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World ‘Burning Through Oil Safety Net’ as Trump Weighs Plans to Restart Iran Assault
“You can only decrease consumption so much, and when inventories run out, they are going to run out,” said one energy industry expert.
May 15, 2026
The global energy crisis caused by President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran is set to worsen in the coming months, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the world is "burning through its oil safety net."
Even though oil prices surged at the start of the war, which led Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial ships, that increase was temporarily mitigated by crude surpluses that allowed countries to add more petroleum to the market.
However, the Journal reported that those reserve stocks are being depleted at an unprecedented pace, with inventories declining by nearly 250 million barrels in just the first two months of the conflict.
This rapid drawdown has led oil executives and analysts to warn that "a harsh reckoning is set to upend the relative calm in energy markets" as "acute shortages of key fuels and soaring prices could emerge within weeks if the Strait of Hormuz remains shut," according to the Journal.
The Journal cited a report from consulting firm Eurasia Group estimating that, at the current rate of depletion, US diesel reserves are set to fall below 100 million barrels for the first time in 23 years by the end of this month.
Ellen Wald, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, told the Journal that while the increased price of oil would be partially offset by a decrease in consumption, the sheer scale of the coming supply crunch is so big that prices will continue to spiral upward.
“You can only decrease consumption so much, and when inventories run out, they are going to run out,” Wald explained. “At some point the market is going to collide and prices are going to shoot up.”
This problem could be exacerbated further if Trump decides to renew attacks on Iran, which could lead to devastating Iranian counterstrikes on oil production facilities throughout the region.
Zeteo reported on Thursday that "preparations for an imminent new phase of Trump’s Iran war have accelerated," as the president "has grown increasingly frustrated by the state of peace talks."
According to Zeteo's sources, the US military campaign is set to ramp up shortly after Trump returns from his visit to China, with options that include "a potential massive new bombing campaign against the Iranians."
The US military bombed Iranian military targets and civilian infrastructure throughout the early weeks of the conflict, but the country has still refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
With peace talks stalled and the prospect of renewed hostilities on the table, the price of Brent crude futures surged on Friday, topping more than $108 per barrel.
Average gas prices in the US remained above $4.50 on Friday, and petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan estimated on Thursday that prices could soon jump to over $5 per gallon if the Strait of Hormuz isn't opened soon.
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How to Reach the Working Class in Red-State America
What should be done in places where there is no Mamdani movement, no Working Families Party, no Democratic Socialists of America, or any effort whatsoever to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up for the benefit of working people?
May 15, 2026
When the polls close next November, about half the country will flash red within seconds. That’s because there are more than 130 congressional districts where Democrats lose by 25 points or more.
So, what’s the strategy for changing that?
That question—and why so many of us seem unable or unwilling to answer it—is at the heart of my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.
There are only two options. The first is to dramatically reform the Democratic Party so that it once again speaks to and for working people. The second is to build a new independent party of working people, distinct from the two major parties.
Neither path is easy. But which one actually has a chance?
The road to reforming the Democratic Party is long—and incredibly steep
Take West Virginia. From 1948 to 1964, the state sat safely in the Democratic column. From 1968 through 1992, it swung back and forth. Bill Clinton still won 52 percent there in 1996. But after that, the Democratic vote collapsed—to 30 percent for Biden and 28 percent for Harris.
Can working-class candidates actually gain traction in red states? There’s evidence that they can—if they run as independents on a bold, progressive-populist economic platform.
The decline in state politics has been even worse. In 2024, Republicans held all but 11 of the 134 seats in the state legislature. In 49 races, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate.
What happened?
The Democrats came to be seen as the enemy of coal—and therefore the enemy of jobs. Worse still, they offered no serious replacement. Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” which meant the government would no longer create jobs directly. The era of New Deal-style public job creation was over too.
Into that vacuum stepped the private sector, helping turn West Virginia into the opioid capital of America, with the highest overdose death rate in the nation.
So how exactly is anyone supposed to reform the Democratic Party in West Virginia—or in any other deeply red state? It’s not happening. In these places there is no Mamdani movement, no Working Families Party, no Democratic Socialists of America rebuilding the party from the ground up. The reality is that red America is being written off. The progressive strategy now is to win primaries in blue and purple districts.
Build a New Working-Class Independent Movement?
Dan Osborn in Nebraska offers another path.
A former local union president who led a strike against Kellogg, Osborn is now running for Senate for the second time against what he calls the “two-party doom loop.” He lost by six points in 2024 but ran 15 points ahead of Harris. The Democrats did not run a candidate. Now, according to recent polls, he’s in a neck-and-neck race.
It will be an enormous battle. Because he’s running for Senate rather than the House, huge sums of money will pour in to defeat him. But he is still likely to perform far better than Nebraska Democrats—and that tells us something important about how to challenge power in ruby-red America.
Can working-class candidates actually gain traction in red states?
There’s evidence that they can—if they run as independents on a bold, progressive-populist economic platform.
In a YouGov survey we conducted of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we asked whether they would support a new “Independent Workers Political Association” (a name we invented) that would back independent candidates outside the two major parties.
We paired the question with a short but strongly progressive platform:
- The right to a job at a living wage, provided by the government if the private sector can’t
- No layoffs at corporations receiving government money
- Raising the minimum wage to a living wage
- Stopping price gouging by pharmaceutical and food companies
Overall, an astonishing 57 percent supported the fictional organization—including 40 percent of Trump voters and 70 percent of voters under 30.
When we isolated the most rural voters, we found:
Support for the Independent Workers Political Association
- Rural Republicans — 50%
- Rural Independents — 50%
- Rural Democrats — 77%
None of this guarantees success. Building a new political organization takes time, money, discipline, and enormous commitment. Right now, all we have are a handful of independents running here and there.
What we really need is for major labor unions to test this path seriously.
Over the next decade, it’s possible that a dozen working-class independents could make it to Congress and form a genuine working-class caucus. That alone would be a major breakthrough.
These are exactly the questions I take up in The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: why the Democrats collapsed across much of working-class America, why independent working-class politics keeps reemerging, and what it would actually take to build durable political power outside the two-party system. If we are serious about progressives competing in red America, we need more than protest votes and nostalgia. We need a strategy.
Over the next decade, it’s possible that a dozen working-class independents could make it to Congress and form a genuine working-class caucus. That alone would be a major breakthrough.
But what if we fail?
Let the late Tony Mazzocchi, founder of the Labor Party in the 1990s, faced up to that question:
“I just look at building the Labor Party as something that has got to be done. I think the chances of defeat are greater than the chances of success—appreciably greater… And not to have tried would have been more tragic than to have tried and been defeated.”
The question is no longer whether working people are angry. The question is how best they can build a political home of their own.
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'He's Just a Bad Person': Lone Democrat Jared Golden Joins GOP to Block Iran War Powers Resolution
"Those holding out in support of Trump’s war should be forced to answer how much pain will they ask their constituents to endure for a war that is wrong morally, strategically, and politically.”
May 15, 2026
Maine Democratic Congressman Jared Golden was the target of fresh ire late Thursday after casting his party's sole vote against a war powers resolution in the US House aimed at curbing President Donald Trump's disastrous war against Iran.
Though Golden, who is not seeking reelection this year, was an original cosponsor of the resolution (H.Con.Res.75) offered by fellow Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) back in March, he became the deciding vote in the 212-212 tie when it finally hit the floor—even as two Republicans broke with their party for the first time to support such a measure.
As The Washington Post notes, the resolution was "proposed early in the war by a faction of pro-Israel Democrats—Golden among them—as a compromise intended to win some Republican backing." While it did win three Republican votes in the end, it was Golden who helped sink it.
When first introduced in March, Gottheimer's resolution was seen as an effort by corporate-friendly Democrats to thwart a more aggressive version put forth by progressive members in the House just days after Trump launched the attack. The text of the resolution plainly "directs the President to remove the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, including potential ground forces in a combat role or used for occupation, by not later than the date that is 30 days after [February 28, 2026], unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran."
Enactment would have put Trump's ongoing military operations against Iran in direct violation of the resolution.
"Jared Golden was the only Democrat to vote NO. If he voted yes, it would have passed," said Jonathan Cohn, political director of Progressive Mass, an advocacy group based in New England. "He isn't even running again. He's just a bad person who wants more people to die and wants a job lobbying for defense contractors."
While Golden had announced ahead of the vote he would be a "no" on the resolution, there was a time during the vote that four Republicans had entered "Yes" votes in favor. That number later changed back to three as it became increasingly clear how tight the vote would be.
"There weren't enough Democratic votes to kill it, that was why they held the vote open past the deadline until they were able to pressure one republican to flip from 'yes' to 'no,'" said Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, who tracked the vote closely. "It's in the video."
Vulnerable GOP members of both chambers are starting to turn against Iran war
House joins Senate with narrowest defeat since war began (49-50, 212-212)
House WPR nearly passed but pro-war @HouseGOP pressured someone to change their vote last second to protect the war effort
⬇️ https://t.co/IW8AxPt8oM pic.twitter.com/87GGFAmr3i
— Erik Sperling (@ErikSperling) May 14, 2026
Golden defended his vote against the resolution by saying, "unfortunately its proposed 30-day deadline lacks any real meaning now that we are more than 70 days into this conflict," which is a stretch of logic—one critic called it "nonsensical rationale"—when the point of the War Powers Act is to put the president in violation—or alignment—of what Congress has authorized by law.
Ryan Costello, policy director for the National American Iranian Council (NIAC), noted that with Republican Reps. Tom Barrett of Michigan and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania voted with every Democrat except Golden to pass the resolution. GOP support for Trump's war of choice is beginning to crack under the pressure of soaring gasoline prices and the other economic pain the conflict has unleashed. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)—who has been a leading and consistent voice against the war—was the third Republican "yes" vote
“Two more swing Republicans in toss-up districts moved in line with the vast majority of Americans who want this war to end, just as President Trump is considering authorizing another phase of the war that would fail to solve the standoff with Iran and deepen the financial insecurity facing ordinary Americans,” said Costello. "The House of Representatives is now split down the middle, with more Representatives who have voted for Iran war powers resolutions since the war began than haven’t."
Earlier this week, three Republicans in the Senate joined with every member of the Democratic caucus except Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on a war powers resolution that failed in a razor-thin 49-50 vote.
“Just a single vote flipping in the House and two votes in the Senate changes a narrow defeat on war powers into a victory,” added Costello. “There are lots of vulnerable lawmakers who could flip with gas prices continuing to soar and the President’s Iran strategy floundering. Those holding out in support of Trump’s war should be forced to answer how much pain will they ask their constituents to endure for a war that is wrong morally, strategically, and politically.”
In his statement on Wednesday, Golden said he would support what he described as a "clean" war powers resolution introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), which is set to come to a vote as soon as next week.
“I have said since the start of this conflict that the War Powers Act of 1973 grants the president only 60 days to conduct military operations without an explicit authorization from Congress,” Golden said. “President Trump, like all his predecessors, has refused to recognize the limitations of the War Powers Act, but to me the law is clear. His window for unilateral military engagement has closed. Hostilities, including the use of the US fleet to impose a blockade of Iranian ports, cannot legally continue unless the president seeks, and wins, Congressional approval.”
The expected vote, which will be the next in a series of efforts to check Trump's war, will put to the test the "rotating villain" theory, which proffers that the powers that be coordinate behind the scenes to make sure there is always a lawmaker willing to throw themselves on a political grenade to make sure certain legislation opposed by leadership in either party does not pass.
"In this case, Golden isn't really a 'rotating' villain," said Just Foreign Policy's Nathan Thompson, "because he's voted against every single Iran War Powers Resolution that's been brought to the floor so far.
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The United States' Long War on Cuba
A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty.
May 15, 2026
In recent weeks and months, Washington has intensified its long-running campaign of collective punishment against the Cuban people. Escalating sanctions have further tightened the noose of a punitive US blockade that has strangled the island for more than half a century. The resulting “energy starvation” has deepened a manufactured crisis, threatening Cubans’ access to food, water, healthcare, fuel, electricity, and other basic human rights and needs, while intensifying the broader assault on the island’s sovereignty and development.
Since 2017, when the first Trump administration began dismantling the limited normalization measures introduced under former President Barack Obama, Cuba has once again been subjected to a regime of “maximum pressure” economic warfare. The consequences have been severe. These policies have degraded material conditions across the island, accelerated the exodus of more than 1 million Cubans, and imposed disproportionate suffering on the country’s most vulnerable populations.
This economic weapon, wielded by the ruling elites of the world’s largest financial and military power, has exacted particularly devastating consequences on mothers and children. During this period, the infant mortality rate rose from 4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025. Put plainly, an estimated 1,800 Cuban infants died during these years who would have survived absent Washington’s intensified criminal sanctions. This is but one stark measure of the blockade’s profound brutality and inhumanity.
The only “crime” of these children, like that of countless other Cubans, was being born in a country that continues to insist on its right to determine its own political and economic future outside the structures of hemispheric domination the United States has sought to impose across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider world. The infliction of such suffering has never been incidental to such policies. It has been, and remains, a central feature.
It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege.
The same has been true since 1959, as Washington has pursued a singular, near-fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neocolonial shackles it once imposed on the island. Its aim has been not only to undermine Cuba’s social transformation and internationalist commitments, but to extinguish the example the revolution represented: that an alternative to US hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment was possible.
So despite recent threats to “take” Cuba, such rhetoric cannot be understood in isolation, nor should it obscure a fundamental reality: A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty from a Washington-backed lawless order that has sought to punish Cuba for its defiance and refusal to submit meekly to the dictates of empire.
Cuba Under the Shadow of US Empire
Cuba’s independence has long been imperiled by its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. Situated 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the island occupied a central place within the US imperial imagination. Throughout the 19th century, Washington elites viewed Cuba not as a to-be sovereign nation, but as an inevitable extension of their commercial and geopolitical ambitions, a “crown jewel” destined to be drawn into Washington’s orbit.
The opportunity arrived in 1898. Seizing upon Cuba’s nearly victorious war for independence from Spain, the US intervened not to end empire in the hemisphere, but rather to inherit it. Washington presented its action as a selfless mission to secure Cuban liberation. But for many across the region, the contradictions were unmistakable. The US, itself forged in the crucible of empire, with all the violence and exploitation that project entailed, went to Cuba not to secure freedom, but to replace Madrid with Washington as the imperial metropole of the Americas.
As early as 1829, Simón Bolívar warned that “the United States seemed destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.” Decades later, Cuban revolutionary José Martí issued a similar denunciation. In his 1891 essay "Our America," he called for “common cause” among oppressed peoples and warned against the threat of subordination to the rising power to the north. Martí also championed self-sufficiency over integration into an unequal global capitalist system, insisting that Cuba must “make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine!” Having spent years in exile in New York, Martí sharpened that critique shortly before his death in 1895, writing “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”
History would soon vindicate these words. As the United States extended its “Manifest Destiny” to foreign shores, it repeatedly intervened across the hemisphere, seeking to transform it into a de facto protectorate. In doing so, Washington consistently sided with the interests of capital and local elites over the demands for popular sovereignty. In the decades that followed, the US invaded countries throughout the region, overthrowing democratic governments, crushing revolutionary movements, and backing brutal dictatorships.
In Cuba, this took the form of three lengthy military occupations spanning half of the island’s first 24 years of “independence,” from 1898-1902, 1906-1909, and 1917-1922. In each case, the objective was to uphold the neocolonial order established during the first occupation and rooted in US economic interests. Under this restrictive framework, the Cuban government was denied control over its foreign relations and domestic economic policy, compelled to cede territory to the US military, and forced to accept Washington’s unilateral right of intervention.
By the 1920s, this relationship had produced a profound dependence on exports, mainly sugar, to the United States while fostering a deeply corrupt system incapable of responding to the needs and aspirations of the Cuban people. The island’s land remained concentrated in the hands of American corporations and a domestic collaborationist aristocracy, while the state invested more heavily in repression than social development, constructing more barracks than schools. With the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of the sugar economy upon which the country had been made dependent, popular discontent only intensified.
By 1933, the government of Gerardo Machado, which promised to transform Cuba into an island of stability for American investment while violently suppressing nationalist and anti-imperialist currents in Cuban society, had become untenable. Amid mounting unrest, Machado was deposed, and a revolutionary coalition under Ramón Grau San Martín emerged, seeking to challenge Cuba’s semi-colonial status. But the United States refused to recognize it. The resulting instability created conditions for the rise of one of the more conservative figures within the anti-Machado coalition, army officer Fulgencio Batista, who in 1934 deposed the short-lived government and consolidated de facto power in his own hands with the backing of Washington.
The Roots of the Cuban Revolution
Batista would directly or indirectly pull the political strings in Cuba for much of the next quarter century. Though his earlier rule adopted a more populist posture, culminating in his election to the presidency from 1940 to 1944, life improved little for Cubans. Corruption and dependence on foreign capital remained entrenched. And by 1952, Batista had seized power outright in a military coup, inaugurating an authoritarian regime backed by increased state violence.
It was Batista’s rise, coupled with decades of economic disparities, political repression, and social neglect, that created conditions that were ripe for revolution. Among those preparing to contest the suspended elections that year was a young lawyer named Fidel Castro. Batista’s closure of even the limited avenues for democratic change lent weight to John F. Kennedy’s later observation that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around.
Castro’s first revolutionary assault came soon after, with the attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. Though the attack failed, Castro’s arrest and trial gave him the opportunity to defend not his innocence, but the legitimacy of and need for revolution, delivering a two-hour speech that condemned the island’s entrenched inequalities and the regime that sustained them.
The state imprisoned Castro and his fellow revolutionaries before commuting their sentences under popular pressure in 1955, after which they went into exile. From Mexico, joined by Che Guevara, they began plotting their return to Cuba and the overthrow of the regime. By late 1956, they had landed in Cuba and launched their insurgency from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Just two years later, Batista fled the country on New Year’s Day 1959, carrying with him as much as $300 million in siphoned state funds and ill-gotten gains amassed at the expense of the Cuban people, while leaving behind the ruins of a regime stained with the blood of as many as 20,000 Cubans.
Counterrevolution in the Caribbean
In 1959, the new leadership inherited a desiccated country picked over by the buzzards of foreign capital and a corrupted local elite. The Cuban revolutionaries set out to overcome these conditions and construct a more just social order, one capable of guaranteeing a basic standard of living long denied to the Cuban population through the misappropriation of the island’s wealth and resources.
The earliest measures included agrarian reform, universal education, a national literacy campaign, expanded healthcare, urban reforms that opened pathways to homeownership for working-class Cubans, and anti-discrimination laws aimed at dismantling entrenched racial hierarchies. Crucially for the trajectory of US-Cuban relations, the revolution also nationalized parasitic foreign-owned and privatized industries.
The new Cuban government was initially met with a degree of popular appeal and favorable media coverage in the United States, further amplified by Fidel Castro’s April 1959 visit to the country, during which he sought to explain the revolution to American audiences. While in Washington, Castro even met with Vice President Richard Nixon, but the Eisenhower administration quickly soured on the revolutionary government and soon resolved to see it fail.
The concern was not Cuba itself, but what the revolution might represent. As State Department official J.C. Hill warned that year, “there are indications that if the Cuban Revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.”
By October 1960, that decision had effectively been made with the imposition of a blockade on the island. The logic underpinning this economic declaration of war was made explicit in a memo by State Department official Lester Mallory. Recognizing that Castro retained widespread popular support, Mallory concluded that the most effective means of undermining him was the deliberate immiseration of the Cuban people. The memo called for the denial of “money and supplies” to the island in order to produce “hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”
In April 1961, Washington escalated its campaign by backing a direct military assault on the island. Yet the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion did little to temper the obsession with unseating Castro. In the aftermath, consensus hardened across the Kennedy administration that “US policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro.” What followed was an expansive campaign of covert warfare involving sabotage, assassination plots, and support for anti-communist exiles.
Among the proposals considered were plans to manufacture consent for military escalation through false provocations. One suggestion was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area… pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States… [which] would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” Other proposals called for false flag attacks on the US navy and the shooting down of a civilian airliner that would then be blamed on the Cuban government.
This single-minded fixation did little to advance US objectives. Instead, it pushed Cuba further toward the Soviet Union, which offered the island an economic and political lifeline in the face of Washington’s blockade and escalating campaign of destabilization. It was within this context that Castro declared the Marxist-Leninist character of the Cuban Revolution in 1961. The relentless threats to the island also fostered a profound and understandable sense of siege within the Cuban government itself.
Ultimately, Washington’s Cuba policy, combined with what Kennedy privately described as the “goddamned dangerous” deployment of US missiles in Turkey, helped create the conditions for the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust and revealing the extent to which the US was willing to risk a senseless, largely self-imposed global catastrophe in defense of the maintenance of its empire.
The Persistent “Threat” of Example
Despite this long war against Cuba, the Cuban government and people have not abandoned their revolutionary project. They have continued to build socialism and a new social order toward what Che Guevara described as the construction of “new [people]”: human beings whose motivations, commitments, and social relations are not governed by opportunistic self-interest at the expense of others, but by solidarity and a shared sense of collective humanity.
Cuba has consistently sought to demonstrate this commitment on the world stage. One of Fidel Castro’s earliest acts of foreign policy was the support of those seeking to liberate the Dominican Republic from the brutal US-backed dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. In the decades that followed, Cuban soldiers and advisers would play major roles in liberation struggles across Africa, including in Algeria, the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name.
Cuba’s foreign interventions proved especially consequential in the struggle against South African apartheid and white minority rule in Southern Africa. It was this material solidarity that led Nelson Mandela to declare during his 1991 visit to Havana that “the Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the peoples of Africa,” traveling to Cuba shortly after his release from prison.
But Cuba’s principal export to the Third World has not been bombs to take lives, as in the case of the United States. It has sent doctors to provide life. Since 1960, Cuba has dispatched more than 600,000 medical professionals to over 160 countries. In doing so, Cuba has advanced not only the principle and practice that healthcare is a human right, but a vision of education and foreign policy rooted in both science and conscience.
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around. It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege. It is not a sponsor of terrorism, but the victim of sustained US aggression.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name. Cuba, like all those confronting US empire, deserves not the “freedom” of the grave that Washington has so often offered the world, but a true freedom rooted in justice, self-determination, and respect for human life and dignity.
We must therefore demand an end to the blockade on Cuba. We must reject any further military escalation. We must call for Cuba’s removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list. And we must support the restoration of Cuban sovereignty over the occupied territory at Guantánamo Bay.
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