Roberto Jorquera
July 26 marks the 51st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Barracks. The attack, led by Fidel Castro, is regarded in Cuba as the event that initiated the six-year struggle to oust the US-backed capitalist regime of Fulgencio Batista and the country's subsequent socialist revolution.
Since the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the US government has applied all sorts of measures in an attempt to overthrow Castro's revolutionary government. This has included an economic blockade that also punishes third parties if they attempt to trade with Cuba, travel restrictions on US citizens wanting to visit Cuba for personal, business or educational reasons, organising terrorist attacks that have killed at least 3000 Cubans assassination attempts on the country's revolutionary leadership as well as numerous military provocations through the illegal US military base in Guantanamo Bay.
The 100-year lease on this base expired in 2001. The Cuban government since 1959 has not accepted any royalties that it is entitled to under the 1901 Platt agreement for the US lease on the area. Washington refuses to negotiate the base's removal.
With these and many other provocations looming over the Cuban people, they have nevertheless been able to beat the odds and have established a society that has stood against the capitalist rampage that we see all over the world.
Cuba's population of 11 million people has access to some of the world's best health and educational facilities. The infant mortality rate is one of the world's lowest. According to World Health Organisation statistics, as of 2002 Cuba had a lower child morality rate than its immensely richer, northern capital neighbour.
Cuba continues to provide free medical services for its population and for thousands of people in Third World countries. It has also volunteered to provide free medical care for up to 3000 US citizens by sending Cuban doctors to treat the most marginalised sectors of US society.
Cuba has provided thousands of scholarships to medical students wanting to study at Cuba's world renowned medical schools.
Despite enormous US pressure, the Cuban government continues to defiantly oppose Washington's global imperialist agenda. It has been the most consistent and clear opponent of the US war on Iraq, and the most outspoken opponent of neoliberal globalisation. It continues to show solidarity with the people of the world that are campaigning against corporate greed and has shown in practice that another world is possible.
Miguel Alvarez Sanchez wrote in the May 2002 Cuba Socialista (the Cuban Communist Party's theoretical journal): "The blockade and the economic war have intensified, although there is increasing opposition to them inside the United States. The funds that are openly appropriated for financing subversion have increased which, they state, are only a small portion of those delivered covertly. Provocative actions are also carried out which infringe on the sovereignty of the Cuban state...
"All this is combined with the manipulation of the facts and a systematic and well articulated media campaign to create the conditions for significant sectors of the American and international public opinion to understand and accept 'the need' for military action against Cuba."
On July 1, the National Assembly of People's Power — Cuba's legislature — issued a statem4ent noting: "The empire plans to crush the Cuban nation and proclaims its intentions with insulting arrogance. It is intensifying the economic war, the internal subversion, the anti-Cuba propaganda and the pressures on the rest of the world designed to pave the way for a direct military intervention that would destroy the Revolution, end our independence and sovereignty and realise the old annexationist fantasy of seizing control of Cuba."
In some of its latest measures against Cuba, the US government has outlined its plans to set up a counterrevolutionary "transitional government" in Cuba. In a 450-page document released on May 6, the US government makes it clear that it cannot accept the example that Cuba sets of a society based on the needs of working people rather than the profit-driven interests of big business.
According to the Cuban National Assembly statement: "One of the first tasks of the so-called 'transitional government' would be to restore their properties to the former exploiters, including houses and lands sought by the annexionist mafia that supported Batista in the past. The process would be quick and directed by Washington, which would set up a special mechanism to that end.
"This infamous document also specifically decrees the eviction of those living in reclaimed dwellings or unable to pay high rents, a return to the practice of arbitrarily evicting small farmers, as well as the dismantling of the farming cooperatives and restoration of the former latifundia.
"What was already foreseen in the Helms-Burton Act is now expressed in a more blatant form. All sectors of the economy would be privatised, while a permanent US government Committee for Economic Reconstruction, to be set up right away, would control the economy. The subsidies and price controls affecting goods and services supplied to the public would be abolished.
"The social security and welfare system would be dismantled and commitments to pay benefits and pensions would be repudiated. Health-care and education services would be privatised."
The US plan would amount to "a return to capitalism in its most brutal form, under the yoke of a foreign power", the statement added.
The release of the US plan is a clear sign that Washington is stepping up its efforts to achieve "regime change" in Cuba. In response, the Cuban people have implemented measures to overcome any such direct aggression.
Armando Hart, director of the Jose Marti Program Office, has warned of the dangers of this diabolical annexationist plan not only for Cuba, but for the entire world. "Be careful, Mr Bush", Hart affirmed, adding: "Cuba is not alone; don't go looking for another Vietnam in the Caribbean in the 21st century."
President Fidel Castro summed up the situation when on July 1 during the discussion on the National Assembly statement he said: "We have an adversary powerful in technology and armaments, but a total orphan in terms of ideas. I am in no doubt that this empire is not going to have the duration of the Roman one; the rate and the velocity at which events are occurring in these times and the point that the planet has reached give me total certainty of that."
From Green Left Weekly, July 21, 2004.
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