When Cuba is under attack, what do we do? STAND UP! FIGHT BACK!
Speech given by Autumn Lake, member of the Anti-War Committee, on August 28, 2022 at the SCOTA Cuba Solidarity Caravan protest in Minneapolis
I am 31 years old. Growing up I was always told by my seniors that the economy used to be so much better for us, but for as long as I’ve been alive it’s consistently been jn decline. Every year that I was in school, I was told that there was something we couldn’t do anymore, or some resource that we no longer had, because of budget cuts. I’ve watched economic crisis after economic crisis unfold and I’ve seen working people take the brunt of it, losing jobs and homes in the process. In real time these past few months I’ve seen pantry staples jump in price to the point that trips to the grocery store are starting to become inaccessible for some working people.
There’s record amounts of wealth held in this country and yet every single day I drive past homeless encampments. Politicians in other countries, such as Chinese politician Zhang Meifang have used pictures of our own Minneapolis Police Department clearing these encampments to display the unique cruelty of the American system.
As anti-imperialists, we recognize that the US imposes this political and economic cruelty on Cuba as well. And while worsening conditions in the US are business as usual for the ownership class, the reason why the US has been trying to undermine the Cuban people for 60 years is that Cuba clearly shows that another way is possible. While people in the US deal with a system defined by cruelty that only intensifies over time, people in Cuba do not starve. They do not go homeless. They do not go without healthcare. 60 years of being denied access to the resources necessary to keep a country going and Cuba still has the most robust healthcare system in all of the Americas.
The US will continue to try to undermine this country that actually serves its own people until either it succeeds or collapses itself. And the US will feed the propaganda machine that tells millions of people here that Cuba is a uniquely oppressive place where the people desperately cry out for US intervention.
Here in the imperial core, we must push back against the cruelty that we all collectively face, and against the propaganda that makes people believe that Cuba’s system isn’t an alternative to that cruelty.
When Cuba is under attack, what do we do?
STAND UP! FIGHT BACK!
