Dear Socialist Viewpoint,
PBS News Hour along with a professor from the Miami Cuban exile community, reported how Cubans were demonstrating for freedom nationwide. Rebelling against the economic hardship brought on by authoritarian communism. The Miami professor even blamed the Cuban government for not being able to provide Tylenol for their sick and languishing.
After the counter-revolutionary Russian Stalinist bureaucracy dropped its financial and material supports, the Cuban Communist Party was left with no choice but to work with international capital and develop a tourist industry. PBS News Hour allowed the gusano [Spanish for worm] Professor to say that the tourist industry was built to benefit the party. This is simply not the case.
Daycare centers, schools, and infra-structure needed to maintain a semblance of civilization had to be paid for. When the tourist industry brought luxury and good food, eye-witnessed by Cubans who live on rations and whatever they can wheel and deal out of the black market, it made Cuban citizens with no connection to the tourist industries pissed off. Fidel Castro answered this by saying that the tourist industry is solely to earn money for the island's social programs.
Remittances from the United States were cut off by the Trump administration. Dollars that were sent from the exiles helped Cubans weather the worst aspects of the blockade and Russian withdrawal of financial support.
The blockade was ratcheted up by the Trump Administration just in time for the COVID-19 outbreak.
If the Cubans think that driving the Cuban Communist Party from power will make their lives better, it will not. The tremendous wealth of the United States and the rest of the rich capitalist states will not be Cuba's future. It will be that of Columbia, Guatemala, Haiti. Theirs will be a world of food insecurity and high rents on their already decrepit housing.
International capitalism's dictatorship has turned our world, in some places, into a literal furnace incinerating our environment. The U.S. vanguard of working-class thinkers like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Kevin "Rashid" Johnson endure prisons that are administrated to strip men and women of their humanity.
Cuba's youth organized into the July 26th Movement in the 1950s to rebuild their country with blood and sacrifice. Down with the U.S. capitalist class, the real terror state of the world. May Cuba's majority realize that only through their revolutionary government do they have a chance to break the blockade.
The world's oppressed are waking up and moving. It can't be fast enough to break open the cells of the American gulags and save the Cuban revolution from international capital roosting like vultures to devour the historic gains of its revolution.
-Brian Schwartz, July 17, 2021