Tag: Cuba

Cuba has always defended the need for international relations based on sovereign equality, dialogue and cooperation, rather than hegemonic doctrines or threats of force. The peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have the right to freely determine their own destiny, without external interference.

For more than 60 years, the U.S. government has economically targeted Cuba while mainstream corporate media often repeats official narratives without fully examining the human cost of sanctions and blockades on everyday Cuban people. In this conversation, Havana-based journalist Liz Oliva Fernández offers a perspective rarely heard in U.S. media — one rooted not in politics from afar, but in the lived reality of surviving, reporting and resisting from inside Cuba itself.

To be against Cuba is to be against humanity. Time and time again Cuba has offered support wherever it is needed most. They have even offered medical aid to the United States because, for them, people and lives come before politics and ideologies.

The question we should be asking ourselves is not whether socialism has failed, but rather: What country in the world, regardless of its political system, would survive a siege of this magnitude for seven decades?

Maria Mirabel's children and niece are some of the innocent bystanders threatened with starvation because of the US government's 65-year blockade as well as Trump and Rubio's complete ban on oil to the island since January. End the US taxpayer sponsored blockade on Cuba! 

Cuba has provided Guyana with doctors, scholarships and healthcare for nearly five decades. In return, Guyana's government has turned its back at the moment of Cuba's greatest need.

Brenda Lopez is cofounder of Cuba Si, Bloqueo No! to end the 65-year-old US blockade that was supposed to strangle Cuba to death. Thanks to grassroots support around the world, Cuba still stands strong.

Maria cooks for her family in remnants of what was her family's home prior to October's Hurricane Melissa in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

Maria Mirabel is in Old Havana helping the Mumia Freedom organizers teach the youth in the streets about Black Panther political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. 

For 30 years now we have seen the rest of the world side with Cuba. Most of the world sees the US for what it really is, and it has mostly isolated itself in order to try to continue to be at the top of the world.

Hurricane Melissa has had a devastating impact on eastern Cuba. Cuba has found creative ways to survive and move forward despite enormous obstacles and just got overwhelming support from the UN to end the US blockade.

Black Cuban photographer Sekou’s “Miradas desde Cuba” illuminates Afro-Cuban life at the Bayview Opera House.

For decades, Cuba has treated healthcare as a basic human right. International donations are a key support for this system. They remind us that health is a global good, something that should never be held hostage to geopolitics or sanctions.

Among the US soldiers captured in the Abu Ghraib torture photos were Amerikans who worked as prison guards in their civilian lives, linking the culture of abuse that pervades US prisons with the sociopathic mindset of military officials trained to deliberately torture other humans. That interplay is still very much alive today.

The United States has not been able to control COVID-19. The Donald Trump administration did not react in time, played down the reality, and as a result tens of thousands of people have died. Yet the government finds time to attack Cuba.

The COVID-19 emergency underscores longstanding truths about capitalism and socialism. Acting on the most immediate demands that it raises draws us directly into a confrontation with core issues.

The Embassy Protection Collective is calling on all peace and social justice organizations and people from all over the United States to join together next Saturday, May 18, for a massive mobilization in Washington, D.C., at the Venezuelan Embassy. San Francisco’s rally and march in solidarity is Saturday, May 18, 12 noon, at Powell and Market Streets.

For five decades, people across the U.S. have been travelling to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades. They’ve defied travel bans to see first hand how the Cuban people are building a society where gross inequality and exploitation are gone, where all health care, childcare and education are free. They’ve met with ordinary Cubans who enthusiastically travel overseas whether it’s to defeat apartheid or the ebola virus. The Venceremos Brigade invites you to learn more about the Brigade, which will be travelling to Cuba this summer.

I recently attended the first Caribbean Peace Conference in Bridgetown, Barbados, Oct. 6-7, 2017. The theme of the Conference was “Resisting Nuclear and Environmental Disaster: Building Peace in the Caribbean.” Attendees included representatives from Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Venezuela and Barbados. The purpose of this conference was to consolidate a serious Caribbean Peace Movement equipped with a concrete agenda and guiding philosophy.

At Merritt College, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, on the 74th birthday of its co-founder, Huey P. Newton, the African American Studies Program fittingly hosted a talk by the recently opened Cuban Embassy’s First Secretary Miguel Fraga, where he spoke on Cuban-U.S. relations. Afterwards, he and I continued to talk about the embargo, U.S. relations with Haiti, Venezuela and Bolivia, funding of Radio Marti, and the dissipation of the radical Latin American bloc of nations opposed to U.S. aggression and hegemony in the region and in the world.