WHY IS THE US BLOCKADING CUBA?

This 34-year cold war against Cuba is only the latest episode in a century old attempt at conquest and annexation of the island. When the US intervened in Cuba towards the end of  its war of independence against Spain in 1901, the then military commander of the US occupation forces, General Leonard Wood, wrote the following in a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt:

The triumph of the Cuban revolution in January 1959 put an end to Cuba's colonial status as a sugar producing state of the USA. As the US government saw it this revolution was a downright robbery. How dare the Cuban people overthrow a government of the US and take over the US owned sugar mills and plantations! What right did they think they had to establish their own foreign policy independent of the imperial aims of Washington? And to add salt to an already gaping wound, they then have the audacity to go communist! The worst nightmare of the US sugar barons and oil conglomerates had become a reality just 90 miles off the Florida coastline.

The US has never forgiven Cuba for this unpardonable crime and for 35 years it has waged a relentless war to conquer Cuba and erase its example from the minds of tens of millions of working people across the Americas.

Besides an ongoing CIA programme to assassinate Castro and to sabotage the Cuban economy, the centrepiece of this cold war has been the trade and financial embargo against Cuba which has actually been intensified under the Clinton administration.

At a conservative estimate, this blockade has cost the Cuban people in the region of 40 billion dollars. It extends to every conceivable item of clothing, raw material, manufactured goods, essential foodstuffs and medicines.

There is only one reason why the US continue with this blockade: Cuba made a socialist revolution, the first of its kind in the western Hemisphere and it is the threat of that moral and political example spreading to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean which has kept the night lights on at the Pentagon for the last 35 years.

Washington's conditions for lifting the blockade have made this perfectly clear. They want Castro out and a wholesale privatisation of the Cuban Economy - including the return of the so called US assets - to follow.

The Cuban revolution has been a revolution which has depended upon the wholehearted participation and mobilisation of the people for its progress and its defence. That is why the target of Washington's war is not just the Cuban government but the Cuban people as a whole.

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