One of the remarkable aspects of what’s happening now in Cuba is how quickly the Cuban people and leadership are attempting to respond even to the most adverse conditions of their asphyxiation. Take the accelerated production of renewable energy: getting off of dependency on oil to try to use solar to power homes, schools, hospitals, and the like. I was speaking with a friend just yesterday from Camagüey who was saying that she’d never seen solar in her home community. She was just back there two weeks ago, and there were four new providers of solar panels and production to install them in homes and institutions. So there has been a massive push toward renewables, to resist this latest effort to destabilize the revolution.
Still, as I said, this executive order is ratcheting up a long-standing logic of strangulation, asphyxiation, oppression, and domination by the United States. What concerns me is whether Marco Rubio will even be satisfied to see a humanitarian crisis unfold in Cuba, whether he will be satisfied to see the deaths of newborns or the absence of neonatal care for their mothers, and whether he will be satisfied to see grandmothers and grandfathers die as a result of not having access to their life-saving medicine.
The critical aspect of this convoy is not only to deliver humanitarian aid but to show up, as the peoples of the world, to be present on the island, where there’s a real risk that the United States is preparing — as it is often preparing — a more aggressive form of intervention that would directly assault Cuban sovereignty.
We don’t know what that looks like, mostly because US foreign policy is made in the darkest halls of the Pentagon, in the darkest basements of Fort Bragg, and not in the bright lights of Congress or the court of public opinion. One crazy aspect of being a US citizen right now is watching our government commit these crimes and not even knowing what they’re planning to do in our name, in Cuba or…
Auteur: David Adler
