July 30, 2025 — The River Reporter – Narrowsburg, New York
By IKE NAHEM and ERIN FEELY-NAHEM
Today a great crime is being committed by the U.S. government, with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio deepening further the cruel policies of Joseph Biden and Antony Blinken aimed at asphyxiating the Caribbean island of Cuba through unremitting, cruel, extraterritorial sanctions, which amount to bullying economic warfare.
Ever since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, the United States government—under both Republican and Democratic White Houses and Congresses—has been committed to the destruction of its example by any means possible. This bipartisan Washington policy is hated hemispherically and internationally. This is registered in near-unanimous condemnation every year in the United Nations General Assembly for the past 30 years.
U.S. anti-Cuba policy is also broadly opposed in the United States. Over 116 City Councils—including cities large (Chicago, New York City, Pittsburgh) and small; dozens of central labor councils and national and local labor unions; and religious institutions. (For the full list, visit nnoc.org.)
Over these many decades, those means have gone beyond mendacious propaganda and conscious disinformation. More important has been direct material aggression and covert subversion: assassination (the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro was targeted for murder some 638 times); terrorism (over 3,500 Cubans have been killed in terrorist attacks organized illegally from U.S. territory); industrial sabotage; mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs; the introduction of biological agents to spread dengue fever; and many more sordid examples. All of this has been thoroughly documented in files released under the Freedom of Information Act and innumerable books and documentary films.
So why has the U.S. government continued to expend so much energy and resources to overthrow the government and social system of our Caribbean neighbor? Is it really a sincere opposition to “communist tyranny” and for “democracy”?
Such boilerplate of course is belied by Washington’s historical record of installing and supporting vicious military dictatorships that grind workers and peasants into destitution in the service of the U.S. capital. It’s a bloody legacy of horrific crimes of U.S. interventionism, overthrowing democratically elected governments, and has resulted in many, many hundreds of thousands of lives extinguished.
Perhaps the answer has more to do with the example of Cuba’s amazing social advances which resonate across the Americas and the world: eliminating [illiteracy]; smashing Cuban-style Jim Crow segregation; elevating the status of women; access to free health care, a state-of-the world science and biotechnology industry that has life-extending medications and vaccines for lung cancer (collaborating with the Roswell Center in Buffalo, NY), diabetic foot ulcers and much more. Perhaps most decisive has been Cuba’s foreign policy of international solidarity and support for the struggles of working people, which invariably is at odds with U.S. foreign policy.
President Barack Obama, under mounting hemispheric pressure, started to shift U.S. policy in the direction of U.S.-Cuba normalization in 2014-15. Great hopes were raised in Cuba and around the world. He removed Cuba from the spurious U.S. “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. Over the course of his first term, Donald Trump reversed nearly all of Obama’s limited but important policy changes. Surprising some and breaking his 2020 campaign promises, Joseph Biden continued and even deepened Trump’s policies. Trump 2 and Rubio are preparing yet further bipartisan aggression.
Today, Cuba is under very harsh economic circumstances. The accumulated damage of the U.S. economic war has been devastating: shortages, energy blackouts, long lines, rising costs, growing inequality. Most heartbreaking is the effect of the blockade on Cuba’s system of free, universal health care.
We are calling on people of conscience and consciousness in our beautiful region to speak out and act! Support and join the newly formed Upper Delaware River Cuba Si Coalition. Look for our website, which is under construction. Join us in this great cause!
Ike Nahem and Erin Feely-Nahem are longtime Cuba solidarity activists who honeymooned in Havana in 1998. They have organized dozens of delegations to visit the island. Ike is a retired Amtrak locomotive engineer and a Teamsters Union member. Erin is an LMSW and retired longtime leader in the fields of domestic violence, where she organized shelters for battered women (and some men), low-income housing and HIV-AIDS advocacy in New York City. They live in Cochecton. Both are founders and organizers of Cuba Si NY/NJ and the International US-Cuba Normalization Coalition.
