Editorial | Help Cuba!

Jamaica may be fearful to act on its own. But with its Caribbean Community (CARICOM) partners, it has a moral obligation to speak out, and offer support to the Cuban people in the face of America’s attempt at bludgeoning its government into submission by starvation.

Not even Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, who has made a virtue of toadying-up to Donald Trump, could, in this instance, deny CARICOM a consensus on the matter, and be part of any effort to provide humanitarian assistance to Cubans – which should happen with urgency.

Cuba and Jamaica are close neighbours (90 miles apart at their closest points) with different political systems. Jamaica, like most of the countries of CARICOM, is a two-party democracy. Cuba is a single-party socialist state, led by a communist party. However, except for brief periods of tensions, Jamaica and Cuba have enjoyed exceedingly good relations. In any event, humanity does not know ideology.

The same cannot be said of Cuba and the United States – not since the 1959 Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party to power.

DELETERIOUS SANCTIONS

For over six decades, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States, the world’s most powerful country, has maintained an embargo on Cuba. America has severely limited trade and other forms of economic activity between the countries. It has also used its power to prevent other countries’ firms from operating in, or doing business with, Cuba.

Even after the end of the Cold War – periodic slight thaws in relations notwithstanding – not much has changed in the US’s hardline, anti-Communist posture towards Cuba.

Whatever may be policy failings of the Cuban government, the American sanctions have been deleterious to Cuba’s development, depriving it of access to a wide range of goods and services. Indeed, it is estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba close to US$150 billion, contributing to the deterioration of the quality of life of ordinary Cubans.

Now, Mr Trump, the US president, and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio (the son of anti-Castro Cuban immigrants for whom the matter is personal) are further tightening the screws, hoping to affect regime change.

Already facing fuel shortages and problems with its old and unstable electricity grid that causes frequent and prolonged power outages, Cuba now has no oil to run its turbines. Since January, the Trump administration has sought to prevent shipments to the country, threatening higher tariffs on the goods of countries that did so.

HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

Cuba needs around 100,000 barrels of oil a day. The bulk of that came from Venezuela. However, with the US’s effective control of Venezuelan oil since Washington’s capture, and rendition, of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s shipments have halted. Supplies from Mexico now dribbles.

Cuba has been hustling around the world for new suppliers to prevent the total collapse of its economy.

In a modern world, this is not only an economic problem. It is a humanitarian crisis. Incubators in hospitals do not work, because of a lack of power. Babies die. So, too, do children and adults, who need live-saving surgeries, but doctors cannot operate.

Hunger, malnutrition and death usually follow when people cannot work, factories go idle, or farms produce less because they have to resort to primitive equipment rather than petroleum-powered ploughs and tractors.

A comparison of recent vintage is Israel’s blockade of Gaza, starving Gazans of food, water and oil in its war against Hamas. As was the case with Gaza, “policy goals”, as the office of Volker Turk, the UN’s human-rights chief, observed with respect to Cuba, “cannot justify actions that in themselves violate human rights”.

The United States, in other words, is flouting international law, using ordinary Cubans as the pawns in the fight against the regime.

OBLIGATION TO DECENCY

Jamaica, as do other CARICOM countries, has an obligation to decency and morality to offer help to Cuba, not least to reciprocate for Havana’s past and current support, in tangible ways, to the region.

Despite the recent moves by Mr Rubio for Caribbean governments to dismantle the arrangements, many of the region’s health systems would collapse without the presence of Cuban doctors and nurses. Cuba, especially in better times, has been unselfish with its technical assistance to its neighbours.

In Jamaica in the 1970s, Cuba gifted the island the G.C. Foster College for Physical Education and Sport, the Jose Marti Technical High School (St Catherine) and the Garvey Maceo High School (Clarendon). Construction of a new campus for the Anchovy High School at Montpelier, St James, was completed in 2015 after its abandonment in 1980 and conversion into an army barracks.

Last October, in recognition of the wrongness of the US embargo, Jamaica’s Parliament, as it has done annually for years, passed a resolution calling for its removal. Symbolically, the deputy foreign minister, Alando Terrelonge, spoke in Spanish.

The circumstance now demands more than symbolism.