The Let Cuba Live donation campaign in the United States aims to send solar panels to keep hospitals running and save lives on the island amidst the tightened blockade imposed by President Donald Trump.
The campaign, a collaborative effort involving the New York-based organization The People’s Forum, seeks urgent relief from the situation created by Trump’s executive order of January 29, which declared a national emergency regarding Cuba and imposed a blockade on oil imports.
“Trump’s fuel blockade is trying to paralyze Cuba,” The People’s Forum said in a public message on X.
“Don’t let them get away with it. Help us send solar panels to keep hospitals running and save lives. Trump can’t block the sun! Long live Cuba!”
U.S. president Donald Trump has threatened coercive tariffs on countries that directly or indirectly defied the measure and sold fuel to the Caribbean nation. This action, which has extraterritorial reach, tightens the unilateral embargo imposed on Cuba more than 60 years ago.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during his trip to the Munich Security Conference in Germany, reiterated the hostile rhetoric toward Cuba in interviews with the press, stating, among other things, that the “Cuban regime” lacks a real economic policy and doesn’t know how to improve the daily lives of its people.
To which some users of X responded: “It’s a bit difficult to have an economic policy when tiny Cuba is living under sanctions from the US empire” and “More than 60 years of US sanctions, and they still claim the Cuban economy collapsed ‘on its own.’”
This week, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, denounced the Trump administration’s cruel and despotic oil embargo against Cuba.
“The U.S. oil embargo against Cuba is cruel and despotic,” the Democratic representative from Minnesota wrote, stating that “it is an economic war designed to strangle an island, where innocent civilians will pay with their lives to force regime change.”
“We must lift the embargo NOW,” demanded Omar, one of the leading voices of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing in the U.S. Congress.
Her social media post on Thursday was accompanied by an article published in The Wall Street Journal about the situation in Cuba following Trump’s order.
Another statement on Capitol Hill came from Jim McGovern, Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, who introduced a new bill to lift the embargo against Cuba.
HR 7521, the U.S.-Cuba Trade Act, would repeal or amend several decades-old laws that restrict trade, exchange, telecommunications, and travel with Cuba, he noted.
A similar bill, S. 136, was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Democratic Representatives Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
He further warned that this economic embargo “is not only absurdly ineffective, but counterproductive and harms precisely (…) ordinary people and their families who are denied food, medicine, and basic necessities.”
On February 3, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy signed the decree establishing the blockade against Cuba. Four days after that order was issued, Washington’s illegal and inhumane policy became official, a policy that remains the longest-running unilateral embargo in history against any country.
[ SOURCE: PRENSA LATINA ]
