End the Blockade D.C. Rally; UN Vote and Shipment of Food and Medicines

CODEPINK and ten other D.C.-based Cuba advocacy groups held a rally on Wednesday, November 2nd at Lafayette Square as part of an international week of action against the U.S. blockade on Cuba aimed to coincide with the United Nations casting its 30th consecutive vote condemning the blockade.

CODEPINK will cap the week on November 5 by joining with the Cuban American group Puentes de Amor to send a planeload with 17,000 pounds of food and medicines to Havana.

The U.S. position has been overwhelmingly outvoted every single year at the United Nations. Thursday the U.N. once again strongly condemned the blockade with every nation voting in favor of ending it with the exception of Brazil and Ukraine, who were absent from the vote; and the United States and Israel who voted against ending the blockade.

"The Biden administration talks about the need for a rules-based international order. Today's UN vote clearly shows that the global community is calling on the U.S. to lift its brutal embargo on Cuba. Biden should respect global opinion and return to President Obama's policy of normalizing relations with Cuba," said CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin.

"We are exciting that, thanks to the outpouring of support from thousands of supporters around the United States, we are able to end this week of actions by chartering a plane and loading it with food and medicines for Cuba," said CODEPINK Latin American Coordinator Samantha Wherry, who will be traveling to Cuba with the donations. "Unfortunately, it represents a tiny gesture compared to the billions of dollars of harm caused by the U.S. blockade."

For years, CODEPINK has actively organized to end the life-threatening sanctions on Cuba through its End The Cuba Blockade campaign. To coincide with the UN Vote, the women-led grassroots organization launched a petition calling on U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to abstain from the UN vote, as was done during the Obama administration as a gesture of a change in U.S. policy. Unfortunately, Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield chose to oppose the resolution, following the path of Trump, not Obama.

In the days before leaving office, President Trump also put Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, alleging that Cuba's harboring of U.S. citizens who are considered fugitives in the United States qualified it as a state that sponsor terrorism, even though the fugitives themselves are not considered terrorists by the United States. The fact that the Biden administration still stands behind this designation is arbitrary and unjust.