Hollywood actors Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon appear as signatories of “Let Cuba Live,” a leftist initiative launched this week condemning President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on Cuba’s authoritarian communist Castro regime.
The letter accuses President Trump of seeking to “induce a famine in Cuba” with the alleged goal of causing “mass starvation and human suffering” by addressing the national security threat the Cuban communist regime, a state sponsor of terror, poses to the United States. The letter completely ignores the inhumane catastrophe that the Castro regime has unleashed on its own people in the last 67 years of uninterrupted communist rule.
The list of signatories featured on the initiative’s website include anti-U.S. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, Harold and Kumar star and former Obama administration White House Staff member Kal Penn, director Boots Riley, New York State Senator Julia Salazar, and about 20 New York City council members, among others. Some of the notoriously anti-U.S. far-left organizations supporting the campaign include the Democratic Socialists of America, Codepink, and the People’s Forum — a group known for its extensive and public friendly ties with the Castro regime and China’s communist party.
In January, President Trump signed an executive order declaring the Castro regime a national security threat to the United States. In its text, President Trump cited the extensive, decades-long track record of support of international terrorism, the persecution and torture of political dissidents, and the spreading of its malign communist influence in the region as some of the reasons for the executive order — stressing that the United States “has zero tolerance for the depredations of the communist Cuban regime.”
The executive order calls for the imposition of tariffs on any country providing oil to Cuba. At press time, the Castro regime has not received new oil shipments from its traditional top suppliers, Venezuela and Mexico, nor has it received any oil from its longtime ideological allies such as China and Russia.
“It [the executive order] is a cynical and crude ploy to distract public opinion from the issues at home that are eliciting mass public dissent, and as we’ve seen with Venezuela, a precursor to an illegal military attack,” the pro-Castro initiative’s letter claimed.
“We, along with millions of people in the United States and around the world, reject this inhumane act against the people of Cuba. This is not a policy of national security; it is a deliberate act of economic warfare aimed at strangling an entire population,” the letter continued.
The letter signed by Ruffalo and others criticized President Trump for reversing former President Barack Obama’s “Cuban thaw” policies that Obama enacted during his second term, which saw the Castro regime receive numerous concessions while maintaining its brutal communist repression on the Cuban people. The leftist initiative claimed that Obama “initiated an important effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba.”
The leftist group claimed in the letter:
The two countries reopened their embassies after they had been closed for 50 years. People across the United States, Cuba, and the entire Western Hemisphere greeted this as a welcome end to the anachronistic Cold War policies that had dominated the relationship.
But Trump has reversed the path that the Obama administration began. His January 29 Executive Order labels Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. This is obviously false, but it provides a pretext to impose severe economic penalties on any country that attempts to deliver oil or trade with Cuba.
According to the initiative, President Trump’s executive order will leave Cubans without power, hospitals at risk of closing critical treatments, shortages of food, and leave children and elderly people vulnerable. In reality, all of the alleged “consequences” that the leftist group claimed will occur as a result of Trump’s January executive order have already happened in Cuba as a direct result 67 years of the Castro regime’s disastrous communist rule, which has pushed the island nation to the complete collapse of not just its infrastructure but its demographics, as well.
“This policy is unconscionable. It deepens a humanitarian crisis of our own making. Cuba poses no threat to the United States. Starving a population into submission is not diplomacy; it is a form of terrorism,” the letter reads.
The Cuban regime’s Foreign Ministry published the campaign’s anti-Trump letter on its website, praising the “influential public figures” promoting it, and calling for people to sign it in support. Additionally, the Cuban embassy and consulate in the United States are actively promoting the campaign on social media platforms.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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