Take Cuba Off the List and End the US Blockade
We, unions, political parties, and popular movements from around the globe, recognize Cuba as a pillar of international peace and justice and demand the immediate removal of its US designation as a “state-sponsor of terrorism.”
In January 1959, Cuba dared to chart a revolutionary path in the belly of the beast, putting behind the indignities of colonial rule that had tormented its people for centuries. Since then, it stood firmly with the aspirations of peoples across the Third World.
Cuba is not a “state-sponsor of terrorism.”
It is a state-sponsor of health. Over the course of its revolutionary history, Cuba has dispatched 605,000 health professionals and technicians to 165 countries, bringing health to as many nations as the United States has sanctioned.
It is a state-sponsor of peace. On 9 June 2023, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro and Antonio García, the guerrilla commander of the National Liberation Army (ELN), shook hands in Havana at peace talks brokered by the Cuban government. The meeting laid the groundwork for an extended ceasefire – a historic step in a decades-long struggle for peace.
It is a state-sponsor of liberation. Half a million Cubans joined the national liberation struggle in Angola, helping to break the back of South Africa’s apartheid army. Cuba’s victory against South African forces at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Nelson Mandela said, paved the way for the legalization of the African National Congress in 1990 and the end of the apartheid regime.
In the face of its tremendous service to humanity, the United States’ designation of Cuba as a sponsor of terror is a cynical ploy to sustain the long punishment for its defiance to US diktats. The policy has only one purpose: to maximize the suffering of the Cuban people.
It represents a radicalization of the cruel six-decade blockade of Cuba. The blockade, as the infamous April 1960 State Department Memorandum said, sought explicitly 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 government.”
Over sixty years later, nothing has changed. The Cuban people lack access to most basic goods and resources: medicine, food, construction materials, energy, industrial machinery, and spare parts. The designation has strangled the Cuban economy. Despite repeated promises to revisit the policy, Joe Biden has sustained the punishment – a cruel and cynical policy that stands in violation of fundamental norms in international law.
With this letter, we celebrate Cuba as a promoter of health, peace, and liberation, and commit to mobilizing in our millions to demand an end to its long persecution by the US government. •
Signed by:
- Abolition Feminism For Ending Sexual Violence, United Kingdom
- Afrodescendientes, Venezuela
- Aj Muste Foundation For Peace & Justice, USA
- Akcja Socjalistyczna, Poland
- Al-Awda PRRC, USA
- Al-Muntada The Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Forum To Combat Violence Against Women, Palestine
- All Nepal Peasants Federation, Nepal
- Alrowwad, Palestine
- American Student Union, USA
- Amigas Da Terra Brasil, Brazil
- Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, USA
- Anti-War Committee Chicago, USA…
Complete list at Progressive International website.
