Hands Off Cuba!
By Sylvia Weinstein (1994)

In my desk drawer I have a paper bag full of buttons that say “HANDS OFF CUBA.” They were made in the early 1960s by the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, an organization to which I was proud to belong.

This was a committee dedicated to the idea that every country has a right to self-determination. That when a people, such as the people of Cuba, decides to kick out a dictator, as they did to Batista in January 1959, they have a right to organize their freedom anyway they want.

The free-loading capitalist class of the United States didn’t see it that way. They thought Cuba was theirs, just as they think that every country in Latin America and everywhere else is theirs to plunder.

Whenever a North American capitalist is in trouble, the United States sends its gunboats and armed soldiers to strong-arm anyone who doesn’t like being exploited by some American businessman. That’s the American way.

Cuba was used as a sporting house and a playground for North American tourists. Brothels, gambling casinos, big hotels, plantations, and factories were all owned and controlled by American businesses. Cuban men, women, and children were there to be controlled and to labor so that the exploiters could send their profits to banks in the United States.

Batista, the dictator of Cuba at that time, acted like a hired gun of the United States. He made sure that any Cuban worker who even thought of organizing a union disappeared, rapidly. His job was to keep the Cuban people in their place, on their knees, for the North American capitalist class. Then something happened.

Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and other young Cuban rebels decided to try to take back their country. And they did—with the support of the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people, who wanted to get the foreign capitalists out of their country. On New Year’s Day, 1959, the July 26th Movement took Cuba away from the Yankee imperialists.

Then they set about taking back their land and turning it over to the Cuban peasants and workers. They closed the brothels and gambling casinos, took the plantations and factories out of the hands of North American robber barons, and stopped the northward drift of profits.

Then, for all Cubans, they set up free medical care, free public education through college, and free childcare. They began to build housing, roads, and airports and nationalized the banking system. They made Cuba a nation of proud, educated, and militant people.

Imperialism hates that kind of thing. It could catch on in other countries in the Western Hemisphere. If one group of workers threw out the capitalist bums, then every other small country could do likewise. Even workers within the imperialist countries could get wise and start thinking about a real democracy in their own country.

Can you imagine the working class voting on their own hours of work and wages? Can you imagine workers voting to build houses and repair schools instead of bombs and tanks?

And the working class voting against bombing Panama or Iraq, saying they had nothing to gain by murdering men, women, and children in another country?

Instead, the workers of imperialist countries vote for puppets who go to Washington, D.C., and work for their bosses. They have the choice of voting for Candidate #1, who will do what he or she is told to do, or Candidate #2, who will do what he or she is told to do.

Every once in a while there comes Candidate #3, who promises to work for the “people” and then does what he or she is told to do by the ruling class. That’s the kind of “democracy” in practice in the United States.

In Cuba, the workers bypassed that kind of “democracy” and set up their own kind of government. In fact, when the United States invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban people voted with their guns and drove out the invaders. That was democracy, an event very similar to our own “Boston Tea Party” on Dec. 16, 1773, an early event in the struggle that eventually eliminated control by the British monarchy.

Once again, the U.S. imperialists are on a rampage against Cuba. They have tried everything to choke the life out of that country. Now they want to tighten their fingers around the throats of the Cuban people.

We must stand with our Cuban sisters and brothers at this time. We must say to our own capitalist class:

HANDS OFF CUBA! END THE EMBARGO!

OPEN THE DOORS TO TRADE WITH CUBA! NO WAR!

—August 1994




FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein

Socialist Viewpoint Publishing Association
ISBN: 0-9763570-0-3    
360 pp.

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