KNOW demands: Hands Off Cuba!
On March 21st, a solidarity flotilla called Nuestra América Convoy arrived in Cuba, bringing urgently needed supplies including medicine and medical equipment. Hundreds of people from dozens of countries participated in this effort to break through the U.S. blockade and deliver life-saving aid to the Cuban people.
No bombs have fallen on Cuba, but the impact of U.S. policy is no less deadly. U.S. economic warfare has caused massive disruptions across Cuban society, including its healthcare system. Hospitals face power outages, medical equipment cannot function, and critical medicines are increasingly unavailable. This is not an unintended consequence; it is the predictable result of policies designed to strangle an entire country.
Cuba, despite decades of crippling U.S. sanctions and blockades, has long been known for its global medical solidarity. The country has sent tens of thousands of doctors and medical personnel to impoverished countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to support and develop their local healthcare systems. These envoys have often provided services in areas with little to no medical infrastructure. The U.S. is actively working to force countries, particularly those in the Western hemisphere, to expel these teams and send them back to Cuba, depriving millions of people of essential healthcare, for the sake of isolating and punishing Cuba.
Since the 1959 revolution which overthrew the US-backed Batista dictatorship, Cuba has built a system that guarantees free medical care and education, including university degrees, even under conditions of severe economic constraint. This makes one wonder if perhaps travel to Cuba has been limited or restricted for decades because the ruling elites of our country know that if Americans see that even a severely underserved country with limited natural resources can provide a social safety net, we will begin to question why the wealthiest country in the world cannot provide the same for their citizens.
Cuba has been under an illegal and immoral U.S.-led blockade for decades. The U.S. embargo has made it nearly impossible to obtain essential medicine, equipment, and parts needed to keep the economy running, yet the country has managed to maintain its autonomy and resist U.S. invasion in 1961, numerous paramilitary regime change actions, and over 600 assassination attempts led by the CIA against Fidel Castro, while retaining the highest literacy rate in Latin America.
With the recent intensification of the U.S. blockade restricting even shipments of fuel, Cubans are at risk of an imminent genocide by way of siege warfare. Transportation systems are breaking down, children can't go to school, people can't get to work, hospitals and essential services can't operate amid prolonged blackouts, crops can't get to market, and the real threat of widespread hunger is stalking the land.
These conditions are not the result of a natural disaster. They are the direct outcome of intentional policies implemented by the U.S. government to make an example of Cuba. The goal of these policies is not humanitarian reform, but economic and political coercion that aims to tear apart the very fabric of Cuban society and engineer a failed state. U.S. billionaire vultures can then gobble up the pieces and manufacture a false narrative that only western imperial-aligned states are capable of stability and success. It is an effort to punish a nation that has refused to submit to U.S. dominance, with a goal of returning Cuba to a condition of subservience and dependence on the U.S. as a neo-colony.
Kalamazoo Nonviolent Opponents of War (KNOW) calls for an immediate end to the illegal, immoral, and inhumane blockade on Cuba. We urge Congress to pass the recently introduced "New Good Neighbor Act", which calls for a formal end to policies of intervention in Latin America, and we call on people everywhere to demand an end to the many forms of deadly U.S. interventionism that have suffocated the Cuban people for over 60 years.