In March 1997, an independent inquiry by the prestigious American Association of World Health concluded that: "the US embargo is contributing to malnutrition and poor water quality in Cuba, and placing severe strains on the Cuban health care system. Cuba is being denied access to US manufactured drugs and medical equipment and this is causing patients including children to suffer unnecessary pain and in some cases die needlessly."
This 34-year cold war against Cuba is only the latest episode in a century old attempt at conquest and annexation of the island. When the US intervened in Cuba towards the end of its war of independence against Spain in 1901, the then military commander of the US occupation forces, General Leonard Wood, wrote the following in a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt:
This is a natural sugar and tobacco country and as we must, in any case, control its destinies, and will probably soon own it, I believe it sound policy to do what we can to develop it ....With the control which we now have over Cuba...combined with other sugar producing lands which we now own, we shall soon practically control the sugar destiny of the whole world... I believe Cuba to be a most desirable acquisition for the United States. She is easily worth any two of the Southern States, probably any three with the exception of Texas.
The triumph of the Cuban revolution in January 1959 put an end to Cuba's colonial status as a sugar producing state of the USA. As the US government saw it this revolution was a downright robbery. How dare the Cuban people overthrow a government of the US and take over the US owned sugar mills and plantations! What right did they think they had to establish their own foreign policy independent of the imperial aims of Washington? And to add salt to an already gaping wound, they then have the audacity to go communist! The worst nightmare of the US sugar barons and oil conglomerates had become a reality just 90 miles off the Florida coastline.
The US has never forgiven Cuba for this unpardonable crime and for 35 years it has waged a relentless war to conquer Cuba and erase its example from the minds of tens of millions of working people across the Americas. Besides an ongoing CIA programme to assassinate Castro and to sabotage the Cuban economy, the centrepiece of this cold war has been the trade and financial embargo against Cuba which has actually been intensified under the Clinton administration. At a conservative estimate, this blockade has cost the Cuban people in the region of 40 billion dollars. It extends to every conceivable item of clothing, raw material, manufactured goods, essential foodstuffs and medicines.
There is only one reason why the US continue with this blockade: Cuba made a socialist revolution, the first of its kind in the western Hemisphere and it is the threat of that moral and political example spreading to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean which has kept the night lights on at the Pentagon for the last 35 years.
Washington's conditions for lifting the blockade have made this perfectly clear. They want Castro out and a wholesale privatisation of the Cuban Economy - including the return of the so called US assets - to follow. The Cuban revolution has been a revolution which has depended upon the wholehearted participation and mobilisation of the people for its progress and its defence. That is why the target of Washington's war is not just the Cuban government but the Cuban people as a whole.
HOW IS THE USA BLOCKADING CUBA?
The Cuban gains have been accomplished in the teeth of one of the most prolonged campaigns of hostility and sabotage in modern times: most Cubans alive today have known nothing else. Here is a picture of US aggression in the Caribbean region.
In Guatemala the people elected the progressive leader Jacobo Arbenz in 1951. A principal element in his programme was land reform. Washington decided that the popular reforms represented a threat to US interests. It was necessary therefore for the CIA to stimulate a campaign of terror and subversion, terminating in the US-sponsored invasion that succeeded in overthrowing the Arbenz government in 1954. The United States funded the Guatemalan army, trained its officers, and supplied its weapons.
In Chile in 1970 the Marxist Salvador Allende was democratically elected to power. On 8 September Washington's principal strategist, Henry Kissinger, ordered a "cold-blooded assessment" of the situation, including considerations of whether a Chilean military coup should be organised with US assistance. The CIA provided money and weapons to right wing officers planning the overthrow of Allende. Financial institutions under the control of the United States (the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank) acted to exclude Chile from the international credit markets. The coup duly took place in September 1973. US military attaches supported the Chilean army, a US Navy commando team penetrated the country, US ships were off the coast, and US fighter planes were held in a state of readiness at an Argentine base just across the border. The democratically elected Salvador Allende was murdered, and there then began the repressive rule of the military dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
In Jamaica in 1972 the democratic socialist Michael Manley was elected prime minister - and US action was immediately taken to destabilise his government. Kissinger acted to withdraw US aid and to pressure other countries into blocking assistance. CIA-trained Cuban exiles were sent to the island to carry out terrorist acts.
In 1994 fresh evidence emerged to show that President Kennedy had ordered the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagain British Guiana (now Guyana).
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the United States sustained a procession of right-wing governments in El Salvador for the transparent purpose of protecting the economic interests of wealthy Salvador families and US corporations F rom 1980 to 1986 the US supplied El Salvador with more than $2 million aid, most of which was used to procure military hardware.
In the Dominican Republic the liberal Juan Bosch, (democratically elected president in December 1962 with 60% of the popular vote), began to implement a modest land reform programme and minor nationalisation. US aid came to a halt; the CIA and the US military began discussions with anti-Bosch army officers. In 1963 a CIA-orchestrated coup installed Colonel Wessin y Wessin as a new US friendly dictator. On 28 April 1965 President Johnson sent in the marines, later followed by the US army's 82nd Division: a combined force of about 23,000 troops.
Nicaragua was first invaded by US troops in 1854 to avenge an alleged insult to the millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt. Another US invasion took place in 1909, and from 1912 to 1933 Nicaragua was under American military occupation. In 1980 the US-backed forces , operating from sanctuaries in US-backed Honduras, managed to slaughter some 30,000 people. Ronald Reagan's 'freedom fighters' had achieved their purpose in the approved way: eyes gouged out, breasts cut off, castrations, lips sliced, tongues torn out, throats slashed, disembowelling...The suffering Nicaraguan people, desperate for another way, voted a majority for the ramshackled coalition headed by the US-supported Violeta Chamorro. The 1990 victory was not for democracy but for torture and violence.
In 1983 Reagan decided to send 6,000 elite troops to invade the small island of Granada, where some 800 soldiers, workers and militia had to be overcome. Panama in the late 1980's....
The US invasion of Haiti in 1993 was part of a well-established pattern.
The above examples of US intervention - involving terror, subversion, lies and military invasion - indicate the regional context in which Cuba has struggled to survive over nearly four decades. Washington has been well prepared to sanction torture, sabotage, military aggression, economic strangulation, and the use of starvation and disease as strategic weapons. This is the political framework that Washington prefers to social reforms; this is the regional environment in which Cuba struggles to protect its social gains. Today, through US policies, Cuba is ideologically isolated. Washington has worked hard to ensure the popular leaders (Arbenz, Allende, Manley, Bosch, Ortega, Aristide and others) who might have been naturally sympathetic to Cuban reform have all been assassinated, tamed or marginalised.