All eyes have quite rightly been on Palestine for the past year. Joe Biden’s maniacal pact with Israel has killed an estimated 200,000 people, and Israel is poised to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza and Lebanon. Their war crimes range from starvation, destruction of hospitals, shooting children in the head, rape and torture, attacking United Nations peacekeeping forces, assassinating Palestinian leaders, and burning hospital patients to death. All the atrocities have been documented, often by the perpetrators themselves, and have been defended vociferously. The genocide is a joint project with the U.S. and has more bipartisan support than any initiative which directly impacts people in this country.
The horror makes it easy to forget that U.S. crimes continue unabated around the world even when we don’t have to look very far to find them. Just 90 miles away from Florida, the people of Cuba are suffering in darkness, denied the ability to access electricity, all because of the damage done by more than 60 years of sanctions which were made worse by a new crime, the State Sponsor of Terror (SSOT) designation.
On January 11, 2021, with only nine more days in office, the Trump administration added Cuba to the SSOT list. It was strange timing to take an action that could have been carried out at some point during the previous four years. But the Trump team wanted to kill the improvement in relations that began in 2014 when Barack Obama restored diplomatic relations between the two countries. In 2015 he removed Cuba from the SSOT designation and in 2016 traveled there to make an in-person visit. Sanctions were still in place but the thaw in relations was significant, as travel and other restrictions were eased and gave Cuba some degree of breathing room.
Yet despite the fact that the outgoing and supposedly discredited Trump administration made the SSOT designation days away from leaving office, it continues to this day under the Biden administration. SSOT tightens the screws, and makes it nearly impossible for Cuba to conduct financial transactions. As soon as the SSOT designation was made more than 30 financial institutions left Cuba, NGOs and even Cubans living abroad had bank accounts frozen, and nations feared selling Cuba medical equipment for fear of being sanctioned themselves.
Europeans, Australians, and New Zealanders regularly traveled to Cuba but the SSOT designation banned anyone from securing an ESTA visa waiver needed to enter the U.S. if they traveled to Cuba. Tourism was a lifeline for Cuba and the Trump/Biden administration killed off that industry which was an employer of thousands of people and the provider of needed foreign currency.
Now Cuba is suffering after nearly a week of blackouts caused by their antiquated electrical grid. Sanctions prevent Cuba from securing even ordinary supplies such as electrical components and make it impossible for its grid to function.
It is important to say what this situation means for the Cuban people. Normal activities cannot take place without electricity. Food is spoiled without refrigeration and so are many medicines. Surgery cannot be performed without lights and x-ray machines and dialysis equipment cannot operate either. Streets are dark and dangerous for drivers and pedestrians alike.
Restorations have been intermittent even as hurricane Oscar struck the island. One day most of Havana has power, but the next it may not. The only fix for Cuba’s electricity woes is an end to the SSOT designation and to all sanctions.
The U.S. imposes unilateral coercive measures, sanctions, on one-third of the world’s countries. Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, are just some of the nations punished by the supremacy of the U.S. dollar. People in these countries suffer without food, medicine, or even simple materials like lumber or hammers and nails because the U.S. is determined to wage war against them. In Venezuela alone some 40,000 people died as a result of the U.S. sanctions regime of collective punishment, which is a war crime by definition.
Coercive measures are a means of making war without soldiers, bullets, or bombs. They are deadly and secure the primacy that the U.S. seeks. Countries are declared adversaries and punished not because of any wrong doing on their part, but because they somehow run afoul of U.S. foreign policy dictates. In the case of Cuba, its commitment to its socialist revolution presents the threat of a good example. The existence of free education and free health care and a foreign policy that seeks peaceful coexistence so close to the U.S. presents a possibility that the U.S. will not permit, and so the punishing sanctions regime goes on.
The bipartisan nature of the crime against Cuba cannot be overemphasized. We are told that Trump is a political outlier, a fascist who is determined to end democracy. He enacted the SSOT designation less than one week after his supporters marched onto the capitol on January 6 and in the process created enmity that lasts until this day. But there is no true hostility towards Trump in this regard.
Biden’s State Department didn’t bother to review the SSOT designation until 2024, only to conclude that it should continue. United Nations rapporteurs have said it should end. Every year the UN General Assembly votes overwhelmingly to end sanctions altogether, only to be ignored by Trump, Biden, or in all probability whoever may come after them.
The U.S. has perpetrated so much criminality that it is hard to give any of these acts the full attention they deserve. But the consensus to seek regime change in Cuba and to punish the people there has largely been consistent. No one should forget that it was Cuba which sent its army to Angola to fight against South African forces and bring an end to the apartheid system.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment didn’t forget and they punish Cuba to this day. We must not forget either and continue to stand in solidarity with the Cuban people and their human rights to self-determination and self-defense.