By Anisia Castro Morera on July 4, 2023 from Havana
photo: Bill Hackwell
As a great protest against this U.S. offensive at the global level, the Network in Defense of Humanity-Cuba (REDH) joins the initiative launched on June 15 in Moscow, to celebrate the first International Day of Independence from U.S. Influence this July 4, 2023. This call is part of the great international project “Get out of the American Sector”, and it is necessary that it responds in turn to the need for international counter-hegemonic, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist articulation.
The words of Frederick Douglass resonate today from what he said in the July 4, 1852 ceremony in Rochester, New York, for the independence of the United States:
“What is your Fourth of July to the American slave? I answer you: a day which reveals to him, more than any other day of the year, the tremendous injustice and cruelty of which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a lie; your vaunted freedom, an unholy license; your national greatness, puffed-up vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, insolence; your cries of freedom and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious ostentation and solemnity, are, to the slave, mere grandiloquence, fraud, deceit, impiety and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes that would shame a nation of savages. There is no nation on earth at this very moment, which is guiltier of such shocking and bloody practices, than the United States.”
The mask of its proclamation for freedom, democracy and independence is shown in its interventionist policy, in its numerous aggressions and interferences of which, to mention a few, we have: Its intervention and constant siege in Mexico since 1846; colonization in Puerto Rico since 1898; occupation of Haiti (1915-1934); occupation of Dominican Republic (1916-1924); overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala (1954); Vietnam (1955-75); coup d’état in Chile (1973); coup d’état in Argentina (1976); US military invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989); as well as the Sandinista electoral defeat in the 1990 elections; support for bloody dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, etc.; its interference in Asia and Latin America; and its interference in the US military invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). Its interference in Asia and Eastern countries since 2001; its maneuver to consolidate a global hegemony against Russia and China; and among so many other actions, its media manipulation of international politics up to the present day.
A recent study shows that the United States has launched nearly 400 military interventions since its independence in 1776, half of these have been carried out between 1950 and 2019. More than 25% took place in the post-Cold War period (Kushi, 2022). As Martí expressed, from where the title of this article is inspired: “It is necessary that the truth of the United States be known in our America. Neither should their faults of purpose be exaggerated, by the prurience of denying them all virtue, nor should their faults be hidden, or touted as virtues […]” (Martí, 2008: 172).
As a great protest against this U.S. offensive at the global level, the REDH-Cuba joins the initiative launched last June 15 in Moscow, to celebrate the first International Day of Independence from U.S. Influence on July 4, 2023. This call is part of the great international project “Get out of the American Sector”, and it is necessary to respond in turn to the need for international counter-hegemonic, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist articulation.
The initiatives within this date, in order not to commit the same faults of which Fredirick Douglass alerted us, must not forget the current struggle of the peoples who continue to clamor for social justice, must respond to the continuous call for popular and revolutionary unity with historical memory. It is necessary that it becomes a day of struggles, resistances, of unity. Refuse to take for granted a farce reality that contradicts itself in financial control, mercantile hegemony, exploitation and plundering of raw materials, invasion and territorial occupation, imposition of puppet governments, political control and media manipulation, the destabilizing processes carried out against governments that do not respond to the world right wing and the overthrow of the march of democratic and popular transformations, all this carried out and promoted by the United States at present.
Cuba does not forget the multiple consequences brought about by the system of U.S. domination at the continental and global level. For our country, the hegemonic ambitions of the United States have been clear since its presence in Cuba in 1898, adding to its actions the Guantanamo Naval Base (1903), its imposition of dictatorships from 1925 to 1958, its mercenary invasion against Cuba (1961), the Torricelli Act, the Helms-Burton Act, with its military invasion of Cuba (1961), and its military invasion of Cuba in 1925.
Helms-Burton Act, with the establishment of the genocidal blockade, the permanent ideological division, the media manipulation of the socialist nation, etc. The Cuban people have struggled for centuries in the face of U.S. influence, not an easy road, but with many victories. It is not a finished hostility, since we continue to live the sieges of a country that does not forgive a revolution under their noses and we continue to battle.
From the words of Marti ” In others, Yanqui mania is the innocent fruit of one or another little jump of pleasure, like someone who judges the entrails of a house, and the souls that pray or die in it, by the smile and luxury of the reception room, or by the champagne and the carnation of the banquet table: -bear; bear yourself; work; love yourself, and, in vain; study, with the courage and freedom of self; live, with the poor; weep, with the miserable; hate, the brutality of wealth; live, in the palace and in the citadel, in the school-room and in the vestibules, in the theater box, of jasper and gold, and in the backstage, cold and bare: and thus it will be possible to give an opinion, with a hint of reason, about the authoritarian and greedy republic, and the growing sensuality, of the United States. “
Later in his writing, from the same invitation to critical thinking, José Martí would argue: “[… But it does not augur, but certifies, the one who observes how in the United States, instead of tightening the causes of union, they are loosened; instead of solving the problems of humanity, they are reproduced; instead of amalgamating in national politics the localities, they divide and fester; instead of strengthening democracy, and saving itself from the hatred and misery of monarchies, democracy is corrupted and diminished, and hatred and misery are reborn, threatening.”
What can a 4th of July mean for the American continent? This date gains meaning in the social transformations, in the power of the people, in the popular articulation and organization, in the constant revolutionary practice, in internationalism, in the social struggles with popular and class sense. It gathers a meaning in solidarity and in that peace with social justice proclaimed by the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN), which celebrates its 59th anniversary on this date and which drew from the example of the 26th of July Movement and the Cuban revolution; its bet is, in great summary, a popular unity that does not allow that the peoples’ humanist values, political ideas, history, their life that makes sense in the collective bet and that their voice is never extinguished.
To paraphrase Claudio Korol, what emerges must be a proposal that challenges the multiple oppressions produced by colonial and patriarchal capitalism; it must be a movement of historical consciousness that grows and takes shape from memory, and that changes our daily lives. From all these arguments, this 4th of July strives toward the organization, mobilization and international popular dialogue that must be anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and decolonial.
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity – Cuba, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US