Cuba’s blackouts are getting worse. Many are going days without any light at all and the public electric company is “fighting to provide even a few hours of power a day.” The gas stations are empty. There are “mosquitos everywhere.” People in high-rise apartments are cooking with charcoal, risking carbon monoxide poisoning and deadly fires.

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That was the Venezuela playbook: fossil fuel companies donated heavily to his campaign, and Trump then kidnapped Venezuela’s president so that he could open the country to U.S. oil producers. This is precisely what is happening in Cuba: Trump is starving the country in the hopes that the government will institute “economic reforms” (read: privatization) that allow Trump’s donors to get rich.

One of the sticking points in negotiations with the Cuban government is that the U.S. is demanding Cuba, a poor country, pay billions of dollars to Miami businessmen to compensate them for property nationalized after the 1959 revolution. Like Haiti having to pay back the “debt” to slaveowners from their lost property values after the revolution (much of that property being human beings), Cuba is expected to pay for treating its assets as belonging to the people as a whole rather than belonging to a small moneyed elite.

Cuba’s blackouts are getting worse. Many are going days without any light at all and the public electric company is “fighting to provide even a few hours of power a day.” The gas stations are empty. There are “mosquitos everywhere.” People in high-rise apartments are cooking with charcoal, risking carbon monoxide poisoning and deadly fires. The suffering of Cubans has been inflicted upon them on purpose. It is the intention of U.S. policy to make the Cuban people suffer, and endanger their lives, in order to put pressure on their government. The Trump administration is waging a “pressure campaign aimed at forcing political and economic changes in Cuba.” The Trump administration, earlier this year, took “the almost unprecedented measure of blocking all oil shipments to a country with which it is not at war.” That means that food aid can’t be distributed on the island, because there’s no way to transport it. Once fully-stocked bodega shelves are now empty. (Not because “socialism” is causing shortages, since people had enough to eat before, but as a direct result of the blockade.) The UN reports that the U.S. policy is killing babies and children: “infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births; childhood cancer survival rates have fallen from 85 to 65 per cent; and essential medicines are available at only around 30 per cent of normal supply levels.” The UN human rights chief’s verdict on the U.S. is scathing: “Such severe sanctions packages that target entire sectors of an economy and produce broad, indiscriminate and harsh effects on populations are incompatible with basic principles of international human rights law.” But even this condemnation is too mild. The U.S. pressure campaign amounts to nothing but terrorism: making people sick, making them poor, making them suck in carbon monoxide, starving them, denying children their cancer treatments, in order to try to force a change in their government’s policy.

Crosspost from https://news.abolish.capital/post/55742