The world trembled as Bad Bunny marched onto the field at the Super Bowl, in front of millions of spectators, with flags from every country in the Americas, in a performance that, while a kick to imperialism, will only find dry dust in liberal enthusiasm. While the Puerto Rican singer fired off in Spanish, across the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba was announcing that it has run out of jet fuel.
This medieval siege by the United States is an intolerable aggression that suffocates a people and will not have the indignation of a bubble used to bring its solidarity to the compass of what Washington or Brussels says. Let me be clear: I support the Cuban revolution. However, regardless of what we think of the Cuban political model, this is an intolerable aggression that is leaving ambulances without fuel, universities without electricity, and entire neighborhoods without power.
Once again, after allowing genocide in Gaza, extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea, and the kidnapping of a president, we are allowing our leaders, with their selective indifference, to lead us into the abyss.
The problem with Cuba is not democracy or the lack thereof, because we already realize that this is not what guides the political empathy of the United States or the European Union.
I’ll tell you why I think Cuba is the most beautiful country in the world. After being elected president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela visited Fidel Castro in Havana and rebuked him. How is it that the leader of the Cuban Revolution had not yet visited his South African homeland, he asked. Mandela recalled that Cuba had trained ANC fighters who fought against apartheid. When Fidel finally decided to visit South Africa, he passed through several other countries that welcomed him as a hero. Why?
In the 1960s, Cuba supported the liberation of countries such as Algeria and Guinea-Bissau. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of Cubans fought in Angola against the South African invasion and defeated the apartheid regime at Cuito Cuanavale. For countries such as Namibia, this victory was fundamental to their independence.
Cuba built hospitals in Vietnam and supported resistance struggles throughout Latin America, including Puerto Rico. It helped hide Black Panthers and outlaws from around the world, such as Assata Shakur. They treated thousands of children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident. In many countries in the Global South, the only doctors the poorest people have ever seen in their lives have been Cuban.
When an Ebola epidemic broke out in Sierra Leone, Cuban doctors were the only ones who dared to confront the disease alongside the populations. Facing a health crisis unprecedented in decades, when Covid-19 broke out, Italy was forced to ask Cuba for help.
How can a small island blockaded for more than half a century by the world’s greatest power, without significant natural resources, manage to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV? How can it be one of the countries with the lowest infant mortality rate? How can it have an average life expectancy on par with most developed countries?
If this doesn’t interest you, remember that Bad Bunny would not exist without Cuba. Many of the sounds we hear today that come from the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, were born with the Cuban son, which, with the immigrant community in New York, gave birth to what is known as salsa and was fundamental to the arrival of reggaeton.
The fact that the world turns a blind eye to what is happening in Cuba, including some of the countries that received aid from Havana, subject to Washington’s taxes, is one of the greatest proofs of ingratitude of this century. Cuba has often given up its park resources to stand with the people of the world. It is time for the peoples of the world to demand even more firmly an end to the siege and blockade.