Communist Party USA
The recent protest demonstrations in Cuba, which started on July 11, have set off a frenzied anti-communist response in the United States, from politicians of both the Republican and Democratic parties and from both right-wing and supposedly “centrist” and even “liberal” sectors of the press and media. One Florida Republican congressman called for the Cuban national leadership to be “executed.” President Biden called Cuba a “failed state.” Even before the protests, Senators Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) renewed the offensive of the U.S. right against Cuba’s much-lauded international health solidarity missions, which have been praised in the many countries where they have helped to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, repeating the canard that the missions constitute “human trafficking.” The fact that there have been much larger pro-revolutions demonstrations in Cuba in response to the anti-government protests has been ignored or distorted, with enemies of the socialist government even mislabeling images of the pro-revolution demonstrations as being anti-government. The major bourgeois media in the United States have covered the recent situation the way they always have: to downplay or ignore completely the role of the 60-year blockade of Cuba by the United States in creating economic difficulties for the Cuban people, and to attribute any disturbances to “failed socialist policies” by an “authoritarian” and “repressive regime.” Not only that, but supposedly professional journalists and editorial commentators give credence to versions of events peddled by discredited right-wing hacks and ideologues. Media outlets forget the much larger protests against right-wing governments. When there are protests in Cuba, major U.S. press and media outlets forget the much larger protests against right-wing governments in many, many other countries, including Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, and Brazil, all of whose governments are subordinate to U.S. imperialist interests. In Colombia, for instance, the right-wing government of President Ivan Duque, closely allied with the United States, has unleashed a wave of violent repression against all opponents, repression which has cost the lives of many labor, indigenous, youth, and other leaders. There are other manifestations of the corporate media’s propensity to ignore wider context when they are out to do a hatchet job on Cuba or other left-wing-led nations. For example, there has been an uptick in the number of cases of Covid-19 in Cuba (as in the United States and everywhere) in recent days, and this is trumpeted by the right-wing enemies of the Cuban Revolution as proving that the pandemic has been “mismanaged” by the Cuban government. In fact, Cuba has done far better than any of the other poorer countries dominated by imperialism in mobilizing its national resources to fight the pandemic, while its access to vital medications and medical equipment (including syringes needed to provide the population with anti-Covid vaccinations) has been severely harmed by the U.S. economic blockade. The reasons for economic difficulties in Cuba are also distorted. This writer was in Cuba twice: in 1995 and 2017. At the time of my first visit, Cuba had been hard hit by the ending of favorable trade arrangements with the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries. Health care and educational institutions were still operating successfully, but there were serious scarcities and electrical blackouts caused by lack of fuel supplies. The United States government took advantage of Cuba’s difficulties by intensifying its attempts at economic strangulation of the island nation by passing the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996. These acts, along with sundry executive orders, had the purpose of strangling the Cuban economy by making it risky for foreign companies to do business…
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The current attacks on socialist Cuba, and our response