No to U.S. govt threats of more genocidal actions against Cuba. Let us take action.
*** Statement of the Chicago Antiwar Coalition (CAWC) ***
As you may know, just a few days ago, on January 29, President Trump signed an executive order declaring that Cuba constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and foreign policy. This genocidal declaration empowers the U.S. government to take broad actions, including blocking oil to Cuba and adding tariffs against countries such as Mexico if they continue to send oil directly or indirectly to Cuba. Cuba very much needs oil to maintain basic social services and ensure the health and well-being of its 11 million citizens. Lack of oil will hit the electrical grid, as well as its health and educational systems, day care, ability to get food and water, and transportation.
This is genocidal as it kills untold numbers of the Cuban people through the U.S. government blocking medical supplies and food, and now vital oil.
The Trump Administration justifies its action partly by demonizing Cuba’s alliances with countries or groups the U.S. government labels as hostile or destabilizing, such as China, Russia, and Iran.
This is part of a long-standing U.S. capitalist ruling class effort to have regime change in Cuba, to return it to being a capitalist puppet of the U.S. ruling class. The U.S. government blockade of Cuba began decades ago under the Republican President Eisenhower and then Democratic Kennedy administrations, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution for independence, sovereignty, socialism and democracy.
Of course, we must oppose this cruel and ruthless U.S. imperialist effort.
There are a number of actions we can take, some of which we suggest below.
Our opposition is to U.S. government interference with the sovereignty of any country, and in solidarity with resistance to this in every country. And resistance to U.S. government interference is high in Cuba.
The response to these latest genocidal threats by the U.S. government by the people of Cuba is strong. There was a huge turnout in Cuba in honor of the 32 Cubans who were murdered in Venezuela during the recent U.S. attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of its democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, Venezuelan lawyer and politician and wife of President Maduro.
Right after Trump’s January 29 threat, the people’s government of Cuba condemned and denounced this threat. They said that this U.S. government declaration confirms that it is the U.S. government, not Cuba “that is threatening the security, stability, and peace of the region and the world….Imperialism is mistaken when it believes that economic pressure and the determination to cause suffering to millions of people will break their determination to defend national sovereignty and prevent Cuba from falling, once again, under U.S. domination….We will face this new attack with firmness, equanimity, and the certainty that reason is absolutely on our side. The decision is one: Homeland or Death, We Shall Overcome!”
Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, said on Friday that he recalled the comments made by Trump in early January, after the aggression against Venezuela and the kidnapping of its legitimate president, when he said that not much more pressure could be exerted on Cuba and that what had to be done was to go in and destroy the place. Diaz-Canel pointed out that this is confirmation that although extreme levels of pressure of all kinds have been exerted on the country, Trump has had to acknowledge that the Cubans have resisted. He said, “They have applied all the pressure they can, and here we are…”
U.S. Imperialism, Diaz-Canel emphasized, “is concerned about the example of Cuba, what Cuba can do without the blockade, what another type of model, another type of construction, another type of popular empowerment can mean for the world, which, even under blockade, has had social results in 65 years that the United States does not have.” Diaz Canel said what we are seeing is U.S. government “arrogance, bullying, blackmail, pressure, coercive measures, violence, slander, and lies.” He said we are facing an imperial doctrine that also has its sights set on Greenland and Iran; in other words, “We are facing a stark imperialist and fascist aggression in which the president of the Empire is behaving like Hitler, with a criminal policy of contempt that aims to take over the world. SURRENDER WILL NEVER BE AN OPTION.”
Author Laura Mercedes Giraldez said in an article in the Communist Party of Cuba publication, Granma, “The Executive Order signed by the U.S. president … declaring a national emergency… given that – according to the document full of fallacies – Cuba…” maintains that Cuba has relations with “hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign adversaries” of the of the U.S. “The U.S. government is lying again, as it does systematically. It knows full well that Cuba does not harbor terrorists, does not give refuge to terrorist organizations…It is in that territory [the U.S.] that murderers such as Luis Posada Carriles, responsible for the Barbados plane crime [1976] and others who still walk the streets of Miami have found shelter….Trump’s Executive Order speaks of human rights violations, repression, and regional destabilization in the largest of the Antilles. What it does not say is that the extraterritorial measure it endorses meets the criteria for [the U.S.] qualifying under those same elements, in addition to causing human suffering and affecting the lives of millions of people…
“Is Cuba—free, independent, sovereign, democratic, with social justice and human solidarity—a threat to U.S. national security or to the development of its hegemonic, expansionist interests and the perpetuation of the serious health crisis generated by fentanyl within its borders?
“The Cuban people, descended from Martí, know the monster’s guts and can decipher its lies. They will not be fooled. They have endured almost 70 years of genocidal blockade and have stoically resisted all the empire’s aggressions without renouncing their principles. This time will be no different.”
It is interesting and important to note that The Wall Street Journal, mouthpiece for a section of the U.S. capitalist ruling class, seems to agree in a posting on February 1 that it will not be easy for the U.S. government to defeat Cuba. For example, one commentator, José de Córdoba, points out how “Blackouts last in the provinces for 20 hours at a time. On top of that, you have huge scarcity of medicines, all kinds of goods and food….[It has] a deficit of roughly 60,000 barrels [of oil] per day. But fellow contributor Vera Bergengruen says that while the Trump Administration has a goal “of trying to force out this regime by the end of the year….when you speak to Trump officials, they’re riding high. They think that this operation to depose Maduro was very successful…. For many reasons this will] just never work in Cuba….” Luke Vargas adds, “Putting yet more economic pressure on the Islanders doesn’t seem like it would really help [with regime change]” Bergengruen emphasizes that people of Cuba “are really loyalists. It’s just hard to imagine from the people we’ve spoken to what’s in it for them if they betray that.”
Chicago Antiwar Coalition (CAWC) has long opposed the U.S. government blockade of Cuba. It has pointed out in earlier Statements about how this fits into a long system of U.S. capitalist ruling class imperialism since 1776. It is important to see that Trump action is not separate from what the U.S. ruling class has long sought to achieve, that there is a system in operation that we need to be aware of and deal with.
Imperialism is how the U.S. has worked against Cuba and other countries since the days of the Founding Fathers.
The Founding Fathers of the U.S. all said, in writing, that their aim was to build an American Empire. Jefferson talked in 1809 of “receiving Cuba into our union,” and tried to buy Cuba from Spain. In 1820 he told Secretary of War J.C. Calhoun that the U.S. “ought, at the first possible opportunity, to take Cuba.” Jefferson said in 1823: “I frankly confess that I have always regarded Cuba as the most interesting addition that can be made to our system of state.”
In 1823 the U.S. declared what was to be known as the Monroe Doctrine—forbidding European powers to have colonies or neo-colonies in the Americas and effectively declaring the Caribbean to be a U.S. lake.
In 1848 the Polk Administration unsuccessfully tried to buy Cuba and its half million slaves from Spain for $100 million in order to extend the power of the Southern slave owners. And there was another attempt to buy it in 1854 and annex it to the union as a slave state.
U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine wrote in 1881 of Cuba, “That rich island, the key to the Gulf of Mexico, and the field for our most extended trade in the Western Hemisphere, is, though in the hands of Spain, a part of the American commercial system … If ever ceasing to be Spanish, Cuba must necessarily become American and not fall under any other European domination.”
After some rebel successes in Cuba’s War of Independence in 1897, U.S. President William McKinley offered to buy Cuba for $300 million.
Cuba remained under Spanish rule until the U.S. government instigated the Spanish-American War (1898) in the wake of the Cuban War for Independence. Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, Cuba became a U.S. protectorate under U.S. military rule from 1898–1902. The U.S. government imposed economic and political dominance over the island, which continued after Cuba became formally independent in 1902.
The U.S. government only agreed to withdraw its troops from Cuba in 1902 when the government of Cuba was forced to accept provisions of the Platt Amendment. This had provisions to allow the U.S. government to intervene in Cuban affairs if needed for the maintenance of “good government” and committed Cuba to lease to the U.S. land for naval bases. Cuba leased to the U.S. the southern portion of Guantánamo Bay, where a U.S. Naval Station had been established in 1898. This year is the 123rd anniversary of the U.S. take-over of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in 1903.
The Platt Amendment defined the terms of Cuban-U.S. relations for the following 33 years and provided the legal basis for U.S. military interventions 1906–09, 1912 and 1917–22. In 1912 U.S. forces were sent to quell protests by Afro-Cubans against race discrimination.
By 1926, U.S. companies owned 60% of the Cuban sugar industry and imported 95% of the total Cuban crop.
A big workers struggle with many strikes and opposition to the rule of Gerardo Machado emerged in 1933 until he was forced to resign. U.S. Ambassador Sumner Welles requested U.S. military intervention. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, despite his promotion of the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America, ordered 29 warships to Cuba and Key West, alerting U.S. Marines and bombers to be ready for action if necessary.
Machado’s replacement, Ramón Grau, assumed the Presidency and immediately nullified the Platt Amendment. In protest, the U.S. government denied recognition to Grau’s government, Ambassador Welles describing the new regime as “communistic” and “irresponsible.”
The rise of General Fulgencio Batista to positions of power in 1933 strengthened the U.S. corporations’ almost complete domination of Cuba’s economy. Earl Smith, former Ambassador to Cuba said, “Until Castro, the U.S. was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president.”
On July 26, 1953, a small band of Cuban revolutionaries launched an armed attack on the Moncada Barracks in the city of Santiago. The attack was intended to start a revolution against the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. It was led by Fidel Castro, who had been an activist student at the University of Havana.
The rebels did not succeed on that day. Some were killed and many others were imprisoned, some of whom were murdered by Batista’s goons. But eventually a mass campaign led to the amnesty of Castro and other remaining prisoners.
The 26th of July was the beginning, not the end. Moncada led to the formation of the 26th of July Movement, which became the central organizing force of the Cuban Revolution. The seeds sown on July 26, 1953 germinated on January 1, 1959, as the victorious July 26th movement marched into Havana as the last of Batista’s top cronies fled to Miami.
U.S. President Eisenhower officially recognized the new Cuban government, but imposed trade restrictions, the start of the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
U.S. interference with Cuba continued with bombings, biological warfare, an attempted invasion, known as the Bay of Pigs, and assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.
As Lester D. Mallory, an Assistant Secretary of State, wrote on April 6, 1960, “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government.”
The motivation of the U.S. ruling class, its big banks and corporations, is clear—to impose privatization and U.S. domination over this nation that is so politically independent of the U.S. and influential in the world. The capitalists oppose socialism. They want to get maximum profits for themselves.
The U.S. ruling class ignores public opinion. They persist in their imperialism despite the fact that the U.S. government is politically isolated. In October, 165 countries voted in favor of a resolution titled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” Seven countries voted against the resolution (the U.S., Israel, Argentina, Hungary, Paraguay, North Macedonia and Ukraine). This was the 33rd year in a row that the U.S. government has been voted against for its blockade of Cuba.
In short, the U.S. corporate government and its mass media have acted criminally not only by continuing the lie that the Cuban regime is brutal, but in ignoring the U.S. role in undermining Cuba’s ability to function as a normal nation state.
On what we can do.–
–Since it is possible that many ordinary Americans believe the lying propaganda, we all need to take up the task of exposing and opposing the U.S. imperialist attacks on Cuba. The Cuban people have every right to exercise self-determination in deciding their future.
–Join in with local organizations such as Chicago Cuba Coalition and Levántate por Cuba to oppose the U.S. blockade of Cuba and the latest threats to it, and oppose continued U.S. government occupation of Guantanamo, to demand the right of Cuban athletes to participate in international events being held in the U.S., to demand the unrestricted right of U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba, etc. This includes leafleting and public meetings and other efforts.
–Travel to Cuba with one of the many delegations who are still being allowed by the U.S. government to travel to Cuba. One will be leaving from Chicago in March and another around May Day.
— Many of those travelling to Cuba are bringing needed medical supplies with them. You can help the local effort on this by donating one or more large suitcases.
Any comments or questions?
February 3, 2026
The Chicago Antiwar Coalition facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/chicagoantiwarcoalition/
The email address is ChicagoAntiwarCoalition@gmail.com