A farmer carries a milk bucket at a farm in Batavano, Mayaveo Province, Cuba, on April 14, 2021. On the same day, the Cuban government announced the adoption of a number of new measures to promote domestic food production to improve food shortages. (Xinhua News Agency/Photo)
"The U.S. blockade is the most comprehensive, unequal and protracted war against a country in the history of the world." On May 28, 2021, cuba's National Congress of People's Power held a special hearing to publicly condemn the U.S. blockade as an "act of genocide."
On the same day, the "Long Live Free Cuba" convoy of cars, bicycles and motorcycles also began to travel through several cities such as Las Tunas. In Havana, Rolando Amy Ellie, 63, appeared in the crowd of protesters holding signs that read "Don't block."
<h3>"Morbid hatred"</h3>
Near Plaza de Armas in Old Town Havana, Amy Elli runs a Spanish restaurant.
"Affected by the US lockdown, the price of ingredients has been soaring." Amy Ellie sighs almost every time she comes back from the "black market."
In a foreign affairs store in Havana, I saw that a 2-liter bottle of olive oil costs $3.98, a kilogram of chicken costs $1.8, and a bottle of 500 ml of mineral water costs $0.5.
However, most Cubans do not visit such foreign affairs stores. According to statistics released by the Cuban government in January 2020, the average monthly income of Cubans is less than $38.
Cuba implements a basic food rationing system, and basic necessities such as rice, flour and eggs are supplied by the Government in limited quantities and prices. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Cuba's food self-sufficiency rate is about 30%.
At present, due to the general increase in international food prices and the combination of factors such as the US embargo, the import price of wheat in Cuba has risen from $200 per ton in the same period in 2020 to $280 per ton, and the price of chicken has also risen from 24 cents per pound to 48 cents.
"The rise in the price of ingredients is only the 'side of the broken sieve'. To make matters worse, there are fewer and fewer foreign tourists. Amy Avery says his restaurants have reduced the number of foreign tourists by at least 70 percent.
Cuba's natural resources are relatively scarce, its industry is underdeveloped, and most of its production and living goods depend on imports. Under the U.S. sanctions policy, any foreign company that trades with Cuba could be sanctioned.
Amy Eley said that after the import decoration light bar in the restaurant lobby broke down, parts were not bought. She also worries that air conditioners imported from Germany more than a decade ago could strike at any time. Recently, it has been squeaking louder and louder as it runs.
The United States Government has also cut off remittance channels to Cuba. After losing the November 2020 election, the Trump administration imposed a tougher financial embargo on Cuba. Soon, Western Union, a U.S. financial services provider, closed 407 of its branches in Cuba.
"The new sanctions could prevent the profits from remittance transactions from benefiting the Cuban military." Then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said. Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel responded on social media that "pathological hatred in the United States" was hurting ordinary Cuban families.
Before the new round of financial sanctions, Amy Avery received about $200 a month in funding from relatives and friends such as her daughter and brother, who worked in the United States, more than the restaurant earned off-season.
Remittances from the United States are also an important source of foreign exchange earnings for Cuba. The Miami-based Havana Advisory Group estimates that about one third of Cuban households receive remittances from more than two million Cuban relatives and friends in the United States. In 2019, the remittances totaled more than $3.7 billion, almost on par with Cuba's tourism revenue and more than Cuba's annual trade with the European Union.
Affected by factors such as the severance of remittances by the United States, In 2020, Cuba's foreign exchange earnings only completed 55% of its annual plan. Between April 2019 and March 2020 alone, U.S. sanctions cost Cuba $5.57 billion, while nearly 60 years of sanctions and embargoes cost the country $150 billion in trade, according to figures released by the Cuban government.
In order to earn shrinking foreign exchange, Cuba's "white army", which pursues an internationalist mission, provides medical services to many countries in Latin America and Africa, and also brings $11 billion in foreign exchange earnings to the country every year, more than the $3 billion from exports of sugar, tobacco, nickel and rum.
United States sanctions have caused deep harm to the Cuban economy and society. As early as 1837, Cuba opened its first railway, becoming one of the six countries in the world at that time that had a railway. To this day, Cuban trains are still like a "time machine", the doors and windows are mostly broken, and the wooden seats "creak" and crunch...
Rail remains the most economical and convenient way for Cubans to travel. It only costs $8 to get from Havana to the Guantanamo U.S. military base, but it takes twice as long as a car. In the eyes of many Cubans, the Guantanamo US military base is a colony forcibly leased by the United States, and it is also a symbol of Cuba's humiliation. But Cubans are more concerned about when the United States lifts sanctions, and they have high hopes for the new U.S. President Joe Biden.
<h3>A period of "love and hate" years</h3>
As vice president, Biden supported Oba President Ma's policy of opening up to Cuba. During the 2020 campaign, he promised to restart Obama's Cuba policy. Like many Cubans, Amy Avery has been following U.S.-Cuba relations in the newspapers and on television.
The two countries have experienced a period of "love and hate" years. After Columbus discovered the New World, Cuba became a Spanish colony. In 1898, the United States won the Spanish-American War and began to control Cuba by supporting a military dictatorship.
In February 1959, Fidel Castro led the Cuban people to overthrow the long-standing Batista regime. Soon, the nascent revolutionary regime adopted a policy of nationalization, confiscating the assets of many Americans and adopting a pro-Soviet policy.
Cuba was thus seen by the United States as "the wedge of the Soviet Union in the back garden". In April 1961, the U.S. Military Intelligence Service orchestrated the "Bay of Pigs Incident" that tried to subvert cuba's new regime. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Soviets abandoned plans to set up missile bases in Cuba, and the United States promised never to invade Cuba, but began to impose an economic blockade on Cuba.
It was not until 1996, when economic sanctions against Cuba reached their first post-Cold War upsurge, when the Helms-Burton Act was passed, which began to restrict normal trade between other countries and Cuba.
After Obama's election as president, the U.S. blockade policy was loosened. In December 2013, at the funeral of South African President Nelson Mandela, Obama and Castro shook hands briefly and historicly.
A year later, Obama announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba, eased the trade blockade, travel ban and remittance restrictions on Cuba, and removed Cuba from the list of "countries that support terrorism."
In March 2016, Obama officially visited Havana and delivered a speech at the National Theatre in Havana entitled "Reaching out the Hand of Friendship to Bury the Remnants of the Cold War." But the good times were short-lived. On November 8, 2016, just half a month before the death of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Republican Trump won the U.S. election.
After Trump took office, U.S.-Cuba relations took a sharp turn for the worse. In March 2017, the U.S. side expelled 15 Cuban diplomats in the United States on the grounds that personnel at the Embassy in Cuba had been hit by "sonic attacks."
"The so-called 'sonic attack' may be crickets singing love songs." Two biologists, Alexander Stubbs from the University of California, Berkeley, and Fernando Montealegre-Zapata from lincoln university in the United Kingdom, believe that.
Despite the suspicion of "falsehood", the "sonic attack" still opened the second round of economic sanctions imposed by the United States on Cuba after the Cold War. According to Raúl Castro's report at the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, the Trump administration has imposed more than 240 sanctions on the country in four years, and the United States has "launched the most comprehensive and unequal economic war against Cuba in an unprecedented way."
On January 11, 2021, less than 10 days after Trump stepped down, the U.S. State Department announced that Cuba would once again be added to the list of "countries that support terrorism." This means that the United States will prohibit the international community from exercising economic assistance to Cuba, the import and export of arms and the control of trade in military and civilian equipment, sanction individuals and countries engaged in specific trade with Cuba, and oppose loans to Cuba by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Trump's emergency "blackout" of Cuba before leaving office also created more political and legal obstacles for Biden to restart the Obama administration's engagement policies.
On April 25, 2021, marches were held in many parts of Cuba, and people demanded that the U.S. government lift the nearly 60-year-old blockade against Cuba. (Xinhua News Agency/Photo)
<h3>"Ongoing internal disputes"</h3>
Nearly five months after Biden entered the White House, none of the more than 240 blockades taken by the Trump administration against Cuba have been lifted. Washington's accusations against Havana have not diminished, but have also increased. Recently, an article in the Spanish newspaper El País titled "Cuba and the United States Return to the Era of Confrontation" sent a signal that upset Cubans.
William Leogrand, a U.S.-based expert on Cuba, further revealed that the Biden administration's shelving or abandonment of its engagement policy was due to "a widespread and ongoing internal debate."
To this day, many Cubans still hate Trump. According to Reuters, most Cubans hate Trump, and 89-year-old woman Esperanza Chacon prays almost every day for Trump's defeat. In the United States, Trump's hard-line policies are supported by many Cuban-American groups.
The history of Cuban immigration to the United States can be traced back to the Spanish colonial period more than four hundred years ago, but large-scale migration began in the four years after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when about 250,000 wealthy businessmen, former politicians and other upper-middle-class people immigrated to the United States.
They are known as "golden immigrants", and immigrants are generally well educated and have a lot of wealth.
Between 1965 and 1973, there were about 300,000 Cubans, most of whom were relatives of the "golden migration wave".
Most of these two rounds of immigrants hate the Cuban revolutionary regime. In the United States, they organized a government-in-exile to try to overthrow the Cuban revolutionary regime through extreme means such as riots and assassinations.
However, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. Cuba policy gradually evolved from violent subversion to embargo-based, and the political movement of Cuban exiles fell into a low ebb.
In the 1970s, the "ethnic consciousness" of Cuban immigrants sprouted. In 1981, Cuban Americans followed the example of Jews in creating the Ancient American Foundation and began influencing U.S. Cuba policy as a form of interest group. Since then, the establishment of Marty Television and the passage of the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act have all been represented by the Gumei Foundation.
Cuban decision-making, which influences the United States through parliamentary and presidential elections, has also gradually become a common tool for Cuban interest groups. Cuban-Americans, who make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, are wealthy, united, highly educated, and have a high degree of political engagement compared to other Hispanic groups, and these advantages also increase the political influence of the group.
About 67 percent of Cubans live in Florida. Objective factors such as the relative concentration of the population and the fact that Florida has been a "swing state" in the US election for many years have also amplified the political influence of Cubans and become a group that neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party dares to ignore.
<h3>Time is smoothing out old grudges and hatred</h3>
Cuban interest groups, represented by the Cuban American Foundation, are mostly political lobbyists, but organizations such as the Hermanosal Rescate often use extreme means to influence the détente of U.S.-Cuban relations.
After the end of the Cold War, Cuba's status as a "pawn" in the US-Soviet struggle for hegemony declined, and US-Cuban relations began to ease. On May 1, 1995, U.S. and Cuban diplomats issued a joint statement saying that the two sides had agreed to implement a "wetfoot & dryfoot" policy: Cubans who set foot on U.S. territory would be allowed to stay, while Cubans intercepted at sea would have to be repatriated.
Previously, even Cubans who were intercepted at sea would become U.S. citizens within a year, and the new policy directly made it more difficult for Fraternal Relief to assist Cuban exiles to smuggle into the United States.
On 24 February 1996, José Basurto, the leader of Fraternal Relief, personally led three civilian aircraft from Miami into Cuban airspace illegally. Two of the aircraft were shot down by the Cuban Air Force.
The original warming up of U.S.-Cuba relations quickly froze. Soon after, the Clinton administration signed the Helms-Burton Act, which extended the embargo from Cuba's pillar products such as sugar to a full range of trade sanctions.
However, organizations such as the Fraternal Relief Society have also begun to be suppressed by the US authorities in the "violent and counter-reactionary" situation, and the influence of the entire Cuban community has begun to decline. In 1997, with the death of its founder, Jorge Maas, the Gumei Foundation, which took the interest group route, also became moderate. Four years later, 20 hardliners announced their withdrawal from the Gumei Foundation.
"More and more Cubans are beginning to oppose the Cuban stance of the Cuban Foundation and generally want to end the U.S. embargo and sanctions against Cuba." According to William Leogrand, an expert on Cuba.
Time is smoothing out old grudges and hatred. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the second and third generations of Cubans born in the United States gradually grew up, they did not experience the Cuban Revolution, and their attitude towards both the mother country and the United States was more flexible.
In contrast to before, most of the immigrants since the 1980s have been Cuban destitute. It was a year before the "wet feet & dry feet" policy was implemented in 1994 that Rolando Amy Ely's eldest daughter and brother smuggled into Florida on a raft.
As the destitute gradually became the mainstream of Cuba's immigration army, the policy advocacy of cuban groups towards their home country became milder and friendlier from hatred, and there was a general desire for the United States Government to ease or lift the embargo against Cuba.
"They love their families and they love Cuba." Amy Avery said most Cubans who immigrated to the United States because of poverty have family members who remain in Cuba.
Many Cubans are pinning their hopes on the Biden administration to resume its "engagement policy" and looking forward to the upcoming UNITED Nations General Assembly. Since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted the relevant draft resolution submitted by Cuba on several occasions, but the United States Government remains reluctant to lift the sanctions and embargo against Cuba.
Southern Weekend contributed to Zhu Xiaodi