General secretary of the Joint Trade Union Movement (JTUM) Ozzi Warwick says the repeated calls by local organisations for the US to lift the embargo against Cuba are not in vain.
Warwick spoke with the media outside the US Embassy yesterday, moments after attempting to deliver a letter calling on US President Joe Biden to de-list Cuba as a country with state-sponsored terrorism.
The letter was not accepted by security officers at the embassy, as they did not have permission to accept it. But Warwick said it would be mailed instead.
Warwick said he represented not only JTUM but eight other organisations, which include the Caribbean Freedom Project, the Caribbean Pan African and Indigenous Movement, the Emancipation Support Committee, the Movement for Social Justice, the Network of NGO’s for the Advancement of Women, the Trinidad and Tobago Friends of Cuba, the Women Working for Social Progress, and the Global Pan-African Movement.
Warwick said while the joint statement is not a new call, he does not believe that it is a waste of time. He said over 180 countries in the UN are all in support of free trade with Cuba and have voiced this through votes calling for an end to the blockade.
“There is growing international support for the people of Cuba. A growing international condemnation and call for the US to end the economic blockade. Yes, the blockade has been there for many years, but so too was apartheid,” Warwick said.
He said much like the struggle to end apartheid, so too will be the struggle to end the US-led sanctions against Cuba.
The joint statement called on Biden to reverse policies enacted under former US president Donald Trump’s tenure. He said to revert to the previous policies would be going back to policies that existed while President Barack Obama was in office, with Biden as his vice president.
“We in Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of Caricom have also been affected by this vindictive action by the US as our companies have also lost out on business in Cuba. We, the undersigned organisations, therefore, once again demand that President Biden do the honourable thing. Take your knee off the neck of the Cuban people and let them breathe, Mr Biden! In the name of humanity do the right thing!”
Warwick’s call comes a week after Foreign and Caricom Affairs Minister Dr Amery Browne called on the US to remove Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list and lift the embargo.
Browne made the statement during a meeting with Cuban Ambassador Gustavo Daniel Véliz Olivares on June 17.
In a media release on Monday, Browne said he told Olivares that: “Trinidad and Tobago remains resolute in its positions that Cuba be de-listed as a ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’ and that the Embargo against Cuba be lifted.”
The media release added that T&T found that the unilateral classification of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism was “unfair.”