Above photo: Protesters on Sunday outside Moynihan Train Hall. Lyna Bentahar.
The movement hopes greater awareness will lead to a larger coalition.
Dozens of demonstrators convened Sunday in front of Moynihan Train Hall to protest the United States’ oil blockade on Cuba and raise awareness of the dire conditions there.
Virtually no fuel is allowed to enter the country since the Trump administration ordered the blockade in January, halting essential services like health care and sanitation.
At the same time, the Trump administration has threatened “take” Cuba, and media reports have suggested President Donald Trump has taken greater interest in the island since entering a stalemate with Iran in the war the United States has waged there.
“We really feel the threats are real,” Monica Moorehead, a political activist with the Workers World Party, said.
The average age of the protesters was considerably older than the left-wing protests of recent years in New York City. Danny Valdes, a founder of the organization Cuban Americans for Cuba and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, compared the Cuban solidarity movement to the DSA, which historically had a small membership base before the rise of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016.
“It’s the people who have been caring about Cuba for decades that are continuing to show up and have always shown up,” Valdes said of the movement.
“I’m hoping that DSA can step up in this movement, that some of these younger movements that came out for Palestine can come out for Cuba in the same way,” he said.
Valdes hoped to grow the movement by making it welcoming to people distrustful of the Cuban government.
Many of the protesters, however, were staunch supporters of the Cuban revolution. Members of the December 12th Movement, a pan-Africanist organization, after hearing Valdes and another DSA member speak, merely replied, “Liberalism.”
The United States has long maintained an embargo against the Cuban economy since 1960, the keystone of its regime-change strategy. The embargo has expanded over the decades, particularly under both of Trump’s terms. The sanctions contributed to a rise in poverty and infant mortality.
“There is no country in the modern history that has been subjected to what the Cuban people have been subjected,” Roger Calero, a protester, said.
The protesters now worry that the blockade is a prelude for the Trump administration to launch a war against the Caribbean nation. A recent YouGov poll found that most Americans oppose war with Cuba.
Some protesters carried Puerto Rican flags, which Valdes said was a reference to a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, a Puerto Rican writer, comparing Cuba and Puerto Rico as “two wings of the same bird.”
“Cuba broke off from U.S. hegemony, became independent,” he said. “Then we have Puerto Rico, which is a colony in all but name.”
