‘TIS no hyperbole. The bell sounds like it’s tolling for Cuba. Or so that’s what is being brought across as suddenly this column is momentarily diverted from the Iranian conflict.
Following the abduction by United States President Donald Trump of Venezuelan leader Nicho-las Maduro, Trump ordered no more aid and oil from Venezuela to Cuba.
And to other oil suppliers, Trump’s threats of tariffs hang like a sword of Damocles ready to crash into their skulls at the appropriate slash.
So, since January, only a 730,000-barrel shipload from Russia arrived in Cuba.
For a nation of 10 million, that is certainly a pittance.
Since then, the shortage of fuel has sent Cuba’s economy crashing.
In March, Cuba experienced two island-wide power blackouts.
Most of the time, power outages lasted for hours on end. Industries shut down. Social services like basic education and health care practically totally diminished.
The disaster has been particularly telling in infant mortality.
The Lancet Global Health Journal has estimated a staggering 564,000 excess deaths due to eco-nomic sanctions imposed by the United States.
So economic sanctions are no different from pandemics. People get killed in multi-tudes.
And with no ready medicines for cure, the most you can do is ready body bags for cadavers.
Quite appalling is that of the figure above, the rate of infant mortality has been rising.
Doctors candidly attribute this thus: It is rising because the hospital staff cannot report for work, because there are no buses; cleaners cannot get to work to disinfect the surroundings of moth-ers and their children, so they contact sepsis; and, of all things, milk, for sheer want of transport, cannot reach the poor darlings who have nothing left to do but expire.
Sanctions and tariffs, though economic as they are touted to be, have a most ironic way of ulti-mately exacting cost in human lives medically.
Let alone style of living for those who manage to survive.
In one of Trump’s tirades, he predicted Iran would be thrown back to the Stone Age “where it belongs.”
Reading a social media account in that regard, I cringe at realizing the Trump threat has al-ready worked out that catastrophe on Cuba.
With electricity completely down, nights are for throwing people back to the dark ages.
Cooking out in the streets in wood-fired ovens.
Thank God, not quite yet devouring raw animals slain with stone implements.
And to think that it has been my predilection to cite Cuba as a model of a strong rampart of socialist revolution.
The last such phenomenon being the 1959 ouster by Fidel Castro of the Fulgencio Batista re-gime.
That was a perfect model for a proletarian uprising.
Because well-planned, swift and executed with precision, it won after only a year of hostilities.
Quite unlike the Sisonite protracted people’s war in the Philippines. After a half-century of struggle, the NPAs ended up just struggling protractedly on and on.
Oh, the victorious Cuban revolt.
To have succeeded right at the very backyard of American imperialism!
No wonder Fidel Castro was catapulted to the high echelons of world icons. Shirts embossed with his image as a revolutionary became the fad among excited youngsters. It reflected the revolutionary culture of a world gener-ation of Cuba-adoring multitudes — all thumbs down for the evil America.
Cuba had the reputation of being the site of the last crushing of bourgeois political power.
A shining symbol of rising proletarian supremacy.
And then suddenly, in your eighties you wake up to a Cuba wrecked by America from the mag-nificent image you had of it in your teens!
It disheartens.
Yes, indeed.
Proletarian spirit knows no national boundaries so that whenever you remember Cuba, you are instantly thrown back to your own days of rage against capitalist oppression and exploitation.
Oh, how magnificent had been that era of the First Quarter Storm. It might have failed to over-throw capitalism in the Philippines, but with Cuba there persevering in its mighty stand against the United States, the beacon of proletarian internationalism continued to shine on.
And in the Philippines, such a spirit could experience a brilliant Second Coming.
Which is why when as the Iran war began to pick up tempo and Trump declared, “Cuba will be next,” my instinct was to find out what happened to the Fidel Castro era.
It’s main back-up, the Soviet Union, was toppled by the glasnost perestroika in 1991. China had shouldered the brunt of worldwide socialism since then and had achieved significant strides with its propagation of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative onward to the ultimate objective of “a world community of shared future.”
How sad to realize now that Cuba, rather than being, as Trump threatened, the next after Iran, has actually been already the first to fall.
All the more reason Iran must carry on in its struggle against the United States and Israel.
It’s high time the two are told of John Donne’s: “No man is an island entire of itself.”
Cuba’s sufferings are not exclusive to itself. They are an affliction by every nation affected by Trump’s arbitrary sanctions and wars of aggression.
As Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi quite lucidly worded it when asked how Tehran is re-sponding to the threats of Washington, “I think it’s not for Iran to respond to that (question). It is for the whole international community to respond to such threat to the United Nations charter.”
Araghchi threw the challenge at the United Nations Security Council: “The Security Council must play it’s responsibility (as the guarantor of world security). Otherwise nothing will be left of international law...”
The suffering Cuba is experiencing right now is the very same fate Trump has vo-ciferously threatened to throw Iran into.
What behooves the world, therefore, is to recognize that what is happening to Cuba already is a dire precursor of what will happen to Iran — and to the world at large in fact — if America is not at long last vanquished in its ceaseless aggression of nations of the world.
Iran has been most outstanding in this respect. It has been shouldering almost by its lonesome the great battle with the United States and Israel, and yet consistently steadfast in persevering in the fight with amazing success-es.
Iran has shattered in the eyes of the world Trump’s unending boasts of America’s invincibility.
In every aspect of the intensifying Gulf war, Iran is winning.
The sudden refusal of the United States Army chief of staff to obey Trump’s order of a ground invasion of Iran cannot but amount to a final nail in America’s coffin.
The Army chief’s defiance reflects the erosion of morale now pervading the American military.
Absent the will to fight, the American military is definitely doomed to defeat.
So, to Cuba and every other nation of the world suffering from aggression by the United States — count the Philippines surely among them — the message from Iran is a paraphrase from John Donne: “No nation is an island entire of itself. Every nation’s death diminishes me for I am a part of the international community. And therefore send no one to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
