Cuba: capitalism’s shame – Article by AKEL MEP Giorgos Georgiou
Saturday 17th July 2021, ‘Haravgi’ newspaper
Although more fake and directed than true, mainstream news reports about Cuba in recent days have built up a picture that portrays the country as a powder keg ready to explode at any moment. Absent from the grand plan of the picture presented to us are, of course, the hands holding both the matches and the fuse. But we all know who they belong to… They are the same hands that have been depriving the children of Cuba of milk and bread for 60 years. Now they pretend to care about Cuban children…
Right now, there’s more than enough dilemmas and hypocrisy going around. “You’re either with the killers or you’re with the victims” who are “rightly protesting, asking for the self-evident”. And we’re not talking about Trump’s Mafia hordes, but of Biden’s as well who are raging against Cuba from the beaches of Miami. We are talking about the Cuban people, who for decades now have been suffering the cruelty of the US economic blockade because the people of Cuba chose to take their fate into their own hands and build socialism in their homeland.
Cuba, like the rest of the world, is in the midst of a huge economic crisis caused by the pandemic. Despite the reforms that have been initiated by the Cuban government and, in particular, the ongoing process of modernisation and opening up, as demonstrated by the constitutional reforms in 2019, Cuba has been suffering the criminal consequences caused by the murderous US blockade that was illegally imposed 60 years ago.
The blockade has become more severe, and even more inhumane, during the pandemic, deliberately depriving the Cuban people of access to the supplies that are needed to confront this virus.
Those who are demanding “humanitarian intervention” deliberately underestimate the fact that, in the particularly harsh and adverse conditions created by the US blockade, Cuba has actually developed five vaccines against COVID-19, has guaranteed health care and services for its people and continues to combat the pandemic on its own. In addition, it has successfully carried out admirable humanitarian and internationalist missions in dozens of countries around the world to help the fight against the pandemic, even in EU countries. Really, has anyone forgotten that at the beginning of the pandemic the first initial reaction of most EU countries was to “close” their borders to their partners and engage in a unilateral race to find and retain needed medical equipment for themselves?
The Cuban experience of managing the pandemic has shown that when limited resources are allocated fairly and with the focus being on people and prevention, results can be achieved that were previously considered as unthinkable. And all this at a time when the “traumatized”, neoliberal cuts imposed on Western health systems were collapsing like a house of cards in the face of the pandemic.
Shame on you hypocrites of the so-called “Western free world”. Your servile cries for the “liberation” of Cuba echo everywhere, especially in Guantanamo Bay perhaps more deafeningly than anywhere else… At the same time as America and its systemic puppets are denouncing the Cuban government for human rights abuses and once again instigating and fermenting political destabilization in the country, they themselves are perpetuating in Guantanamo one of the biggest shameful actions in History…
Cuba is not alone!
Cuba mustn’t be alone!
