Demand end to U.S. blockade of Cuba

Cuba’s National Children’s Theater, La Colmenita, or “The Little Beehive,” concluded its U.S. tour in San Francisco on Oct. 29. The love-filled, U.N. Children’s Fund ambassadors’ visit coincided with two events significant for Cuba: the 35th anniversary of the midair bombing of Cubana airline’s Flight 455 in Barbados and the 20th annual U.N. vote condemning the U.S. blockade of Cuba.

La Colmenita’s latest work, Abracadabra, depicts the school children’s search for “the essence of things,” guided by a new young teacher. The children, in turn, guide their audiences to view the U.S. imprisonment of the Cuban Five from the perspective of the Cuban people, for whom the Five are heroes who sought to shield their socialist homeland from terror attacks.

Almost everyone in Cuba is personally touched by the more than 50-year terror campaign waged against them from U.S. territory with impunity. The Cubana 455 explosion and crash killed 73 people, among them the then 41-year-old father of Carlos Alberto Cremata, La Colmenita’s founder and director.

Luis Posada Carriles, one of the still living architects of that horror, walks free in Miami despite an active extradition order from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and an international treaty that mandates that such perpetrators either be extradited or brought to trial in their resident country.

On Oct. 24, La Colmenita brought songs, music and the true story of the Cuban Five as told by noted actor and activist Danny Glover to the United Nations. The tears, joy and dancing evoked by the irresistible young performers uplifted the U.N. audience as it did in every venue, delighting all ages with their unabashed warmth and love.

The next day, for the 20th consecutive time, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly — with 186 countries agreeing — to the “necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” As in last year’s vote, only the U. S. and Israel voted for continuing the blockade of Cuba. Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau abstained.

Although the paramilitary acts of aggression on Cuba stand out in their overt violence and could mistakenly be attributed to desperate acts by a small number of fanatical Cuban exiles in Florida, the unilateral U.S. economic blockade is no less an act of war. It reveals the U.S. government’s overall goal is to destroy the independent, socialist Cuban revolution.

In his statement before the vote, Cuban Minister for Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla reported that the blockade has cost the Cuban people $975 billion. He cited the 1948 Convention on Genocide, pointing to the April 6, 1960, U.S. government memo which stated the objectives of the blockade as “to cause … disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship … weaken the economic life of Cuba … denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.’”

He continued, “The United States has never hidden the fact that the objective it pursues is to overthrow the Revolutionary government and destroy the constitutional order that the Cuban people sovereignly defends. That is what former President George Bush called ‘a change of regime,’ which has currently acquired new dimensions.”

The 2010 U.N. vote total was 187, one more than this year’s vote on Oct. 25. Libya was absent, having suffered massive bombing and the destruction of its independent government at the hands of U.S./NATO imperialist aggression.