What is it about Cuba that the U.S. political establishment finds so unacceptable?
The answer, we are told, is that the Cuban government is repressive and cannot govern the country in a way that would allow people to access medical treatments during a pandemic or provide regular power without rolling blackouts-a failed state.
We are told that the communists in Cuba simply hunger for power.
What they fail to tell us is that Cuba has had to access fuel, medical supplies, manufacturing equipment, buses, cars, and all the things needed to make a nation of 3 million people run while navigating a devastating and criminal blockade placed on it for 60 years.
Yet despite that, the small, island nation has developed its own Covid-19 vaccine, sent doctors to third world countries to treat the very old, the very young, and the very ill, while simultaneously dodging assassination attempts of its leaders, terrorist attacks on its hotels and airlines, and sabotage of its crops and food supply.
Indeed, what is it about Cuba that is such a threat to the most powerful nation with the most powerful military on earth?
Is it the free and modern health care they provide to all their citizens who have a longer life span than U.S. citizens, or maybe the lower infant mortality rate?
No. It is the power wielded by the displaced rulers of Cuba residing in Miami who have serious political power in a swing state.
It is the loyalty of the wealthy 1% in the United States to the wealthy 1% of former Cuban oligarchs residing in Miami who work so hard through both political parties to deny a decent standard of living and democratic elections to working people here in the United States.
What those Cuban oligarchs and their puppets in Washington seek is not democracy; it is a return to the Cuba of the 1950s. A Cuba run by gangsters and ruthless dictators who will cease the spending on social services there and redirect that money to U.S. corporation which cannot wait to once again gain access to natural resources while destroying a competing social system that places human beings before profit.
It is the unending need for ever-expanding profit and the loyalty among the wealthy globally that supersedes sovereignty while delivering a swing state to the forces inside the United States that wish to end democracy here as well.
You know, the same forces that tried to overthrow an election by violently storming the U.S. Capital on Jan. 6.
Americans do not want more coups and regime changes.
Americans want access to affordable health care and good-paying jobs.
Americans deserve better living conditions with affordable housing and safe infrastructure.
Americans deserve those things.
We don’t want more coups and wars. We’ve had enough.
It is time to end this outdated Cold War mind-set and end the embargo.
Let the Cuban people live. Hands off Cuba!
Jason Jones
Pendleton