Cuba Aid Caravan, Maine to Québec

Why We Fight the U.S. Blockade Against Cuba

by W.T. Whitney, Jr.

Four pick-up trucks and three cars left Maine early on October 30, 1999, passed through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and arrived in Burlington, Vermont, for a midday rally in front of the Federal Building there. The trucks carried 65 boxes of medical supplies for Cuba — intensive care equipment, monitors, defibrillators, and medicines. The shipment had been organized by the Maine Cuba solidarity group, Let Cuba Live.

After the brief rally in Burlington, attended by a couple of reporters, the procession of trucks and cars with supporters headed north to the international border at Highgate, Vermont. The main purpose of the shipment was to challenge the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. Let Cuba Live had refused to secure the required Treasury Department license for humanitarian donations to Cuba, because the embargo laws are viewed as wrong in their entirety.

Skirting Lake Champlain and then crossing the Richelieu River, the caravan was following invasion routes from Canada used by Vergennes and Burgoyne centuries ago. The tiny procession was dwarfed by the setting of natural grandeur and historical drama. At the border, the presence of blinking police lights and 30 uniformed officers were sure signs that the aid shipment had been expected. The histrionic reception was followed first by a cursory inspection and then by permission to take the supplies into Canada.

Although the boxes were all labeled as heading for Cuba, the U.S. authorities preferred to ignore the illegality of the situation, apparently reluctant to risk the potential publicity of a confrontation. The author of Don Quixote, that chronicler of other journeys in search of justice, would have had a field day with such incongruities.

Members of the Québec solidarity organization, Caravane d’Amitie Québec-Cuba, met the people from Maine on the Quebec side of the border and led the four trucks, modern machine versions of Don Quixote’s faithful horse Rosinante, on to Montréal. The next day, a Sunday, a band of sixty Cubans, Québécois, and Mainers loaded the medical supplies into a shipping container on a deserted dock, with giant cranes overhead. Havana Club rum was served, and speeches were heard in three languages.

The aid shipment was intended to demonstrate continued resistance to the blockade, provide humanitarian relief, and show support for the Cuban revolution. The embargo chieftains and the mainstream news media may have been oblivious to the shipment (although there was a splattering of coverage in the Montréal and Maine newspapers), but Let Cuba Live pays little attention to the audience head count and continues its opposition to the blockade at every bend in the road, with a Quixote-like single-mindedness.

The expedition firmed up solidarity between the Maine and Quebec groups of activists in support of Cuba. They scheduled a weekend gathering of the two groups on the Maine coast for the summer of 2000. Emiliano, a member of the Québec Caravane, told this writer that his support for Cuba comes “straight from the heart.” He laments all the lives lost elsewhere in Latin America, because those countries are deprived of the kind of medical care and social support that the revolution brought to Cuba. An emigrant to Québec from Italy in 1959, Emiliano cites Sacco and Vanzetti as the prime example of injustice in the United States.

Back in Maine, the expedition to Montréal provoked comments like this: “Why do you people worry about Cuba? There is work to be done here at home.” The response to such criticism is this: action taken in support of Cuba is directed against U.S. hegemony over the globalized system of money power, because Cuba through example and action contributes to the worldwide resistance to that system. If the U.S. were to lose the vast benefits it enjoys as top dog of global capitalism, internal turmoil and unrest would be the result, and an opening might be created for change to benefit the majority of the American people. By joining Cuba and the international struggle against U.S. corporate domination, the Let Cuba Live activists are working to change the status quo here at home.

This argument rests upon certain assumptions. Opposition to oppression must come from the oppressed themselves. Formerly, most members of the social class that was seen as available for struggle against the system were close at hand, “on the other side of the tracks.” Now great masses of poor people who work in the international market economy live beyond U.S. shores, wherever their labor can be bought cheaply. Today the “reserve army of  the unemployed” are everywhere, on eroded Haitian hillsides, in the barrios of Lima, in Jakarta, in U.S. prisons, even in Russia and China — but not in Cuba! The U.S. government, to maintain its version of world order, wages both high and low intensity warfare. The blockade against Cuba is an example of the latter.

The empire may be most vulnerable where it does the most harm. On that account the fight for justice here at home calls for a globalized frame of mind and action.