The shameful continuity of U.S. failures

Even though they represent a new and more refined milestone in the aggressive actions of the United States, the measures against Cuba recently announced by Donald Trump are nothing more than a continuation of the policy used by the Empire for almost seventy years in its attempt to erase from the hemispheric map the "bad example" of sovereignty and resistance of this country.

On February 4, 1959, the U.S. government threatened to reduce the Cuban sugar quota in retaliation for the measures that the island’s nascent government was implementing following the revolutionary triumph, namely the enactment of the Land Reform Law and other popular measures which triggered the first blockading actions taken by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

 With the aim of limiting the revolutionary government's main source of export revenues, Washington decreed the cessation of purchases for that year of the seven hundred thousand tons of sugar that the United States acquired from each harvest.

 The contract they so arbitrarily terminated dated back 25 years, when the trade agreement was adopted stipulating that Washington would buy more than 90% of the total production of each harvest.

This trade relationship meant that Cuba depended almost exclusively on the U.S. market, which received the island’s main export commodity that sustained its economic survival.

Therefore, ending the so-called sugar quota on July 2, 1960 was not only the first act of hostility from our historical adversary, but also a brutal attack on the country's stability. The response was swift.

A news report from that time stated: "Faced with the initial reduction and subsequent elimination of the sugar quota, leader Fidel Castro proclaimed to the people: (…) To this attempt to take away our quota, pound by pound, we will reply by taking the sugar mills away from them, one by one! And we will keep, cent by cent, every last American investment in Cuba! And not only that, but pound by pound, we will suspend all American imports! The world is wide, and we will buy from those who buy from us.'"

Under the principle of responding to each U.S. aggression with a further deepening of the revolutionary process, the oil companies and their refineries in the country were nationalized, along with all of the U.S. interests, including the sugar mills.

Such profoundly radical revolutionary measures demonstrated from the very beginning of the Cuban revolutionary process that imperialist arrogance would be shattered by the capacity to resist and confront each new aggression orchestrated by them.

 Many have been the attempts to regain neocolonial control over Cuba: sabotage, mercenary aggression, terrorist attacks, and economic pressures of all kinds have failed to diminish the convictions that underpin our sovereignty, independence, and resolve to achieve development on our own.

Just as we overcame the challenge posed to the survival of the Revolution by the cessation of the sugar quota and the most all-encompassing and cruel blockade in history, we will face today, with the spirit of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the October Crisis, the potential closure of our access to fuel and any other means concocted by the hegemonic power embodied by Donald Trump.

 Cuba does not know how to yield to threats, and as it has always done, it will be able to face up to any danger with the will and resolve of its people to never surrender to an enemy, however powerful, and to turn every setback into a new victory.