At the recent UN-sponsored "International Conference on Financing for Development" in Monterrey, Mexico, Cuban President Fidel Castro won thunderous applause with his short but rousing speech. He was then forced to leave the gathering early because the Mexican government acceded to President Bush’s refusal to attend the conference while Castro was present.

In his speech Castro declared, "The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. [....]

These words demonstrate Cuba stands for. And they also show why Washington’s 'Cold War' against Cuba-- the economic blockade, the political hostility, the threats and pressures (including military intimidation)-- are not ending, are not easing, and why they cannot without fundamental shifts in U.S. or Cuban politics.

The simple fact is that the Cuban Revolution remains a dynamic force in world politics with a genuine revolutionary leadership. As this event today indicates, Cuba has become an attractive pole for a new generation of students and youth, working-class and anti-imperialist fighters in Latin America, the United States, and throughout the world-- more so, in fact, than at any time since the 1960s and the inspiring example of Che Guevara’s revolutionary internationalism.

A major reason for this is that no other government in the world consciously and intelligently aims to link up with and help lead the growing resistance to the world capitalist economic and social order --called in shorthand "neoliberal globalization"-- that oozes injustice, inequality, poverty, and misery from every pore.

To understand Washington’s maintenance of its 42-year old economic and political war against Cuba --for which it pays a high and mounting political cost internationally, and in domestic U.S. politics-- you have to understand Cuba’s place in Latin American and world politics.

Cuba is, of course, a small country, some 12 million people inhabiting a small island. It is hardly an economic superpower, although in biotechnology, medical research, and the development of vaccines Cuba is already a world leader. Its main industries are tourism, a service industry, tobacco (which is bad for you), and sugar (also not so good for you) and the important metal, nickel. Cuba has little oil, although there are some promising potential deposits.

Yet Cuba is a political and moral superpower in today’s world. No world leader is so respected, admired, and genuinely loved --especially by the overwhelming majority of oppressed and exploited humanity-- than Fidel Castro. But it's not only a question of Fidel Castro’s charisma and intellectual power, but of the dignity and refusal to surrender of an entire people which Castro merely personifies.

These are the real reasons why Washington continues to oppose and attempt to eliminate the actuality of the Cuban Revolution. That example --what Cuba stands for-- is increasingly relevant in a capitalist world order that is ever more crisis-ridden.

The policy continues no matter how ridiculous it looks to world and U.S. public opinion; no matter how longstanding the failure to achieve its goals; no matter how embarrassing that continuity of failure is to U.S. ruling circles; and no matter how inconvenient it is for businesses who could profit from legal trade between Cuba and the United States.

Once we understand that U.S. policy is based on an irreconcilable opposition to what Cuba stands for, then we can also puncture the widespread myth that U.S. policy is "held hostage" by the so-called Cuban-American Miami lobby, electoral votes in Florida, and other such superficial nonsense.

Even under casual examination, this myth collapses like a house of cards. It confuses the client with the boss, the puppet with the puppeteer. Washington doesn't need Cuban counter-revolutionaries and terrorists in Miami --which it created and sustained-- to tell it why it should hate Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. After all, they’ve been in the business of crushing progressive and revolutionary change in Latin America and the Caribbean for over a century, long before Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Elena Ros-Lehtien were born.

Of course, it is convenient to hide behind the fiction of the mighty Miami lobby in order to deflect attention from U.S. policy ---a failed policy that is utterly isolated in Latin America and the world. (Only Israel [which itself trades with Cuba] and the utterly U.S.-dependent Marshall Islands vote with Washington in the UN over the trade embargo.)

We should recall that the equally vaunted "China lobby" was supposedly why Washington couldn't normalize relations with "Red China." However, when Beijing’s international policy began to converge with Washington’s interests in Vietnam, Angola, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and elsewhere --while the previously demonized Mao deZong was still alive--the powerful China lobby simply evaporated.

Likewise, if the policies of Cuba just stopped being what they are --revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and socialist-- and if its domestic economy carried out "market reforms," in the spirit of Mao’s successors, you can be sure that Washington would change its policy overnight, declare Castro a great statesman, end the embargo, and dump the "Miami lobby" once and for all.

It's nevertheless true that there are numerous international and domestic pressures to change or alleviate Washington’s Cuba policy, all of which are opposed by the hard-core ultra-right business leadership of the Cuban-American community. (We should also note that many surveys show majorities or pluralities of Cuban-American oppose the embargo and support normal relations.)

In recent months there's been much speculation about a "new thaw" in U.S.-Cuban relations. The speculators point to Cuba’s recent purchase of U.S. food items; majority support in Congress to lift the travel ban (or more precisely to defer enforcement of it); Cuba’s supposed cooperation with the use of the U.S. military base in Guantánamo (arrogantly held for over forty years against the opposition of the Cuban government) to hold prisoners from Washington’s war in Afghanistan [I even saw one headline around the transfer of prisoners to Guantánamo that read: "Is Cuba the Latest U.S. Military Ally?"]; and the travel to Cuba of delegations of U.S. politicians. The latest to go will apparently be ex-president James Carter.

All of this is interesting -- and also fits a pattern oft-heard over the decades. But I'm here to tell you that it is an illusion to think that U.S.-Cuban relations are improving or are about to improve. In fact, the opposite is the case.

In recent weeks, Washington has escalated its pressures, tightening, not easing its political and economic war.

They include:

1. Intense U.S. pressure on Latin American governments to condemn Cuba at the UN "human rights" session in Geneva.
2. The denial of visas to Cuban commercial agents involved in arranging legal food sales to the island from U.S. companies.
3. Increased support for Cuban counter-revolutionary individuals and grouplets on Washington’s payroll, provocatively organized more and more openly out of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
4. The recent prosecution and conviction in Philadelphia of James Sabzali, a 43 year-old Canadian salesman currently living in suburban Philadelphia, who faces life in prison and over $19 million in fines for the high crime of selling water purification supplies to Cuba while with working with Canadian and UK subsidiaries of a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer. He was charged with 76 counts of violating the 1919 U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act and one count of conspiracy.
5. The continued, provocative inclusion of Cuba on a State Department list of nation’s supporting "terrorism."
6. And, most importantly, the frame-up, conviction, and harsh separation and treatment of five Cuban revolutionaries who, with great courage and sacrifice, infiltrated terrorist groups in Miami, who have carried out and continue to carry out violent attacks in Cuba, from their bases in the United States. This important case will be the subject of another panel later this afternoon.

All indications are that the addition of many more items to this list is imminent.

Truth is that the U.S. government remains committed to the overthrow of the Cuban government and the destruction of the Cuban Revolution. That has been the policy since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959 and the beginning of serious revolutionary changes, beginning with the most radical land reform in Latin American history. It remains U.S. policy today.

"Regime change," to use the latest imperialist euphemism coming out of Washington, remains the policy of establishment opponents of the embargo, as well as its supporters. There isn't a single U.S. politician or policymaker who supports Cuban sovereignty, that is, their right to determine their own social, economic, and political system and forms. Politicians from Charles Rangel to Jimmy Carter speak of "the transition to democracy" in Cuba --simply a "gentler" way of advocating overthrow of Cuba’s government and dismissal of its sovereignty. Rangel argues against the U.S. blockade by saying, "The way to dismantle communism is not through Cold War but through trade and engagement."

In the late 1970s, ex-president Carter dangled before Fidel Castro the prospect of normal relations if Cuba would withdraw its troops from Angola (where they were engaged in combat with apartheid South Africa in defense of the African liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa). The Cubans went on to defeat the south African army in the famous --famous in Africa, if mostly suppressed in the U.S.-- Battle of Cuito Cunavale, which led, according to Nelson Mandela, to his own freedom and the unraveling of the apartheid regime. Now Carter has accepted an invitation from Fidel Castro to visit the island. It was reported yesterday that the Bush Administration has given its permission for the Carter trip.

Carter told CNN, "I think the best way to bring about democratic changes in Cuba is obviously to have maximum commerce and trade and visitation by Americans and others who know freedom, and to let the Cuban people know the advantages of freedom. That’s the best way to bring about change. And not to punish the Cuban people themselves by imposing an embargo on them, which makes Castro seem to be a hero, because he’s defending his own people against the abusive Americans."

Meanwhile Carter, said Castro, "may make all the criticisms he wants. If he wants, we’ll fill Revolution Square so they can criticize us as much as they want, because we are so convinced of the moral, ethical, ideological, political, and human strength of our revolution."

Carter’s arguments and presentation of the case against the so-called embargo are not the predominate view at the top levels of U.S. policymaking. That view, which I think is more accurate, is that a unilateral U.S. end to its economic and political war against the Cuban Revolution, without any change in Cuba’s revolutionary anti-capitalist orientation, would be a gigantic humiliation for U.S. imperialism. It would send exactly the wrong signal to all who are resisting the U.S. empire and its ruthless world order.

Normal trade with the U.S. and an end to the exorbitant costs of the U.S. economic war would give a gigantic boost to the Cuban economy --which would remain socialist in its foundations, including a state monopoly of foreign trade, economic planning, and state protection of workers employed in enterprises managed by foreign capitalists. Ending U.S. sanctions and pressures would free Cuba from paying extortionate interests rates to finance its trade with countries defying U.S. pressure. Access to lower-interest loans and credits would help finance Cuba’s industrial modernization.

Ending U.S. sanctions would also lessen dependence on the booming but problematic tourism industry. The revolutionary government would be able to pour more resources into health, education, industrialization, agricultural diversification, and so on, becoming an even more stunning contrast to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In short, ending U.S. sanctions would strengthen the revolutionary government, not facilitate its demise as Carter and Rangel fantasize. Contrary to Carter’s absurd and arrogant assertion that allowing U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba will "let the Cuban people know the advantages of freedom," the truth is that as Americans go to Cuba, as the experience of Professor Gerassi’s students and countless others testify, they will see the Cuban reality with their own eyes, and come back and tell the truth.

Cuba is, of course, not a "military threat" to the U.S. empire, the world’s last capitalist empire with its bases in dozens of countries around the globe and its Navy utterly dominating every inch of the globe’s oceans-- world cop for the billionaires, the bankers, and the bondholders. U.S. imperialism spends more on its war machine than the next 20 top national spenders combined. And Bush and the U.S. Congress are moving to further increase the Pentagon budget by some $50 billion, an increase that is far more than any other nation spends.

Meanwhile Cuba has spent over the past ten years exactly nothing --zero-- on weapons.

So it's beyond ludicrous to view Cuba as a military-technical threat to Washington’s military might.

But Cuba does represent the most serious threat to the U.S. Empire in a more profound and fundamental sense. It is a political threat and a moral threat. Cuba is a threat precisely because of what is stands for, because of its ideas.

That makes it a threat far more serious than any "weapon of mass destruction" to the U.S. ruling rich and their European and Japanese allies and competitors, and imperialist-controlled institutions who through the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, which defend and reproduce the truly evil and permanently crisis-ridden world system. A system sustained and reproduced through continual and massive transfers of wealth and value from the Third World to the imperialist centers.

Cuba is a threat because, unique in today’s world, the Cuban government speaks out clearly, consistently and truthfully about that world order. And furthermore organizes on many levels against it.

Fidel Castro has said that "the truth must not only be the truth, but it must also be told."

Cuba tells the truth about the world we live in. Castro’s speeches are exercises in revolutionary mass education, an incredible source of information, data, statistics, and analysis.

Cuba is engaged in what they call a "battle of ideas." They are not afraid to speak out and debate, not embarrassed or ashamed of their system and their socialism, which is the opposite of the counterfeit Marxism of the Stalinist systems in the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

Cuba continually sponsors international conferences of trade unionists, farmers, students and youth, women, economists, artists, intellectuals, professionals, doctors, lawyers, and journalists to provide forums and international organizing tools against the imperialist status quo-- which Cuban leaders always point out is "unsustainable." I've attended many of these conferences with many thousands of activists from around the world and can tell you they are amazing and unique experiences.

Cuba supports-- in words and deeds-- every progressive, national liberation, and revolutionary-democratic cause in the world. Cuba is a leading voice-- in words and its own practice-- against racism and the oppression of women. The Cuban people overcame misguided attitudes towards homosexuality and today represents by far the most progressive legal and social atmosphere for gay and lesbian rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Cuban revolution has always been and remains internationalist to the core. Cuba is a leading voice in support of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and against Israeli brutality and occupation (without, I might add, giving an inch to anti-Jewish prejudice) and is outspoken on the struggle of the Irish people for unification, to cite just two examples.

Cuba’s internationalism is also registered in its astonishing record of medical aid and personnel it provides free of charge in the most impoverished areas of the world. Cuba has more doctors serving in such areas, including sub-Saharan Africa than the United Nations and the U.S. combined. In Haiti, Cuban medical assistance has had a significant impact in curtailing the AIDS epidemic.

Cuba stands for solidarity in words and deeds.

What's more, Cuba is a moral, political, and social example. It is living proof that "Another World is Possible."

Cuba has conquered what is unheard-of for the overwhelming majority of humanity in the so-called Third World, which it is part of. (By Third World I mean the nations and peoples of Africa, Central and South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East, the formerly colonized people who remain dominated and superexploited by contemporary imperialism–whose corrupt, neocolonial governments are hostage to debt slavery, and the dictates of the self-righteously brutal and "democratic" West.)

The Cuban people have fought for and won guaranteed food, clothing, shelter, education and health care for all.

Cuban children are in school, getting an excellent education; Cuban women (who are the majority of Cuban professionals) are advancing, in control of their bodies and their minds. All Cuban men, women, and children have free and world-class health care from womb to tomb.

If the overwhelming majority of Third World humanity were to wake up tomorrow in Cuba, they would think they had died and gone to heaven.

Today’s Latin America has 225 million impoverished people, 90 million of whom are utterly destitute. There are 114 million children living in poverty, 60% of all children. Fifty million Latin American children are living on the streets, homeless. There are one million homeless children in the United States. Over 500,000 Latin American children die every year from preventable diseases. According to the International Labor Organization, 10 million of the Latin American children who are driven out of school by the imperative of working, end up in the prostitution and pornography rackets of the so-called sex industry! These are the fruits of capitalism and imperialist exploitation that Bush wants to deepen with more neoliberal austerity.

The only country in Latin America and the Caribbean where these evils do not exist is Cuba which through a socialist revolution ended the domination of Washington and the dictates of world capital.

What Cuba has accomplished is all the more incredible and awesome when seen in the framework of the U.S. empire’s commitment to sabotage and strangle Cuba’s economy-- its industry, agriculture, (against which in the past it used biological warfare, as revealed by a U.S. Senate committee), and trade through 42 years of political and economic war.

What Cuba stands for is a socialism that puts the working people in power and social predominance. The social relations of this economic and social order puts human needs before profits and values solidarity before privilege. The old American labor slogan, "An Injury to One is an Injury to All," is a governing principle in Cuba.

That is why Cuba-- a country with far less resources than Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, or Venezuela-- has none of the massive poverty, landlessness, homelessness, sexual abuse of children, violence and degradation of women, lack of mass access to health care and decent education that plague all of these countries that have adopted the neoliberal Yankee model.

It is well-known and cannot be denied-- no matter how many lies and how much mud is slung by the State Department and White House and the ex-bourgeoisie in Miami-- that Cuba has the highest life expectancy and lowest infant mortality in the Third World and among the best indices for both in the entire world. (Better indices in these categories, I might add, than for Blacks and Latinos in the U.S.) A UN study recently showed that Cuban primary schools have by far the best results in the hemisphere.

Even during the worst of the so-called "Special Period," when Cuba’s economy was devastated by the overnight collapse of decades of trading patterns with the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, Cuba did not close down a single school, hospital, or day-care center.

Finally, consider Cuba in the explosive social and political reality of Latin America today. The collapse and defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution in the late 1980s and Washington’s ability to prevent revolutionary victories in El Salvador and Guatemala ushered in a decade of assaults on working people, privatizations, austerity-- the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" which has now exhausted itself. The collapse of Argentina’s neoliberal capitalist "miracle" and the mass rebellion that toppled the regime of Fernando de la Rua and Domingo Cavallo last December and which ushered in a pre-revolutionary situation is the highest expression of the new period now opening up in the Americas. [This was written before the uprising of the Venezuelan people quickly toppled the coup against President Chávez. --SeeingRed]

Latin America today is in permanent crisis. It is starting to boil over into social explosion. Slaves to unpayable debts to imperialist banks, subject to unending austerity from the IMF, popular resistance to neoliberalism is permanent and mounting from Venezuela to Chile, from Ecuador to Bolivia. There isn't a single country in Latin America that hasn't seen growing protests, strikes, peasant movements, student mobilizations.

Washington fully understands that revolutionary Cuba will be a bastion of solidarity, support, and truth-telling for the present and coming battles by the workers and peasants of Latin America to establish governments of their own. These struggles-- as in Cuba in 1959, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Chile in 1973, and Central America in 1980s-- are bound to come up against U.S. policy and power.

Count on Cuba providing leadership in the fight for a new and better world.

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