A breach in the blockade
A partial victory in the fight to end Washington's immoral blockade against Cuba was won on May 26, when the US Treasury Department released more than 300 computers it had seized to prevent them from going to health care centres in rural Cuba.
As a result of the deal, the 94-day "Fast for Life" by the Reverend Lucius Walker, Jim Clifford and Lisa Valanti ended. The three had been barely subsisting on a diet of water, fruit juice and some mineral supplements.
The computers were originally collected by Pastors for Peace, which Reverend Walker helped found, and which has organised a number of "caravans" with donated goods for Cuba.
I heard Reverend Walker on the radio, when the fast was in its 85th day, explaining in a matter of fact voice that either the computers would be released, or he would die.
"I simply don't want to live any longer in a country that is so mean and so punitive and so vicious that it will starve 11 million innocent people into submission to the will of the United States", he said.
Announcing the end of the fast, Reverend Walker thanked "the hundreds of thousands of supporters who never gave up the struggle to free the computers. Our efforts have not been in vain, but much work remains. The new broad coalition which has grown around the fast will keep working to send these computers on to Cuba. And as the coalition grows, we will keep working together to end the US blockade of Cuba and to address other injustices."
Under the deal, the Treasury Department released the computers to the United Methodist Church. The UMC still must guarantee to the government that the computers are for the humanitarian use stated, before the computers will be sent on to Cuba.
The US government claims that it will allow humanitarian, food, clothing and medical shipments to Cuba if they are approved by it under the Trading with the Enemy Act. But in practice the government seeks to block all aid to Cuba.
When the computers were first seized, customs officials said they could be used for "military" purposes. These machines are second-hand personal computers, not exactly the state of the art even for PCs. Cray super-computers, they are not.
The brutal stupidity of Washington's excuse for seizing the machines underscores that in spite of what it says, it does not make exceptions for humanitarian goods under the blockade, unless forced to.
Earlier, the Clinton government was compelled to release some of the computers, because they were from Canada. On May 14 Canadian hunger striker Brian Rohatyn ended his 83-day fast at the news.
The Canadian computers were just being sent through the US on their way to Mexico and then to Cuba. The fact that the Clinton administration saw fit to seize them in the first place demonstrates its arrogance even towards its close imperialist allies like Canada, most of whom don't support Washington's blockade.
The fact that Clinton was forced to release the Canadian computers, under pressure from public outcry there, shows the difficulty facing Washington in attempting to force other countries to toe its line.
The recently passed Helms-Burton bill that Clinton signed seeks to drastically tighten the blockade by punishing any foreign firms that do business with Cuba. This bill, misnamed the "Cuban Liberty Act", instructs officials to bar entry into the US to "any alien", plus their spouses and children, whose company does business with Cuban enterprises that were expropriated during the revolution.
The real aims of Washington are revealed, and they have nothing to do with democracy in Cuba, any more than they did under the US-sponsored dictatorships which held power from the US conquest of Cuba up until the revolution. The real issue is property.
In a recent speech, Fidel Castro pointed out that if the goals of this act were to be implemented, among those who would suffer would be one million Cuban peasants, whose land would be taken from them.