Lessons from Cuba: sovereignty and dignity

"We are not going to surrender the sovereignty or independence of this nation," assured Diaz-Canel on July 11, 2021 in his emotional public appearance, after marching through San Antonio de los Baños followed by a multitude of patriotic people, as also happened in many other places of the country where the support was evident, in a clear demonstration that in Cuba there will only be crowds in the streets to defend the Revolution.

The increasing severity of the Covid-19 and the opportunistic tightening of the blockade measures decreed by Donald Trump had placed the country before the almost total paralysis of the productive activity and the most acute deficit of food, fuel and lack of liquidity in the middle of the year.
As a consequence of this situation, the population was subjected to enormous shortages and anxiety every day. The moment of crisis was valued by Cuba's traditional adversaries as a new opportunity to take advantage of the anguish and deprivation to which the people were exposed to try to destroy the Revolution and they began to foment a potential social explosion.

In the first days of July, the Cuban president himself had warned: "There are systematic actions and substantial U.S. financing of destabilizing plans against Cuba that have made it possible to set up a sophisticated framework of unconventional warfare, with an important communicational ingredient in which, in recent times, social networks have played a decisive and growing role".

This was the driving force behind the disorders and acts of plundering carried out on July 11 and 12, 2021, in an effort to capitalize, ineffectively, -with the use of internal wage earners and criminal elements- the popular dissatisfaction caused by the economic crisis and incite a massive insubordination against the Government.

But the attempt at a "soft coup" failed. Diaz-Canel made clear with his usual readiness the true intentions of the imperialist circus: "The proposal was not peaceful. There was vandalism, stores in currency were broken and stones were thrown at, articles were stolen (...) police forces were stoned, cars were overturned. A totally vulgar, indecent and criminal behavior.

"We made a call to the people to defend their revolution and their rights, and the people supported. We have not encouraged anyone from positions of force or violence. The people went to discuss and argue, but they were confronted with violence, and the people defend themselves and their rights".

As colleague Iroel Sanchez reflected in this regard: "The turning point that July 11, 2021 has meant in our actions reaped its first results in the defeat, last November, of the imperialist plans to provoke a bloodbath in the country. They ended in the disarticulation of a good part of their fifth column here.

"This has been possible, in the worst of economic circumstances and when we still drag a lot of bureaucracy in our institutional functioning, because of the timely information to the people, the emergence of new revolutionary spaces of physical and media communication and the popular mobilization, especially of the youth, in defense of the Revolution, which shows that no matter how many resources our enemies have, what is decisive is what we do.

"It is not that we have gone on the offensive and there is no longer any danger of turning back. However enormous the political capital of the Revolution and the ethical reserves it has sown in the people, we must assimilate the hard lessons of the last years in order to understand that hegemony is not a final product, always the same, finished; but a process that implies relations, hostility, confrontations of many types, in spaces or instances that must be conquered daily".

A year has passed since the events of July and the historical enemies are astonished to see how normality and the normal development of society continue to prevail in Cuba. However, these days, vulgar calls for popular insubordination and destabilization that would lead to ungovernability in the country are once again appearing.

In moments like now, when shortages continue to tighten belts and inflation -which also affects most of the nations of the world- becomes a very heavy burden for the pocket of each person, these adversaries think once again that it is time to drag crowds in their favor and reinstate the old system of exploitation and plunder. The only answer is to be prepared to confront them as before.

The same doctrine after a century of failures

For more than a century the United States has been waiting uselessly for the moment when Cuba, "the desired fruit", supposedly "ripens and falls under its own weight" in the bowl of its ambitions.

The story began in 1898, when the military forces of the Spanish metropolis suffered a progressive attrition in the face of the resistance and the courageous advance of the Mambises that endangered their domination over the Island. At that moment, President William McKinley decreed the opportunistic military intervention in the conflict, thus starting the Spanish-Cuban-American war.

That bitterly remembered event, which took advantage of the virtual defeat of Spain by the Cuban armies and had as an infamous pretext the explosion of the battleship Maine, exposed the imperial doctrine of the "ripe fruit".

Attempts to take over Cuba have not ceased since then. The blockade, decreed by John F. Kennedy a little more than a year after the revolutionary triumph of 1959, made it clear from the first moments of the establishment of the revolutionary power that the United States would not give up the purpose of taking over the nation that had awakened its desires for so long at the gates of the Caribbean. However, in view of the strength of the Revolution and its popular support, it would henceforth employ more underhand methods to achieve its aims.

In 1960, the well-known memorandum of the US Deputy Secretary of State, Lester D. Mallory, is irrefutable proof of the new imperial strategy towards Cuba. Its validity is indisputable.

"The majority of Cubans support Castro (...), Mallory detailed, and the only foreseeable way to undermine his domestic support is through disillusionment and dissatisfaction arising from economic discomfort and material difficulties (...) all possible means must be rapidly employed to weaken the economic life of Cuba (...) a course of action which, being a means to weaken the economic life of Cuba (...). ) a line of action which, being as skillful and discreet as possible, will achieve the greatest progress in depriving Cuba of money and supplies, in order to reduce its financial resources and real wages, to provoke hunger, despair and the overthrow of the Government".

In this context, it must be clearly understood -as Diaz-Canel also expressed- that "the historical enemy of the Cuban nation changes its costumes, but not its purposes. It continues to be the same, in spite of the shaving and make-up of the new era.
And that in contrast: "The Revolution is true dialogue that puts truth and ethics before indecency and perversity, that does not negotiate its existence, does not legitimize mercenaries and acts with security and firmness".