“If your skin is black or brown, my friend, you can be questioned or deported as soon as you are seen on the streets of Minneapolis,” Bruce Springsteen
“This is not just about Venezuela. The real objective is Cuba.” I heard this reflection from Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute and one of the most lucid minds of our time, just a couple of weeks ago in a conference we shared.
His words have become a premonition after Trump’s executive order to prohibit the shipment of oil to the island and strictly prohibit anyone from daring to help them. Terrifying, yes, but it gives me hope that he announced the brutal siege of Cuba the same week that hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets against their domestic authoritarianism, encouraged by one of Springsteen’s most beautiful songs composed to support them and to denounce Trump’s neo-fascist brutality.
I find a thread, which weaves itself, that unites the streets of Minneapolis and Havana: the fight and resistance against contemporary fascism and I am not using a metaphor. At all. I intend to argue to you that “contemporary fascism” is what Trump’s threat to Cuba is, after the aggression against Venezuela: a MAGA version of the Habitatthe German Living Space, the guiding principle of the Nazis that served as an excuse to destroy the world: the supremacist idea that Germany needed to expand territorially towards eastern Europe to guarantee resources, cheap labor and build the Great Reich.
An updated replica of that Libensraum It is the Trumpist slogan “This is our hemisphere” that Marcos Rubio, who, let us not forget, is one of the promoters of the genocide in Gaza, replicated as an order. Perhaps from there he learned what he intends to impose on Cuba by blocking all oil to the island: what it is about is provoking a humanitarian crisis.
My Cuban friends warn me that the situation is serious. The island has oil for weeks and without energy it is very difficult for anything to work. Trump’s criminal intention is the economic suffocation of a rebellious people. Pure Empire.
It seems extraordinarily important to me to clarify that they are not doing this because the US is strong, but precisely the opposite. Its loss of economic hegemony, especially in Southeast Asia, makes it act like the wounded bear and seeks, at least, to impose its rate of profit in a Latin America that it seeks to domesticate to the point of coloniality.
This statement is not my interpretation, it is written black on white in the US War Department’s National Defense Strategy document that I recommend you read because it is disbelieving. In that supremacist way of thinking, Cuba is the enemy, the rebellious island, the one that will not accept Washington’s orders, the one that gives hope to others, the one that, if it has learned anything in 60 years of blockade, it is to resist. Cuba is the resistance.
I still remember some words that Julio Anguita said years ago when asked about Cuba and that today I want to rescue them. With the security that having principles gave him, he made it clear that: “As long as there is a pirate like the United States, violating international law and squeezing a small nation called Cuba, Commander Fidel and I, in the same trench.”
I could subscribe to Julio’s words from then, like so many others, and yet today is more serious. Trump’s executive order to besiege Cuba, isolate it energetically and threaten anyone who dares to help them is of unprecedented brutality: it seeks to provoke a humanitarian crisis in Cuba with the cowardly cruelty of those who besiege it and the connivance, even more cowardly, of those who do not stop them.
“It is time for Europe to stop being complicit [de Trump]it’s time to have a backbone. It is time to have principles, to not accept this complicity. They submit: I should have brought a bunch of knee pads for the world leaders. It’s pathetic.” The words and the anger are from the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, at the Davos Forum, embarrassed by the level of submission found there towards Donald Trump.
Faced with this, in front of them and because their outrage against international law is beginning to be constant, we must not let Trump besiege Cuba with impunity. Whoever writes to you, like that governor, does not expect much from the people who walk through Davos, but we must demand that the Government of Spain firmly condemn the aggression and that European governments act as if they had a backbone and an ounce of pride.
Even so, I have no doubt that rebellion and solidarity with Cuba are found outside the palace. In the streets, workplaces, universities, forums, solidarity movements and putting pressure on us from all possible places, even if only a little, from these modest lines in a brave newspaper.
Cuba is resistance and hope. It has always been, even beyond its beautiful coasts, throughout Latin America and the world: it is and has been an example of resistance and solidarity. Cuba is not alone, and although in the corridors of power in our old Europe there are more knee pads than people with courage, outside of them, we experience it with Palestine, there are many citizens fed up with obedience to the tyrant.
In front of Trump, Cuba and I in the same trench and it is from that place that I convey to you the call of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba:
“We call on the intellectuals of the world to denounce the danger represented by this new threat that will cause incalculable human damage to the Cuban people. Let us use the weapons of reason and the art that unites us to denounce Yankee imperialism and build a civilized world without wars.”
Once again, Cuba is not alone.
