At the end of October, the United Nations General Assembly, for the 32nd consecutive year, will be voting on a resolution submitted by Cuba claiming “the necessity to put an end to the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”
As they do every year, the delegates will most likely approve the resolution overwhelmingly.
Likewise important for Cuba is the U.S. election a few days later, on Nov. 5, which will decide the presidency and the makeup of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
The House is one of the few institutional centers of U.S. power where collective dissent can be registered against U.S. bullying of Cuba.
On March 21, 2021, 80 U.S. Democratic congresspersons – no Republicans – signed a letter to President Joe Biden asking that he reverse restrictions imposed against Cuba and remove the country from the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism (SSOT).
The enhanced sanctions and the terrorist designation were both imposed by President Trump. The signers of the letter urged Biden to turn the page and undertake “a more comprehensive effort to deepen engagement and normalization” with Cuba.
Despite candidate Biden’s campaign promises to the contrary in 2020, he did not reverse Trump’s strangling of the Cuban people. The blockade continues.
The experience of the Obama years is instructive. That administration made a start toward normalization between the U.S. and Cuba. Full diplomatic relations were restored, the Cuban Five political prisoners returned to the island, and U.S. citizens found themselves able to easily go to Cuba. All of these things had an immediate and positive impact on the lives of ordinary Cubans.
Of crucial importance was the Obama administration’s removal of Cuba from the SSOT list, which Cuba should never have been on. Indeed, the list itself should not exist. That action also had a positive effect on economic conditions in Cuba and on the well-being of all Cubans and of the Cuban working class in particular.
Trump reversed Obama’s partial, but nevertheless valuable and welcomed-by-Cubans, move toward normalization. In concert with right-wing anti-Cuba fanatics in Miami and beyond, Trump restored Cuba to the SSOT list once he came to office. That crowd helped out by disseminating a perverted version of the reality of Cuba’s big contribution toward negotiating a peace agreement in Colombia.
The resulting, severe economic distress visited on Cuba has led to an exodus from there to the U.S. and elsewhere of approximately a million people. The hundreds of thousands of them entering the U.S. have had the misfortune of meeting up with the anti-immigrant frenzy provoked by Trump and his followers.
And now, with Cuba reeling from a prolonged electricity blackout in the wake of recent hurricane damage, it’s even more apparent why the blockade must end.
When they look at Biden’s policy, too many of our colleagues in the Cuba solidarity struggle conclude that electoral politics do not work. They see the blockade continue under a Democrat, and they think it doesn’t matter which of the two major parties controls Congress or the White House.
But they should keep in mind that Obama did not open diplomatic relations with Cuba because he approves of Cuban socialism. He responded to pressure from several directions, including from businesses and agricultural interests that see Cuba as an important and profitable market and from friends of socialist Cuba.
Those pressures still exist and must be intensified to successfully remove all elements of the blockade of Cuba.
Filling the Congress and the White House with friends of Cuba, or even friends of diplomacy vs. diktat, is not enough by itself.
Mass consciousness-raising, organizing, and agitation are also essential. The process will be long, no doubt. It will include lobbying allies in Congress to introduce legislation aimed at normalizing relations with Cuba. That’s the only real way to end the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
Down with magical thinking! No socialist revolution in the United States is coming to the rescue, not for a long while. Cuba’s needs are immediate, dire, and far-reaching.
Of the 80 representatives who signed the original letter to Biden in 2021, 62 are still in Congress. They represent a foundation for building the block that is needed if the blockade is to be dismantled. They, and more of their kind, need to be elected to the next Congress.
How about the White House, though? We know how Trump would treat Cuba; he’s already shown us. But what would President Kamala Harris do about Cuba? She hasn’t said.
During her presidential campaign in 2019, perhaps influenced by Obama’s actions, a spokesperson indicated that “Sen. Harris believes we should end the failed trade embargo,” and that she wanted “Cuban civil society and the Cuban American community to spur progress and freely determine their own future.”
Later as vice-presidential candidate, she promised that a Biden administration would repeal restrictions Trump imposed on Cuba, a promise it failed to deliver on.
While neither of the major presidential candidates has articulated a clear anti-imperialist stance, votes for third-party candidates at the presidential level that end up helping throw the election to Trump is a terrible strategy for Cuba.
We know, looking at the history of the Trump administration in the Latin American context, that a return by him to the presidency represents an extreme danger to Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other countries whose governments seek to implement progressive, independent policies.
Dozens of the signatories of the letter to Biden in 2021 have endorsed other communications with Biden urging him to relax sanctions against Nicaragua and Venezuela, as well as Cuba – and to support the progressive government of President Gustavo Petro in Colombia.
The stand taken by these progressive Democrats requires great courage. They, along with many new candidates in the November elections, were targeted for defeat in the primaries by right-wing Democrats, and the survivors are now the targets of intensive Republican efforts backed by huge sums of money.
We urge all who wish to see Cuba recover from the suffocation re-imposed by Trump’s first presidency and support the Cuban people’s right to live and prosper to seriously consider the effect of their actions up to the election and their vote in November.
As we are well aware, for Cubans, election outcomes in the imperialist center to the north have major consequences.
The authors are members of the Peace and Solidarity Commission of the Communist Party USA.
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