Sanctions make us all Cubans

On the evening of Monday, January 20^th, 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that revoked all executive orders issued by the Biden administration. Among the revoked orders was Biden’s 11th hour removal of Cuba from the US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. This action by the Trump administration is part of a long history of US-sponsored counter-revolutionary efforts targeting the Cuban people and an intensification of the US government’s war on Cuba. The Biden administration, by waiting until the last minute to issue an order that they knew would almost certainly be rescinded, robbed Cuba of the time it needed to gather the resources required to address a profound economic crisis created by the United States.

The US government has a long bipartisan history of callously toying with the lives of Cuban people, and this is yet another disgusting example. The centerpiece of the US government’s war in Cuba, the economic blockade known as sanctions, is explicitly designed to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the Cuban government. Cutting Cuba off from international banking and trade prevents commerce between the US and Cuba and acts as a successful deterrent against other countries doing business with Cuba for fear of being blackballed by the US.

Economic isolation hits the working class

The impact of this economic isolation on the day-to-day lives of Cuban people is profound. It means widespread shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, nationwide blackouts, crumbling infrastructure that cannot be repaired because they cannot import the materials to do so, mass migration, and death. Meanwhile our governments tell us the Cuban people suffer because of socialism! The perennial lie.

Alongside this policy of economic strangulation, the US government has pursued a military policy of sustained terror against civilians. This has included the funding of terrorists to sabotage and destroy resource centres in Cuba, the bombing of roads and ports, the bombing of commercial airlines with Cuban nationals on them, the attempted assassinations of leaders, and the murder of revolutionary teachers as young as 15 who volunteered to go into the countryside to teach Cubans to read.

Socialism’s success undermines western imperialism

Cuba has long been a beacon and a leader in the global movement for liberation. Cuba’s practice of internationalism, which has ranged from aiding movements for liberation in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, to the training of doctors and teachers throughout the world, including in the United States, has always been seen as a threat. It is for this simple reason, and with the absence of any evidence, that the US government continues its projection of its own crimes onto Cuba with its absurd designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror.

Understanding the reason why the US has focused so strongly on attacking the Cuban revolution, on attempting to economically strangle the Cuban people, attempting to starve them to death, is precisely because a revolutionary socialist, anti-imperialist country, sitting just 90 miles off its coast, represents a direct challenge to its supremacy. Cuba’s commitment to internationalism, to finding alternatives to the US dollar, to joining alternative economic formations like BRICS, all represent a challenge to US authority.

Cuts to our social services are sanctions by any other name

Don’t be fooled, this isn’t just happening to the poor Cuban people. It is happening to working people all over the world, including us! We experience domestic forms of sanctions when we are denied access to decent housing, health and education, when we can no longer afford to feed and clothe our families, when hard work no longer provides sufficient wages to maintain a secure living. It isn’t poor working people from other nations who undermine our livelihoods, it’s the system we live in, monopoly capitalism.

Workers everywhere are being targeted by imperialism. It is literally the same people who are making conditions unliveable here who are doing the exact same thing all over the world for the same reason, to attempt to inflict so much suffering that their policy objectives are taken on – greater extraction and exploitation of resources, nations and people for profit. It’s the dictatorship of the bourgeoise (the ruling class) who exploit the world’s resources and people in their insatiable pursuit of more profit, more capital.

There is no line of separation between our domestic issues and our foreign policy actions. It is the same enemy, the same ruling class, who are carrying out these economic and political attacks against us and against communities all over the world. These attacks on Cuba, on Nicaragua, on Venezuela, on Zimbabwe, on Eritrea, on Palestine, on Syria, on Russia, on the DPRK, on all these nations and more who are being sanctioned. These are attacks on the world’s working class, on the majority of the world’s people by a minority of global imperialists.

Sanctions are tools of economic warfare

Sanctions have been successfully sold to workers across the west by their ruling class as a kinder and gentler alternative to boots on the ground, which the ruling class know would be massively unpopular and a dangerous step. But kinder they are not!  Sanctions are designed to attack civilian populations, to bring suffering to the most marginalised segments of these populations, elders, disabled people, families, women. People like our mothers, our children, people who live in our communities. Do cuts to our own livelihoods feel kind?

People living in the west for the most part do not understand this reality because it is hidden from us. It’s just a word we hear our politicians say – “sanctions”. But just as we oppose our own growing repression by the sanctions applied to us domestically when social services are cut, depriving us of access to healthy food, housing, healthcare and education, armed with knowledge of the genocidal intent of international sanctions, we must stand with workers across the many nations in which sanctions apply.

Sanctions are not about democracy or human rights. They are tools of economic warfare designed to force nations into submission, often with devastating effects on ordinary people.

Anti-imperialist nations such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Palestine, Iran, and North Korea who are on the front line of the global struggle against imperialism are the allies of the British people and we must stand side by side with them, proactively supporting their fight.

There is but one enemy in our world, western imperialism led by the United States and Britain. There is but one army to defeat them, the workers of the world. The time has come to understand that clear distinction, the time has come to raise your level of class consciousness, the time has come for us to stand united.