Alyson Kennedy statement on Cuba

US out of Guantánamo! 
End Cuba embargo now!

Socialist Workers Party campaign statement

The following statement was released March 23 by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president and Osborne Hart for vice president.

We call on working people in the U.S. and around the world to stand with the Cuban people and demand: End the U.S. embargo! Guantánamo belongs to Cuba — return it now! Stop meddling in Cuba’s internal affairs!

The presence of the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo — occupying an area about twice the size of Manhattan — is an outrageous violation of Cuban sovereignty. Washington seized Cuba’s best harbor in 1903 and imposed a “treaty” at gunpoint granting the imperialist masters a “perpetual lease.” Ever since the Cuban people overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, the revolutionary government has demanded an end to this illegal occupation. What’s more, since 2002 Washington has maintained the infamous prison camp there that has turned the name “Guantánamo” into a symbol of torture and abuse.

The U.S. rulers have tried to destroy the Cuban Revolution for more than 56 years using everything from assassination attempts and invasion to sabotage and economic warfare. Having failed, they now hope to undermine the revolution by other methods.

In 1961 Fidel Castro boldly asserted, “There will be a victorious revolution in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba.” Amid the growing world crisis of capitalism, these words are even more timely.

What does U.S. capitalism and its parties — Democrats, Republicans, and others — offer humanity? More wars, unemployment, discrimination against women, attacks on constitutional rights, racism, police brutality, farm foreclosures.

In face of what at times seemed insurmountable odds, Cuba’s workers and farmers have shown their capacity to build a society based on human solidarity, not on profits of a tiny minority. What people sent the most doctors to West Africa to cure those ill with Ebola? Who is setting the example of how to fight the Zika virus? What country sent hundreds of thousands of volunteers to help stop the racist South African regime in its tracks in Angola, asking nothing in return? The Cuban people and their revolutionary government.

As part of our campaign, the Socialist Workers Party candidates explain what the working class in the U.S. and elsewhere can learn from working people in Cuba — to make a socialist revolution in our own countries. Workers here have the same capacities as our brothers and sisters in Cuba.

We encourage workers and young people to read Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes;The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class; Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and other books that explain what Cuba’s socialist revolution has accomplished and what the Socialist Workers Party is for.

As we campaign we are often asked, “What can I do?” Help us win new readers to the Militant newspaper and books like these. Join picket lines by workers on strike. Participate in protests against police brutality and in defense of a woman’s right to choose abortion. Speak out against the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Join the Socialist Workers Party and be part of organizing to make a revolution right here in the United States. 

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