Last Monday, on a beautiful summer evening my partner Penny and I had the great honour of hosting Cuban Embassy officials David Aldama Pando, Third Secretary, and Areadna Quitana Castañeda, Press Attaché, as guests in our home. It was two hours of informative, intellectually stimulating discussion about a wide range of topics.
The main topic was Washington’s brutal and cruel 60-year economic blockade of Cuba. We talked about the recently declassified US State Department memo which explicitly indicated that the sole purpose of the economic blockade was to make life miserable enough for the Cuban people that they would turn against their government. This economic blockade has inflicted over $100 billion damage to this small altruistic nation.
We talked about how former president Donald Trump, in the latter months of his presidency, turned the screws even tighter. Trump made it illegal for Cubans living in the United States to send remittances to family members still living in Cuba.
Trump also imposed massive fines on any oil tankers transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba. Cuban electricity is generated in the main by oil-powered generators. Absent the Venezuelan oil, there are now frequent blackouts. Without electricity, tens of thousands of Cuban families watch in agony as the little food they’re able to purchase and keep in their fridge spoils.
Cuba’s COVID infection rate has been much lower than most other nations due to its socialized health care system. However, there are still many thousands of Cubans catching COVID every day, an infection rate which has recently exploded with the arrival of the highly contagious Delta variant. Much of this situation can be blamed on former president Trump’s tightening of the embargo which has led to an extreme shortage of food and medicines, as well as making it almost impossible for Cuba to import desperately needed ventilators to support seriously ill COVID patients.
However, we did not just talk about the blockade. We also talked about Cuba’s incredible achievements on the international stage. In particular we talked about Africa.
In the 1970s, the South African apartheid regime invaded Angola with the objective of setting up a puppet government. To the world’s astonishment, Cuba responded, achieving the impossible – airlifting tens of thousands of Cuban troops and supplies from one side of the Atlantic to the other. The Cuban troops turned the tide against the very heavily armed and well-trained army of South Africa, setting the stage for an international peace conference that would try to resolve a related question – independence for Namibia, which sits in between Angola and South Africa.
US representatives to the peace talks adamantly refused to permit the Cubans a seat at the conference table. However, the Angolan delegation and the guerillas fighting for Namibian independence, SWAPO, were equally adamant that the Cubans be included. Eventually Washington relented, the Cubans had a seat at the table, and the peace talks were successful beyond all expectations.
The American delegation’s telegrams sent back to Washington at the conclusion of the peace conference have long since been declassified. Unbelievably, they credit one delegation alone for the success of the peace talks – the Cuban delegation – which they describe as mature, level-headed, and realistic. It was the view of the American delegation that without the presence of the Cuban delegation, the conference would have gone up in flames.
Almost 20 years later, Nelson Mandela was released from his decades-long prison sentence on Robben Island. He held a press conference to let the world know that in his opinion, there was one nation that contributed more to the end of apartheid than any other nation on the face of the planet – Cuba.
All in all, it was an evening together that my partner Penny and I will never forget.
I’m starting a monthly online series of progressive film nights. Join us for our next event, Friday August 27 at 7pm. More details are here: https://www.timlouis.ca/fireside/
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (Aug. 2, 2021): 413.59 ppm
One year ago (Aug. 2, 2020): 413.6 ppm
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