By Medea Benjamin
June 16, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - A team of 85 Cuban doctors
and nurses arrived in Peru on June 3 to help the Andean
nation tackle the coronavirus pandemic. That same day,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced another
tightening of the sanctions screws. This time he
targeted seven Cuban entities, including Fincimex, one
of the principal financial institutions handling
remittances to the country. Also targeted was Marriott
International, which
was ordered to cease operations in Cuba, and other
companies in the tourism sector, an industry that
constitutes 10 percent of Cuba’s GDP and has been
devastated globally by the pandemic.
It seems that the more Cuba helps the world, the more
it gets hammered by the Trump administration. While Cuba
has endured a U.S. embargo for nearly 60 years, Trump
has revved up the stakes with a “maximum pressure”
strategy that includes more than 90 economic measures
placed against the nation since January 2019. Josefina
Vidal, Cuba’s ambassador to Canada,
called the measures “unprecedented in their level of
aggression and scope” and designed to “deprive the
country of income for the development of the economy.”
Since its inception, the embargo has cost Cuba well over
$130 billion dollars,
according to a 2018 estimate. In 2018-2019 alone,
the economic impact was $4 billion, a figure that
does not include the impact of a June 2019 Trump
administration travel ban
aimed at harming the tourist industry.
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While the embargo is supposed to have
humanitarian exemptions, the health sector has not
been spared. Cuba is known worldwide for its
universal public healthcare system, but the embargo
has led to shortages of medicines and medical
supplies, particularly for patients with AIDS and
cancer. Doctors at Cuba’s National Institute of
Oncology have had to
amputate the lower limbs of children with cancer
because the American companies that have a monopoly
on the technology can’t sell it to Cuba. In the
midst of the pandemic, the
U.S. blocked a donation of facemasks and
COVID-19 diagnostic kits from Chinese billionaire
Jack Ma.
Not content to sabotage Cuba’s domestic health
sector, the Trump administration has been attacking
Cuba’s international medical assistance, from the teams
fighting coronavirus today to those who have travelled
all over the world since the 1960’s providing services
to underserved communities in 164 countries. The U.S.
goal is to cut the island’s income now that the
provision of these services has
surpassed tourism as Cuba’s number one source of
revenue. Labeling these volunteer medical teams “victims
of human trafficking” because part of their salaries
goes to pay for Cuba’s healthcare system, the Trump
administration convinced Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil to
end their cooperation agreements with Cuban doctors.
Pompeo then applauded the leaders of these countries for
refusing “to
turn a blind eye” to Cuba’s alleged abuses. The
triumphalism was short lived: a month after that quote,
the Bolsonaro government in Brazil
begged Cuba to resend its doctors amid the pandemic.
U.S. allies all over the world, including in Qatar,
Kuwait, South Africa, Italy, Honduras and Peru have
gratefully accepted this Cuban aid. So great is the
admiration for Cuban doctors that a global campaign has
sprung up to
award them the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Trump administration is not just libelling
doctors, but the whole country. In May, the State
Department
named Cuba as one of five countries “not cooperating
fully” in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The main
pretext was the nation’s hosting of members of
Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN). Yet even the
State Department’s own press release notes that ELN
members are in Cuba as a result of “peace
negotiation protocols.”
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called the
charges dishonest and “facilitated by the ungrateful
attitude of the Colombian government” that broke off
talks with the ELN in 2019. It should also be noted that
Ecuador was the original host of the ELN-Colombia talks,
but Cuba was asked to step in after the Moreno
government abdicated its responsibilities in 2018.
The classification of Cuba as “not cooperating” with
counterterrorism could lead to Cuba being placed on the
U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list, which carries
tougher penalties. This
idea was floated by a senior Trump administration
official to Reuters last month. Cuba had been on
this list from 1982 to 2015, despite that fact that,
according to former State Department official Jason
Blazakis, “it was legally determined that Cuba was
not actively engaged in violence that could be defined
as terrorism under any credible definition of the word.”
Of course, the United States is in no position to
claim that other countries do not cooperate in
counterterrorism. For years, the U.S. harbored Luis
Posada Carriles, mastermind of the bombing of a Cuban
civilian airplane in 1976 that killed 73 people. More
recently, the U.S. has yet to even comment on the April
30 attack on the Cuban Embassy in Washington D.C., when
a man fired on the building with an automatic rifle.
While there are certainly right-wing ideologues like
Secretary Pompeo and Senator Rubio orchestrating Trump’s
maximum pressure campaign, for Trump himself, Cuba is
all about the U.S. elections. His hard line against the
tiny island nation may have
helped swing the Florida gubernatorial campaign
during the midterm elections, yet it’s not clear that
this will serve him well in a presidential year.
According to conventional wisdom and polls, younger
Cuban-Americans – who like most young people, don’t tend
to vote in midterms – are increasingly skeptical of the
U.S. embargo, and overall, Cuba
isn’t the overriding issue for Cuban-Americans.
Trump won the Cuban-American vote in 2016, but Hillary
Clinton took between 41 and 47% percent of that
electorate,
significantly higher than any Democrat in decades.
As an electoral strategy, these are signs that
Trump’s aggression towards Cuba may not pay off. Of
course, the strategy might not be just about votes but
also about financing and ensuring that the
Cuban-American political machinery is firmly behind
Trump.
The strategy has certainly not paid off when it comes
to achieving the goal of regime change. The Trump
administration is arguably farther from achieving regime
change in Cuba now than the U.S. has ever been in over
60 years of intervention. During Trump’s tenure, Cuba
calmly transitioned from the presidency of Raul Castro
to that of Miguel Díaz-Canel. In 2019, Cuban voters
overwhelmingly ratified a new constitution. These
aren’t signs of a country on the brink of collapse.
All Trump has achieved is making life more difficult
for the island’s 11 million inhabitants, who, like
people all over the world, have been battered by the
economic impact from coronavirus. Tourism has collapsed.
Income from remittances has tanked (both because of new
U.S. restrictions and less income in the hands of the
Cuban diaspora). Venezuela, once a major benefactor, is
mired in its own crisis. But Cuba’s economy, which was
forecast to contract by 3.7% before the pandemic hit,
has been through worse, particularly during the 1991 to
2000 economic crisis known as the “special period” after
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A change in the White House would bring some relief,
although Joe Biden has staked a rather ambivalent
position, saying he would restore relations as President
Obama did, but adding that
he was open to using sanctions as punishment for
Cuba’s support to the Venezuelan government.
It’s clear that from now until November, and perhaps
for four more years, the Trump administration will
pummel its island neighbor. Cuba will continue to seek
global condemnation on the blockade (the
2019 UN vote was 187 against vs 3 in favor—the U.S.,
Brazil and Israel) and continue to show what a good
neighbor looks like. It responded to these latest
provocations in the way that only Cuba does: with more
global solidarity, sending Covid-19 healing brigades to
Guinea and Kuwait a day after the June 3 round of
sanctions. A total of 26 countries now have Cuban
medical personnel caring for their sick.
That is the kind of goodwill that money just can’t
buy and it greatly presents a stark contrast to the
Trump administration’s shameful behavior during the
pandemic. Back in March, as Cuban doctors arrived in
Italy, former Ecuadorian President
Rafael Correa tweeted: “One day we will tell our
children that, after decades of movies and propaganda,
at the moment of truth, when humanity needed help at a
time when the great powers were in hiding, Cuban doctors
began to arrive, without asking anything in return.”
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of
the peace group CodePink. Her latest book is Kingdom
of the Unjust:
Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection
(OR
Books, September 2016).
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