Solidarity with Cuba

Solidarity with Cuba

Speech given by Drake Myers, member of the Anti-War Committee, on July 31, 2022

Thank you, I respect everyone here so much.  I don’t want to take up too much time. Thanks for letting me speak and the Anti-War Committee is proud to come to these events and help car marshall.  And thanks to the Cuba Committee for hosting the Cuba Film Festival a month ago now.  Adam and I went to every single movie, to win the perfect attendance award, so really thank you for that selection. It was really amazing. I just want to share a story that shows why we as anti-imperialists stand in solidarity with Cuba against the blockade.  I read about some of this in a Vijay Prashad article from 2017 and from other places.

He compared how Hurricane Irma affected Cuba and Puerto Rico. One of them is independent of America and the other is a colonial possession. Something like half of Americans living in the states don’t even know Puerto Ricans are citizens. You know, the flags are even almost the same, my friend whose family is from Puerto Rico we went drinking and came to my apartment and he pointed to the Cuban flag that I have from these caravans and he was like, “Nice Puerto Rican flag” but anyway it’s an easy mistake to make. Just the red and blue are switched. But ok so the main point of the article is that the two island’s responses to the horrible Hurricanes of 2017 are instructive about the differences between Cuba and the American model.

Irma was a terribly destructive hurricane which had already destroyed 95% of St Martin, an island there that’s half under French colonial control and half under Dutch.

So before Hurricane Irma hit Cuba, the people knew it was coming and they have these committees for the defense of the revolution, which is a network of neighborhood committees that support their neighborhoods, they organized in every city and the province Camaguey was hit especially hard, hundreds of houses were destroyed. But basically the committees were able to prepare people in many ways, but one big one is that they knew the electricians in their different neighborhoods, and had them all immediately dislocate the power lines and protect parts of the infrastructure before the Hurricane hit. So that when the hurricane came and pushed the power lines down, everything was shut off and when the storm cleared within two days the power was back on. A lot of the electrical infrastructure there was and is in a bad shape because of the blockade, but just two days they got it back up.

In Puerto Rico, which was not even hit directly by Irma, for almost a year there was no power, and the second Hurricane Maria that came by combined with that they had something like 3,000 DEAD. In Cuba it was a couple dozen, but in Puerto Rico 3,000 and then President Trump, who’s their president, went there, denied the deaths, and you remember the disgusting pictures where he was throwing paper towels. But the people of Puerto Rico had no way to prepare their communities or to protect the power lines. They were waiting for electricians to come from US corporations, they couldn’t shut it off as just citizens or neighborhood groups because that would be tampering with private property. Cuba had it on two days later, Puerto Rico it took a year.

 But the people of Puerto Rico had no way to prepare their communities or to protect the power lines. They were waiting for electricians to come from US corporations, they couldn’t shut it off as just citizens or neighborhood groups because that would be tampering with private property. Cuba had it on only two days later, Puerto Rico it took a year.

Cuba is a country where the well-being of people is put ahead of private property and you see that also with COVID or housing or healthcare. So the government of Cuba paid like 50% to 100% for damages to people’s homes after the Hurricane.

These storms will just get worse as we all know, and the Cubans desperately need the blockade to end, and the Puerto Ricans want an end to their situation of exploitation, too. You know, it’s Hurricane season once again right now, and the US system is still forcing privatization on the electric grid and tens of thousands are protesting in Puerto Rico and New York City right now against LUMA Energy, the company with the energy monopoly there. More and more people there are joining the fight against US imperialism and that’s certainly what the Anti-War Committee is all about and the Cuban Revolution, too. The people there can see they’re being screwed, the electric bills have had their prices hiked there 7 times since 2021 already. Maybe the Puerto Rican Revolution begins with this fight against LUMA Energy, you know, no one knows the future, but Cuba serves as an example to us all that things can be done differently and that there’s nothing inevitable about the tragedy of the Hurricanes of 2017.

Thanks for listening everybody, let’s follow the example of the Cuban Revolution and keep fighting and fighting. The blockade must be ended as soon as possible to allow their system to flower and protect them from the upcoming climate catastrophes.

¡Cuba Sí, Bloqueo No!