By Luis Toledo Sande
The magnate who presides over the United States announces a new twist of the truly vile stick with which that imperialist power has been trying to strangle Cuba for more than six decades. Now he appears with an executive order to reinforce the blockade established—as one of his spokespeople brazenly acknowledged in April 1960—to provoke hardships that would cause the Cuban people to stop giving their majority support to the Revolution led by Fidel Castro.
The imperialists have been working on these plans ever since, and the “Republican” Donald Trump set out to reinforce them as soon as he first became president. He immediately halted the deceptive steps his predecessor, the “Democrat” Barack Obama, had announced, not to help Cuba, but to seek through more subtle means what the embargo had failed to achieve, and to prevent the embargo from further damaging the image of the United States.
As the organic representative of a violent and decaying empire, the thuggish and boastful Trump, in his plans against Cuba, returned to the path of ostensible force. He not only dismantled Obama’s announcements and reinstated the embargo in its most ruthless hostility but also bolstered it with more than 240 measures aimed at that end.
And these measures—revalidated by his successor, Joseph Biden, a “Democrat” like Obama—have been maintained and intensified since his return to the White House after the hiatus he tried to prevent with actions such as the storming of the Capitol, an ostensible attempt at nothing less than a civil war that today seems ever closer. Recently, emboldened by the pirate action perpetrated by forces of his imperialist army in Venezuela, he assumed the moment had come to further intensify the siege of Cuba.
He calculated that Cuba would fall once it lost Venezuela’s cooperation, and yet he tried to intimidate it with the bravado of demanding a pact with him before it was too late. But the example of the thirty-two Cubans who fell in an act of courageous resistance, which he could observe from afar from his lair at Mar-a-Lago in the company of some of his most detestable henchmen, would have already confirmed something he knew: the Cuban people are not to be trifled with. Faced with this reality, he announced a naval blockade to prevent Cuba from receiving oil and other essential resources.
Now he has chosen the mechanism with which he intends to dominate the world: his tariff war. To pursue other options, he knows he faces complications exacerbated by the economic downturn—not unrelated to his administration—the Epstein scandal, the violation—as seen in the assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its constitutional president—of laws and the prerogatives of Congress, and the protests within the United States itself against his paramilitary ICE detachment—which various voices call “Trump’s Gestapo”—resulting in the murders of white citizens, not just “racially inferior” immigrants.
Instead of a naval blockade, which would have costs, especially economic ones, detrimental to him and his ambitions of remaining in the White House, the man who believes himself not only to be President of the United States but also emperor of the world, announces another form of blockade, even more suffocating: an executive order to impose high tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba, an imposition that does not preclude military reprisals against those who disobey his orders.
Just as he—with some accomplices of his own ilk, especially Israel—has systematically mocked the almost unanimous vote against the blockade in the UN General Assembly, he feels empowered to impose his anti-Cuban will on other countries.
If those who should be supporting Cuba fail to do their duty, they will not only be effectively supporting the mobster who presides over the United States: they will be weaving—or reinforcing—the noose around their own necks. It is clear that the American leader, and he has said so himself, respects no law other than that of his own morality—that is, his complete lack of morality—and his deranged mind: one doesn’t need to be a psychologist or psychiatrist to see that he teeters between illness and shamelessness.
Cuba, which has faced challenges such as the near collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist bloc, has a long and rich history to continue honoring, a history further enriched by the example of its thirty-two sons who died in Venezuela. Rooted in this history, its path is clear: to remain faithful to its great founders, from Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to Fidel Castro, the originator of the “Homeland or Death. We Shall Overcome” motto that is the nation’s greatest inspiration, and including the towering figures of José Martí and Antonio Maceo.
In paying tribute to those who had given their lives for the freedom of Cuba, Martí exclaimed: “Move and rejoice, illustrious dead!—Before we falter in the endeavor to make the homeland free and prosperous, the South Sea will unite with the North Sea, and a serpent will hatch from an eagle’s egg!” And, setting the course for the struggle against those who would impede the triumph of that endeavor, Maceo declared: “Whoever attempts to seize Cuba will only gather the dust of its soil drenched in blood, if they do not perish in the fight.”
This country, which loves peace and has given ample proof of its ethical solidarity, is also ready to defend itself and defend justice. Those within or outside its borders who fail to do so will bear that guilt before history, and must prepare themselves for the raging, brutal monster to continue despising and humiliating them.
[ SOURCE: CUBA DEBATE ]
