After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba went into a serious crisis called the Special Period. There was an outpouring of solidarity across the world. In India, the communist movement took an active role with the farmer movements to raise 20,000 tons of grain that were shipped from Calcutta to Havana. Fidel Castro gave a moving speech, saying, “This is the bread of India we will be eating.” Later the victory of Hugo Chávez and the start of Venezuela’s Bolivarian movement in 1998 became a lifeline for Cuba. However, with intensified attacks on Venezuela over the past ten years, Cuba has again entered a serious crisis, and the United States has tightened its blockade.

For the past thirty years — every single year except during the pandemic — every country in the world, except for the US and its ally Israel, has voted against the illegal US embargo of Cuba. The embargo is illegal, by the UN Charter, because the United States doesn’t have the Security Council resolution it requires to impose it. The US can choose not to trade with Cuba, but it is illegal for the United States to use its influence over the world economy to place third-party sanctions on others who want to trade with Cuba.

Without international solidarity, Cuba will have a hard time recovering from its electricity crisis. The United States will not allow shipments of machines that will help them rebuild electricity plants damaged by hurricanes and fires. Without Mexico, Barbados, Russia, and Venezuela helping, Cuba will be in a difficult situation. To those who say the Cuban government is at fault, I say, why not end the embargo and let the government fail by itself? It’s not the government that’s failing, but the embargo that’s strangling the country. The US knows the embargo is working. That’s why they have it in place.

In 1804, when the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and others overthrew the system of slavery, the French, British, and US each tried to crush it. Why? Because it sent the powerful message up and down the hemisphere that slavery was the antithesis of civilization, and that liberty, fraternity, and equality means the end of the enslavement of people.

The Haitian Revolution brewed fears of contagion — a concern that its ideals would spread to the plantations of the US South or other Caribbean islands — so it had to be garroted and constrained. That was one aspect of the post-1804 mentality. As for the second aspect, when you read Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, it becomes clear that the intellectuals of US slavery were interested in creating a political economy running along the Mississippi River and into the Caribbean, which would include of course Cuba, a very important island of enslavement at the time.

By the early 1800s, high-ranking US officials are fantasizing that the entire Mississippi economy would be managed by these offshore islands that would provide ports. I’m not a close reader of John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, but when I introduced the Johnson book in our conversations, Chomsky went on a long riff about how the United States, particularly after the Haitian Revolution, starts getting the idea that Cuba was going to fall into its lap. Eight decades later, the US hijacks the 1898 Cuban War of Independence and assimilates Cuba into the US dominion. By then, the Mississippi “river of dark dreams” economy has understandably disappeared, so the project changes. Cuba after 1898 becomes the “gangster’s paradise,” a place for tourism and gambling.

The 1959 Cuban Revolution marked a break from post-1804 fantasies of US designs on Cuba becoming part of the United States, shifting the island toward sovereignty — a move the US found unacceptable. This sense of entitlement to Cuba remains entrenched in the upper level of the administration.

To understand the Roosevelt Corollary, you have to go back to the Venezuelan crisis of 1902 and 1903. At the time, the president of Venezuela was, interestingly, a man named Castro — Cipriano Castro — who told European creditors that the Venezuelan government shouldn’t have to pay back debts from previous wars. Essentially, he argued that these were “odious debts” — to use a term anachronistically — and that the creditors had lent to all kinds of unscrupulous entities, so why should the Venezuelan people bear the costs?

In response, Britain, Italy, and Germany blockaded Venezuela with their navies. Castro thought the United States would protect Venezuela by telling the Europeans to buzz off. But instead, Roosevelt issued his Corollary, and I’m glad you noticed its most fascinating aspect.

The original Monroe Doctrine of 1823 says that the US has the right to intervene in the whole hemisphere to protect it from European intervention. In fact, you can even read it as a relatively progressive document that declares the United States will protect the Western hemisphere from European colonialism — although it also has the arrogance of portraying the United States as a “city on the hill” entitled to the hemisphere. Roosevelt, thinking like a capitalist, takes it in a direction far from James Monroe’s aristocratic and pastoral vision. His Corollary says that if you have borrowed money from anybody — European or not European — you have to pay your creditors, and if you don’t, the US will intervene.

So rather than protecting Venezuela from its European creditors, the United States intervened to protect the rights of finance capital. That’s why so many coups take place, because the US feels that it has the right to intervene in a country — Chile, for instance, in 1973 — to protect capitalism against socialist development. When the Organization of American States (OAS) is formed in 1948 in Bogotá, Colombia, its charter effectively incorporates the Roosevelt Corollary, setting up an anti-communist alliance. That’s why, when a revolution of the Left occurs in Cuba, the OAS will take a position against it.

During our conversations for the book, we compared the Cuban Revolution with other historical movements. C. L. R. James likened it to the 1804 Haitian Revolution, comparing Toussaint and Castro in an interesting afterword to The Black Jacobins.

I thought it was more illuminating to compare Cuba with François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s 1957 “revolution” in Haiti — a right-wing takeover that enforced terror with the Tonton Macoute death squads out there killing people. Two years later, there’s a revolution in Cuba where there is none of Haiti’s death squad culture. There was violence, but that violence didn’t become a permanent fixture. In Haiti, violence was the tool that kept Papa Doc, and later “Baby Doc” Duvalier, in power, which led to their downfall. Cuba’s revolution survived because it didn’t rely on repression and violence in the same way.

If the OAS were principled, it would have condemned Papa Doc’s regime and called for a return to elections in Haiti; it might have even sanctioned Duvalier or encouraged the United States to intervene. None of that happened. After the 1959 revolution, the US tried to kill Castro over six hundred times, tried to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs and other places, and didn’t allow Cuba into the OAS due to its communist government. Neither the United States nor the OAS was acting on principles — it was pure geopolitics. Haiti, as an ally, was given a pass while Cuba was treated as an adversary, even though Cuba has never taken an adversarial position toward the US.

Before discussing the “state sponsor of terrorism” label being applied to Cuba, let’s talk about what the United States is doing today — sending two-thousand-pound bombs to Israel, with which Israel is wiping out Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is conducting acts of terror, and the US is backing them. Don’t take my word — Leon Panetta, ex–CIA director, said that the pager attack that Israel carried out in Lebanon was an act of terror.

There are so many examples of the United States supporting, encouraging, and sometimes financing acts of terror against the Cuban Revolution, whereas Cuba never exercised any impulse to commit violence against the US government.

It’s worth noting that the Cuban Revolution happened in 1959, yet the United States didn’t label Cuba a “state sponsor of terrorism” until 1982. What changed? Under Reagan, the US was waging dirty wars in Central America, funneling illegal money into the Iran-Contra affair, despite congressional restrictions, to conduct massacres in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. At that time, the Cuban government was training revolutionaries from all over Latin America, but Cuba was not intervening with troops or supplying weapons. Conditions in some countries got so ghastly that, in fact, the social democratic Venezuelan government intervened to provide air support to some of the guerrilla groups. Yet Venezuela was never labeled a state sponsor of terror.

In the 1980s, the United States supported apartheid South Africa, a terrorist regime, yet it was the Cubans who actually sent troops and intelligence officers into Angola to help liberation forces. With the defeat of South Africa at the 1987 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the apartheid state was finally brought into discussions with the African National Congress. When Nelson Mandela was out of jail, he went to Havana on his first overseas visit and thanked the Cubans.

While I was in Namibia, people in the Southwest Africa People’s Organization told me Cubans are the only people who intervene without wanting anything for their intervention. They intervene on principle, unlike the US, which intervened in South Africa for geopolitical reasons and — bringing back the Roosevelt Corollary — to protect capital interests.

For any country anywhere in the world, the first priority is putting its people’s interests first. To do that, you need to exercise sovereignty over your territory — claiming control over your resources and resisting the external forces who’ll insist they own your mines, your energy systems, and so on. Private property, even across international borders, is sacrosanct. That’s the Roosevelt Corollary.

The tendency to establish sovereignty directly clashes with imperialism. Take Guatemala under Jacobo Árbenz — he wasn’t a socialist; he was simply a liberal who wanted a dignified life for Guatemalans. In order for the poorest Guatemalans to live with dignity, he said they have to take some land from multinational corporations — not all, just land they don’t use — and give it to smallholders and farmers. The United Fruit Company, which owned vast amounts of land, didn’t even want to give fallow land to landless farmers. For them, it set a bad precedent, so they pushed for a coup, with officials like John and Allen Dulles, who had shares in United Fruit, backing it. Che Guevara witnessed this and realized that any attempt at national sovereignty would be met with imperialist backlash.

All Cuba is saying is: we want control over our own electrical systems and fair terms for our sugarcane, and we want to build a dignified society. But this vision clashes with multinational corporations and the idea of property. Imperialism and sovereignty cannot coexist. One has to triumph over the other. That’s the struggle in Cuba.

Take a look at the efforts of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). When Cuba was excluded from the Summit of the Americas, AMLO was outraged and said Mexico would not attend either. Since then, he has been leading the fight against Cuba’s isolation. When he was president, AMLO was bold and tried to build post-OAS international forums that aren’t rooted in anti-communist history. Why should the OAS be headquartered in DC? Why should Washington have domination over the OAS agenda? If you want a hemispheric body, why is Cuba not included?

The real issue in this rolling cycle of crises that Cuba is facing is that nobody has been able to directly confront the United States — apart from the UN votes to try to break the blockade. Why haven’t ships from certain countries pushed ahead? Cuba rented Turkish electricity ships for a while. It’s not like ships are prevented from going in and out of Cuba, but ultimately, the blockade has to end. If the blockade ended, Cuba could transform its pharmaceutical industry, export life-saving drugs, and form international partnerships for joint patents. Right now, Cuba’s groundbreaking drugs can’t reach the world because of the embargo.

The people of Cuba are holding strong because they know if the revolution falls, they’d return to the days before the Cuban Revolution in December 1958. Nobody wants to go there. Can they advance? They need capital, they need resources, and they need to get them from somewhere. Where? We don’t know. Maybe one of the BRICS countries or possibly Turkey, who, it must be noted, has even offered to take wounded Israelis off Hamas’s hands.