​The recent protest demonstrations in Cuba, which started on July 11, have set off a frenzied anti-communist response in the United States, from politicians of both the Republican and Democratic parties and from both right-wing and supposedly “centrist” and even “liberal” sectors of the press and media.

One Florida Republican congressman called for the Cuban national leadership to be “executed.”  President Biden called Cuba a “failed state.” Even before the protests, Senators Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) renewed the offensive of the U.S. right against Cuba’s much-lauded international health solidarity missions, which have been praised in the many countries where they have helped to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, repeating the canard that the missions constitute “human trafficking.”

The fact that there have been much larger pro-revolutions demonstrations in Cuba in response to the anti-government protests has been ignored or distorted, with enemies of the socialist government even mislabeling images of the pro-revolution demonstrations as being anti-government.

The major bourgeois media in the United States have covered the recent situation the way they always have: to downplay or ignore completely the role of the 60-year blockade of Cuba by the United States in creating economic difficulties for the Cuban people, and to attribute any disturbances to “failed socialist policies” by an “authoritarian” and “repressive regime.” Not only that, but supposedly professional journalists and editorial commentators give credence to versions of events peddled by discredited right-wing hacks and ideologues.

​When there are protests in Cuba, major U.S. press and media outlets forget the much larger protests against right-wing governments in many, many other countries, including Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, and Brazil, all of whose governments are subordinate to U.S. imperialist interests. In Colombia, for instance, the right-wing government of President Ivan Duque, closely allied with the United States, has unleashed a wave of violent repression against all opponents, repression which has cost the lives of many labor, indigenous, youth, and other leaders.

There are other manifestations of the corporate media’s propensity to ignore wider context when they are out to do a hatchet job on Cuba or other left-wing-led nations. For example, there has been an uptick in the number of cases of Covid-19 in Cuba (as in the United States and everywhere) in recent days, and this is trumpeted by the right-wing enemies of the Cuban Revolution as proving that the pandemic has been “mismanaged” by the Cuban government. In fact, Cuba has done far better than any of the other poorer countries dominated by imperialism in mobilizing its national resources to fight the pandemic, while its access to vital medications and medical equipment (including syringes needed to provide the population with anti-Covid vaccinations) has been severely harmed by the U.S. economic blockade.

The reasons for economic difficulties in Cuba are also distorted. This writer was in Cuba twice:  in 1995 and 2017. At the time of my first visit, Cuba had been hard hit by the ending of favorable trade arrangements with the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries. Health care and educational institutions were still operating successfully, but there were serious scarcities and electrical blackouts caused by lack of fuel supplies. The United States government took advantage of Cuba’s difficulties by intensifying its attempts at economic strangulation of the island nation by passing the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996. These acts, along with sundry executive orders, had the purpose of strangling the Cuban economy by making it risky for foreign companies to do business with Cuba, especially if such business was to be done on a credit basis, and by making it extremely hard for Cuba to get hard currency to use in foreign trade.

​Cuba overcame these problems by negotiating new international trade networks while also launching new productive enterprises, notably in the biomedical field. Then in December 2014, the Obama administration began a program of rapprochement with socialist Cuba. Agreements between Obama and then Cuban President Raul Castro helped to develop Cuba’s tourism industry by making it much easier for U.S. citizens to travel to the island. But much of the legal architecture of the blockade remained.

So when I visited Havana in 2017, significant improvements in living standards were clearly visible. Public transportation was visibly improved by the presence of spanking new Chinese-built buses, cultural activities were thriving, and people were well fed, well dressed, and healthy looking, and Havana was clean and orderly. I even saw people walking “designer dogs”!

That was in the spring of the first year of the Trump administration. But things went downhill very soon after that, as Trump reversed most of Obama’s rapprochement policies and added new sanctions, among others, restricting the ability of Cuban-origin residents of the United States to send cash remittances to their relatives in Cuba. Using the still unexplained “Havana Embassy Mystery” as an excuse, the Trump administration imposed new anti-Cuba measures and returned Cuba to the list of countries not cooperating with the United States in the so-called war against terror. These things had their impact, and then on top of them came the Covid-19 pandemic, which stopped tourism to Cuba for more than a year. Tourism had become a major generator of vitally needed foreign exchange funds for Cuba, so this was a serious setback.

The pandemic, in the context of heightened U.S. attacks on Cuba, has had an extremely negative effect on the Cuban economy. And this is the moment that hardline anti-communists in the United States, which include influential Cuban-American politicians like Senators Rubio and Menendez, have been waiting for since the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959.

​In 1960, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory outlined the imperialist approach to reversing the Cuban Revolution that is still in force today. Noting the popularity of the revolutionary government, he proposed that this popularity should be undermined by employing “every possible means” which should “be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Methods should be employed to “make the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government.” And indeed, this is the policy that the United States has maintained against the Cuban people for nearly 61 years. This is why current U.S. claims to be “defending the Cuban people” are particularly repulsive.

But this time, simply ignoring international and historical context has not been enough. Making use of the internet and social media, enemies of the Cuban people have flooded the U.S. public with completely fictitious or doctored material. For example, there are multiple instances in which images of pro-government, pro-revolution counter demonstrations in Cuba have been mislabeled as anti-government protests. False information has been put out concerning the size and effects of the protest demonstrations.

For a long time, the U.S. government has been funding organized efforts to support dissident activism in Cuba. Recently, there has been a reliance on social media to achieve this aim. Much of the funding comes from U.S. government agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute for International Development  (USAID), working through a network of right-wing nonprofit and religious organizations in the United States.

​For example, in 2020 alone, USAID channeled 2.5 million dollars (as far as we know) for subversion in Cuba through dozens of such organizations. Many have connections to right-wing Cuban exile groups such as the Bacardi Family Foundation, which received $181,699. This foundation was established by the family that formerly controlled Cuba’s rum production, pre-revolution. The Cuban Revolution nationalized Bacardi, offering the former owners managerial positions in the socialized enterprise. But like many rich Cubans, the Bacardis decamped to the United States, and since then have been involved in anti-Cuba activities such as a long-running trademark dispute over the right to use the famous “Havana Club” brand name. Another entity, which received $333,122 in 2020, is Canyon Communications, which announces that it is funding young Cuban artists and intellectuals to help them express themselves. A really splendid one is Grupo de Apoyo de la Democracia, Inc., a recipient of $167,107 and like many of these entities based in the right-wing Cuban exile community in Florida; it was accused in 2006 of spending U.S. taxpayer money for illegitimate purposes. The International Republican Institute, connected to the U.S. political party, got $470,267. “Evangelical Christian Humanitarian Outreach to Cuba” got $148,089; its goal is to foment the organizing of independent Evangelical Christian churches in Cuba, a country with plenty of religious congregations of its own.

Much of the U.S. money directed at destabilizing Cuba has been directed at funding dissident artists, musicians, and bloggers, giving them the ability to project their message quickly to larger audiences on the island. Some of these artists, like the rapper Yotuel, have strong international networks, including in the Cuban exile circles in Miami.

There has been a recent sharp uptick in Covid-19 cases in Cuba. This has also been decontextualized. In fact, overall Cuba has done much better than other Latin American nations in dealing with the contagion, and better than the United States. This recent sharp uptick has not been just a Cuban phenomenon—it is worldwide and is happening in the United States too. For the United States to make it difficult for Cuba to import vital supplies to fight the pandemic, including syringes and medications, is a strange way to “help” the Cuban people.

​The whole issue of Cuban health care, a strong point of Cuba’s socialist system, is constantly distorted. The fact that Cuban doctors don’t drive around in Bentleys has nothing to do with the quality of that country’s health care system. Omitted from bourgeois media accounts of Cuban health care is the fact that medical education in Cuba is completely free, so young doctors are not burdened with impossible student loan repayments as they are in the United States. Instead, they are asked to put time into community service, either in Cuba or, on a volunteer basis, in one of Cuba’s overseas health solidarity missions. And health services are also free, so sick Cubans are not bankrupted and left homeless by medical bills, as happens in the United States.

Some so-called pundits express shock that some countries who host the Cuban missions pay Cuba for the service. The truth is that Cuba does not charge anything to provide these services to poor countries, only to countries wealthier than itself. And why not? Why indeed should Cuba subsidize the health care system of a wealthy developed country like Italy? Cuba’s per capita gross domestic product (calculated by the Purchasing Power Parity method) is estimated at $12,300 per year, while Italy’s is $42,492. So Cuba should subsidize Italy?

In 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden hinted that if elected, he would return to the Obama administration’s policy of gradual normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba. However, current statements by Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and other administration figures seem to indicate otherwise.

However, the direction of the Biden administration Cuba policy should not be seen as immutable. Biden is getting pressure from the anti-Cuba lobby based in South Florida and New Jersey, an old story. This pressure is deliberately exerted in such a way as to threaten the Democratic Party’s hold on the White House and its majorities in Congress and state legislatures.

Friends of the Cuban people must find more effective ways of exerting our own counter pressure. Here are some:

*Act as a truth squad. Especially those of us who have been to Cuba and follow events there closely should avail ourselves of every opportunity to speak out when wrong information about Cuba is peddled in the press, radio, and television, and especially on social media. Write letters to the editor, call into radio and TV programs, and put out correct information on all online and social media platforms.

*Support positive legislation on Cuba by contacting your federal senators and representatives,  asking them to sign on to the following bills, and then to work to get them passed: S 249, United States-Cuba Trade Act; S 1694, Freedom to Export to Cuba Act; and HR 3625, United States Cuba Relations Normalization Act. Legislative action on Cuba can be found on the website of the organization ACERE.

*Get your city council, state legislature, or other public or private body to pass a resolution denouncing the U.S. blockade of Cuba and demanding normalization of relations with the island nation. More than a score of city councils and state legislatures, including the city council of the country’s third largest city, Chicago, have already done so.

*Support the many organizations working to help the Cuban people overcome the imperialist blockade, such as IFCO/Pastors for Peace and many others.

*Join the international campaign to award the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to the outstanding Cuban international health care solidarity campaign of Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade.

*Support specific campaigns to help Cuba fight the Covid-19 pandemic, like the recent one to send syringes to Cuba.

​Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar, Paul Le Blanc, Suzi Weissman, Tithi Bhattacharya, Charlie Post, Robert Brenner, Gayatri Spivak, Alex Callinicos, Ashley Smith, Eric Toussaint, Marc Cooper, Etienne Balibar. These are a handful of the over 500 signatories on an open letter directed to the blockaded Cuban government on July 12th demanding “respect for the democratic rights of all Cuban people” and the release of “dissident Marxist” Frank García Hernández and his comrades from jail after the protests of July 11th.

These signatories are high-profile academic socialists in the US and Europe, featured prominently in the publication catalogue of Verso and Haymarket Books, or on the editorial boards of online journals like New Politics, Tempest, Spectre, Socialist Worker, and other ex-ISO-now-DSA, SEP, or UK SWP related outlets. Their work also frequently appears in more mainstream left outlets, such as Jacobin and the Nation. Their opinions on the left reach a wide audience and, in some cases, carry significant weight. Their petition circulation effort drew major support on social media in the days after the initial protests in Cuba, helping to stitch together a left-reinforcement to the edifice of the mainstream press, which described the event as an uprising by “political dissidents” against an “oppressive bureaucratic regime” in the pursuit of democracy and freedom of expression.

The definition of “freedom” pursued and the political orientation of the protesters in question differed between the tales spun by the New York Times and those of the Socialist Worker, but the story was the same: Repressive government arbitrarily detains political dissidents.

And while these signatories differ among themselves over their characterization of the Cuban government and its revolutionary tradition—ranging from the view that Cuba is “state capitalist” that harbors no revolutionary potential to the view that the once-revolutionary state has become an intransigent bureaucracy that is still preferable to the neoliberal model—all seem to find common ground with co-signer Gilbert Achcar’s warning about “the anti-imperialism of fools.” Achcar condemns those who oppose US imperialism no matter its target, because he believes this misses the “nuanced” view that US imperialism might be instrumentalized by popular movements in the pursuit of their own liberation.

​On July 17th, a different narrative emerged from the mouths of Frank García Hernández’s Cuban colleagues themselves. The Comunistas collective Editorial Board, of which Frank is a founder, published an account of events that was much more balanced and far less negative in its appraisal of the Cuban government and its response to the protests than the narrative that was promoted by the petition’s signatories. Rather than a repressive response to an organic anti-state uprising, they portray the events of July 11th as unprecedented protests with a variety of origins and compositions, some legitimate and others manufactured.

In their account, the protests were composed of three flanks: a small group of US-funded counter-revolutionaries with massive reach and influence, a small group of anti-state intellectuals with legitimate grievances that were co-opted by the reactionaries, and a much larger group of “non-political” demonstrators demanding an end to austerity and shortages—a crisis which the Comunistas Editorial Board attributes, with some reservations, almost entirely to the exacerbating US blockade and global pandemic. In short, the most explicitly anti-government slogans and orientations were crafted and carried by the US-funded counter-revolutionaries, whereas the majority of the demonstrators lacked a cohesive political consciousness and simply wanted a reprieve from their very real material hardships. As the editorial board asserts, “The protests did not represent a majority. Most of the Cuban population continues to support the government.”

​Notably, this closely mirrors the public address of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who stated, “The protests involve many revolutionary citizens who want an explanation for the current situation in the country, but are also contaminated by groups of opportunists who take advantage of the current crisis to undermine order and generate chaos.” And while Díaz-Canel expressed full faith in the Cuban people to engage in productive dialogue to resolve the present crises, his calls for revolutionaries to take to the streets to defend the nation against opportunistic attacks and US-financed subversion campaigns was met with scorn from the self-described “anti-campist” or “third campist” Western left.

For these Western left critics of the Cuban state, Díaz-Canel’s calls for popular defense of national sovereignty represented a cynical demand by the Cuban state for its supporters to engage in vigilante violence against dissidents like García Hernández. The fact that García Hernández’s comrades—who engage in frequent criticism of the Cuban government themselves—did not subscribe to this narrative of events nevertheless did not discourage the petitioners from propagating the perspective that Frank’s arrest was the smoking gun evidence of Cuba’s authoritarian round up of “critical communists.”

​No such round-up took place. The arrests that did occur followed outbreaks of violence and vandalism after mostly peaceful and unharassed protests in a number of cities, which the Comunistas collective describes as: “Violent groups carried out acts of vandalism, attacking communist militants and government supporters with sticks and stones.” The Cuban police and defenders of the revolution engaged in kind. In other words, according to this collective of Cuban critics of the state, the violence that resulted in scattered arrests were largely carried out by counter-revolutionary forces against government supporters and other communist partisans. This is a far cry from the narratives emerging out of the US corporate media and academic left circles, which characterized the violence as a one-sided repressive crackdown by an intransigent bureaucratic “regime” and its paid supporters against dissidents striving for freedom and plenty.

Nevertheless, Frank García Hernández and some others were arrested—the catalyst for the petition. Frank’s comrades at the Comunistas collective address this too. It turns out, Frank was not arrested for being a “dissident” participant in the protests. In fact, Frank is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) who merely watched but did not partake in the protests, and was arrested by “confusion” as he put it. Frank and another intellectual named in the petition, LGBTQ activist Maykel González Vivero, who did participate in the protests, were picked up after a nearby act of counter-revolutionary violence resulted in injuries and vandalism late in the night. By Frank’s own admission, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The next day they easily proved their innocence and were released without incident. According to his colleagues at Comunistas collective, “During his little more than 24 hours of detention, Frank affirms that he did not receive physical abuse, nor any type of torture.” No other person associated with the publication was arrested or targeted.

But here a key detail emerges. Frank’s release actually preceded the publication of the open letter demanding his release by his “comrades” in the US and Europe. And while Comunistas collective maintained their own criticisms of the Cuban government, their characterization of the genesis of the protests, the response of the government to the protests, and the appraisal of the revolutionary process in general, differ significantly from the ostensibly “progressive” critics of the Cuban government in the US and Europe who organized the petition to release their friend who had in fact already been released. Again, these significant discrepancies have not been addressed by any of the prominent signatories and circulators of the petition.

In fact, on July 17th, the day that the Comunistas blog collective published their retrospective of the protests and arrests, some of the US-based petition endorsers republished the original petition in Tempest Magazine without mention of any of the above critical divergences from on-the-ground reports. Further, the editorial board of Tempest broadened the appeal to a call for the release of “all detainees in Cuba.” Even the Comunistas collective demanded only the release of the detainees “as long as they have not committed actions that have threatened the lives of other people.”

In the week that followed the July 11th protests, the Open Letter Left were confronted with an excess of evidence and investigative research documenting the existence of US CIA front subversion projects, tens of millions of dollars funnelled into counter-revolutionary activities, coup-propagating social media bot farms, and other examples of hybrid warfare that served as the backdrop of the unrest. And yet, they maintained their political line that all arrests were arbitrary and illegitimate. One signatory even asserted that the duty of the left in the West is to support all such protests, “whatever people’s politics involved in these struggles– against whatever states and ruling classes, even those who falsely claim the mantle of ‘socialism.'” This is, of course, a tacit endorsement of the reactionary tail that wags the dog of these astroturfed “color revolutions,” disguised as they are as organic movements of workers and oppressed peoples.

​Taken in isolation, a charitable reading could view signing such an open letter as a political slip-up brewed in the fog of war that is a developing foreign event. But for many of the most prominent left signatories, this was the only public statement or call to action made regarding the unprecedented events in Cuba. Too few matched their outrage of the arrests with equal outrage over the ongoing illegal blockade of the island by the US, and even fewer (close to none) circulated open letters or petitions calling for anti-imperialist solidarity with Cuban sovereignty against the now well-documented imperial provocations that played an important role in the outbreak and international media coverage of the protests in Cuba. Even after statements of support for the gains of the Cuban revolution came from all corners of the world, demanding an end to the illegal blockade and hybrid warfare, the signatories spared little attention for the very real threat of escalating imperialist intervention.

When the mayor of Miami called on the US government to bomb Havana, none of the open letter endorsers change their tune. None came to the defence of Black Lives Matter after the organization’s condemnation of the US blockade brought them heavy backlash.

At most, as in the petition itself, the blockade and imperial provocations were mentioned as an almost unrelated preamble to the real point, despite their absolute centrality. No open letter was signed and circulated by this group of Western academic leftists demanding an end to the blockade after the 29th consecutive UN General Assembly majority vote to end the economic siege in June, and neither was there an effort on their part to circulate the campaign to send millions of much-needed syringes to the island to help put Cuban-made COVID vaccines into Cuban arms. When President Joe Biden announced that he would not change course on Cuba and called the nation a “failed state” without reference to the blockade, they issued no scathing open letter. They did not collectively come to the defence of a patriotic Cuban woman who was censored on Twitter after she demanded that the UN Human Rights Council stop using her image as the symbol for the anti-government protesters, when in reality she was in the streets of Cuba defending her revolution. Similarly, many signatories silence on the ongoing violent US-backed state repression of a months-long popular uprising in Colombia, or the years-long popular uprising in Haiti, grew more pronounced with the circulation of this petition. Their priorities were laid bare.

When confronted on social media, those that disagreed were accused of supporting “repression” and “ignoring voices on the ground.” No intellectually honest reference was made to the voices on the ground of the 100,000 Cubans who took to the streets of Havana in defence of their revolution. No mea culpas were issued after even Reuters was forced to admit that the media had fallen for lies and manipulations about the protests and the repression that ostensibly followed. Their perception of events, one must assume, remains the same as it was on July 12th. Their own political orthodoxy, it seems, left little room for “dissident Marxists” engaging them in criticism among comrades.

On July 22nd, US President Joe Biden announced a new round of sanctions on Cuba, which he promised were “just the beginning.” The Biden administration’s intransigence—and its cynical hypocrisy in denouncing “mass detentions and sham trials” in Cuba that presumably does not describe the US-run torture camp known as Guantanamo Bay—saw a rapidly organized response in the pages of the New York Times on July 23rd. In a full-page advert, the People’s Forum, Code Pink, the Answer Coalition, and over 400 “former heads of state, politicians, intellectuals, scientists, members of the clergy, artists, musicians and activists from across the globe,” issued an open letter to the US government demanding the end to its economic warfare against the Cuban people. Here is an example of the kind of public statement with prominent endorsers that places the responsibility for human rights abuses at the feet of US imperialism, and that expresses solidarity with the working and oppressed people of the globe who resist empire. A rare few signatories of the July 12th petition directed against the Cuban government did sign the “Let Cuba Live” letter in the NYT, including Noam Chomsky. One can only wonder what the political priorities are of those who condemn the imperialism of their own government only after first making demands and criticisms upon the targets of that imperialism.

​No matter the developments of the last two weeks, the July 12th petition denouncing the Cuban government has not been renounced by any of its signatories. File this away as one more example of Western academic socialists and progressives being captured by the ideological manipulations of US State Department propaganda and their own internalized colonial chauvinism toward revolutionary projects in the Global South. Other targets of these petitions and open letters in recent years and months have been Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Notably, all are targets of ongoing and well-documented subversion operations, economic sanctions, and electoral interference by the United States, something that is rarely remarked upon by the signatories.

The outraged open letter from prominent leftist intellectuals making demands upon anti-imperialist nations and other targets of Western imperialism is one of the most insidious and effective propaganda efforts by non-state actors in the imperial core, as it serves to confuse and disorient the broader left within the belly of the beast, weakening our capacity to collectively undermine and resist the US empire, thus relegating the burden of the struggle against imperialism to the revolutionary peoples of the Global South alone. This is a dereliction of our revolutionary duties.

As progressives and revolutionaries living within the empire, we must express an unqualified and unwavering solidarity with Cuba and all targets of US imperialism, and we must organize to put an end to US aggression, political interference, and economic strangulation so that Cuba and all working and oppressed peoples of the world can breathe.

A version of this article first appeared in Fight Back News.
Red Ant publishes this with permission of the author.

​On July 22, U.S. President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris released a “fact sheet” on U.S. “measures” against Cuba. The release from the White House said that Cuba was a “top priority for the Biden-Harris administration.” On March 9, Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” On July 12, NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell asked Psaki if Biden had reassessed his priorities regarding Cuba after the protests on the island the previous day. “In terms of where it ranks in a priority order,” Psaki replied, “I’m not in a position to offer that, but I can tell you that we will be closely engaged.”

Not a priority, closely engaged, top priority: matters have moved rapidly from March 9 to July 22. What moved the Biden-Harris administration to focus so quickly on Cuba? On the morning of July 11, some people in Cuba—notably in the town of San Antonio de los Baños—took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the social and economic problems created by the U.S.-imposed blockade and by the global pandemic. The reaction to these events in Havana and in Washington, D.C., is instructive: Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel heard the news of the protests, got into a car, and drove the 40 miles to San Antonio de los Baños, where he met with the people; while in Washington, Biden used the protest to call for the overthrow of the Cuban government. U.S. government-funded nongovernmental organizations and Cuban American groups hastened to take advantage of the frenzy, excited by the possibility of regime change in Cuba.

On the evening of July 11, tens of thousands of Cubans rallied across Cuba to defend their revolutionary process. Since that Sunday evening, Cuba has been calm.

​Eleven days after those events, the Biden administration announced its “measures” for the island. There are two kinds of pressure engineered by the United States government: tightening the blockade and lies.

The Biden administration deepened the U.S. blockade that has been in place since 1960. Elements of this deepening include the continued ban on the freedom of people in the United States to make remittance payments to relatives and friends on the island. In October 2020, the United States forced the closure of 400 Western Union offices in Cuba. By this act, the United States denied Cuba between $2 billion and $3 billion in annual remittance payments (Cuba is not among the top 10 Latin American countries that rely on such income).

In December 1950, the U.S. government created the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which manages the sanctions programs. Sanctions are a key element in the U.S. government’s “maximum pressure” campaign against its adversaries. Cuban banks and Cuban businesses as well as Cuban government officials populate the OFAC list alongside businesses and officials from about 30 other countries. In the “fact sheet,” the U.S. government mentioned the addition of “one Cuban individual,” namely Cuba’s minister of defense. He is accused of “facilitating the repression of peaceful, pro-democratic protests in Cuba.” The term “repression” is used loosely. In 2020, police officers in the United States killed 1,021 people, almost three people per day. There is no state violence at this scale anywhere in the world, let alone in Cuba.

​Cuba’s minister of defense is Álvaro López Miera, who took this post in April 2021. In 1957, at the age of 14, López Miera went up to the Sierra Maestra to join the rebels against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was motivated by his parents, who had been partisans in the Spanish Civil War, and who fled to Santiago de Cuba when the Spanish Republic was defeated by the fascists in 1939. López Miera was allowed to participate in the Second Front led by Raúl Castro, but only in the education department. He spent the next two years teaching peasants in the Sierra how to read and write.

Subsequently, López Miera worked in the Cuban military, volunteering to be part of the anti-colonial Operation Carlota in Angola in 1975 (where he returned in 1987) and to be part of the defense of Ethiopia against Somalia in the Ogaden War in 1977-78. He is now sanctioned by the U.S. government.

​The “fact sheet” casually repeats several accusations against Cuba that are simply not true. For one, the U.S. government accuses Cuba of the “intentional blocking of access to the Internet.” Countless reports make this accusation, but their evidence is scant (for instance, the Open Observatory of Network Interference found that as of July 23, the Cuban government had blocked 86 websites, many of them U.S. government-funded regime change sites, while the United States had blocked 2,661 sites); in fact, many U.S. internet corporations—such as Zoom—prevent Cubans from using their technology. Secondly, Biden’s administration repeats the fantasy of a 2017 “sonic attack” on the U.S. diplomatic officials in Havana.

After the July 11 events, the U.S. government circulated a one-page “Joint Statement on Cuba” among members of the Organization of American States (OAS) to get them to condemn Cuba. On July 21, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who released the leaked draft on Twitter, strongly criticized the “interventionist maneuvers” of the United States “to intensify the blockade” against Cuba.

On July 24, after Biden’s “fact sheet” and “joint statement” made the rounds, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the Washington-dominated OAS needed to be replaced by an organization that is not “a lackey of anyone.” These comments were made on the birthday of Simón Bolívar, known in Latin America as the Liberator. From the port of Veracruz, Mexico, two ships—Liberator and Papaloapan—left laden with food, medicines and other goods for Cuba. Russia sent 88 metric tons of supplies on two aircraft.

WASHINGTON—Organized labor’s intensive drive to lobby senators, from supportive Democrats to resistant Republicans, to pass the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, revved up the week of July 17-24. It featured rallies, phone banks, and sometimes virtual events in cities ranging from Orlando, Fla., to Fairbanks, Alaska.
​
And the workers picked up notable backing from groups of faith leaders from Judaism, the Catholic Church, Islam, and mainline Protestantism. One non-signer: The right-wing Southern Baptist Convention. The 21 supportive groups cast worker rights as a moral issue, too. And the eight Catholic groups’ stand agrees with the strong, frequent pro-worker pro-union statements of Pope Francis I.

“Our belief in the intrinsic worth of both work and workers leads us to strongly support the PRO Act, which will strengthen and expand the right of workers to bargain collectively, form unions, and engage in collective action without fear of retaliation from their employers. Such assurances are also better for employers as they contribute to better productivity, mutual collaboration, and sustainability,” they said.

The theme of the pro-PRO Act drive is “Workers’ rights are civil rights.” Details about the legislation, rallies and events are on a new website: www.proact.aflcio.org.

Whether all the pressure will convince enough GOPers to defect from the party’s anti-worker, anti-union line is uncertain. And there are still two reluctant Democrats to persuade: Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema and Virginia’s Mark Warner. The Northern Virginia AFL-CIO holds “weekly Wednesday” demonstrations near Warner’s home in the D.C. suburbs.

Without those two, plus 10 of the evenly split Senate’s 50 Republicans, a GOP filibuster threat by worker-hater GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would halt the legislation, the most wide-ranging pro-worker labor law reform since the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act, in its tracks.

“This PRO Act Week of Action is another full-court press. America’s labor movement is showing up in every corner of our country to demand a fix to our outdated labor laws that are nearly 100 years old,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “Our members and all working people are committed to making the PRO Act the law of the land this year.”

That week of action led to rallies and events both thanking supporters—such as a planned July 23 rally at the two Illinois Democrats’ offices in Chicago—and lobbying the others.

Those included a press conference in front of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Orlando office, and rallies on June 20 in Juneau, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, Alaska, especially targeting Republican Lisa Murkowski. Federal figures put Alaska fourth in the U.S. in union density, behind Hawaii, New York, and Rhode Island. Those three states each have two Democratic senators, who already support the PRO Act.
The religious groups’ letter cast the PRO Act in economic as well as moral terms, pointing out how its passage would help workers of color in particular, by invalidating “the harmful legacy of” state Jim Crow-era so-called “right to work” laws.

Bosses use those laws to weaken unions financially and to divide and conquer workers by playing off race against race.

“Our current labor laws are no longer effective in protecting the lives and dignity of workers and fall woefully short of allowing workers to productively advocate for their needs from a position of mutuality with employers,” the groups wrote senators. “As union membership has fallen due to counter-productive laws and amendments, inequality has skyrocketed leaving the working class with little constructive power over their own economic security; and thus, also harming sustainable business models.

“The PRO Act addresses these current inadequacies by empowering workers to effectively exercise their freedom to organize and bargain. Critically, it also ends employers’ practice of punishing striking workers, strengthens the National Labor Relations Board and allows it to hold corporations accountable for retaliating against workers, and would help us collectively do better for all our needs by repealing” the federal law—which congressional Republicans enacted in 1947—legalizing states’ RTW statutes.
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Those state laws “reinforce Jim Crow by maintaining labor segregation and further exploiting workers of color,” since eight of the ten states with the highest percentage of Black residents—and workers—are RTW states, they note.

“These restrictions strip funding and bargaining power from unions, which have a devastating effect on the economic stability of people of color,” the faith leaders declare.

Eight Catholic groups signed the letter: The Catholic Labor Network, the U.S. provinces of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker of D.C., the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Pax Christi USA, the Franciscan Action Network, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and the National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

Other faith groups signing the letter were: the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Council of Jewish Women (all Jewish), the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers), the Islamic Council of North America’s social justice commission, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Presbyterian Church’s Office of Public Witness, the Progressive National Baptist Convention (Black Baptists), the Episcopalian, United Methodist, Unitarian churches, and the United Church of Christ.

Currently, under contract with the FAO, I advise the Cuban government in the implementation of the Food Sovereignty and Nutritional Education Plan.
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I know in detail the Cuban daily life, including the difficulties faced by the population, the challenges to the Revolution, the criticisms of the country’s intellectuals and artists. I visited prisons, talked to opponents of the Revolution, lived with Cuban priests and lay people opposed to socialism.
When they tell me, a Brazilian, that there is no democracy in Cuba, I descend from the abstraction of words to reality.

How many photos and news have been seen or are seen of Cubans in misery, beggars scattered on the sidewalks, children abandoned in the streets, families under the viaducts? Something similar to the cracolândia, to the militias, to the long lines of sick people waiting years to be treated in a hospital?

I warn friends:
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• if you are rich in Brazil and you go to live in Cuba, you will know hell. You will not be able to change your car every year, buy designer clothes, travel frequently on vacation abroad. And, above all, you will not be able to exploit the work of others, keep your employees in ignorance, be ‘proud’ of Maria, your cook for 20 years, and whom you deny access to your own home, schooling and health plan.
• If you are middle class, prepare to meet purgatory. Although Cuba is no longer a state-owned society, bureaucracy persists, you have to be patient in the queues at the markets, many products available this month may not be found next month due to the inconsistency of imports.
• However, if you are salaried, poor, homeless or landless, get ready to experience paradise. The Revolution will guarantee your three fundamental human rights: food, health and education, as well as housing and work. You may have to develop an appetite for not eating what you like, but you will never go hungry. Your family will have schooling and health care, including complex surgeries, totally free of charge, as a duty of the state and a right of the citizen.

​Democracy, in my concept, means the ‘Our Father’ -the authority legitimized by the popular will- and the ‘Our Bread’ -the sharing of the fruits of nature and human labor-. Electoral rotation does not make or ensure a democracy. Brazil and India, considered democracies, are flagrant examples of misery, poverty, exclusion, oppression and suffering.

Only those who know the reality of Cuba before 1959 know why Fidel had so much popular support to lead the Revolution to victory.

The country was known by the nickname ‘brothel of the Caribbean’. The mafia dominated the banks and tourism (there are several movies about this). Havana’s main neighborhood, still called Vedado, has this name because blacks were not allowed to circulate there….

The United States was never satisfied with having lost the Cuba subjected to its ambitions. Therefore, shortly after the victory of the guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra, they tried to invade the island with mercenary troops. They were defeated in April 1961. The following year, President Kennedy decreed the blockade of Cuba, which continues to this day.

Cuba is an island with few resources. It is forced to import more than 60 percent of the country’s essential products. With the tightening of the blockade promoted by Trump (243 new measures and, for the moment, not withdrawn by Biden), and the pandemic, which has completely eliminated one of the country’s main sources of resources, tourism, the internal situation has worsened.

Cubans had to tighten their belts. Then, those dissatisfied with the Revolution, who gravitate in the orbit of the ‘American dream’, promoted the protests of Sunday, July 11, with the ‘solidarity’ support of the CIA, whose chief has just made a tour of the continent, worried about the results of the elections in Peru and Chile.
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Who best explains the current situation in Cuba is its president, Díaz-Canel:

It is this fragility that opens a flank to demonstrations of discontent, without the government putting tanks and troops in the streets. The resistance of the Cuban people, nourished by examples such as Martí, Che Guevara and Fidel, has proven to be invincible. And we must, all of us who fight for a more just world, stand in solidarity with them.
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Translation by Internationalist 360°

NEW YORK—“Cuba sí, bloqueo no!” (Cuba yes, blockade no!) chanted the crowd in Spanish while holding signs that read “Long live Socialist Cuba” and “End the inhumane sanctions!”
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The Young Communist League of New York took the initiative to organize a rally in support of ending the blockade on Cuba after a series of protests mounted in Miami and Cuba this past weekend for a variety of reasons, ranging from food and syringe shortages to possible regime change.

The organizations endorsing the protest included NY-NJ Cuba Sí Coalition, the Venceremos Brigade, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, United Against War and Militarism, The People’s Forum, and Kristin Richardson Jordan for Harlem New York City Council District 9, among others.

Speakers from these organizations stepped forward to lead chants of solidarity with the Cuban people and reiterate that it is not Americans’ role to demand regime change on the island. Instead, speakers said, the most important thing people here can do to help the Cuban people is to push the U.S. government to end the ongoing blockade that has prevented the island country from obtaining easier access to food and medical supplies for over 60 years now.
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Members of the YCL-NY also asked the crowd to contact elected representatives to hold the Biden administration accountable, since on the campaign trail he had promised a return to Obama-era policy regarding Cuba. Since taking over from Trump, however, there has so far been no substantive change in the U.S. approach toward Cuba.

Justine Medina, the Cuban-American co-chairwoman of the YCL-NY, spoke about how the U.S.’ undeclared war against Cuba has divided her family here from relatives still living on the island and others residing in Florida. “The blockade is bad for all Cubans,” she said. “You don’t need to be a Communist to care about Cuba, only human.”

Maicol Lynch, another YCL-NY representative, took the mic saying, “It doesn’t stop at Cuba or even socialism. The U.S. implements illegal blockades on capitalist nations, too, such as Russia, Syria, Zimbabwe, and Iran—and in the middle of a global pandemic no less!”

When CNN en Español interviewed representatives of the YCL-NY about what exactly the protest demanded, they answered, “We as American Communists are concerned with pushing the Biden administration to end this blockade which continues to plague Cuba during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The current demonstrations in Cuba cannot be grouped together and generalized as one large “anti-government” protest, as several mainstream corporate media outlets have tried to do. Nor can all of the protesters be labeled “CIA plants” or “counter-revolutionaries,” as some on the sectarian left have rushed to claim.

Many protesters are simply apolitical citizens of the island nation who are frustrated with the pandemic and food shortages brought on by the blockade and do not know exactly where to direct their frustration. In Miami, anti-communist (and mostly Trumpite Republican) “gusanos,” such as Mayor Francis Suarez, call for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. But how bombing the Cuban people, as Suarez has advocated, would supposedly save them from the pandemic and food shortages goes unexplained. The demands for military attacks and airstrikes came on the heels of GOP Rep. Anthony Sabatini calling for Cuban government officials to be executed.

So far, it only right-wing anti-communists such as these promoting violence, not the Cuban government. And given the size of counterdemonstrations, it does not appear that the overthrow of the government is a prospect that excites many Cubans. The protests are also notably taking place only two years after a constitutional vote in Cuba where over 80% of the population voted in favor of preserving socialism.
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In any case, one thing is clear: Only the Cuban people can decide the future of Cuba, and it seems that the majority of Cubans have no plan on abandoning their revolution.

Anti-communist protests recently sprung up in Cuba. Factions of protesters condemned the government for repression and violence. A large part of the manifestations also called for an end to scarcity of food, electricity, and medical supplies, including syringes for COVID-19 vaccines.
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Western imperialists immediately pounced on the opportunity to blame Castro and the Communist Party of Cuba for these shortcomings. They charge the government with seizing the nation’s riches to distribute amongst themselves. According to them, scarcity in Cuba has been manufactured by a totalitarian regime that suppresses its people.

These mighty accusations stem from American politicians and Cuban exiles in Miami. First, one must examine the interests of these groups. American politicians, such as Republican representative Anthony Sabatini, have called for immediate intervention and the execution of communist officials. Like many other Southern white conservative politicians, Sabatini subscribes to the notion that anything left of fascism is communism. He donned blackface and brownface, labeled Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, and called for the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of protestors in the United States. Hence, one might not think much of his statements. After all, fear mongering about communism is the Republican Party’s bread and butter.

But similar echoes can be heard from Democrat politicians. US President Joe Biden tweeted, “We stand with the Cuban people as they bravely assert their fundamental and universal rights, and as they all call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering.” He even warned the Cuban government to refrain from violence or attempts to silence the protests; this statement comes from a man that called on the National Guard to suppress protesters of racism multiple times (in Minneapolis following the murder of Daunte Wright and in the capitol prior to Derek Chauvin’s trial verdict).

Evidently, his issues lie less with police violence than regime change. For over 100 years, the United States has had an imperial strangle on Cuba. Prior to Cuban nominal independence, five US presidents (Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, Grant, and McKinley) attempted to purchase the island from Spain. Under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, American soldiers entered the battle for independence in the Caribbean. The military victory resulted in the American acquisition of Puerto Rico and protectorate status of Cuba. A protectorate state is controlled by another sovereign state. In this case, the US controlled elections, owned the sugar and tobacco industries, overtook Guantanamo Bay, and launched military occupations for 22 years.

American politicians have always prioritized control of Cuba in their imperial dreams. Settler colonialism birthed manifest destiny. As mainland colonization neared its course, the empire looked overseas to continue expansion. Cuba and Puerto Rico were two principal targets. The islands’ people rebelled in numerous occasions, but only Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba succeeded in exiling the Yankees. Obviously, the revolt caused dire consequences. The US launched an invasion at the Bay of Pigs and a hostile embargo.

Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s administrations designed the embargo to suffocate the Cuban people into overthrowing Castro. As Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory wrote in 1960 memorandum, “The majority of Cubans support Castro (the lowest estimate I have seen is 50 percent). There is no effective political opposition […] The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” The blockade bars other countries from trading with, investing in, or giving aid to Cuba. Companies face the option of either working with the United States (the global power with the largest trading network and concentration of capital) or Cuba (an impoverished island).

The blockade uses the hegemonic global alliance to trap Cubans into surrendering to imperialism. In Mallory’s words, the blockade attempts “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” The claim that Cubans are being starved is not false, yet the blame is misplaced. Monocropping of sugar and tobacco has made Cuban soil largely infertile; hence, Cubans rely on imports of food and other necessities. When a country cannot import food, its citizens face the consequences. Still, the government implemented rations to evenly distribute the food it did have access to, and consequently managed to prevent widespread famine. All economic sectors are impacted by the embargo. Seed patents prevent farmers from mass production. Vaccine patents deny Cubans the opportunity to receive the Pfzier, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines. And, though the Cuban medical field developed its own vaccine, trade restrictions prevent access to syringes necessary to carry them out. The blockade similarly prevents new construction, leading to decaying infrastructure. The repercussions are endless. And it all comes at the courtesy of the United States.

 Hence, Biden’s cries for the end to economic suffering in Cuba come off as rather insincere. If he truly wanted to end the economic plight of Cubans, he would immediately lift the embargo. Instead, he and other Westerners have placed all responsibility on communism, not the systems actually responsible for this depravity – capitalism and imperialism. Cuban American exiles clamor for the United States to save Cuba. But what does this saving look like? How does the captor save its captive? History has proven this simply does not happen. Humanitarian concerns veil a heinous call for intervention. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez even called for immediate airstrikes in Cuba, citing previous administrations bombings of Panama and Yugoslavia. 

Not all calls are quite as unabashedly violent, but, with or without hawkish language, intervention remains the main objective. White House spokesman Andrew Bates assured: “[Biden]’s committed to forming his policies toward Cuba based on two principles: That standing up for democracy and human rights is paramount, and that Americans — especially Cuban Americans — are the best ambassadors for freedom and prosperity in Cuba.” The United States attempts to instill its brand of disingenuous democracy in all parts of the world, with the desire of securing capital for the ruling class. American “democracy” brought Afghanistan an endless war and innumerable civilian casualties. American “democracy” brought Puerto Rico an endless cycle of poverty and debt. American “democracy” brought Libya an open slave market. American “democracy” brought Americans mass incarceration, along with manufactured starvation and homelessness amidst food and housing surpluses.

What do the Cuban people stand to gain from intervention? The same unequal conditions that created the Cuban revolution? An anti-imperialist lens should inform our answers to these questions. Americans often fail to recognize the state’s imperial apparatus in their analysis. They feed into the trap of advocating for interventionist foreign policy that extrapolates resources and decimates native populations. Do not fall for the deception. The end of imperialism is the one true solution.

The Western powers, chief amongst them the United States government, tout themselves as defenders of freedom and democracy, and spend millions of dollars trying to convince us of this. They spend billions more on wars, covert operations, and propaganda, which, they would have us believe, will bring these freedoms to other nations.

Liberal democracy, whose defining political characteristic is ‘free and fair’ elections between rival parties, is, they tell us, the pinnacle of human socio-political organisation.

It follows, therefore, that Cuba, with its single party, is a pariah, their elections a sham, and their leaders incompetent dictators. Its people are to be pitied, mocked, insulted, attacked, and, most especially, targeted by millions of dollars of ‘aid’ to help them make a transition to the one true democratic form.

Little wonder then, that in the global north, there is precious little written about Cuba’s political system, the way it is structured, its processes and its institutions, because it is seen as the last stubborn vestige of the Soviet system, an anachronism, and, therefore, simply not worthy of study. Cuba’s political system is, however, complex and vibrant. In this article I will sketch out its most salient features.
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Cuba’s political system has three main pillars; the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), the Organs of Popular Power (OPP), and the mass organisations. These institutions work closely together, and to understand the character of participatory democracy in Cuba, it is necessary to understand each and the way they interrelate.

The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) traces its ideological roots to the Cuban Revolutionary Party founded by Cuba’s national hero, José Martí, in exile in New York in 1882. Its purpose was to free Cuba from Spanish rule by uniting into a single party all those who wanted Cuban self-determination. Following the 1959 Revolution which swept out the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s progressive forces began a process of uniting into a single party, which finally came to fruition six years later when the PCC was formed in 1965.
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Today one in six of Cuba’s eleven million people are Party members. To become a member of Cuba’s Communist Party, a person must be first nominated by fellow workers or neighbours and then voted in by their local branch.

A year has to be served as a ‘candidate member’ before becoming a full member as this brings with it responsibilities and duties, especially within the local community. To be a member of the PCC is seen as an honour in Cuba, and members are generally respected as honest and committed revolutionaries.

Cuba’s principal mass organisations are the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR), the Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC), the trade unions - Cuba Workers Federation (CTC), and the Association of Small Farmers (ANAP). All are involved in organising meetings for mass policy debate, implementing new legislation and evaluating policy outcomes. Almost everyone in Cuba belongs to one or more of these organisations, and all have grassroots, local branches and higher structures at the Municipal, Provincial and National levels. They are the means by which Cubans can engage, and participate, in the political life of the country. All mass organisations have the right to initiate and be consulted on new legislation.

Since the early years of Revolution there have been several experiments and pilot schemes in local government in order to gain experience and develop the capacity of local people. Cuba’s system of local, provincial and national government was enshrined in its first Constitution of 1976. This created 169 Municipal Assemblies, 14 Provincial Assemblies, and a National Assembly.
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At the heart of this system is the locally elected Delegate. Each Municipal area is divided into ‘wards’ which nominate and elect their Delegate. This is done by dividing each ward into smaller nomination areas - between 2 and 8 per ward depending on the population density - where neighbours meet to nominate, from amongst themselves, who they want as their Delegate. Any person who is nominated is free to accept or decline nomination. If several people are nominated, the meeting decides who will be their nominee by a show of hands. In this way, the ward ends up with between 2 and 8 candidates. These people will then be on the ballot paper on election day, and all the people in the ward vote by secret ballot to choose the ward’s Delegate to the Municipal Assembly. To be elected, the candidate must receive at least 50 per cent plus 1 of the votes cast. If this doesn’t happen, run-off elections are held. Turn-out in the 2013 elections was 94 per cent, with 4.63 per cent of papers blank and 1.2 per cent spoiled ballots.

The thing to note about this method is that the Communist Party is not an electoral party. It is not permitted to nominate or stand candidates, and it is barred from involvement in the entire electoral process. Candidates are chosen by the people, from amongst the people. The CDR has the responsibility of keeping the electoral role, verifying and correcting errors, arranging nomination meetings, setting up the polling stations, getting the vote out, and counting the votes and reporting the results.

Once elected, office is held for a period of two and a half years, but if they do not perform to the satisfaction of their electors, they can be recalled, removed from office, and another Delegate nominated and elected in their place before the next election. Delegates are also required to meet with their electors at least once every six months for ‘accountability sessions’, where they are required to take up issues and problems raised by electors and seek solutions.
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Delegates receive no remuneration for their work (and no expenses!) and remain in their normal jobs, carrying out the civic duties in their own time. The duties of a Delegate are many and varied and the role is demanding, requiring an understanding of public policy and finance, business and administration, and the ability to negotiate, explain, motivate and lead. And because Delegates are known to almost every one of his or her electors, and lives amongst them, people call on him, or her, at all hours of the day and night with all manner of problems, ranging from broken water pipes to broken hearts. Delegates carry out the inspection and monitoring of services provided by the Municipal administration, and of the factories, shops and businesses in their area.

All assemblies, National, Provincial and Municipal, have Work Commissions. Their role is to research and scrutinise policy areas and feed directly into policy content, and at the National level into drafting legislation. There are around 20,000 people involved in the Work Commissions at any one time including delegates and specialists pertinent to the commission’s field of work in areas such as health, education and production etc.
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Work commissions offer an explanation of the unanimity of voting in the National Assembly. Legislation is not placed before the Assembly until wide consultation has been carried out and agreement has been reached. If agreement cannot be reached, legislation is not presented.

The 1992 Constitution saw the incorporation of Popular Councils into the Organs of Popular Power, which, while adding to an already heavy workload, helped the Municipal Delegate work as a part of a team, and so be more supported and effective. Popular Councils are formed from around ten or fifteen wards working together. In addition to the Municipal Delegates from those wards, the Councils include representatives from the mass organisations, and professionals working in the locality (for example health workers, architects, enterprise mangers), although only elected Delegates can vote on Popular Council business. A President and two Vice-Presidents are chosen by vote from amongst the Delegates. These are released from their day jobs to work full-time on their Delegate duties. They receive the same pay as they would for their day jobs and their jobs are held open for them.
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The Popular Councils are charged with reaching out and involving local people in identifying problems in the locality and helping to find solutions to them. Since their formation the Popular Councils have been given increasing areas of responsibility, including maintenance of schools, public health, monitoring the economic and social services, housing repairs, urban horticulture, and more recently, engage in participatory planning and the formulation of Strategic Community Plans.

Building on the experiences they had gained from early experiments and pilot schemes in the early years and after having studied and visited governments in other countries, including the United States, Cuba chose to create its own governance system around the election of local delegates and linked it closely to the mass organisations. In this way, the Cuban citizen has multiple opportunities for participating in the governance of their country. It would be a mistake to think that because the opportunities for participation are on people’s doorsteps, that the issues they become involved in are only of local significance. For example, the large scale consultations on major pieces of legislation, such as the latest Labour Code, the enormous changes to the status of women since the Revolution and the giant strides made in attitudes to sexual diversity, are testament to this. These successes were made possible precisely because of the importance attached to popular participation.

A characteristic of the Organs of Popular Power is that locally nominated and elected Delegates are present at the local, Provincial and National levels of government. This links the local with the national structures, and ensures, along with the non-professionalisation of those elected, that the National Assembly is not a body remote from its electors. The fact that elections to the Provincial and National Assemblies are not competitive because the delegates are chosen from those elected to the Municipal bodies does not mean that people do not have an input. Cuban citizens participating in the Electoral Commissions decide who the candidates will be.

The Communist Party is there to support and guide the other institutions, to ensure that they implement legislation, to guard against corruption, and to ascertain people’s needs and concerns. It has a political leadership role, and is charged with keeping the country united.
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The competitive nature of liberal democratic election campaigns, where big bucks call the shots, are an anathema to Cubans. Cuba has opted for a system which seeks to keep people as involved as possible with the tasks of finding solutions, balancing need, allocating scarce resources and accommodating difference. Cuba is a country in constant negotiation with itself and its systems of participation facilitate those negotiations.

"We are here because the streets belong to Fidel, because the streets of Cuba belong to revolutionaries." This was the phrase we heard the loudest walking along several Havana avenues Sunday afternoon, July 11, when an entire people came out to defend their Revolution.
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We heard it, for example, in front of the Capitol, seat of the National Assembly of People's Power, and along Prado down to the waterfront Malecon. We heard it up to Belascoaín, and along Carlos III, where neighbors gathered, waving flags and, above all, ideas.

A woman shouted from her balcony, "Viva la Revolución!" and "Viva Cuba Libre!" Her voice joined those of many younger residents who, on the street below, waved the 26th of July Movement flag and repeated, louder and louder, clearer and clearer: "Fidel, Raúl and Díaz-Canel are here," "Patria o Muerte, Venceremos" (Homeland or Death, We will win).

We heard it along Infanta, from women and men, Cubans with few and many years of age, all with the same conviction: a country like ours, with so many dreams and more than a few pains, is defended tooth and nail, knowing that, as the poet said, "For this freedom/ beautiful as life/ we must give our all/ if necessary/ even the shadow/ and it will never be enough."

We heard it from Julio Alejandro Gómez, a blogger who joined the honest demands of those who love and create and took to the streets, "because I am a revolutionary and I know that this is a manipulation. They want to take advantage of our needs and problems to apply the same formula of ‘social unrest’ that they have used in other countries; but with Cuba there are no formulas that work. The Revolution belongs to the people and is defended by the people."

We heard Alberto Bermudez, who lives on Infanta, and in the midst of the racket, hummed "I die as I lived" with a group of buddies and, soon thereafter, it was the notes of the national anthem they offered.

"Unity and continuity," others shouted, while Alberto interrupted his song to affirm, "Fidel, this is your people, and the streets belong to the people. The order has been given and we are here. We are going to win, in spite of COVID-19, in spite of whatever."

The same phrases, shouted along the way, led our group of reporters to Alfredo Vázquez, provincial secretary of the Federation of Cuban Workers in Havana, who was injured in one of the confrontations with the "destabilizers."

"They hit me hard on the head and I ended up with a seven-stitch gash. But here I am, my flag stained with blood, ready to continue defending the Revolution, because to die for the Homeland is to live," he insisted without slowing his pace, just like Cuba, the land of revolutionaries who are never intimidated.
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And there beside Via Blanca, Faustino Leonard, a resident of Cerro municipality, also spoke to us about the day, with the remains of rocks thrown still on the street.
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"The quarrel was tough here, but there were more revolutionaries. The saboteurs ran away to hide, probably to some cave, like rats usually do. Let no one doubt it, this country belongs to the people, and will continue to belong to us."

​On July 12, Alejandro Gil Fernández, Cuba’s minister of economy and planning, told the press about the expenses of the pandemic. In 2020, he said, the government spent $102 million on reagents, medical equipment, protective equipment and other material; in the first half of 2021, the government spent $82 million on these kinds of materials. This is money that Cuba did not anticipate spending—money that it does not have as a consequence of the collapsed tourism sector.

“We have not spared resources to face COVID-19,” Fernández said. Those with COVID-19 are put in hospitals, where their treatment costs the country $180 per day; if the patient needs intensive care, the cost per day is $550. “No one is charged a penny for their treatment,” Fernández reported.

The socialist government in Cuba shoulders the responsibility of medical care and of social insurance. Despite the severe challenges to the economy, the government guarantees salaries, purchases medicines and distributes food as well as electricity and piped water. That is the reason why the government added $2.4 billion to its already considerable debt overhang. In June, Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister Ricardo Cabrisas Ruíz met with French Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire to discuss the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. France, which manages Cuba’s debt to the public creditors in the Paris Club, led the effort to ameliorate the debt servicing demands on Havana.

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) calls on its members and friends to demand the Biden Administration not interfere in the internal affairs of Cuba and live up to its pledge to “reset” relations that must include an end to the blockade.

We urgently ask our members and friends to contact the State Department, the White House, Senators, and Congresspersons and tell them “Hands off Cuba!
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The majority of our country who desire peace and an end to the decades-long strangulation of the Cuban people and economy must make their voices heard.

We stand firmly in solidarity with the Communist Party (PCC) and the people of Cuba against U.S. imperialist interference.

For more than half of a century, the country of Cuba has been the target of U.S.  ruling class resentment and ire. Despite never having threatened or attacked the U.S., Cuba has met with resistance at every turn for over 60 years.

Despite all the immense difficulties, Cuba has maintained its efforts to build socialism, led by its Communist Party and working class. They have created a medical system that is the envy of the world, provided free education for all its citizens, and ended homelessness. Cuba is an example to the world of what the working class can achieve.

It is for these reasons, chief among them medical solidarity, that they have been nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet U.S. imperialism never relents and now is trying to plant an anti-communist movement in the middle of Cuban society. In addition, members of Congress like Rep. Anthony Sabatini  are openly calling for the toppling of the Cuban government and the execution of government members.

Despite the best efforts of the forces of reaction, the Cuban people stand strong. We see the videos of Cuban people flooding the streets in support of the government and the revolution.

The best solidarity we can build is to end the blockade, a position now supported by tens of millions in this country as represented by resolutions passed by city councils, trade unions, school boards, churches, and others.

One specific way to support is to assist the Syringes4Cuba campaign.

The time to act is now! Every effort to build broad public support helps wherever you are, be it the city, rural communities, or suburbs.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel spoke to the Cuban people today, Sunday, July 11 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern, after going to the site of one of several protests that took place in Cuba today. This unprecedented series of events are the result of the growing difficulties the people are experiencing by the double blow created by the increasingly severe U.S. blockade and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being in control of infections for many months, cases have been growing in recent weeks and days. Because the Cuban government is necessarily prioritizing medicines and health care for thousands of COVID-positive patients, shortages are being experienced by the rest of the population. Electrical energy is scarce because of the blockade, and what little is available is being directed to facilities for COVID patients. As a result, blackouts are happening in parts of the country, adding to the people’s difficulties. The United States is taking advantage of the situation by heavily financing counter-revolutionary groups that are part of the protests and trying to foment opposition. And yet, this is at a time when Cuba’s famed biotechnology industry has created five vaccines to vaccinate its population, the real hope for saving lives. This speech provides crucial context and information being covered up by the corporate media in the United States.
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We in the Party for Socialism and Liberation stand with the Cuban Revolution and the heroic people who have resisted U.S. imperialism for more than 60 years. Down with the U.S. blockade!

The following is an unofficial translation of President Díaz-Canel’s words from CubaDebate.cu (Italic and bold type in the original article).

We have been honest, we have been transparent, we have been clear and at every moment we have been explaining to our people the complexities of the current moments. I remind you that more than a year and a half ago, when the second semester of 2019 began, we had to explain that we were entering a difficult situation. … Since then we have remained under that situation as a result of all the United States government moves led by the Trump administration in relation to Cuba.

They began to intensify a series of restrictive measures, a tightening of the blockade, of financial persecution against the energy sector with the aim of suffocating our economy and expecting that this would provoke the desired massive social outbreak, which sows the possibilities for the entire ideological campaign that it has done, to be able to call for humanitarian intervention that ends in military intervention and interference, and that affects the rights, sovereignty and independence of all peoples.

That situation continued, then came the 243 measures that we all know about [Trump’s measures tightening the blockade, banning all remittances, etc.] and finally they decided to include Cuba in a list of countries sponsoring terrorism, a spurious, illegitimate and unilateral list that the United States government has adopted, believing themselves, the United States, the emperors of the world.

Many countries suddenly submitted to these decisions, but it must be recognized that others do not allow it to be imposed on them. All these measures led to the immediate cutting off of various sources of foreign income such as tourism, Cuban-American travel to our country, and remittances. A plan was made to discredit the Cuban medical brigades and the solidarity collaborations provided by Cuba, which received an important amount of foreign exchange for that collaboration.

This whole situation caused a situation of shortages in the country, especially of food, medicines, raw materials and supplies to be able to develop our economic and productive processes that at the same time contribute to exports. Two important elements are cut off: the ability to export and the ability to invest resources. And from the productive processes, to then develop goods and services for our population.

We also have limitations on fuels and spare parts and all this has caused a level of dissatisfaction, coupled with accumulated problems that we have been able to solve and that came from the special period together with a fierce media campaign of discrediting, part of the unconventional war that tries to fracture the unity between the party, the state and people; that tries to portray the government as insufficient and incapable of providing well-being to the Cuban people whereby the U.S. government tries to convey that only with them can a country like Cuba hope to progress.

Those are well-known hypocritical recipes, speeches of double standards that we know very well throughout the history of the United States towards Cuba. How did they intervene in our country, how did they take over our island in 1902, how did they maintain domination of our island in the pseudo-republic stage, and how were those interests dealt a blow by the Cuban Revolution in its triumph?

The example of the Cuban Revolution has bothered them a lot for 60 years and their aggression has been constantly increasing. They have applied an unjust, criminal and cruel blockade, now intensified in pandemic conditions and therein lies the manifest perversity, the evil of all those intentions. Blockade and restrictive actions that they have never taken against any other country, nor against those they consider their main enemies.

Therefore, it has been a policy of viciousness against a small island that only aspires to defend its independence, its sovereignty and to build its society with self-determination according to the principles that more than 86% of the population has supported in the broad and democratic exercise that we supported a few years ago to approve the current Constitution of the Republic of Cuba.

In the midst of these conditions comes the pandemic, a pandemic that has not affected only Cuba, but the entire world, including the United States. It has affected rich countries and it must be said that in the face of this pandemic neither the United States nor those rich countries that had all the capacity to face its effects in the beginning — and in many of those first world countries — with much more wealth, their health systems and intensive therapy rooms collapsed. The poor were disadvantaged because there are no public policies aimed at the people for their salvation, and their indicators in relation to the confrontation of the pandemic have worse results than those of Cuba in many cases.

This is how we were progressing, we controlled the outbreaks and new outbreaks, with a tremendous capacity of our people, our scientists and our health personnel to sacrifice, and almost the entire country has been involved in it. We have created five vaccine candidates, of which one has already been recognized as a vaccine and which is the first in Latin America. Cuba is already vaccinating its population. It is a process that takes time. Vaccines must be produced, but at the moment we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and in a few weeks we have exceeded 20% of the population’s vaccination, a process that continues.

In recent months, strains that are more aggressive and cause more transmission of the disease have begun to circulate. In the middle of this situation is that a group of complications begin to appear. In the first place, cases occur with a speed and accumulation that exceeds the capacities that we have to be able to create, to attend to these cases in state institutions. So we have had to go to open up capacities in other centers for the cases. By opening up more centers, we have also had to give priority for electrical energy use, even in the midst of accumulated energy problems that have caused us blackouts. The amount of electricity circuits we are having to protect so COVID patients are treated, creates a situation where more circuits are causing annoying but necessary blackouts, because we have to restore our electricity generation capacities. This has happened in recent days and has caused irritation, misunderstanding, concerns and affectations to the population.

By having more patients, there is more consumption of medications, and our stocks of drugs are also running out, the possibilities of acquiring them being very difficult. In the midst of all this, we continue with will, thinking about everything, working for everyone. Now we have to go to the experience of [COVID-positive cases] cases staying home, due to the lack of capacities in a group of provinces, and we have had to summon the family so that they have a more direct, responsible participation. We do not tire of admiring in the midst of this situation the capacity for creative resistance that our people have. And how with these values, if we maintain responsibility and unity, in the shortest possible time with vaccination and with responsible behavior, complying with hygienic sanitary measures, social isolation and physical distancing, we will leave this pandemic peak sooner rather than later, which is not just the case for Cuba.

What Cuba managed to do was postpone this pandemic peak over time with everything we did, and in the shortest time we will overcome it. This is what we have affirmed these days, in our tours of the provinces to specify all the strategies of confronting the pandemic.

In a very cowardly, subtle and opportunistic and perverse way, from the most complicated situations that we have had in provinces such as Matanzas and Ciego de Ávila, those who have always approved the blockade and who serve as mercenaries of the Yankee blockade on the streets, begin to appear with doctrines of humanitarian aid and a “humanitarian corridor.” We all know where they come from.

They do this to strengthen the claim that the Cuban government is not capable of getting out of this situation, as if they were so interested in solving the health problems of our people.

If you want to have a real gesture of support with Cuba, if you want to be concerned about the people, lift the blockade and we will see how we engage. Why don’t they do it? Why don’t they have the courage to lift the blockade? What legal and moral foundation do they have to support a foreign government that applies this policy to a small country in the midst of such an adverse situation.

Isn’t that genocide, isn’t that a crime against humanity? They make claims that we are a dictatorship. What a strange dictatorship it is that cares about giving its entire population health care, that seeks wellbeing for all, that in the midst of these situations is capable of having programs and public policies based on everyone. A dictatorship that is aspiring to vaccinate everyone with a Cuban vaccine, because we knew that no one was going to sell us vaccines and we had no money to go to the international market to buy vaccines.

Now they shout that we are murderers. Where are the murdered in Cuba? Where are the disappeared?

Why were the other countries that have suffered these events of pandemic peaks not attacked in the press? Why were they not given the solution of humanitarian intervention? They were not attacked with discrediting campaigns that they have wanted to launch against us.

Life, history and facts show what is behind all this: It is to suffocate and end the Revolution and for that they are trying to discourage our people by misleading them. When people are in severe conditions like the ones we are living in, events like the ones we saw today in San Antonio de los Baños occur.

In San Antonio de los Baños, a group of people gathered in one of the most central parks in the city to protest and demand. Who were those people? They were made up of the people who are experiencing some of the shortcomings and difficulties, there are revolutionary people who may be confused and who may not have all the arguments or who were expressing their dissatisfaction.

Those two groups of people did it in a different way and looked for an argument and asked for an explanation. The first thing they said was “I am a revolutionary” “I support the Revolution.”

This was headed by a group of manipulators who were lending themselves to the plans of those campaigns that appeared on social networks. The famous SOSMatanzas or SOSCuba, the call to the banging of pans, so that in several cities of Cuba there would be demonstrations of this type and there would be social unrest.

This is very criminal, very cruel, especially at this time where we must ensure that people remain in the houses who are protecting themselves from the pandemic. With the morale that the Revolution gives, the revolutionaries of San Antonio de los Baños, the authorities of the province, and a group of comrades from the leadership of the country presented ourselves in San Antonio de los Baños.

This mass of revolutionaries confronted the counterrevolutionaries and we spoke with the revolutionaries and some who may be non-revolutionaries but who were asking for arguments. Later we marched and toured the town to show that in Cuba the streets belong to the revolutionaries.

While this is happening, we know that there are other towns in the country, where groups of people in certain streets and squares have gathered, also motivated by such unhealthy purposes.

The state has all the political will to dialogue, but also to participate. We will not hand over our sovereignty nor the independence of this nation. They have to pass over our corpses if they want to overthrow the Revolution.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation stands in full solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, its government and people in the struggle against the latest sinister counterrevolutionary efforts of U.S. imperialism.
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The sixty year old blockade and hundreds of sanctions imposed under the Trump administration have caused grave shortages of food, medicines, electricity and other necessities of life. The shortages have greatly exacerbated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island. The pandemic has virtually eliminated the economically vital tourism industry, greatly reduced remittances and contributed to major problems in the already-limited global supply chains serving the island.  

In the last day, protests have been taking place in Cuba focused on the shortages and economic deprivations caused by the intensification of the U.S. blockade during the time of COVID. The corporate media in the United States is pointing to these demonstrations as evidence that the people of Cuba oppose the revolutionary government. As always, these outlets are completely distorting the situation and covering up the criminal role of the United States. And they are ignoring the mobilizations held in response by Cubans who support the revolution, as well as the efforts of the top leadership of the country to directly engage with the people in the areas where the demonstrations occurred. 

The United States has a long and bloody history of coups and “regime change” operations, including in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Greece, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, Ukraine and elsewhere. Most often in recent years, coups have come in the form of “color revolutions,” beginning with what falsely appear to be spontaneous popular protests, following the imposition of extreme sanctions and blockades designed to strangle the targeted country’s economy and foment discontent. Like other “color revolution” coup attempts, such as in Venezuela in 2014, the break-out of the protests at the same time suggests planning by opposition elements.

Since the Revolution took power in 1959, Cuba has endured hundreds of U.S.-sponsored terrorist attacks, CIA assassination attempts of its leaders, and a relentless and vicious economic war aimed at cutting off Cuban trade not only with the United States but the entire world. For more than six decades, Washington has sought to inflict the greatest suffering on the people in the hope that would lead to counterrevolution. All of these measures are a form of punishment for Cuba for having broken free after 60 years as a U.S. neo-colony and set out on a course of independent development. 

No working person in the United States should be fooled – this is the latest manifestation of an imperialist war to destroy Cuban independence and socialism. U.S. hands off Cuba!

For 60 years the example of the Cuban Revolution has bothered the United States, stated First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, yesterday, during a special message from the Palace of the Revolution explaining to the people the most recent provocation orchestrated by small groups of counterrevolutionaries.

The President began his remarks with a revolutionary greeting to the entire people, and said: "Unfortunately, we have been obliged to interrupt our Sunday, that all our families take to rest and spend time together, to inform you and share with you a series of elements related to the events that have been taking place today, which are part of a high level, systematic, escalating provocation, which has been promoted by the counterrevolution over these days."

What is the background to this situation we are experiencing, he asked.

"We have been honest, we have been open, we have been clear, and at all times we have explained the complexities of the current situation to our people. I remember that more than a year and a half ago, when the second half of 2019 was just starting, we had to explain that we were heading toward a difficult conjuncture, and we used that term, which was later taken up as part of popular humor, since we have remained in this ‘conjuncture’ for a long time...Beginning with all the signs that the U.S. government, headed by the Trump administration, was giving in relation to Cuba."

Diaz-Canel recalled that the adoption of an extensive series of restrictive measures to tighten the blockade began; financial persecution, energy persecution, with the goal of asphyxiating the country’s economy.

He denounced ongoing efforts to provoke a massive social explosion in Cuba, including all sorts of propaganda and ideological constructions they fabricate to call for misnamed humanitarian interventions, which end up as military interventions and interference, trampling the rights and violating the sovereignty, the independence of peoples.

This succession of hostile acts continued, he noted, "Then came the 243 measures we all know about. And in the last days of that administration the decision was made to include Cuba on the list of countries sponsoring terrorism."

He reiterated that this list is a totally spurious list, an illegitimate list, and a unilateral list, fabricated by the U.S. in the belief that they are the power dominates the world, that they are the emperors of this world."

He noted that, unfortunately, due to the lack of principles that exists within more than a few international institutions and national governments, many cave in and go along with these hostile measures and actions.
"It must be recognized that others do not submit to be the imposition of these measures, but they are limited by the extraterritorial nature that these.

"And that further increased the impact of the restrictions, which above all implied that the country was immediately cut off from its main sources of foreign currency income: I am talking about tourism, I am talking about the trips of Cubans and U.S. citizens to our country, about the much-awaited remittances to Cuban families from their relatives in the United States."

The President also denounced U.S. efforts to discredit Cuban medical brigades, since this medical collaboration, beyond the many instances of solidarity provided, also generates foreign currency income.

All this, he said, is causing shortages in the country: "Shortages of food, of medicines, raw materials and inputs needed by our economic and productive processes, which contribute both exports and supplies for the people; therefore here two important elements are cut off: the capacity to export and to acquire foreign currency to import and invest, and the capacity of the productive processes to be produce a full range of goods and services for our population."

He pointed out that the country "has seen its fuel supply limited, access to spare parts limited, and all this has caused dissatisfaction, has exacerbated accumulated problems, which we have not been able to resolve, have been around since the special period, and to all this has been added a ferocious media campaign to discredit us, as part of a so-called non-conventional war, which attempts, on the one hand, to break the unity of the Party, the government, the state and the people, attempting to portray the government as inept, incapable of providing wellbeing to the Cuban people, attempting to portray the U.S. government as “very concerned about the welfare of the Cuban people,” who it has unjustly blockaded, telling them how they can aspire to development and progress in a country such as ours.

"These are the usual hypocritical prescriptions and speeches of double standards, which we know very well, throughout the history of United States behavior toward Cuba. We know how they intervened in our country, how they appropriated our island, how they maintained domination of our Island during the pseudo-republic and how their interests were hit hard by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

"For 60 years the example of the Cuban Revolution has bothered them, and they have constantly tightened… applied an unjust, criminal, cruel blockade, reinforced, worse than ever under pandemic conditions. Therein lies the manifest perversity, the maliciousness of all these intentions: blockade and restrictive measures, which they have never taken against any other country, or against those they consider their main enemies.

"This has been a work and a policy of viciousness against a small Island, which only aspires to defend its independence, its sovereignty and build, with self-determination, its society in accordance with the principles that more than 86% of the population has approved, has supported in the broad and democratic exercise we held, to approve the current Constitution of the Republic of Cuba.

"And in the midst of these conditions comes the pandemic, a pandemic that has not only affected Cuba, a pandemic that has affected the whole world, a pandemic that has also affected the United States, that has affected rich countries. It must be said that the United States and other rich countries did not have the capacity to confront the effects of this pandemic at the beginning.

"And in many of those first world countries, with much more wealth, health systems collapsed, intensive care units were overwhelmed. The poor have been disadvantaged because there are no public policies directed toward saving the people,” and these rich countries in many cases have worse results than Cuba in terms of responding to the pandemic.

"And we were impacted by the pandemic and, in the midst of all these other restrictions, with the reserves that the country has created, with the little we had in the country, with the little we have been able to acquire this difficult year and a half, is that we have been able to meet these challenges, these tests.

"And we have done it with courage, we have done it without giving in and, above all, we have done it by sharing among all the little we have, and we have not only shared within Cuba, we have shared with the world. There is the example of the Henry Reeve internationalist brigades, which has gone to places brutally affected by the pandemic.

"And this is how we have moved forward, controlling one wave after another, with a tremendous capacity for sacrifice on the part of our people, of our scientists, of our health personnel, of almost the entire country involved in this.

Díaz-Canel recalled that five candidate vaccines have been developed, one already recognized as a vaccine, the first in Latin America against COVID-19. Cuba is already vaccinating our population, and this is a process that takes time. Vaccines must be produced, but we currently have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and in a few weeks we will have reached more than 20% of the total population," he noted.

However, he noted, in the last few months more aggressive strains have appeared, and in the midst of this already serious situation, another group of complications began to appear.

"First of all, new cases are emerging at a speed and accumulation that exceeded the capacities we have been able to create to treat these patients in state institutions. On the other hand, we have been obliged to expand capacity in other centers," he explained.

In this sense, by opening more centers, to which energy priority must be given - in the midst of the accumulation of problems in the generation of electricity, the number of circuits that we must protect, to attend these patients, has increased.

With more patients, he continued, the stock of medicines is also running low and acquiring them is very difficult; and in the midst of all this, we continue to work for everyone.

"Now we have been obliged to resort to home isolation due to the lack of capacity in a number of provinces, and call on families to participate more directly, more responsibly. One never tires of admiring the capacity for creative resistance of our people."

With these values, he insisted, with vaccination advancing, complying with the necessary sanitary measures, we will emerge sooner rather than later from this peak in the pandemic, which is not only hitting Cuba. Cuba managed to postpone this high point with everything we did, and we will overcome it.

But now, he noted, in a very cowardly, subtle, opportunistic and perverse manner, exploiting the most difficult situations we have in provinces like Matanzas and Ciego de Avila, those who have always supported the blockade, those who have served as mercenaries, lackeys of the Yankee empire, begin to appear with calls for a humanitarian intervention, a humanitarian corridor, to strengthen the idea that the Cuban government is not capable of handling this situation, as if they were really interested in the welfare and health of our people.

“If they want to make a gesture toward Cuba, if they really are concerned about the people, if they want to solve Cuba's problems: lift the blockade and let's see how we do, why don't they do that? Why don't they have the courage to lift the blockade, what legal and moral basis allows a foreign government to implement such a policy against a small country, and in the midst of such adverse conditions? Isn't this genocide?”

He denounced the assertion that a dictatorship exists in Cuba, "A dictatorship that is concerned about providing healthcare for its entire population, that seeks welfare for all, that in the midst of this situation is capable of conducting public policies, aspiring to vaccination with a Cuban vaccine, because we knew that no one was going to sell us any, since we don’t have the money to buy them," he said.

"What a strange dictatorship," he exclaimed. Now they are shouting that we are murderers. Where are the murder victims in Cuba, where are the missing persons in Cuba? Other countries that have suffered these pandemic peaks were not attacked in the press and they were not offered humanitarian intervention as a solution, nor were they subjected to these slander campaigns as we are, Díaz-Canel emphasized.

"I believe that life, history, the facts show what is behind all this, which is the effort to asphyxiate us and put an end to the Revolution, and for that they are trying to discourage our people, to confuse our people. And when the people are facing severe conditions, then events like the ones we experienced in San Antonio de los Baños take place."

About the events in this area, he detailed:

Who was part of the group? It included members of the population, who have needs, who are experiencing some of these shortages; it included revolutionaries who are confused, do not have all the arguments, or were expressing these dissatisfactions, but they were doing differently, because they were seeking to understand, seeking explanations.

"But this was led by a core group of manipulators who are indeed lending themselves to the designs of the SOS Matanzas or SOS Cuba campaigns… Several days ago, they were preparing demonstrations or social disturbances of this type in several Cuban cities. This is criminal, at a time when people should be at home, protecting themselves."

Diaz-Canel reported that revolutionaries in San Antonio de los Baños, provincial authorities, a group from the country's leadership showed up there, we confronted the counterrevolutionaries and we talked to the revolutionaries, and to those asking for explanations, to show that Cuba’s streets belong to revolutionaries.

He pointed out that we know there are other groups of people gathering in streets and plazas, in other cities of the country, also moved by unhealthy purposes. "I am also giving this information, to reaffirm that in Cuba the streets belong to revolutionaries, that the state, the revolutionary government, guided by the Party, are more than willing to discuss, to argue and to participate with the people in the solution of problems, but recognizing the real cause of our problems, without allowing ourselves to be confused."

Those who are encouraging demonstrations are not interested in good healthcare for Cuba, he emphasized. Remember that their model is neoliberal, the privatization of health, of medical services, of education; that everyone should save themselves as best they can, that those who have the money can access health care, he warned.

"We are not going to surrender sovereignty, the independence of our people, or the freedom of this nation. There are many of us revolutionaries in this town who are willing to give our lives and this is not a slogan, it is a conviction. They will have to step over our corpses if they want to confront the Revolution, and we are ready for anything and we will be in the streets fighting."

We know that incidents of this type are being orchestrated in the streets of Havana and that there are large groups of revolutionaries confronting counterrevolutionary elements. We are separating the confused revolutionaries, the inhabitants of Cuba who have specific concerns, but we are not going to allow any counterrevolutionary, any mercenary, to provoke destabilization among our people.

"This is why we are calling on all revolutionaries in our country, all communists, to take to the streets in any of the places where these provocations may take place today, from now on, throughout these days," he insisted.
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"As I said in my closing speech at the Party Congress, we revolutionaries defend the Revolution above all else, we communists on the front lines, and with that conviction we are now in the streets, we are not going to allow anyone to manipulate our situation, or defend a plan that is not Cuban, that is not for the welfare of Cubans and that is annexationist. This is the task to which we call revolutionaries and communists of this country," he concluded.