For Immediate Release
Media Contact:
(202) 643-1136
communications@blackallianceforpeace.com
JULY 16, 2021—The Black Alliance for Peace stands in solidarity with the sentiments and positions the Black Lives Matter coalition recently expressed on U.S. policies on Cuba. The moral hypocrisy and historic myopia of U.S. liberals and conservatives, who have unfairly attacked BLM’s statement on Cuba, is breathtaking.
Their reaction comes on the heels of another in a series of annual votes in the United Nations, when most of the world’s countries—except for the United States and Israel—overwhelmingly supported ending the murderous six-decade-long economic embargo against Cuba.
Not only do Democrats and Republicans join hands to defy the world by refusing to lift the embargo. U.S. congresspeople as well as the anti-communist and anti-Black corporate press display their duplicity by continuing the subversion against Cuba. This only demonstrates for oppressed working-class and colonized people—once again—that the U.S. ruling class remains united in its hostility to any socialist project and sees all such attempts by global South nations as existential threats to the rule of capital.
BAP welcomes the principled stance taken by BLM and hopes BLM will continue to be a visible force in the ongoing struggle against war, subversion, militarism, intervention and the economic exploitation that is at the center of U.S. imperial policies. Too often, BAP has been a lone voice in opposition, a position fundamental to the Black Radical Tradition.
Progressive Black forces are making the connections between the U.S. reaction to Cuba, Haiti, Colombia and the United States deploying its military on the African continent in the form of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). That connection links back to the United States when we understand these policies are directly related to the militarization and violence of police forces in the United States and to the economic and social crisis of the capitalist system.
It is only by making those connections and building an effective unified Black working class-based opposition that real leadership can be given to the movement for substantial social change in the United States. BAP sees this as the historic task of the current Black revolutionary movement. Going forward, BAP hopes we will be able to find a way toward the unity of all Black, colonized, working-class and poor people in the United States.
Banner photo: Doctors and nurses of Cuba's Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade pose on March 21, 2020, with a portrait of late leader Fidel Castro before travelling to Italy from the Central Unit of Medical Cooperation in Havana. (Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images)