About 50 people gathered at Grand Circus Park in Detroit on Saturday, March 21, to stand in solidarity with the “Our America Convoy to Cuba,” and call for the end of the United States’ energy blockade of Cuba.
Michigan Action for Cuba Committee organizer Lauren Kenny said the informational picket was organized to educate people about the situation in Cuba and encourage people to take action.
“We’re here to talk about the recent imperialist aggressions on Cuba that have increased recently, but we all know that Cuba has been living under a decades-long criminal blockade,” Kenny said.
Protesters represented a variety of groups, including Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Detroit Anti-War Committee, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America, Moratorium Now and Wayne State Students for Democratic Society.
Darryl Jordan, of Detroit, said he’s been to Cuba with brigades and conferences three times since 1980. He said he wishes more people in Detroit and Michigan knew more about Cuba.
“Cuba has done nothing to try and take the U.S. down, but for the last 60 years, we’ve been trying to mess them up,” Jordan said. “Our work has got to be paying attention to what’s going on in Cuba and interacting with all our friends and all the people in our family and all the people that we work with, and tell them to support Cuba. What’s going on right know is ignorant as hell.”
What’s happening in Cuba?
On Friday, March 20, a group of about 650 delegates from 33 countries began arriving in Cuba with donated solar panels, food and medicine to the island, the Associated Press reported. The aid comes days after the power grid in Cuba collapsed.
On Jan. 29, Trump signed an executive order to impose tariffs on countries that send oil to Cuba, saying communist Cuba’s “policies, practices, and actions” pose an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and foreign policy, USA TODAY reported.
Cuban officials said they have been meeting with U.S. representatives to work out national differences while Cuba is running on about 40% of the fuel it needs.
During the fuel shortage, thousands of people are waiting for medical surgeries, trash is accumulating on some streets because garbage trucks lack the fuel to collect it, and public transportation has been reduced causing long lines and overcrowded buses, CNN reported.
On Monday, March 16, President Donald Trump said he believes he’ll “have the honor of taking Cuba” in some form, adding: “I think I can do anything I want with it.”
Tensions between the United States and Cuba are not new. The country has had a trade embargo on Cuba for 64 years. Cuba is currently on the U.S. State Sponsor of Terrorism list.
What metro Detroiters are saying, doing
Freedom Road Socialist Organization organizer Marcel Ulacia, 26, said he thinks Cuba has been targeted with sanctions and threats of destabilization because of its socialist policies and its refusal to “submit to foreign domination.”
“As an Afro-Cuban, I carry the history of resistance in my blood,” Ulacia said. “The legacy of enslaved Africans who fought for freedom are revolutionaries who stood up against exploitation and are people who have refused time and time again to bow to empire. That is exactly why Cuba has been targeted. What we are witnessing today is not random. … It is a natural result of monopoly capitalism in crisis.”
Kenny said Michigan Action for Cuba Committee started organizing after the Mayday Brigade in 2023 with the goals to remove blockades from Cuba, return Guantanamo to Cuba and remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
A number of people at the protest said they had been on brigades to Cuba, where they said they connected with people in Cuba as well as activists from around the world.
Michigan Action for Cuba Committee is currently hosting a medicine drive and taking monetary donations ahead of its plan to caravan with Cuba action groups from around the United States to take a charter plane full of medical supplies on a flight from Miami to Havana, Kenny said.
More information about Cuba campaigns can be found @michiganactionforcuba on Instagram and at www.letcubalive.info.
Contact Natalie Davies at ndavies@freepress.com.
Source: freep.com
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