Last weekend, for the first time, the Cuban Mission to the United Nations was permitted to send delegates to the state of Connecticut to meet directly with the U.S. people. This visit comes at a time when the island of Cuba is in dire need. The Trump government reversed gains won by the working classes of the U.S. Empire under Obama, not only undoing the steps the Obama government had been forced to take, but instituting 243 new, choking, sanctions rules, denying the Cuban people critical supplies and trade.
The delegation was led by Cuba’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta. Ambassador Pedroso was accompanied by the Deputy Representative, Yuri A. Gala Lopéz, Minister Counsellor Roberto Hernández de Alba Fuentes and Second Secretary Ernesto Sierra Pérez. Normally, members of the Cuban mission to the UN are not permitted to leave the ten-block area around the United Nations building in New York; the U.S. Empire does not have relations with the country of Cuba and does not recognize its diplomats. This was highlighted by a story Ambassador Pedroso told — he once tried to test the boundary by walking beyond the ten blocks. FBI agents sprang out of the ground and escorted him back, informing him that he “had to step back to the other side of the street.”
For two years, Connecticut’s José Oro has been working on bringing the Cuban mission to Connecticut. José is a Havana-born Cuban engineer who lives in North Haven, Connecticut and writes extensively for the website Cubadebate. He’s spent the past two years lobbying interest groups and state officials to permit the delegates from the Cuban mission to come to Connecticut in the hopes of building solidarity between the U.S. people and economically embattled Cubans. Enlisting the aid of the Greater Hartford Cuba Solidarity Committee and Connecticut State Assemblyman and Deputy Speaker for the Connecticut Hout Edwin Vargas, his efforts have borne fruit.
State Department approval was required to permit the embassy to leave its ten-block confines. It was through the efforts of Assemblyman Vargas that the Biden regime’s Secretary of State finally approved the visit. The ambassadors came to Connecticut for two days, 9 and 10 September, and made stops in Hamden, Hartford, and New Haven. They spoke at Quinnipiac University, the SEIU headquarters, and the New Haven public library before returning to the embassy in New York.
While we waited for the ambassadors to arrive at the SEIU headquarters (they had been delayed by late state department clearance), José recounted what Cuba had been like before the revolution: “They say it was flourishing. That’s a lie. It was flourishing… if you had money, were white, were Christian.” He told the gathered audience, consisting of delegates from the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition, the Connecticut Green Party, and other activist organizations, that he had grown up in an upper middle-class family in Havana. The island was heavily divided by class — and, as a result, race. José described the Catholic school in Havana he attended, run primarily by Quebecois priests. There were no Black Cubans there. Later, after the revolution, José asked the priests, “You taught us that we were all children of God… why didn’t you let Black children in?”
“It wasn’t up to us,” the priests told him. “If we had let a single Black student into the school, your parents would have pulled you out, just like that.”
This is the pre-revolutionary legacy that still lives on in Miami. “Most of the Cuban descendants in America don’t want to strangle Cuba,” he said. “That position belongs to an ultra-right group who live in Miami mansions. Unfortunately, they are very powerful. It is up to us to counteract them.”
Deputy Speaker Vargas inveigled against the powerful interests in the Democratic party that forced it to bow to the Miami rightists. “They’ll never be on our side, no matter what we do,” he cautioned. Nevertheless, he warned that the jackals of the Biden administration have abandoned their campaign promises to normalize relations with the island of Cuba precisely to appease this group of wealthy Cuban exiles. “They’re ultra-right racists,” he thundered, “And if the United States can have normal relations with the most repressive countries in the world — Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and gay people, for example — then we should be able to have normal relations with this little island that’s only ninety miles away.”
The ambassadors arrived to a standing ovation. Ambassador Pedroso began with a summary of the current relations of the U.S. Empire and Cuba. The 243 new economic measures put in place by Trump he characterized as a “strategy of maximum pressure.” As Trump fled office, in his last days, he added Cuba to the U.S. list of sponsors of state terrorism. Biden failed to review the sanctions — worse, the Biden regime has adopted new actions with the aim of enforcing the embargo. It was Biden who refused to permit Cuba to purchase oxygen during the COVID pandemic, Biden who maintains the economic stranglehold that threatens Cuba.
“It is important,” said Ambassador Pedroso, “that there are people who are working for change, and equally important that there are people who believe change can come. There is nothing in Cuba against the U.S. people. You are welcome in Cuba with open arms. Still, we are here; and we will be there. We have the right, and we have the determination to resist. We are not going to yield.”
The ambassador thanked Connecticut especially for starting the car caravans to protest the U.S. blockade, which have become a staple of pro-Cuba demonstrations across the country. They know, he told us, back in Cuba what we’re doing to try to put pressure on our bourgeois politicians. International solidarity is a keystone not only of good morality, but of Cuban policy.
He went on to describe the ways that Cuba lived up to its moral obligation of solidarity. “We send aid and, unlike the U.S. aid, the World Bank, and so forth, we take nothing back when we go.” The Cuban soldiers in Angola, he reminded us, were not there for imperialist plunder, but to end apartheid. When they left, the only things they took with them were the bodies of the Cubans who had died fighting that evil regime.
The Cuban medical cooperation missions are a point of pride. “We do not force those doctors to go abroad. They read the contract and they have the choice. And if they do go, they still get their salary at home while they’re gone,” he explained, to dispel the pernicious myths constantly repeated in the bourgeois press by figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Even when Cuba really didn’t have doctors to spare, during the pandemic, they sent doctors to Italy and the colonized periphery. Ambassador Gala added, “We do not say ‘here, have our leftovers,’ we say please, take some of the little resources we have because we want to share.”
The COVID pandemic, Ambassador Pedroso said, had marked the point of reversal from the victories the working people of the U.S. had won against the blockade. It was an opportunity for the rapacious business interests in the U.S. to turn back the clock. Capitalist crises were striking, exacerbated by the COVID crisis. U.S. businesses want to minimize their exposure. But, the ambassador warned, even under the logic of capitalism, the embargo is “a non-sense.” Cuba would pay for the commodities it needs, would help the capitalists in the short term. Their natural desire for markets is being overridden by the ultra-right elements in Miami.
Then, he pointed to Cuba’s incredible achievements, even under the embargo. Only three countries were able to manufacture COVID vaccines: the U.S., biotechnological center of the world, business and corporate center of the world; the Russian Federation; the PRC; and Cuba. Out of these four countries, Cuba is the only one that had not two, but three different vaccines. “Why is this? What is behind this?” he asked. Cuban investment not in imperialist missions, but in the people. Education. Empowerment. The rugged self-reliance of a free people; he did not say as much, but the rugged self-reliance of a Communist people.
Afterwards, José approached me and greeted me warmly. We’ve only met a few times, through other activist circles, but he was as warm as if I were a long-lost comrade. He told me that, although he was born in Havana, he loves New England, and that he was working on getting Governor Sununu to invite the Cuban ambassadors to New Hampshire. He pumped my hand as he said, “His grandfather was an American soldier stationed in Havana during the Spanish-American War. Imagine, a Republican governor meeting with the ambassador. There is a saying in Spanish: whatever hole or crack, the water must get in the coconut.”
Whatever way, we will end this blockade.
