As Cubans face blackouts, US-based activists organize material solidarity

Manolo De Los Santos of the People’s Forum discusses the solidarity efforts of the Let Cuba Live campaign

October 23, 2024 by Natalia Marques
Photo: Luis de Jesús

As the Cuban people continue to struggle under sweeping blackouts and a hurricane that has resulted in six deaths, the US continues its stranglehold on the socialist state in the form of drastic sanctions. US-based organizations, which include the New York City-based People’s Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Hatuey Project, have launched a donation campaign to get urgently needed humanitarian supplies, including food and generators, onto the island. These organizers also recently published an open letter in the New York Times, urging US President Biden to reverse devastating Trump-era sanctions on Cuba, including by removing Cuba off of the US’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. 

Next week, UN member nations will vote on their annual resolution to lift the US blockade against Cuba. Historically, UN states have voted nearly unanimously to end the blockade, to the deaf ears of the United States. Last year, 187 nations voted for a UN resolution to end the over-60-year-long blockade. The only states to vote against the resolution were the US and Israel. Ukraine was the only state to abstain.

Ahead of the UN vote, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs has released its annual report outlining the material effects of the blockade in numbers. According to the report, the cost of 25 days of the blockade are the funds necessary to meet the requirements of the country’s National List of Essential Medicines for one year. Damages as a result of the blockade are USD 421 million a month, more than USD 13.8 million a day, and more than USD 575,683 per hour.

Manolo De Los Santos, Executive Director of the People’s Forum, spoke to Peoples Dispatch regarding the cruel blockade and the responsibilities the people of the US have towards their neighbors.

Peoples Dispatch: Cuban officials, as well as solidarity activists across the world, have characterized the current situation in Cuba as one of the most challenging. What is currently happening on the island and what has made this situation so difficult? 

Manolo De Los Santos: Cuba has lived through over 60 years now of a cruel and quite brutal US blockade that has in many ways challenged its ability to develop the country. Its economy has to function almost under conditions of war, because that’s what the blockade is, essentially a declaration of war on the Cuban people and their economy. But I would say that the last six, seven years have seen this blockade being reinforced to the extent that many of Cuba’s state-run companies that allow for Cuba to import very basic essential goods, but also spare parts, and in many cases, fuel, all of a sudden were sanctioned by the Trump administration in an attempt to limit the solidarity between Cuba and Venezuela, as Trump was heavily focused on undermining the presidency of Maduro in those years. 

Fast forward to 2024, you have a situation where, after years of not being able to renovate or bring in spare parts to fix the infrastructure, the power grid of Cuba’s national electrical system, and with the inability to import fuel at large scale, Cuba is forced into a situation of a blackout.

Even in the worst moments of the special period in the early nineties, this didn’t happen, for the country to face such an extended period of electrical power cuts. 

What’s happening now is a perfect storm created by the US government. The White House says it has no responsibility. But in all reality, when you look at every aspect of the factors that lead to this crisis, to the severe energy crisis, you realize there’s the hand of the US in both preventing Cuba from buying fuel, preventing it from being able to hire ships to bring fuel, preventing Cuba from getting spare parts, preventing Cuba from accessing the banks, to make financial transactions, to cover the costs of these things. It’s all a perfect storm in which the hands of the Cubans are tied in order to be able to defend themselves.

PD: Tell us about the Let Cuba Live campaign. Why are activists in the US standing in solidarity with Cuba as it faces sanctions and blockade? What do you seek to achieve with this campaign? What will the funds go towards? 

MS: For us in the United States, we have a deep sense of responsibility to what’s happening to the Cuban people. We feel a responsibility because it is our government, both Democrats and Republicans, who have consistently taken a warlike attitude towards Cuba. Instead of opening the doors to more normalization of relations, Trump and now Biden have continued on a path of maximum pressure, with the only intent to overthrow the Cuban revolution.

This campaign of maximum pressure, as we’ve said, has wreaked havoc on the Cuban people. So how can we see that happening and stand on the sidelines? I think we have a deep responsibility to both denounce it politically, to raise our voices, to organize people, to oppose the state sponsors of terrorism designation. But I think we also have a material responsibility to actually help ordinary Cuban people withstand the onslaught of US foreign policy.

If we see our neighbors going hungry, we see our neighbors not being able to get medicine and we see our neighbors in the dark, don’t we feel a sense to respond to their needs? That’s what we’re doing now. We have to engage politically. We have to raise our voices. We have to denounce the US blockade, but we also have to put something in their hands.

I think that’s a way of doing more than showing solidarity. It’s a way of actually building real relations, a real sense of what it means to be neighbors despite this awful US policy. 

PD: Biden is on the campaign trail right now, positing that his party is different from Trump in every way. Yet few are perhaps aware that he maintained almost every single crushing Trump-era policy against Cuba. Why has Biden refused to set himself apart from Trump in regard to these policies? Why is the US government so dead-set on keeping its sanctions against Cuba? 

MS: Well, it’s all a bit dumbfounding, to be honest, because President Biden was part of President Obama’s team when Obama led in 2014 a first wave of normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States. This wave carried a lot of hope for both sides. There was an expectation that this period would open new possibilities in terms of how both countries could respect each other as mutually sovereign and independent countries. 

Trump then obviously comes in, imposes 243 sanctions, puts Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, and takes this very extreme position towards Cuba. Many people voted for Biden expecting that he would reverse this, that he would honor the legacy of his previous Democratic president. But reality has shown that Biden, like every other US president since 1959, has a zero sum mentality of the Cuban revolution, that it must be overthrown by all means. The US has seen in Cuba’s difficult moments the opportunity to further tighten the noose on Cuba.

Obviously, that hasn’t worked to the extent that the US would hope, because despite the noose being tightened on Cuba, the Cuban people haven’t given up on their independence, they haven’t given up their sovereignty, they haven’t given up their political project and their democratic process that they’ve designed and they’ve made a choice to build. 

What happens now? If Kamala were to win, would she actually maintain Biden’s war-like attitudes or try to go back to the Obama period? It’s so hard to know. I think ultimately there is a very extreme right-wing shift in US foreign policy by both parties. No candidate up to this point has proposed anything meaningful that would change the character of relations between the US and Cuba, or the US and Latin America as a whole.

PD: In that vein, as we are approaching presidential elections in the US, what can we expect from each major establishment candidate in terms of Cuba policy?

MS: Cuba has consistently proposed a meaningful dialogue with the US government, regardless of who’s in power, regardless of whether they are a Democrat or Republican. Cuba has been willing to speak as an independent, sovereign country with any government in the United States. They have nothing to fear. 

In fact, they have constantly put the proposal on the table of the US, and it has yet to be really reciprocated. Because at the end of the day, the US government, any of these administrations, has not taken Cuba seriously as an independent state, and always put preconditions for these conversations in these negotiations.

Obviously, Harris and Trump are not necessarily the same as candidates, but in many ways, their foreign policy outlooks, whether through so-called diplomacy or war, tend to focus heavily on the US imposing its military, political, economic and financial hegemony on the rest of the world. In a world like that, it is hard for countries like Cuba to exist.

Beyond Cuba, none of the candidates have posed any serious questions as to why the US should continue to sanction a third of the world’s countries. That  leaves a lot to be desired.