We’re rebels. We defeated Batista in 1959. We survived the Bay of Pigs. We endured the Special Period when the Soviet Union collapsed, and we were left with nothing. We’ll survive this, too.”
So said a young Cuban when asked what he sees as Cuba’s future. One can only hope he is right. The Cuban people’s commitment to their exemplary cause and capacity for sacrifice is beyond doubt. Why the world sits idly by and allows the strangulation of Cuba by the USA is beyond comprehension. No civilised country, no matter how powerful, conducts its affairs so cruelly.
But we are all complicit. We all deserve the varying degrees of hell we live in. It’s going to get worse, and we own everything that comes to us. Everyone who lives in comfort needs to feel pain. Everyone who has food needs to go hungry — all of us with electricity need to live in an indeterminable darkness. We need to see our loved ones die. We need to witness death and destruction. We need to stare down our own mortality. If Havana’s sorrow is multiplied across the Global North, we may grow a soul and show some compassion.
Trump and Rubio are evil sociopaths. Citizens of the global north are too comfortable in their snugness. The American Government is notorious for its callousness. But our species’ callousness is beyond comparison. We can’t be this hopeless. We are all complicit. There may be a few exceptions.
Claudia Sheinbaum, the Honourable President of Mexico, announced that her country is actively working to reactivate oil shipments to Cuba. “No country should intercede, and if there’s any problem related to that, there are multilateral organisations. There should not be the intervention of one country over another. The Mexican-Cuban relationship is historical. It is not new, and we are going to continue to support the Cuban people.”
A Russian oil tanker with 700,000 barrels of fuel finally arrived in Cuba last Monday after taking a circuitous route to avoid US and European trackers. This shipment represents a drop in the bucket. Based on Cuba’s consumption needs, the fuel is sufficient for only one week’s supply.
And what can we say about CARICOM’s tardy response to the unfolding catastrophe across Cuba? The Kittitian and Grenadian governments have each announced a commitment of US$500,000 in humanitarian aid to Cuba. Jamaica, on Trump’s dictates, expelled Cuban doctors and professionals but remains muted on aid to its closest neighbour. Trinidad’s punch-drunk political leadership is locked step with Trump, whose PM, Kamla Persad Bissesar, claimed is a godsend. Guyana’s Irfan Ali calls for regime change in Havana, while Barbados’ Mia Mottley, who courageously condemned the Israeli live-stream genocide of Palestinians in which the Biden/Harris and Trump regimes have been complicit, appears to have folded under Washington’s pressure. CARICOM’s four largest countries, historically renowned for leadership on foreign policy issues, have abandoned any pretence at sovereign authority. Our government has done nothing tangible or said anything meaningful on this horrific development.
Even with these glimmers of hope, would it be enough? Would it turn out to be too little too late?
We claim that the world is now multipolar, but is it? How is it that in the third decade of the 21st century, one country can dictate to the entire world what can and should not be done? Barbarism awaits if this political madness is normalised and allowed to continue?
Was Russian President Vladimir Putin correct when, in a 2005 State of the Union address, he said the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest political catastrophe of the last century? Were Moscow and the Eastern Bloc socialist countries an essential counterbalance to the excesses of the USA and Western Europe? Plain Talk considers President Putin wiser than he is credited. The US would never be so recklessly adventurous and dangerous with a strong Soviet Union.
Sixty-four years ago, the world came to the brink of nuclear war over the planned Soviet deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba. The Americans demanded their removal and threatened a potentially earth-shattering war if the offensive armaments were not removed. Today, the American political elite has laid siege to Cuba, which Trump whimsically labelled an extraordinary threat. With the embargo, babies are dying, schools are closed, factories are idle, people cannot go to work, garbage piles up on the streets, and preventable diseases infect and take lives while the world sits and watches.
How can nuclear-armed Russia and China, earth’s premier economic dynamo, not be moved to bring an end to the siege? Are they too self-obsessed to recognise that once the Americans destroy Cuba, Iran, and possibly Colombia, Mexico, swallow Greenland or wherever they please, they will be next on the chopping block? Why have they not taken a risk for humanity by ensuring that fuel, food, and medicine consistently reach Cuba without hindrance? Are we not at a “We are the World” moment?
One does not have to be a specialist to know that Cuba needs more than humanitarian aid. Everyone knows that, left to its own devices, Cuba is an extraordinarily self-sufficient society with the capacity for greatness. Cuba’s 67-year revolutionary history is replete with outstanding achievements. Its advances in education, health care, science and innovation, as reflected in its development of world-class drug treatments for lung cancer and diabetes, and in its COVID-19 vaccines, are demonstrative of the nation’s capacity.
Every day that Cuba goes without fuel, the energy to keep a modern, civilised society truly functional, our species loses its humanity, and our “civilisation” continues its slow but certain decline.