Hands off Cuba! End the Blockade!

Statement by the United National Antiwar Coalition

7/14/21

The United National Antiwar Coalition stands firmly with the Cuban people and their revolutionary government against any US intervention in Cuba’s affairs. We continue our calls to lift the punitive US blockade of Cuba that has caused humanitarian shortages [and been tightened] during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The recent disruptions inside Cuba have all the hallmarks of a coordinated campaign to lay groundwork for US intervention, following the [regime change] playbook used by the United States in nearby Venezuela and Nicaragua, as well as in countries like Libya and Syria to disastrous effect. They coincide with a massive social media offensive featuring hundreds of anonymous accounts that attack public figures who defend Cuba, and spread provocative disinformation like recycled footage from protests in other countries. The United States State Department has spent millions of dollars attempting to turn the masses of Cuban people against the revolution for years. Anti-government organizations such as the Cuban Human Rights Observatory and Cuban Institute for the Freedom of Expression and the Press have received millions from known CIA front groups, such as the National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Much of this campaign is dedicated to muddying the ideological waters by portraying pro-US protesters as somehow progressive. But the true character of these events becomes clear a hundred miles to Cuba’s north, in Florida, where Trump-supporting Cuban-Americans and Republican Party officials are mobilizing to demand US intervention: even calling for arming Cuban dissidents and US airstrikes. These groups follow a legacy of US-based violence against independent Cuba that spans from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to the terrorist attacks committed against Cuba in the 1990s.

Of course, even in Florida, these aging right-wing hardliners from the Bay of Pigs generation are now the minority, as over half of all Cubans in the U.S. support ending the embargo and lifting travel restrictions to and from the island. People from the U.S. as a whole have consistently opposed U.S economic warfare against the Cuban people and political interventions in Cuba.

For sixty years, ever since the Cuban people (led by Fidel Castro) overthrew US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban people have shown steadfast resilience and have defied countless attempts by the United States to destroy their government and their economy. Socialized healthcare, free for all, has boosted Cubans’ life expectancy higher than that of the United States, and produced innovations that threaten US pharmaceutical corporations’ monopoly on medicine. Cuba’s medical internationalism is unmatched by any country on Earth, with Cuban doctors leading the fight against Ebola in West Africa in 2014 and treating COVID-19 patients in nearly 40 countries during the pandemic. While COVID-19 cases have spiked recently in Cuba, the country’s overall response has been far more effective than in the United States, with vastly fewer cases and deaths per capita. The country’s indigenous biotech sector has even begun to produce its own COVID-19 vaccines despite the economic constraints imposed by the blockade.

Since 1960, official US policy has been to try and disrupt the Cuban economy and suffocate the island to the point that the people would blame their government and rise up to overthrow it. What the US has failed to realize for more than 60 years is that the Cuban revolution and the government that upholds it are strongly supported by the masses of Cuban people, and no amount of illegal sanctions will change that. It is clear to the Cuban people and to those with any shred of historical knowledge that the shortages and economic hardships being faced by the Cuban people have everything to do with decades of US intervention and economic warfare against Cuba, and not the supposed failures of the revolution, the Cuban government, or socialism as a whole.

UNAC stands in solidarity with Cuba and its people, and we stand in staunch opposition to any form of US intervention on the island: economic, military or political. We call on the anti-war movement to reject attempts by the U.S. State Department, CIA and their mouthpieces in the corporate media to spread disinformation about the current situation in Cuba. And we encourage supporters of Cuba in the United States and throughout the world to show their solidarity with the Cuban people by resisting any form of illegal, outside intervention on the island.

Solidarity with Cuba!

End the Sanctions!

End the Embargo!

End the Blockade!

US Hands Off Cuba!