"A couple of men sat in Washington, D.C. and planned how to strangle a nation to death, and we did our best to get in their way. There are a hundred things you could say about the Nuestra América mission to Cuba, and I’m going to say some of them, at some length. But in the handful of days I spent walking around Havana, I kept thinking of Ernest Hemingway, who lived there for a third of his life, rattling off manuscripts from his perch in the Finca Vigía. Despite his gallery of personal hangups, the old man knew his business. The simplest, most direct sentence is the truest, he always said. So this is mine. Donald Trump and Marco Rubio tried to strangle Cuba, and a remarkable group of people from all over the world came together to say no.
For four days, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson and I traveled with them. Back in March, we heard that CODEPINK, the Progressive International, and a variety of other socialist and anti-war groups were putting together a humanitarian mission to Cuba. Inspired by the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, they were going to deliver several thousand pounds of medical supplies, solar panels, and other badly-needed aid to the island, by plane and boat, breaking the world’s longest-standing economic blockade. It sounded like a hell of a thing. So we put our names on the dotted line to go along and cover it.
We wanted to see, firsthand, what it’s like for people to live under the most severe of U.S. sanctions. More than that, we wanted to see one of the only communist-governed nations on Earth, and report back about it, clear of the haze of propaganda that has surrounded Cuba for so long. And we wanted, in whatever small way we could, to help. So we got on a plane to Havana, armed with just enough optimism to think we might make a difference. This is what we found."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/four-days-in-havana-under-siege
#Cuba #Havana #USA #Trump #Imperialism #Sanctions #Neocolonialism
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