“Sanctions” used by U.S. imperialism against governments it seeks to overthrow, and part of its policy of enforcing and extending its world domination, are acts of economic warfare. The demonstrations in Cuba that erupted on July 11 against the Cuban government around the slogan “Patria Y Vida” — country and life — illustrate this fact.
Background to the counterrevolutionary demonstrations
Since 1960, Cuba has been blockaded by the United States. According to Wikipedia, in April 1960, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester D. Mallory wrote to his superior Roy Rubottom that the “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” The aim would be to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” This not only describes perfectly the policy adopted by the Eisenhower administration in 1960 but also Biden’s policy toward Cuba today.
Until the end of the 1980s, Cuba’s membership in the socialist bloc led by the USSR greatly mitigated the effects of the economic blockade. However, the counter-revolution that matured under Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR not only destroyed the USSR as a socialist federation of Soviet Socialist Republics, it also destroyed what had been the socialist economy under construction as well. The wave of counterrevolution unleashed by Gorbachev’s policies engulfed all of Eastern Europe as well as the USSR. This capitalist counterrevolution had dire effects on the struggle of the working class, the peasantry, and oppressed people not only in the former socialist bloc but throughout the world.
The Soviet Union had been more than simply another trading partner for Cuba. The relationship between Cuba, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and the other socialist countries in Eastern Europe contained elements of the planned international socialist economy of the future. All this had been lost by the time Mikhail Gorbachev “resigned” as president of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 