Democrats, progressive media and BLM support socialist Cuba over freedom protesters
July 15, 2021
As protests erupted this week in Cuba demanding changes to the government, strangely Democrats are siding with the socialist regime over the common people.
Faced with the undeniable success of the Trump era policy that tightened sanctions on the Cuban communist government, liberals and progressives are falling back to their default option on Cuba: Blame the United States for failures of the Cuban dictatorship to fulfill what a New York Times editor hopefully called the “utopian socialist nation its founders imagined.”
Days after widespread protests broke out in Cuba, liberals and progressives are clamoring for President Joe Biden to reverse the sanctions that have denied the Cuban regime legitimacy instead of celebrating the success of the sanctions that might bring change.
Progressives, it turns out, aren’t offended by the nature of this Cuban socialist state—which lives by corruption and human rights repression.
Instead, they are offended by efforts to change to island nation away from socialism.
They want the state to remain, but with changes to the leadership, not to the socialist system.
Vox cited House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as advocates for a rollback of sanctions, calling the United States “the beast” that Cubans know well.
The fraught US-Cuba relationship means Cubans are are often torn between the beast they know — the communist regime — and the other beast they know, the United States. https://t.co/csGs9mAtUQ
— Vox (@voxdotcom) July 14, 2021
“Cubans are facing profound hardship because of the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, the entrenched culture of corruption and mismanagement among Cuba’s leadership, and the strict sanctions callously imposed by the Trump Administration,” said Meeks according to Vox.
“I call on President Biden to help alleviate the suffering in Cuba by rescinding the Trump era sanctions and offering additional humanitarian and vaccine assistance to the Cuban people,” Meeks added.
Notice the absence of denunciations against the socialist state.
Similarly, Ernesto Londoño, the Brazil bureau chief for The New York Times cited previously, said that the people weren’t just rebelling against the government, but against the situation between Cuba and the U.S., blaming the Trump sanctions.
He went so far as to deliberately mistranslate the Cuban communist slogan to soften the contrast between what the communists offer and what the protestors think they deliver.
Hilarious. The NYT Daily podcast is blaming Trump for Cuba’s protests. Amazing TDS.
— Brady Howell (@bd_howell) July 15, 2021
The protesters over the weekend were chanting “Patria y vida”, meaning “country and life”.
Londoño then explained that it was a play on words from the communist slogan of “Patria o muerte” which he said “essentially means ‘We will defend our homelands with our lives.’”
In fact, the literal translation is “country or death”.
The juxtaposition between “country and life” and “country or death” couldn’t be more apt between the personal liberty, which the protestors want and the communal socialism, which they are rejecting.
Black Lives Matter has released a statement on Cuba: pic.twitter.com/NgnT1o1oZE
— Sabrina Rodríguez (@sabrod123) July 15, 2021
To complete the triumvirate of socialist legislators, socialist media and socialist activists, Black Lives Matter (BLM) came out with a strong endorsement of the Cuban communist regime, which should put an end to denials that BLM is not a Marxist organization.
BLM called the Trump embargo a “human rights violation,” and hailed Cuba for supporting socialist regimes (which they called Black liberation struggles) in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and South Africa. Those struggles were also supported by old Soviet bloc countries, plus North Korea, China and Libya.
“The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination,” said BLM, siding with the Cuban communists over the protestors. “United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades.”
And rightfully so.