Cuba’s Hunger Spring

Sanctions, Siege, Silence, and Western Moral Surrender

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Photo by Daniel Seßler on Unsplash

Outside, snow covers the first day of spring. The thaw that must come feels desperately far away.

Inside, television news is unrelenting propaganda against Iran and Cuba. It’s a bodyguard of lies to protect the status quo. The tone shifts back and forth from reasonable to hysterical like a good-cop/bad-cop routine. There are so many factoids, opinions, appeals to self-interest, national chauvinism, and xenophobia. It’s a wood chipper for the viewer’s critical thinking.

The hot war against Iran began on February 28 and is already a quagmire. That’s got to be a SNAFU record for the USA. No turning back for them because even Trump can’t untruth how weak his Empire looks. So it will continue and perhaps end with nuclear weapons, like beating a straight flush at poker with a Smith & Wesson.

The assault on Cuba will also continue, worsening the lives of 11 million Cubans. America is as vindictive to Cuba as Nazi Germany was to Leningrad during its siege between 1941 and 1944.

When I first travelled to St Petersburg in the early 2000s, its past haunted me. I walked the pavements and crossed its many canal bridges while wondering about the lives of those who had trodden the cobbled streets before me. I remembered images from historical newsreels of civilians in the city during winter dragging the corpses of loved ones to mass graves.

Near the Hermitage and trendy shops, I found a reminder of modern wars. Slumped against a wall, near a restaurant where I had recently had a latte, was a legless beggar, a former soldier with a sign that read “Chechnya,” and a plate half filled with kopeks.

In the 1980s, my mother studied chiropody at a community college. There she met a woman her age who was originally from Leningrad and survived the siege. They were friendly at first, but then Mum pulled away from the friendship.

I asked why.

She said, “It’s not her. I can’t get over my guilt because I am a German from the Nazi era.”

I replied, “But you were just a child during those times.”

She said, “It doesn’t matter.”

And with that, the discussion was closed forever.

Pushkin wrote of his generation’s before times.
“I said: What is past shall be no more, shall be no more! … But lo! They have started to stir again …”

The siege against Cuba is history repeating itself, except with us as the Nazis. Now the American-imposed energy crisis is so dire that power is rationed to a few hours a day, food is running scarce because the means to transport food to urban centres is becoming logistically impossible.

In 1944 and 1945, Holland underwent the Hunger Winter imposed upon them by Nazi Germany. It was a genocide that killed upwards of 25,000 Dutch citizens.

Now, Cuba must endure the Hunger Spring initiated by fascist America. However, unlike the famine Holland underwent in World War II, there is no Allied army to liberate them from the evils of Trump’s America. So hundreds of thousands of Cubans may die from this siege. Other Western nations, especially G7 or NATO countries could stop this. But we don’t.

It’s not illegal to ship oil to Cuba; it’s just not done because the West sees Cuba as the possession of America to do with it as it pleases.

When I was last in Cuba, it was during the nation’s “Special Times.” On a morning in September 1991, I was driven out to the Pan American Games stadium, recently constructed for the Games that had ended only weeks before I arrived.

The stadium and its grounds were deserted, the sun warm and humid, and in the nearby ocean, a strong tropical storm was gathering strength before hitting land the next day.

Although only a few weeks past the Games, the Pan American Games stadium looked prematurely middle-aged. Its paint was faded, and the concrete was chipped and beginning to crumble in places. A Canadian with me made a joke about communist inefficiency and then laughed, basking in his exceptionalism.

Not far off, I heard the sound of horses’ hooves. I turned and saw a team of them drawing a farmer’s cart on which workers stood holding scythes. In no time, the workers had jumped from the cart. The men were laughing and joking with each other. Cheap Superfinos cigarettes dangled off their lips. A foreman barked, and then the men began to cut acres of grass that surrendered the stadium as if it were the 19th century.

Now these men’s children are forced to do the same work in live like it was a preindustrial era. They do this not because communism is a failure. No, it’s because the West under neoliberalism fails to act with humanity. Like the spring thaw I desperately wait for, I have a feeling another thaw is coming, one that will melt neoliberalism’s icy grip on the ordinary people of the world.

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Thank you for standing with Harry—and with me.