August-3, 2020 - The latest in the 60-year series of measures by U.S. imperialism aimed at restoring U.S. domination of Cuba came under discussion during the Trump administration's July 30 briefing on Western Hemisphere Affairs. During the briefing, Ambassador Kozak presented the current long-term view of the U.S. policy as follows:

 

"The thesis here is if you can squeeze off their – these sort of illicit and artificial sources of revenue, that they’ll again be confronted with that problem that their own model doesn’t work. There are no more sugar daddies or sugar mamas out there who are going to give them money just to play around with, and that they’re going to need to make some changes. Now, the changes they make will be their own. They won’t be what we would recommend or anything else, but at least you start to force some kind of a conversation between the Cuban Government and its own people and some alteration in their system.

 

So this is not a – that overnight, something is – big is going to change, but it hopefully has in it the makings for pressing that regime to have to take some steps that will result in more freedom and independence for its own people."

 

Kozak also expressed hope that the U.S. government would be able to shift international attention away from the effects of the economic blockade as follows:

 

"So our policy with respect to Cuba is to restrict their other key sources of revenue to force the regime to face up to the deficiencies of its own model and allow some major freedom to its own people. To this end, we are exposing the truth about the Cuban medical missions program, a moneymaking scheme disguised as humanitarian assistance. We are discouraging travel that involves staying in hotels run by the Cuban military, and we are trying to break the monopoly of the Cuban military as established on processing remittances."

 

In short, the U.S. government will continue to earmark taxpayer resources to enforce its program for preventing growth of prosperity in Cuba.

 

This plan has been laid out even as the UN general assembly has voted over a score of resolutions to condemn U.S. aggression against the people of Cuba. The U.S. government is waging a real war against the Cuban nation that tramples on not only the elementary norms of relations between states and universally recognized international law, but also the declared will of almost every country in the world.

 

This program of dictating to and punishing Cuba for exericising its sovereign rights is carried out by both parties in Washington in violation of the accepted principles of sovereign equality amongst nations, non-intervention and non-interference in the international affairs of other countries as well as the freedom of international trade and navigation. It is also directed against the sovereign right of all countries to freely determine their own economic and political policies towards Cuba.

 

For over 60 years, the U.S. government's campaign of nuclear blackmail, internal subversion, sabotage, terrorism, and economic blockade organized against the Cuban people has aroused the opposition of the American people as well as peoples throughout the world.

 

As we organize among the new sections of the American people who are coming forward to show their support for Cuba's struggle against the illegal and inhuman policy inflicted on it, we must also target the root of the problem in the imperialist system which is the cause of U.S. militarism, war and colonialism in the modern world.

 

Let us continue to expose the lies of the capitalist politicians and media and to tell the truth about the U.S. government's program. Cuba is a "terrorist country" only because it is a Latin American country, in the "backyard" of U.S. imperialism, which threw out the U.S. exploiters, which "dares" to live independently, on its own feet and speak its own mind on world affairs.

 

We must demand nothing less than a genuinely democratic foreign policy which ends U.S. interference and aggression and withdraws all U.S. troops stationed abroad.