Address to Cubans and Friends of Cuba in Jamaica
A year ago, we witnessed a coordinated attack on the Cuban Revolution by reactionary forces in different corners of the world. Legitimate frustrations of the Cuban people, suffering from a blockade lasting more than 6 decades, were hijacked by counterrevolutionaries who made themselves pawns of US interventionism in Cuba.
The US media and politicians acted in a way that made it obvious that this was all planned rather than a spontaneous uprising. They knew about the protests beforehand, they had bigger protests in Miami, and we were able to take note of strange social media activity in terms of the use of bots and certain trends originating from the US and Spain rather than from Cuba.
The US has been open about its funding for destabilisation efforts in Cuba, and we used social media to bring this to light for persons who were unaware of it. After 4 years of Trump, we had already been on guard. We were around for the destabilisation efforts in Nicaragua in 2018, all the coup attempts in Venezuela, and the coup in Bolivia. Knowing that even Obama had supported regime change in Cuba, we had no illusion that the Biden administration would be any less imperialist or interventionist than its predecessors.
However, we are not merely keyboard warriors. When we heard that there were persons protesting across from the Cuban Embassy, we sent scouts to observe these groups. After they mounted 2 protests, unopposed, we decided to attempt a mobilisation against them on July 17. From our end, our movement delivered the numbers that it promised, but some other movements that we had relied on were not able to mobilise their base so we had to downgrade our actions to a test effort.
What we did was more of testing our capabilities rather than really proving them, by experimenting with crowd control and coordination among the roughly 20 of us who showed up. We had given up on the idea of a direct confrontation with the counterrevolutionary protesters, but we still did enough to upset them enough that they began to chase us.
In other countries, like Panama and Venezuela, more serious mobilisations took place to demonstrate solidarity with Cuba. We wished that we had the strength that we saw among the solidarity movements in those countries.
Still, what we did was appreciated by our Cuban friends here. We did not know how serious the situation was until we got news that the Cuban Embassy in France was firebombed later in the month. We had also sent Comrades to infiltrate the protest group and pose as journalists, where one of the protesters admitted being supportive of US military intervention in the region.
Since then, we have been trying our best to rebuild the solidarity network to be stronger than what it is now. We have had tense meetings with internal criticism and self-criticism, and improvements have been made over time as a result. You can ask Trevor; we knock heads all the time, but we are committed to the same causes and goals.
In addition to pressing other units to maintain higher standards and a higher quality of work, we have pressed for the broadening of the solidarity network to include organisations that are not explicitly solidarity organisations. We are glad to have the PNP attending solidarity meetings again after a time of them being absent, and we have brought the MGPPP on board now as well.
The Jamaican masses are already instinctively in solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela, but it is not easy to convince working-class people that they should set aside time to organise exclusively for solidarity. Our people have to organise in their own interests, and then we can approach these organised bases of people and engage them as organised bases. Groups like labour unions are already responsible for organising themselves; we can rely on them for support without having to do the work of organising them.
Our movement is one such entity that organises Jamaicans mostly around issues directly affecting us as Jamaican people, but we are in solidarity with Cuba. As political organisations, the same goes for the MGPPP and the PNP.
We are here, we have done much to demonstrate our solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, and we have no intention of stopping. We are proud of the work that we have done so far, we have much more to do, and we look forward to working with everyone else who is in solidarity with Cuba.