By Karen Wald
HAVANA — In what promises to be the first in a long series of popular demonstrations against US tightening of its economic blockade, thousands of Cuban students massed at the University of Havana on September 29, shouting their rejection of the US government's latest attempt to impose its will on the Cuban people: the Torricelli bill.
Speakers from schools around the capital city added their voices to those of university leaders and guitar-playing folk singers, as students chanted "Cuba Si, Yankee No", and "Fidel, Fidel, Fidel".
Several themes were repeated in their hastily prepared speeches. Many compared this latest manoeuvre with the US's successful attempt to dominate Cuban political life throughout the first half of this century via the Platt Amendment, added to the Cuban Constitution in 1901 at the end of the Spanish-American War.
All insisted that the Torricelli Law would arouse them to further efforts to withstand the blockade and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba's Revolution.
A huge red and white banner of the University Students Federation undulated in the center of the crowd, as strains of Pablo Milanes, Silvio Rodriguez and other popular Cuban singers filled the plaza with songs like "Yo me quedo ..." (I'm staying here ...).
A nursing school student, Yainery Diaz Vazquez, drew warm crowd response when she stated, "We know that vicissitudes, privations and sacrifices are inevitable, but we will know how to face them ... We'll make more efficient use of every resource, and above all, we will be acting on our conviction that we possess the greatest of all riches: the unity of our people."
Thousands of voices chimed in with her when she repeated the well-known quote of fallen revolutionary leader Camilo Cienfuegos, which included the lines "because to stop this totally Cuban Revolution, an entire people would have to die", and ended with the poem "If some day my flag should be shredded into bits/ Our dead, raising their arms, would still know how to defend it".
Mesy Bolanos read a statement by the University of Havana student body. "The US government hopes to suffocate us by applying economic sanctions on other countries, on US subsidiaries, by preventing ships from reaching our ports, thus depriving our people of food, medicine and other vital resources", the statement began. In doing so, she went on, the United States was violating every aspect of international law relating to the right of development, the right to self determination, to sovereign equality — all the while cynically and hypocritically charging Cuba with "violating human
The statement derided the US government's pretense that it was concerned with "democracy" in Cuba. "What democracy?", she asked. "Theirs? The democracy of exploiters, of millionaires? The democracy of the dollar? We don't want it", she went on. "We want ours."
Bolanos insisted that "far from weakening us, laws like these will strengthen us, because democracy is the power of the people. This demonstration is an expression of that form of democracy."
Noting that other peoples in the world look to the Cuban Revolution for a ray of hope, the statement went on, "As long as our flag is still flying, the hopes of all those who struggle for liberty and independence will be kept alive."
The students claimed that no "domino theory" would apply in Cuba because the people have "roots, history, faith and optimism — and a reason to fight: our country, the Revolution and Fidel."
Carmen Rosa Baez, president of the nationwide University Student Federation, declared that the Torricelli bill is a "more inhuman, more aggressive and more offensive" Platt Amendment carried out by a country that feels it can impose its will on all other countries because it owns the whole world.
She called on students of other countries to reject "this law that also robs them of their sovereignty and independence".
Addressing herself to her fellow students, she commented wryly that "while ex-patriots buy senators and congressmen in the elegant salons and hallways of the US Congress, the legitimate sons and daughters of Martí and Fidel know well how much it costs in this unjust world to maintain equal opportunity, and we've learned it by sharing our portion of sacrifices. Our table and our clothes are humble", she stated, "and may not be the most modish styles. But they bear the honour of having been bought with the sweat of each and every one of us, without bartering one single principle."
Cuban popular reaction to Torricelli is mounting. Those who previously looked primarily at their internal problems or the disintegration of the socialist countries as the source of their current problems are now focusing once more on their age-old enemy: the US blockade. While the strengthening of the blockade may create almost intolerable new hardships for the Cuban people, it may well have given the Revolution the moral and political boost it needed in these hard times.