Marce Cameron
Cuba was hit hard by Hurricane Dennis, the most ferocious storm to lash the Caribbean island nation in four decades. It caused the deaths of 16 Cubans and left a swathe of wreckage in its wake. The death toll would have been far higher had it not been for the timely evacuation of more than 1.5 million people.
In a seven-hour TV broadcast that concluded at 1 am on July 12, Cuban President Fidel Castro and other Cuban officials detailed the enormous damage caused by the storm. Castro reported that 120,000 houses had been heavily damaged, with 15,000 totally destroyed. At least 1000 electrical poles and 36 high-tension towers were toppled, leaving 2.5 million people without electricity. Fierce winds flattened 12,000 hectares of banana trees and damaged a 360,000 tonne-crop of oranges and grapefruit. Many hospitals, schools and sports facilities were also damaged.
Castro announced that losses would total US$1.4 billion, a heavy blow to a poor country of 11 million people resisting a four-decade-long US-organised economic blockade.
In a cynical display of "generosity", the US government offered Cuba $50,000 in humanitarian aid. "We don't want aid from the US government", Castro told TV viewers. "Let them get rid of that miserable, genocidal blockade."
However, he announced that Cuba would accept aid from Venezuela, which was sending a ship carrying electricity towers, fuel and other relief supplies.
Castro also noted that Cuba was the first country to send aid to "the sister people of Jamaica", who had also been battered by Hurricane Dennis.
On July 26, millions of Cubans will celebrate the 52nd anniversary of the initiation of the revolutionary struggle against the US-backed Batista regime. On that day in 1953, Castro led a small group of rebels in an attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. While the attack was a military failure, it was a moral victory, signaling that the war of liberation had begun.
On January 1, 1959, Batista fled the country and a general strike paralysed the remnants of his regime. The next day, huge crowds welcomed the first units of the Rebel Army, commanded by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, into the capital Havana.
Since then Cuba has confronted and overcome formidable obstacles — a testimony to the deeply popular and humane process of revolutionary social transformation that Cuba's working people have been creating and defending for almost half a century.
Revolutionary Cuba has resisted the US economic blockade, US-organised terrorist attacks, a ceaseless propaganda war and, since 1992, the collapse of the Soviet Union. To this must be added nature's fury — a recent spate of severe droughts and hurricanes in an age of global warming.
With its living example, tiny revolutionary Cuba stands as a moral giant. For this, Cuba deserves the respect and the solidarity of progressive people everywhere. July 26 is our victory too.
From Green Left Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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