In their article How to Slander a Humanitarian Mission, Alex Skopic and Nathan J. Robinson write:
The two of us just returned this week to New Orleans from Havana, Cuba. We had traveled there alongside hundreds of volunteers from around the world on the Nuestra América aid mission, delivering tons of desperately-needed supplies to a country suffering under a U.S. blockade of fuel (in addition to the preexisting U.S. trade embargo). Current Affairs went along to report on the convoy and to document firsthand the effects of the blockade on ordinary Cubans. A longer report will be appearing in the next print edition of our magazine, but what we saw was harrowing. The whole country plunged into a blackout while we were there, because the fuel shortage brought down the national electrical grid. The entire city of Havana was in almost total darkness, with only a handful of solar or generator lamps shining out.
We have both seen things that will be permanently burned into our minds. People moving around in the shadows like ghosts. Mounds of foul-smelling trash in the street, with sanitation workers in the few running trucks overwhelmed by the task of collecting it—and worse, old men picking through the heaps, looking for anything they can use or sell. Live fish dying slowly in tanks filled with stagnant green water. Shopkeepers losing all of their refrigerated and frozen food. Taxi drivers calling out desperately for a fare, because tourism to the island has shrunk to a trickle. Restaurants having to close in the middle of a busy dinner service after losing power mid-meal. The look of worry on medical workers’ faces, as they contemplate rationing their remaining antibiotics or painkillers.
Our government is systematically torturing the Cuban people. It is doing so purposefully in order to extract concessions from the Cuban government. (Not human rights concessions, mind you, but favorable investment terms.) For a rich country to punish a poor country like this is morally grotesque. The issue is not difficult to grasp.
Indeed it’s not. Even so, there was a concerted media campaign to change the subject and/or portray the trip as nefarious. Privileged tone-deaf American leftists, we were told, were living it up in five-star hotels, thus diverting resources desperately needed by Cubans themselves. Or: By bringing resources, they were saving a dictatorship otherwise on the verge of collapse. Or both. Why not? Internal consistency doesn’t matter much for this kind of thing.
Patiently and methodically, Skopic and Robinson demolish all of the lies and evasions. Did Kneecap somehow procure desperately needed electricity for a concert? Nope. They gave an eight-minute set as part of a long-standing Cuban musical festival. All the Cuban bands who’d already been scheduled most certainly would have gone ahead without them. Did the hotels they stayed at have power while hospitals struggled with blackouts? Yep. Because U.S. law mandates that American visitors stay at private hotels, and the U.S. blockade is explicitly set up to allow fuel for the private sector while denying it to public institutions like hospitals.1 To circle and underline that point, there isn’t fuel coming into the country that could be used by either hotels or hospitals, because *that’s specifically and intentionally prevented by U.S. policy. (*As Marco Rubio has, said,that policy is “entirely designed” to put the private sector in a “privileged position.”) Was the delegation that brought massive amounts of desperately needed humanitarian aid to hospitals and other institutions in Cuba somehow diverting resources needed by Cubans by doing things like staying in hotels, taking cabs, and drinking at bars? No, and the idea that they were is grotesquely stupid, considering that
Cubans urgently want more Americans to come and visit the island and spend money there. Because Cuba isn’t allowed to export much, tourism has become one of the key sectors of its economy, and the drying up of the tourist trade is destroying so many people’s livelihoods. They do not think of visitors as parasitic. They want the hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, and taxicabs to be full. Right now, people are staying away, and if they think that by doing so they’re helping Cubans, they are wrong.
Is Cuba’s economic system responsible for the bulk of the suffering? Pretty dubious, they point out, considering that even before the very recent and far more extreme blockade, a fairly stringent U.S. embargo has been in place since the Kennedy administration. (If the latter doesn’t play a significant role in damaging the Cuban economy, what on earth is the point of imposing it?) They also could have pointed out that, when the Cubans have taken steps on the Sino-Vietnamese road of market reforms, they haven’t exactly been rewarded by gentler U.S. policy. If anything, as all that was happening, the economic warfare intensified. And, in one of my favorite points in the whole article, Skopic and Robinson take a step back from arguing about what proportion of the island’s pre-January 29th misery was caused by endogenous flaws in Cuba’s economic model and what percentage was caused by economic strangulation by the giant next door.
For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the facts. Let’s assume that the Cuban government was 100 percent responsible for the state of the Cuban economy before the January 29 fuel blockade, and that the longstanding prior U.S. embargo had zero negative impact on the country. It would still be true that the Trump administration’s fuel embargo was a criminal act, because turning off the power of a poor country is cruel regardless of how the country’s poverty was caused. Nothing can justify inflicting the suffering we saw in Havana.
And that’s exactly why the hacks and propagandists smearing the delegation would rather talk about just about anything but the core of the issue.
Read the full article here.
Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the first eight here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out my article in Jacobin:
There Was No “Right" Way to Attack Iran
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The only other legally permitted option would be staying in private homes, which Robinson and Skopic point out (a) would have been severely impractical for such a large delegation and (b) would have led to using a lot more fuel from having to use buses to go around.
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