The truth on the other hand, is the unshakable reality that has driven every sanction, every sabotage attempt, and every assassination plot since 1959: Cuba is a threat only to an idea. It is a threat to the imperial doctrine that a small, poor nation in America’s ‘backyard’ must not be allowed to choose socialism, to provide free healthcare and education, and homes to live without the permission of Washington.
For this sin of self-determination, the crime of building a society where capital is not god, Cuba has been punished with the most enduring economic siege in modern history. This is not an ‘embargo’, which I consider to be a sterile, political term. It is a total blockade, designed to constrict and cripple. It is enforced by a plethora of laws with names like the Helms-Burton Act, which terrorises foreign companies from trading with the Island and allows the US to seize ships in international waters. Its goal, as US politician Robert Torricelli once admitted, was to…
‘Wreak havoc’.
The sanctions really should have ended when Castro died at the latest, but I still won’t call Cuba a socialist country. It’s a communist one. It’s under a high amount of control. You’ll get thrown in prison for criticism, internet access is limited, and not everyone is on an equal footing there. Communist or not, the sanctions are still completely bullshit.
What a child like view of politics
good grief please learn what the words you’re throwing around actually mean before you use them
your comment means literally nothing because you don’t know what socialism and communism even are
Yes, I agree, that the sanctions are bullshit. You’re just a little confused about the terms socialism and communism, no wonder, since they are often used wrongly. So communism is defined as a classless, stateless society. No country ever claimed to be communist. Those you probably think of all claimed to be socialist (Soviet Union, China, Cuba,…). Socialist countries by definition want to become communist, but haven’t reached that end goal yet. Communism wouldn’t need to use force or control or prisons or police, because there wouldn’t be class conflict. It would be a completely free society.
Socialist countries like Cuba are not only attacked from the outside, but also from the inside, by people who want to hold on to the unjust privilege of being able to exploit other human beings. That’s why they still need a state to defend their freedom from those who would destroy it.
That’s the marxist definition of a state btw, the institutionalized weapons of class warfare which one class uses to suppress another. In a capitalist society, the opressor class uses the bourgeois state to suppress the majority. In a revolutionary society, the liberated people use a socialist state to suppress capitalist forces, who try to regain power by all means necessary and usually with infinite resources and support from other capitalist states.