EDITOR’S NOTE: Justice Initiative, an Atlanta-based organization founded by Heather Gray, occasionally shares articles, analyses and commentaries for this Web site.  Here, they offer a tribute from The New York Times about human rights activist and educator Bob Moses, who transitioned to the Honored Ancestors on Sunday, July 25.

JUSTICE INITIATIVE

Note: Bob Moses died this past Sunday, July 25, 2021.  Please see below the New York Times article about Bob Moses.

Over the years of my work in civil and human nights advocacy throughout the South, Bob Moses has been invariably referred to for his remarkable organizing work and relentless ‘never give up’ mentality. What was also so impressive about Bob Moses is that his organizing work was never to seek accolades for himself. What he did was always in the interest of building a ‘group’ mentality that would advocate and work for justice.

Also, on Monday, August 2, 2021, we on the ‘Just Peace’ program on WRFG-FM at 6:00PM (EST) interview civil rights leaders Ben Chavis and Courtland Cox, both of whom worked with Bob Moses in the civil rights movement.

Ben Chavis is now the head of  the president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an African-American organization which focuses on supporting and advocating for publishers of the nation’s more than 200 black newspapers.

Courtland Cox is the head of the SNCC Legacy Project of which Bob Moses served as vice chair. Here is excerpt from the SNCC Legacy Project about Bob Moses:

We honor his vision, tenacity, and fearlessness. His deep belief in people who find themselves in the socio/economic bottom made a fundamental difference for millions of his fellow Americans.

He was key to SNCC launching its voter registration campaign in Mississippi. That work in turn led to Freedom Schools, the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, the  Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Poor Peoples Campaign, and the  Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. And these not only began to alter the face of Mississippi, but also challenged the country to be true to the best in itself.

At the heart of these efforts was SNCC’s idea that people-ordinary people long denied this power-could take control of their lives. These were the people that Bob brought to the table to fight for a seat at it: maids, sharecroppers, day workers, barbers, beauticians, teachers, preachers and many others from all walks of life.

(SNCC Legacy Project)

Heather Gray
July 20, 2021
Justice Initiative

Bob Moses, Crusader for Civil Rights and Math Education, Dies at 86

Mr. Moses developed a reputation for extraordinary calm in the face of violence as he helped to register thousands of voters and trained a generation of activists in Mississippi in the early 1960s.

Bob Moses was teaching math at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx when scenes of Black people sitting at lunch counters across the South inspired him to become an activist.   Credit…Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

By Michael Levenson, Clay Risen and Eduardo Medina
July 25, 2021
New York Times

Bob Moses, a soft-spoken pioneer of the civil rights movement who faced relentless intimidation and brutal violence to register Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, and who later started a national organization devoted to teaching math as a means to a more equal society, died on Sunday at his home in Hollywood, Fla. He was 86.

His daughter Maisha Moses confirmed his death. She did not specify a cause.

Mr. Moses cut a decidedly different image from other prominent Black figures in the 1960s, especially those who sought change by working with the country’s white political establishment.

Typically dressed in denim bib overalls and seemingly more comfortable around sharecroppers than senators, he insisted that he was an organizer, not a leader. He said he drew inspiration from an older generation of civil rights organizers, like Ella Baker, a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and her “quiet work in out-of-the-way places and the commitment of organizers digging into local communities.”

“He exemplified putting community interests above ego and personal interest,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said in a phone interview. “If you look at his work, he was always pushing local leadership first.”

In 1960 he left his job as a high school teacher in New York City for Mississippi, where he organized poor, illiterate and rural Black residents, and quickly became a legend among civil rights organizers in a state known for enforcing segregation with cross burnings and lynchings. Over the next five years, he helped to register thousands of voters and trained a generation of organizers in makeshift freedom schools.

White segregationists, including local law enforcement officials, responded to his efforts with violence. At one point during a voter-registration drive, a sheriff’s cousin bashed Mr. Moses’ head with a knife handle. Bleeding, he kept going, staggering up the steps of a courthouse to register a couple of Black farmers. Only then did he seek medical attention. There was no Black doctor in the county, Mr. Moses later wrote, so he had to be driven to another town, where nine stitches were sewn into his head.

Another time, three Klansmen shot at a car in which Mr. Moses was a passenger as it drove through Greenwood, Miss., Mr. Moses cradled the bleeding driver and managed to bring the careening car to a stop.

Arrested and jailed many times, Mr. Moses developed a reputation for extraordinary calm in the face of horrific violence. Taylor Branch, the author of “Parting the Waters,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the early civil rights movement, told The New York Times in 1993 that “in Mississippi, Bob Moses was the equivalent of Martin Luther King.”

A mural of civil rights leaders, including Mr. Moses, second from left, was unveiled at Jackson State University in Mississippi on Saturday. Credit…Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

Although less well-known than some of his fellow organizers, such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis, Mr. Moses played a role in many of the turning points in the struggle for civil rights.

He volunteered for and later joined the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where he focused on voter registration drives across Mississippi. He was also a director of the Council of Federated Organizations, another civil rights group in the state.

Mr. Moses also helped to start the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, which recruited college students in the North to join Black Mississippians in voter registration campaigns across the state, according to the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

Their efforts that summer were often met with brutal resistance. Three activists – James E. Chaney, who was Black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner, who were white – were murdered in rural Neshoba County, Miss., just a few weeks after the campaign began.

That same year, when Black people were excluded from the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., Mr. Moses helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought recognition as the state’s delegation instead.

Mr. Moses, King, Hamer and Bayard Rustin negotiated directly with Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, who was running for vice president. Although King favored a compromise in which the Freedom Party delegates would be given two seats alongside the all-white delegation, Mr. Moses and other Freedom Party leaders held out for full recognition.

Mr. Moses later recalled that he was in Mr. Humphrey’s suite at the Pageant Motel when Walter Mondale, Minnesota’s attorney general and head of the party’s credentials committee, suddenly announced on television that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had accepted the “compromise.”

“I stomped out of the room, slamming the door in Hubert Humphrey’s face,” Mr. Moses recalled in the book “Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project,” which he wrote with Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Mr. Moses called the convention a “watershed in the movement” because it showed that support from the party’s white establishment was “puddle-deep,” and he despaired over the possibility of building a biracial coalition that also bridged class divisions.

“You cannot trust the system,” he said in 1965. “I will have nothing to do with the political system any longer.”

Robert Parris Moses was born on Jan. 23, 1935, in New York City, one of three children of Gregory H. Moses, a janitor, and Louise (Parris) Moses, a homemaker.

In a 2014 interview with Julian Bond, Mr. Moses credited his parents with fostering his love of learning, recalling that they would collect books for him every week from the local library in Harlem.

He was raised in the Harlem River Houses, a public housing complex, and attended Stuyvesant High School, a selective institution with a strong emphasis on math. He played basketball and majored in philosophy and French at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.

He earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 1957 from Harvard University, and was working toward his doctorate when he was forced to leave because of the death of his mother and the hospitalization of his father, according to the King Institute. He moved back to New York, where he taught math at the private Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

Already active in the local civil rights movement, he left for Mississippi after seeing scenes in the news of Black people picketing and sitting at lunch counters across the South. The images “hit me powerfully, in the soul as well as the brain,” he recalled in “Radical Equations.”

His natural confidence and calm demeanor drew people to him, and he soon became something of a civil rights celebrity. He was a hero of many books on the movement, and an inspiration for the 2000 movie “Freedom Song,” starring Danny Glover.

Eventually the fame got to be too much – not only because it added to the stress of an already overwhelming task, but also because he thought it was dangerous for the movement. He resigned from the Council of Federated Organizations in December 1964 and from S.N.C.C. two months later. He was, he said, “too strong, too central, so that people who did not need to, began to lean on me, to use me as a crutch.”

Mr. Moses grew active in the movement against the Vietnam War, and in April 1965 he spoke at his first antiwar protest, in Washington, D.C. “The prosecutors of the war,” he said, were “the same people who refused to protect civil rights in the South” – a charge that drew criticism from moderates in the civil rights movement and from white liberals, who worried about alienating President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Not long afterward, he received a notice that his draft number had been called. Because he was five years past the age limit for the draft, he suspected it was the work of government agents.

Mr. Moses and his wife, Janet, moved to Tanzania, where they lived in the 1970s and where three of their four children were born. After eight years teaching in Africa, Mr. Moses returned to Cambridge, Mass., to continue working toward a Ph.D. in the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Moses is survived by another daughter, Malaika; his sons Omowale and Tabasuri; and seven grandchildren.

When his eldest child, Maisha, entered the eighth grade in 1982, Mr. Moses was frustrated that her school did not offer algebra, so he asked the teacher to let her sit by herself in class and do more advanced work.

The teacher invited Mr. Moses, who had just received a MacArthur “genius” grant, to teach Maisha and several classmates. The Algebra Project was born.

The project was a five-step philosophy of teaching that can be applied to any concept, he wrote, including physical experience, pictorial representation, people talk (explain it in your own words), feature talk (put it into proper English) and symbolic representation.

“He understood that the literacies necessary for the 21st century were very different from the ones needed in the Industrial Age,” Courtland Cox, a veteran civil rights leader and a friend of Mr. Moses, said in a phone interview.

By the early 1990s, the program had stretched to places including Boston and San Francisco, winning accolades from the National Science Foundation and reaching 9,000 children.

Mr. Moses teaching an algebra class at Lanier High School in Jackson, Miss., in 1999. His Algebra Project exposed teachers and students to the latest innovations in mathematics. Credit…AP Photo/Rogelio Solis

Mr. Moses saw teaching “math literacy” as a direct extension of his civil rights work in Mississippi.

“I believe that the absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961,” he wrote in “Radical Equations.”

In the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis touched off global protests against systemic racism and police brutality, Mr. Moses said that the country seemed to be undergoing an “awakening.”

“I certainly don’t know, at this moment, which way the country might flip,” Mr. Moses told The New York Times. “It can lurch backward as quickly as it can lurch forward.”

Groundbreaking Revolutionary Pan-Afrikan journalist, commentator, analyst, co-founder of The Black Commentator and founder of Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford, has passed on to the Honored Ancestors at the age of 71.  He and fellow Black Agenda Report columnist Bruce A. Dixon, who became an Ancestor in 2019, helped form the backbone of Black Agenda Report‘s no-holds-barred, straight-no-chaser analysis of White racism as well as the “Black Misleadership Class” as they relentlessly fought for the liberation and uplift of Afrikan People.  

Black Agenda Report columnist Margaret Kimberley announced that more details of his passing will be made available shortly, presumably on the Black Agenda Report Web site, https://blackagendareport.com.  Also, Bruce C. T. Wright wrote an appreciation for NewsOne, Glen Ford Dies: Black Agenda Report Founder, Veteran Journalist, Dead At 71 | NewsOne.  

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of two articles published this past week (June 17 and 18) by Justice Initiative, a human-rights advocacy organization founded by Heather Gray.  We occasionally share commentaries and articles from Ms. Gray as she consistently comments on issues of the day.  With the current wave of protests in Cuba and the right-wing commentaries being offered by the mainstream press, we wish to share the following seven video clips from Ms. Gray’s June 2014 visit to Cuba, to provide some of the human side of Cuban life, as well as the Afrikan influence on much of Cuba’s culture.

by Heather Gray
Justice Initiative
July 17, 2021

In 2014 I was fortunate to visit Cuba, thanks to the leadership of Prexy Nesbitt in Chicago. While there, under the guidance of “Making the Road,” we focused on the African culture in Cuba which, of course, is profound.  Given the recent attention on Cuba, I decided to yet again send out my videos of the trip. They are below. Enjoy!!!

(1) Visiting Cuba in June 2014 – Part I

(2)  “Learning from Sara Daisy” – Part II 

(3)  “Art & Religion” Part III

(4) Cuban Ambassadors on Cuba’s Assistance to African Liberation – Part IV

(5)  Sara dancing – Part V

(6) Havana Farmer’s Market – June 2014 – Part VI

(7) Making the Road – African Dancing in Cuba – Part VII

BY BRANKO MARCETIC
Jacobin
July 17, 2021

Richard Nixon, then Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, met with Cuba’s Fidel Castro on April 19, 1959, in Washington, DC.

For sixty years, the United States has aimed to strangle Cuba’s economy and inflict misery on the Cuban people. Blockades are methods of war – and it’s time for the war on Cuba to end.

“They always blame the United States,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on the Senate floor this week. “The embargo, the first thing they blame, it’s the embargo. ‘The embargo is causing all this.'”

Not long after the UN General Assembly voted for the twenty-ninth straight year to condemn the six-decade-long US embargo on Cuba – a 184-2 vote that pitted only the US and Israeli governments against the rest of the entire world – the country has erupted in massive protests over widespread food and medicine shortages. A chorus of voices, ranging from Bernie Sanders and other congressional progressives to former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have blamed the conditions on the long-standing US policy, and called for it to be finally lifted.

Regime-change advocates like Rubio have pushed back against this. For them, the embargo is irrelevant to what’s now happening in the country, which they claim instead is a product of “six decades of suffering under totalitarian socialism and communism.” Predictably, their preferred response to the current protests doesn’t involve ending the policy.

But the reality is that the US “embargo” – or blockade, more accurately – was designed to exacerbate scarcity and encourage social unrest in Cuba. For decades, the blockade has strangled the country’s economy and deprived Cubans of access to essentials like medical supplies, its success at creating misery only intensifying with the fall of the Soviet Union, the coronavirus pandemic, and four years of “maximum pressure” under President Trump.

____________
The US blockade was designed to exacerbate scarcity and encourage social unrest in Cuba.
____________

As eighty House Democrats told Joe Biden at the start of this year, “with the stroke of a pen,” he could undo Trump’s actions and “assist struggling Cuban families and promote a more constructive approach by promptly returning to the Obama-Biden administration policy of engagement and normalization of relations.” But this obvious course of action is the very least Washington should do. The US blockade has been a generations-long undeclared economic war on Cuba, one that has consistently failed even on its own terms while inflicting enormous pain on ordinary Cubans.

The Undeclared War

The US blockade on Cuba has been a key part of Washington’s long-standing war on the country, launched shortly after Fidel Castro led a revolution overthrowing the country’s US-backed military dictatorship in 1959.

Things didn’t start out entirely hostile. The Eisenhower administration publicly took a cagey wait-and-see attitude toward the new government. Meeting with Castro for three and a half hours, then-vice president Richard Nixon advised him, according to a post-meeting memo, “that it was the responsibility of a leader not always to follow public opinion but to help to direct it in proper channels, not to give the people what they think they want at a time of emotional stress but to make them want what they ought to have.” With a tinge of regret, Nixon recounted that Castro’s “primary concern was with developing programs for economic progress.”

By September that year, as Castro restricted private ownership of agricultural land and prepared to nationalize foreign-owned industry, the US ambassador to the country expressed “our serious concern at the treatment being given American private interests in Cuba.” The next month, president Dwight Eisenhower approved a program backing anti-Castro elements – including Cuban exiles launching raids on the country and, later, US-supplied sabotage and bombing campaigns – in the hopes that it would topple Castro and make him appear to have caused his own undoing.

____________
The US blockade has been a generations-long undeclared economic war on Cuba, one that has consistently failed even on its own terms while inflicting enormous pain on ordinary Cubans.
____________

By December, a CIA division head would advise that “thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.”

The Cold War gave this US mission extra urgency. Eisenhower warned the Soviets in 1960 that his administration wouldn’t tolerate “the establishment of a regime dominated by international communism in the Western hemisphere,” in line with long-standing Washington doctrine that the US government would intervene in countries in the hemisphere if they ran counter to US interests.

Hoping to stop the spread of “Castroism” and end it in Cuba, Washington pressured other Latin American countries to cut off diplomatic ties, travel, and arms shipments to the country, threatening to suspend military aid and other penalties to those who didn’t comply, eventually twisting enough arms to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States. After successfully pressuring European and Canadian banks to cancel and refuse loans to the Cuban government, what was termed a US “quarantine” of the country began in October 1960, barring all exports to Cuba, aside from food and medical supplies, and over the next few years adding all trade, imports, and even goods from third-party countries containing Cuban materials. By 1963, under John F. Kennedy, the blockade as we know it today was fully in place.

This was no small thing. A blockade – distinct from an embargo, by including imports and trying to coerce third-party countries – is a method of war that, under international law, is meant to only take place during armed conflict. It’s not for nothing that legal scholars have argued that the blockade of Cuba is a serious violation of international law, not least for the fact that it’s aimed explicitly at forcing a change in government. Even the US government’s own legal advisors determined in 1962 that it “could be regarded by Cuba and other Soviet bloc nations as an act of war.”

Just as Nixon would respond to the 1973 election of a socialist government in Chile by ordering the CIA to “make the economy scream,” US policymakers openly hoped impoverishing and starving the Cuban people would lead them to overthrow Castro. “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” one State Department official wrote in 1960, in order “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Eisenhower said it more plainly: “If they (the Cuban people) are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”

Tightening the Screws

As Cuba’s largest and closest trading partner, the United States produced an immediate impact on its economy when it ended trade. The share of Cuban exports going stateside plummeted from the more than 60 percent it stood at through the 1950s to less than 5 percent by 1961, while the roughly 70 percent of imports that entered the country from the United States by the end of the 1950s cratered at less than 4 percent. By 2018, a UN agency estimated the embargo had cost Cuba more than $130 billion over six decades, significant for a country whose average annual GDP is a mere fraction of that sum.

____________
Eisenhower said it more plainly: ‘If they (the Cuban people) are hungry, they will throw Castro out.’
____________

It was the Soviet bloc that kept Cuba’s economy afloat for decades, both through billions of annual subsidies and by filling the trade vacuum left by the United States, becoming responsible for 79 to 90 percent of Cuba’s overseas trade. From fuel, machinery, and parts, to fertilizers, pesticides, and even the fats used to make soaps, the resources that allowed life and the economy in Cuba to function normally flowed because of Cuba’s integration into a broader Communist camp.

The Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991 was the biggest of several shocks that hit the Cuban economy that decade, leaving it more vulnerable than ever to the US blockade. GDP nose-dived by 35 percent, while agricultural output and manufacturing capacity collapsed by 47 and 90 percent, respectively. Construction and passenger transportation plunged by more than 70 percent each, while food queues, hours of no running water, and blackouts became a regular part of life. With soap suddenly needing rationing, Cubans had to make do with four measly bars a year.

Smelling blood, US lawmakers moved in for the kill. When Cuban trade with US corporate subsidiaries sharply rose in the wake of the Soviet crack-up, US congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act the following year to bar the practice, over the objections of the European Community and other allies, leading to the cancellation of dozens of trade deals with the country. On top of this, the law banned the sale of food for the first time (later repealed, sort of) and created a licensing regime for medicine and medical equipment so onerous that it functionally served to end medical commerce with the country. US lawmakers, it seemed, had no problem with heavy-handed government interference in the private sector, so long as it was at the service of overthrowing a government they didn’t like.

The EU similarly objected to the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which took authority for the blockade away from the president and gave it to Congress, all but cementing it into place. Besides making revolution a prerequisite for lifting it, it further discouraged foreign investment into Cuba by, for instance, denying US visas to representatives of firms doing business with confiscated US property. This, even though a year later US military and intelligence agencies determined that “Cuba does not pose a significant security threat to the United States or other countries in the region,” and the Pentagon concluded the same thing a year after that.

____________
The American Association for World Health concluded in 1997 that the blockade had ‘dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of large numbers of ordinary Cuban citizens’ and ’caused a significant rise in suffering – and even deaths – in Cuba.’
____________

The results, as you might imagine, were brutal. After a yearlong investigation, the American Association for World Health concluded in 1997 that the blockade had “dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of large numbers of ordinary Cuban citizens” and “caused a significant rise in suffering – and even deaths – in Cuba” through “critical shortages of even the most basic medicines and medical hardware.”

The report painted a chaotic picture: increased disease as a result of more untreated water and less soap; ambulances, other emergency services, and health care facilities unable to function properly thanks to power outages and a lack of resources like fuel; high rates of anemia, iron deficiency, and undernourishment, the latter of which affected 22 percent of the population at one point; and hundreds of medicines out of reach or only sometimes available, made all the worse by pharmaceutical megamergers. Little surprise that 1994 saw similar civil unrest in Cuba as we’re seeing now.

These conditions were celebrated by the right-wing Heritage Foundation that year. Describing with relish reports of mothers turning to sex work, families subsisting on one meal a day, and the return of diseases like malaria, it urged the US government to keep the blockade in place until Castro’s government collapsed and to deny him a “much-needed safety valve” by turning away Cuban refugees. It casually noted the policy would likely lead to more repression for the Cuban people and possibly end in “bloodshed, armed conflict, and chaos,” before concluding, with no trace of irony, that “the United States must not abandon the Cuban people by relaxing or lifting the trade embargo.”

So, when Marco Rubio says today that “food, medicine and gas shortages are sadly nothing new in Cuba,” he’s right: modern history’s longest blockade has ensured these problems have been going on for a long time.

Economic Sabotage

That Cuba weathered all this is a testament to the benefits of what’s possible with a government that takes an active role during crises and seeks to guarantee economic security. With belt-tightening inevitable, the government launched a program of “humanistic austerity,” with major cuts to the state sector but increased health care and social spending, and food, clothing, and other goods rationed to prioritize vulnerable groups like pregnant women and the elderly.

____________
The Heritage Foundation noted US policy would likely lead to more repression for the Cuban people and possibly end in ‘bloodshed, armed conflict, and chaos.’
____________

Yet such temporary measures have their limits, as we’re seeing now. While Cuba’s economy is certainly plagued by serious issues separate from US policy, the ills being felt most acutely are overwhelmingly driven by two factors: the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy and the pandemic.

Over his four years in office, Trump signed more than two hundred directives aimed at making Cuba’s economy scream. He sharply restricted remittances (to one family member at a maximum of $1,000 per quarter) before effectively banning them outright. He also barred US travelers from carrying out any transactions with entities tied to the military and intelligence and security services, in practice an attack on both Cuba’s ability to draw foreign investment and its crucial tourism industry, given the heavy involvement of the military’s business conglomerate in, by one estimate, 60 percent of the economy. And he put sanctions on shipping companies and vessels transporting oil to Cuba from Venezuela, on top of an existing embargo on the country, which subsidized and supplied a third of Cuba’s oil consumption in 2019.

The impact was swift and clear. The targeting of Venezuela’s oil exports has led to more rationing of energy, shortages of personal hygiene products the government can’t afford while it buys fuel on the open market, and oxen replacing tractors on farms. Trump’s attacks on remittances led to the eventual closure of Western Union on the island, imperiling hundreds of thousands of Cuban families. And after an Obama-era uptick in tourism, Trump’s various restrictions on travel, including a 2019 cruise ban, saw tourist numbers drop for the first time in a decade, by 9.3 percent over 2018 to 2019, and nearly 20 percent over the year after that, with US visitors declining close to 70 percent.

On top of all this, the decline in both remittances and tourism deprived the country of key sources of hard currency. That’s caused the government’s further struggle in paying overseas creditors, hobbled its ability to import the 60 to 70 percent of its food supply it gets from overseas, and motivated its creation of the high-priced dollar stores that have been a core source of anger driving the current protests.

While it may be true the US blockade technically no longer applies to food nor prevents trade with other countries, Washington’s overlapping web of sanctions – by doing everything from depriving Cuba of oil and foreign-exchange currency to crippling its economy more generally and forcing tough trade-offs in overseas purchases – has effectively closed the door on both.

The Cuban state’s generous and long-term investment in health care and education means it was able to develop its own COVID vaccine – only to then face a shortage of syringes.

All of this would’ve been hard enough to navigate at the best of times. But in 2020, Cuba, like the rest of the world, saw its economy further devastated by the coronavirus pandemic that exacerbated every one of these problems: it brought tourism to a standstill, further strangled the entry of hard currency, worsened food shortages, and caused job losses that made Cubans ever more dependent on the foreign remittances Washington was determined to choke out. Over the year, the country saw its economy shrink 11 percent.

As the pandemic magnifies the devastation of the US blockade, the blockade has in turn made it harder for Cuba to handle the pandemic. In July 2020, a UN special rapporteur concluded the blockade was “obstructing humanitarian responses to help the country’s health-care system fight the COVID-19 pandemic.” Among other things, the blockade stopped medical aid and money transfers from overseas companies and humanitarian organizations, denied Cubans the ability to use Zoom, precluded the country’s purchase of ventilators, and caused a shortage of these and personal protective equipment (PPE), while blocking a donation of pandemic aid from China’s richest man.

Oxfam reports the blockade has had a “drastic effect on Cuba’s vaccine industry,” making it difficult to obtain the necessary raw materials. Even so, the state’s generous and long-term investment in health care and education means it was able to develop its own COVID vaccine – only to then face a shortage of syringes, the blockade making it difficult to buy them from manufacturers.

It’s the blockade, too, that has driven the pandemic’s resurgence on the island, a big driver of the current protests. The economic squeeze pushed a desperate Cuba to reopen the country to tourism in November, which, combined with shortages of PPE and a shortfall of 20 million syringes, led to a jump in cases. Still, it’s rich for the Rubios of the world to charge that “the regime’s disastrous COVID response is the predictable result of a corrupt government” as they beat the drums of regime change, when, even with Washington’s determined effort to sabotage Cuba’s pandemic recovery, its response – with 1,608 deaths as of July 12 – doesn’t even come close to the mass death of US citizens engineered by Rubio and his ilk during the pandemic.

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Over his four years in office, Trump signed more than two hundred directives aimed at making Cuba’s economy scream.
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Of course, none of this matters to Washington politicians who don’t think twice about casually starving and killing foreign people, whether by bombs or economic sanctions. But the irony is that the blockade has had a devastating effect on Cuba’s private sector, which is heavily dependent on tourism and on traveling to the US to buy materials. Nor is it particularly good for American industry either, with the blockade estimated to cost US businesses and farmers nearly $6 billion a year in export revenue.

Nor is it popular. For years, polling has shown a majority of Americans, even a fluctuating majority of Cuban Americans in South Florida, support ending the blockade, likely realizing that it’s both inhumane and, after nearly sixty years, ineffective.

Unfortunately, true to his Trump-lite approach to foreign policy, Biden has broken his campaign promises and is steadfastly continuing Trump’s Cuba policy, departing from the successful approach of the very Democratic administration he served in. Even as he “calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs,” Biden refuses to lift the Trump restrictions on remittances that more of those Cubans now depend on than ever.

Washington’s Handiwork

The unrest last week in Cuba cannot be fully understood outside the context of the blockade. None of this absolves the Cuban government over its repression of dissidents, or for the mistakes made in the course of the country’s economic management. But to put the stress on its “Soviet-style, centrally planned economy” and insufficient zeal in market reforms as the cause of the country’s economic woes, and not the more than half century of economic warfare waged by the world’s biggest power, is misleading to say the least.

Short of sadism and imperial hubris, there’s no good reason for the blockade to continue against a country that poses no threat to the United States, and which creates overwhelming misery for the ordinary people figures like Donald Trump and Joe Biden claim to stand with. And while removing it in full will be a heavy lift, requiring getting Congress on board, the president on his own could at least roll back the Trump policies he himself once acknowledged were an abominable failure.

Not doing anything will only drive home how hollow establishment lip service to human rights is.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer. He lives in Toronto, Canada.