Trump’s Return Poses a New Threat to Cuba – Bernard Regan, Cuba Solidarity Campaign
By Bernard Regan, Cuba Solidarity Campaign
Donald Trump will be inaugurated President of the United States of America on Monday 20th January 2025.
His return to the White House, just four years after his previous term of office which ended on 20th January 2021, does not augur well for Cuba or indeed for the countries of Latin America. His attitude towards Cuba and Latin America has been well documented. His overarching policy position was expressed during the period of his first Presidency when on 25th September 2018, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, he invoked the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, rejecting “the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere”. This rejection of external interests was (and is) in reality code for the unfettered assertion of Washington-Wall Street ambitions. He has a Cold War view of the world seen through the prism of the primacy of USA economic interests, with China the new challenge replacing the former Soviet Union, although for senior USA figures Russia too remains a threat.
Trump has his eyes on ensuring that US capital is the determining force in respect of the continent playing a key role in the exploitation of the valuable resources of Latin America such as Lithium, oil and other minerals. His aim is simple – to prevent China, from developing its economic relations with the region. A challenge which is evidenced by the developing relations between Latin America and Chinese companies exemplified by the opening of the megaport of Chancay in Peru, which will become the largest deepwater port on the western coast of the continent.
During the first Trump regime Cuba became a particular target for US imperialism. In the last few days of office in 2021 he imposed a series of vindictive measures which in total added 243 new orders intensifying the already vicious blockade imposed on Cuba by successive Presidents. On 12th January 2021, days before he left office, he placed Cuba on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism – a move which places even more stringent limitations on Havana’s ability to pay for goods and services in the international market. It blocks Cuba’s access to SWIFT – the mechanism universally used to transfer monies between countries. It makes it difficult for the Cuban government to buy and sell on the international market and gain necessary credits to develop the economy.
The blockade is vicious – denying essential medical equipment for the treatment of cancer, cochlea implants for children, basic PPE equipment during the time of COVID and many other examples. The extraterritorial penalties placed on third-party countries are carried out in contravention of UN General Assembly motions and internationally recognised terms of trade between sovereign countries. In the opinion of a number of internationally recognised legal authorities, “no blockade has been as comprehensive, long lasting and brutal against a people as the one that the United States have maintained against Cuba.” A view endorsed in at the UN General Assembly by a vote of 187 – 2 with 1 abstention. Only the USA and Israel voted against the condemnation of the blockade.
Biden kept all of Trump’s measures in place. It was impossible to put a cigarette paper between the policies of the Republicans and the Democrats making people nostalgic for the “Obama days” even though he too retained the same strategic objective of overthrowing Cuba’s socialist revolution.
The ostensible reason for placing Cuba on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list was its refusal to enact an extradition order by the Colombian government imposed on members of the ELN guerilla movement. The ELN members in Cuba were there to forward peace negotiations with the Colombian government. Cuba was hosting these negotiations at the behest of the United Nations in conjunction with the Norwegian government. Needless to say Norway has not been put on the list of sponsors of terrorism! On 24th October 2024, the Colombian government itself agreed to an extension ceasefire with the ELN until 15th April 2025. The retention of this categorising of Cuba is the most vindictive sanction imaginable – at least to date.
Trump’s appointment of Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State signposts that his attitudes are not going to alter one iota in his second Presidency. Rubio, the Miami-born son of Cuban parents, who despite his attempts to rewrite history, left the island two years before the 1959 revolution, is a virulent anti-Cuba warrior when it comes to USA policies towards the island.
Like Trump, he wants to establish hemispheric hegemony over Latin America and he sees Cuba as an obstacle to fully achieving that goal. One of Trump’s weapons will be the imposition of hard-line policies threatening the mass deportation of around 11 million (sometimes he quotes 21 million) non-documented migrants. Countries in the region, including Canada, are anxious about the consequences which, in Cuba, would impact on an already blockade-challenged economy.
The unity of progressive forces in Latin America will be important as will international solidarity.
Bernard Regan is speaking at a solidarity event organised by Arise Festival and the Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America tonight (12 December) at 6.30PM: Trump – Hands Off Latin America!
- You can follow Bernard on Twitter/X here; and follow the Cuba Solidarity Campaign on Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.
With Trump & Rubio on the way, US blockade tightens its grip on Venezuela
By Tim Young
Early signs of what the incoming Trump administration in the US has in store for Venezuela were revealed in mid-November with the approval by the House of Representatives of a new Bill tightening the existing blockade against Venezuela.
The Bill, which still requires Senate approval, is entitled Banning Operations and Leases with the Illegitimate Venezuelan Authoritarian Regime Act, known by its deliberately offensive acronym, the Bolivar Act.
The Bill was introduced by two representatives from Florida — Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Republican Mike Waltz, nominated as Trump’s national security adviser, who has said that the Bill “sends a powerful message to Maduro that there will be no appeasement.”
It is also endorsed by Florida senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who supported an earlier version in 2021. Rubio, picked by Trump as the next head of the State Department, has long been a fanatical hawk for tougher sanctions against Venezuela to achieve the long-held US objective of “regime change.”
The new Act aims to convert into legislative norms the executive orders that have underpinned US policy of applying illegal coercive sanctions against Venezuela over the past 10 years. This will limit the US executive branch’s ability to temper or eliminate sanctions in the future.
The Act also expands the scope of sanctions by employing a wide definition of those at risk of penalty, covering individuals, private entities, governmental bodies and their extensions. This is aimed not just at US domestic targets but those anywhere in the world who might or currently trade with Venezuela.
Under the first Trump administration, the initial wave of sanctions introduced by Barack Obama was ramped up into a series of increasingly severe measures against individual government members and the country as a whole, despite this being illegal under US and international law and treaties that the US has signed.
Starting in 2017, Trump barred the Venezuelan government from borrowing from financial markets, blocked assets, and prohibited US businesses from dealing with Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA, the state’s largest source of revenue.
The disruption to Venezuela’s reliance on oil exports, by cutting PDVSA off from international markets and blocking it from servicing debt, cost Venezuela billions of dollars in revenue.
Under threat, too, foreign companies started pulling out, disrupting supplies of essential goods. Foreign banks became reluctant to handle transactions involving Venezuela.
Estimates put the resulting catastrophic drop in Venezuela’s Gross Domestic Product —in terms of what the economy stopped producing between 2015 and 2022— as equivalent to $ 642 billion, with predictable results for Venezuelans, especially the poor, elderly and infirm.
The overall effect was summed up in 2021 by Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur on universal coercive measures, thus: “Sanctions have prevented revenues and the use of resources to develop infrastructure and carry out social support programs; they have had a devastating effect on the entire population of Venezuela and have undermined the very foundation of social life and the enjoyment of human rights.”
Food and medicine have been targeted by sanctions. The blocking of financial transfer meant Venezuela was unable to access vaccine supplies, leading to vaccination coverage for several diseases falling, with predictable results.
In the case of food, in January 2017, for example, several international financial institutions refused to process of payment transactions, made by the government worth $297 million, to implement the National Seed Plan, seriously affecting the country’s food production.
The obstruction of food imports continued. The US financial system directly blocked the transfer to Venezuela of 18 million boxes of subsidised food for the Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP) programme in September 2017.
The extraterritorial impact of the US’s sanctions regime induced the Swiss bank Hyposwiss to close the account of the company shipping 90 thousand tons of soybean cake worth 15.9 million euros to Venezuela in October 2018. The same month, the Colombian government blocked the shipment to Venezuela of 400 thousand kilos of food destined for the CLAP programme.
An early report on the effect of US sanctions by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in 2019 estimated that they had caused more than 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018, by depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food and other essential imports.
As Trump ramped up the sanctions programme into a blockade akin to that imposed against Cuba since the 1960s, the poor and most vulnerable continued to suffer the most harm, while over seven million Venezuelans were forced as economic migrants to leave the country.
It has taken nearly a decade of sustained effort to bring about recovery in Venezuela’s economy. On the trading front, this has involved Venezuela engaging with BRICS members to mitigate the impact of sanctions and diversify its commercial options.
Recognising this, the new misnamed Bolivar Act aims to significantly expand the extraterritorial reach of the US’s secondary sanctions in an attempt to further choke Venezuela’s economy and disrupt its trade dynamics. Regime change is still the US’s objective, no matter what the cost to ordinary Venezuelans.
As a major online event this week showed, the solidarity movement in Britain must be prepared to defend Venezuela’s right to self-determination against US interference in its affairs, including any renewed offensive of economic aggression by Trump when he assumes the presidency in 2025.
- Tim Young is on the EC of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. You can join the VSC here.
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