The war on Cuba has increasingly become a war on Cuban children

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR>

+ Like many of the rest of you, I suppose, I’ve been thinking a lot about Cuba since Trump and Rubio began starving the little island of oil, as their predecessors, back to JFK, had starved it almost all other forms of trade, and are now threatening an invasion. It struck me how much revolutionary Cuba is admired by almost all colonized people on the planet (excepting some rigidly doctrinaire Marxists who continue to profess the Cuban revolution, along with the Nicaraguan and Zapatistan, was “premature”). I was reminded of wandering the streets of Cardiff a couple of years ago and coming across this restaurant…

The Welsh know what it’s like to be under the boot of an imperial power for centuries and venerate Cuba, as they once did the US, for freeing its people from their colonizer’s yoke and setting an example for the world’s poor and exploited. Let’s hope some of these countries come to Cuba’s aid and defense when it needs it most, as Cuba (and its doctors, nurses, civil engineers and military advisors) has gone to the aid of others.

+ A new YouGov poll shows that Americans oppose a war with Cuba by a margin of 65% to 15% and that two-thirds believe Trump’s war on Iran has harmed the US’s standing in the world.

+ The economic war on Cuba, which has been going on in one form or another for more than six decades, has increasingly become a war waged on Cuban children. Since Trump and Biden reimposed and broadly extended the economic sanctions and embargo on Cuba that Obama had eased, Cuba’s infant mortality rate, which in 2008 was lower than that of the US, has risen by 148 percent. This is infanticide committed through a policy of economic strangulation.

COUNTERPUNCH