By Hedelberto López Blanch
The example of sovereignty that the Cuban people and government have given to the world is the greatest threat to the decadent but criminal US empire, now led by the fascist and convicted President Donald Trump.
The dictatorship established in the United States after the rise to power of a millionaire and neo-fascist elite cannot allow the model of a small island to prevail in Latin America. This island has provided selfless support in recent decades to nations suffering from natural disasters or diseases, despite enduring an illegal economic, commercial, and financial blockade that has lasted for more than 60 years.
This paradigm of Cuba is what they want to destroy by any means, and above all, they want to isolate the island and try to starve its people to death, as the then Spanish Captain General Valeriano Weyler attempted to do by establishing concentration camps against the Cuban population and preventing them from helping the heroic Mambises, an action that caused the death of more than 200,000 civilians from hunger and disease between 1896 and 1898.
Trump signed an executive order this Thursday declaring a “national emergency,” based on the supposed “threat” that Cuba represents to his country and the rest of the region.
A declaration that is logically absurd and incomprehensible to the world, since the island has no weapons or military resources that could attack Washington, but it does have an unquestionable moral authority to confront these lies.
The document authorizes the mythomaniac Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, “to take all necessary measures to implement a system of tariffs and related measures” against countries that sell or supply oil to Cuba.
This is the Donroe Doctrine, Trump’s adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine, which proclaimed “America for the Americans,” meaning America for the United States.
The White House’s new measures seek to intensify the blockade against the country’s economy and cause more human suffering, since preventing oil from entering the island would paralyze medical services, electricity, transportation, industries, and so on.
On his Twitter account, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez denounced: “This new measure demonstrates the fascist, criminal, and genocidal nature of a cabal that has hijacked the interests of the American people.”
Under a mendacious and baseless pretext, peddled by those who profit from the suffering of our people, President Trump intends to strangle the Cuban economy by imposing tariffs on countries that sovereignly trade oil with Cuba.”
In the same vein, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla stated: “We denounce before the world this brutal act of aggression against Cuba and its people, who for more than 65 years have been subjected to the longest and cruelest economic blockade ever imposed on an entire nation, and whom the US now promises to subject to extreme living conditions. The United States is also resorting to blackmail and coercion to try to force other countries to join its universally condemned blockade policy, threatening them with arbitrary and abusive tariffs if they refuse, in violation of all the principles of free trade.”
For his part, Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossio declared: “If this demand is accepted, it will inaugurate a new and grotesque chapter of global subservience, opening a dangerous path whose destination is unknown and from which no state with any notion of sovereignty can feel safe. The effect extends beyond Cuba’s borders, although it is our people who have long faced, with stoicism, the cruel and criminal economic war waged by imperialism.”
Cuba, which for more than half a century has served and shared its medical, educational, and social development with many nations of the world and has even offered the blood of its children to save other peoples from colonialism, neocolonialism, and apartheid, now needs the world’s solidarity to confront the enormous onslaught launched against the island by the most rapacious empire that has ever existed on Earth.
The morale and prestige of the Cuban Revolution prevail against the fallacious arguments wielded by an ultraright-wing and fascist elite that currently dominates US politics.
Once again, with stoicism and dignity, the revolutionary government, together with its people, will confront new imperial threats, but Cuba will not be alone in this battle, and the peoples of the world will also know how to defend it.
(*) Hedelberto López Blanch is a renowned Cuban journalist. He writes for the newspaper Juventud Rebelde and the weekly Opciones. He is the author of “Cuban Emigration to the United States,” “Secret Stories of Cuban Doctors in Africa,” and “Miami, Dirty Money,” among others.
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE AUTHOR: Hedelberto López Blanch
