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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Cuba: with the people, for the people!

by New Worker correspondent

MILLIONS OF CUBANS are closing ranks around the communist party following an abortive attempt by US imperialism to undermine the people’s government on the island.

People’s China, the Russian Federation and many other friends of the socialist island have voiced support for the Cuban government and called on the USA to lift its blockade of Cuba. Mexico is sending much-needed emergency supplies of medicines, vaccines and food to the beleaguered island, and a coalition of Cuban solidarity movements in the USA has just delivered six million syringes to help Cuba conduct its vaccination drive against COVID‑19.

British musician Roger Waters, one of the founders of Pink Floyd and a long-standing friend of Cuba, believes the people’s government “endures and will endure” despite the new attempts promoted from abroad to destabilise it.

“If I were a gambler, I would bet that there are economic problems in Cuba, since there are some people suffering, but if they return the country to the mafia and the United States government, I am sure that the situation will not improve,” Waters said.

Waters, who is now 78, recalled that he first began to hear about Cuba from his communist mother. But before 1959 all he knew was that it was a Caribbean country ruled by gangsters and despots. He stressed that after the triumph of the revolution led by Fidel Castro, the government and people of the island not only resisted the attempts promoted from the USA, including the Bay of Pigs invasion, to overthrow it, but also dedicated themselves to helping the rest of the small and large-scale world.

Millions of Cuban workers have taken to the streets to denounce the “SOS Cuba” stunts organised by American agents in Havana and some other towns across the island, which were clearly designed to justify the US blockade and to provide a pretext for imperialist ‘regime change’ intervention. It also served to divert the media spotlight away the USA’s humiliating evacuation from Afghanistan and the overwhelming rejection of the US blockade at the UN General Assembly in June.

Meanwhile, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) on the island vowed “to defend the Revolution at all costs and not to get on our knees before an empire that for more than 60 years has subjected us to the most criminal blockade in history, in the hope of making our people surrender out of hunger, needs and desperation.

“We know that we still have a long way to go to build the Cuba we long for, the one dreamed of by Martí, Fidel and Raúl, the one our children deserve; but that Cuba can never be born under the rubble generated by the chaos they want to impose on us.”

In Washington reactionary politicians repeatedly voiced their support for the anti-government protesters in an attempt to fan the flames. In Florida, the centre of the counter-revolutionary Cuban émigré movement, Republican Senator Marco Rubio has been very active tweeting daily in support of the dissidents. Rubio, a Cuban-American, raged against the Cuban government, the communist party and socialism because “socialism is always a disaster”, whilst Miami mayor, Francis Suarez, called for US air strikes on Cuba as he pressed the case for military intervention to force regime change on the island.

Several hundred dissidents took part in demonstrations that simultaneously took place in several cities on 11th July. That the protests were nationally co-ordinated and that many of the protesters waived American flags showed that the sinister hand of US intelligence was behind the protests. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called on the people to stand firm in the face of the US-inspired destabilisation attempts, pointing out that when a population has come so far in realising its dreams, it is not stopped by violence or hatred. “‘By the side of the people, with the people and for the people, continues to be the Revolution. Not with statements, but with deeds!” he said.