Washington, Feb 15 (Prensa Latina) The Let Cuba Live donation campaign in the United States aims to send solar panels to keep hospitals running and save lives on the island amid the blockade reinforced by President Donald Trump.
The campaign, a collaborative effort involving the New York-based organization The People’s Forum, seeks urgent relief from the situation created after Trump’s executive order of January 29, which declared a national emergency regarding Cuba and, to address it, decided on a blockade of oil imports.
“Trump’s fuel embargo is trying to cripple Cuba,” The People’s Forum said in a public message on X.
“Don’t let them get away with it. Help us send solar panels to keep hospitals running and save lives. Trump can’t block the sun! Long live Cuba!” he emphasized.
The Republican president threatened coercive tariffs on countries that directly or indirectly defied the measure and sold fuel to the Caribbean nation. This action, which has extraterritorial reach, tightens the unilateral embargo imposed on Cuba more than 60 years ago.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during his trip to the Munich Security Conference in Germany, reaffirmed the hostile rhetoric towards Cuba in interviews given to the press, telling them, among other things, that the “Cuban regime” does not have a real economic policy and does not know how to improve the daily lives of its people.
To which some X users responded: “It’s a little difficult to have an economic policy when little Cuba is living a life sanctioned by the US empire” or “More than 60 years of US sanctions, and they still pretend that the Cuban economy collapsed ‘on its own’.”
This week, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a member of the United States House of Representatives, denounced the cruel and despotic oil blockade against Cuba by the Trump administration.
“The U.S. oil embargo against Cuba is cruel and despotic,” wrote the Democratic representative from Minnesota in X, stating that “it is an economic war designed to strangle an island, where innocent civilians will pay with their lives to force regime change.”
“We must lift the blockade NOW,” demanded Omar, one of the voices of the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party within the United States Congress.
Her social media post on Thursday was accompanied by an article published in The Wall Street Journal about the situation in Cuba following Trump’s order.
Another statement at the Capitol came from Jim McGovern, Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, who introduced a new bill to lift the blockade against Cuba.
HR 7521, the United States-Cuba Trade Act, would repeal or amend several decades-old laws that restrict trade, exchange, telecommunications, and travel with Cuba, he noted.
A similar bill, S. 136, was introduced in the United States Senate by Democratic lawmakers Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley from Oregon.
He also warned that this economic blockade “is not only absurdly ineffective, but counterproductive and harms precisely (…) ordinary people and their families who are denied food, medicine and basic products.”
On February 3, 1962, US President John F. Kennedy signed the decree establishing the blockade against Cuba. Four days after that order was issued, Washington’s illegal and inhumane policy became official, a policy that remains the longest unilateral embargo in history against any country.
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