Theme: #cuba

For Donald Trump, the brazen kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in early January served as a dry run for further regime-change fantasies against both Cuba and Iran. Since their respective anti-imperialist revolutions in 1959 and 1979 respectively, both countries have been outsize bogeymen of the reactionary US imagination. Their disproportionately right-wing diasporas, descended from exiled comprador elites, exert an overwhelmingly toxic influence on their adopted country’s domestic politics. In recent weeks Iran has stolen the global limelight, as much for the strength of its resistance as the viciousness of the unprovoked US-Israeli attack. But all the while, Cuba has endured a sadistic US fuel blockade since the beginning of the year. And as Iran punishes Trump ever more severely for his miscalculation, the prospect of an ‘easier’ victory over the embattled island nation grows more tempting. Hence Trump’s brazen aside at a White House press conference on 16 March that he could simply ‘take’ Cuba if he so wished. An assertion so nakedly colonial that it elicited double-takes from the otherwise jaded White House press corps. And it came at the end of a meandering monologue steeped in nostalgia for Cuba’s pre-revolutionary oligarchy, whose wealth was built on generations of slave labor. The whole surreal episode bespoke Trump’s extreme level of detachment from Cuba’s realities, further compounded by his bizarre aside that the island is ‘not in a hurricane zone’. In his profound ignorance, Cubans can find some reassurance. The island nation’s vast capacity for communal popular mobilisation — a socialist triumph on display during every hurricane season — will also spell doom for whatever military misadventure Trump has planned. #Cuba #HandsOffCuba