David Adler is Organizing a Flotilla to Cuba. Here's Why.

0:00David Adler:First, Venezuela. Now, Iran. Next up, Cuba. This country was stone cold dead. The conventional wisdom in Washington right now is that President Trump's rather imperialist second term has a van to Cuba in its sights next for some sort of regime change operation, whether that means military, economic pressure that we just don't know yet. But we're going to get into that today. And don't just take that from me. Here's a clip of Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, a senator who has never met a war. He wouldn't send someone else's kids to die. And here's him on Fox News this weekend.

0:35Carlo:I'm in Miami. You see this hat? Free Cuba. Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. It's just a matter of time now.

0:44David Adler:OK, well, you can almost smell the bloodlust coming off of Senator Graham there. Now, Graham is not just some ancient neocon who has glommed on to Trump for his own cynical reasons. I mean, he is that. But he is in the inner circle here. He has had Trump's ear on some of these past interventions we've seen, including helping sell the president on the current war that's unfolding in the Middle East. So all that is to say it's probably a good bet to take whatever it is he's saying as, you know, as though he is party to the decisions that are being made in this White House as it relates to what's happening in Cuba or at least what they're planning for Cuba.

1:20David Adler:And look, no question, the regime in Cuba is under perhaps more pressure than it has been in the 60, 70 years since the Cuban revolution that overthrew Batista. The country's in a now total oil blockade after Trump cut off their patrons or their partners, I should say, in Venezuela earlier this year after the Maduro operation. He then issued an executive order calling Cuba, quote, an unusual and extraordinary threat, end quote, to the United States, as well as authorizing tariffs on any country that broke our oil embargo. So without any oil coming in, this is a country of 11 million people, by the way, 90 miles from the coast of the United States, from the coast of Florida.

1:58David Adler:They're now in a full-blown energy and humanitarian crisis. So before we get to our guest today, who's going to sort of walk us through the humanitarian angle of this, I did want to get the latest on the Cuba situation from D.C., from the White House, which is where we find Newsweek's White House correspondent, Leo Feldman. Leonardo, good to see you, man. How are you?

2:18Carlo:Good, good. And you? How are you doing?

2:20David Adler:Good. Good to see you in this beautiful day here in Washington and New York. Leo, while I have you here, before we get to our guests, what is the White House's current posture towards Cuba? Are they are they talking about this or are they just sending surrogates like Graham out to sort of, you know, message this this coming whatever it's going to be?

2:40Carlo:Well, President Trump has said repeatedly in the last couple of days that Cuba will fall soon. He hasn't given us a timeline exactly as to what day that will be. But according to several reports, there is an imminent economic deal that's likely going to come through in the next couple of days or a couple of weeks. Again, we don't have an exact timeline, but that deal apparently like the main focus on that is that they're trying to get the island to go more towards the private sector and to buy a lot of U.S. products. So we don't have the exact details, but what we do know is that they want to shift Cuba away from a completely run government country to one that, you know, helps companies and the private sector succeed.

3:31David Adler:So I saw the report in USA Today earlier today that what you just said, that there is an economic deal that they're trying to broker. Now, that would be a far cry from from regime change. I don't think anybody's suggesting that the U.S. military is about to go into Havana. Although, again, who knows? I wouldn't have guessed that they'd be talking about potentially boots on the ground in Iran. So we just don't know. We should say that. But is there a sense in D.C. that that Trump is set on regime change in Havana as soon as this conflict is over? Or are these reports suggesting that there's a deal to be done here indeed?

4:03Carlo:Well, we do know that the Department of Justice is reportedly trying to, you know, get some indictments against some of the regime there in Cuba. But we don't have the exact names. And if, for example, the president would be one of those people that they're trying to, you know, charge with different criminal indictments. But we do know that the president has said in multiple occasions that this regime in Cuba has oppressed the people there. But in terms of an exact regime change, we don't know that. But what we saw in Venezuela, for example, the regime is still there. Delce Rodriguez was part of Maduro's regime and she's still there.

4:51Carlo:So it is likely that they're going to work with some regime officials to eventually lead the country to a complete transition to democracy. But as far as an imminent regime change, that doesn't seem likely at this point. But we do know that that could change. For example, in Iran, they killed the leader there. So we don't have information. The only one that knows really is President Trump.

5:21David Adler:Yes, which which could be scary, thrilling, all of that, I think, at once. But Leo, thank you. Thank you for your reporting. Of course, Leo Feldman, you can catch his his column in the 1600 newsletter every day. He reports from the White House. We will bring him back on as as news warrants. Leo, thanks, buddy. So now on to our main guest for today. I have with me now David Adler. David is a political economist. He's an activist and the co-general coordinator of Progressive International. David's also the organizer of the upcoming Nuestra America Convoy, which is set to embark on a mission later this month, bringing some of that crucial humanitarian aid we were talking about to the island of Cuba.

6:03David Adler:David, thank you so much for taking the time, man. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So tell me a little bit about this flotilla. What do you guys, first of all, when is it heading out and what are you guys hoping to accomplish?

6:15Carlo:Yeah, so when we first put out this call to respond to the aggravated humanitarian crisis on the island, thousands of people around the world heard that call. I think it's not an exaggeration to say that both in the United States and through the international community, people are looking at Trump's siege of this island with horror. not only because it's a violation of international law, not only because it has disastrous consequences for homes, hospitals, schools, mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, the elderly, the sick, but also because they understand that this tactic, this really barbaric tactic of a siege, if it's successfully applied in a small, peaceful island nation like Cuba, they could be next.

6:59Carlo:And so many people, when we first went out with this call, to join us on a mission to collect humanitarian aid in plazas and streets and communities. They wanted to be a part of it. And so on the 21st of March, from all around the world, we've got delegations from 25, 30 countries now. They'll be converging in Havana to turn in that humanitarian aid and stand shoulder-shorter with the Cuban people at a time when the Trump administration is determined to isolate the Cuban people, to inflame their quality of life, and to use that aggravated crisis as a pretext for a regime change operation. And that's not me reading between the lines.

7:35Carlo:that's now stated policy of the Trump administration and Marco Rubio's Department of State.

7:40David Adler:Yeah, we just played a clip before you came on from Lindsey Graham, who I don't know if he's like running the White House foreign policy right now, but he was on Fox News this weekend with a hat, Cuba Libre hat on and basically saying not even basically saying he's saying out loud, Cuba is next Cuba, we are coming to Cuba. So this you're not you're you're not new to these flotillas. You're a veteran of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla from, I guess it was a couple years ago now. What's the difference? I guess I should ask you, let me back up. What lessons did you learn from that mission that you're going to apply to the mission in Cuba, just with the understanding that Cuba is a sovereign state with its own government as opposed to Gaza, which was more of a stateless civilian population, both obviously under siege in different ways?

8:26Carlo:Yeah, there are similarities and differences between these contexts for sure. And I think it's really crucial to distinguish between the case of Gaza, for example, and the case of Cuba. Let's start with the similarities. The similarities are the application of this barbaric tactic of a siege. The United States has moved and ratcheted up, our press likes to call it ramping up the pressure, but let's be honest about what it is. It's the asphyxiation of the people of Cuba. We've moved from a longstanding, six-decade-long embargo, which effectively excludes Cuba from the international system of trade that we dominate because of our privileged position as the sort of hegemonic player in that international system of trade, to an SSOT designation that was upheld by the Biden administration.

9:06Carlo:That's a designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror, a very cynical move that Trump made in a very, very last week of his first administration, and that Biden didn't even remove until the last week of his administration, but I digress. An SSOT designation, which is used against our most fierce adversaries to effectively exclude them from the international system of finance, which again, we control because of our control of the dollar system, for example, which prevents banks and third parties from making transactions with Cuba. And now we have, as of the 29th of January's executive order, a fuel blockade that has prevented even a single drop of petroleum from reaching Cuba since December.

9:46Carlo:And this is a remarkable situation for any country to find themselves in. And I would encourage your listeners, your viewers, to really think in kind of detail about what this tactic of siege meant for the people of Gaza, who didn't have access to water, to electricity, to fuel, and for the people of Cuba. This means that hospitals don't have access to medicines. But it also means that, for example, if a fire were to break out, the fire brigade couldn't reach that fire because there's no fuel to put in the fire truck. So it's a really escalating crisis. And that's where we see similarities is in the ways in which this crisis multiplies across sectors because of the tactic being applied.

10:24Carlo:But of course, as you say, there are many, many differences, and we shouldn't give in to the idea that these are perfectly applicable, you know, analogous cases between Gaza and Cuba. And most importantly, as you say, I think in the case of Cuba, it's not yet as if the Trump administration is raining bombs on Havana, although I wouldn't rule that out in the context of a State Department that is effectively occupied by a handful of rather sociopathic people. You mentioned Lindsey Graham among them. But it's not too late for us to kind of mobilize and say, really, you know, we didn't decide on this policy.

11:01Carlo:We didn't decide that we wanted to strangle this island of Cuba. but we didn't vote for this policy. And so I think that to loop back around to some of the comparisons many observers have made, I'm not the first to make this observation, is that in the case of US-Israel policy, many people have noted how unpopular, how undemocratic, how unrepresentative that policy is, and how much it has been influenced by a very organized lobby through institutions like AIPAC. And I think people are noticing that there's a certain lobby that comes out of Southern Florida that is pushing a policy that poll after poll shows that people do not support the blockade, let alone the siege that's being applied by the Trump administration.

11:38David Adler:Well, so that brings me to what I wanted to ask you next. And I've always struggled with this, right? Because I understand Cuba's communist, right? We don't like the communists, the United States government, right? People like Marco Rubio in particular don't like them. And they've staked their career on, you know, they're going to be the guy to finally remove a communist regime that exists, you know, 90 miles from our shores. But I've been burned enough time by these types of people that I just tend to assume the worst whenever we start freelancing abroad. But nobody has ever explained to me the threat that Cuba poses to my way of life.

12:14Carlo:I think the threat that Cuba poses to the United States is that it represents an alternative way of organizing society. And it's one that many people have criticisms of, about the structure of their political system, for example, or about property rights and your ability to start a business, those are reasonable criticisms. But I think what's really threatening is that Cuba sort of stands for a different way of organizing the relationship to the world. Cuba fought against the United States when they took on the forces of apartheid in Southern Africa and ultimately triumphed over apartheid while the United States was bearing down on Cuban and Golan, South African forces to try to maintain a regime of apartheid, lest we forget.

12:56Carlo:Cuba built vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic that would service most of the poor world, but threaten the pharmaceutical profits that were getting rich hand over fist in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, again, pushed by our government in alliance with Europe. Cuba sends doctors all over the world to provide medical services to impoverished and marginalized communities. And what are we doing now? We're squeezing those countries. We're squeezing Jamaica, Guatemala, Honduras to kick out those Cuban doctors, which will ultimately mean a significant amount of death and suffering for the absence of these medical services.

13:37Carlo:This is a policy that many people have understood, where the cruelty is precisely the point. And so sure, you know, yes, it's true, there's a presence in the United States for anti-communist crusading around the world. But the body count of that anti-communist Cold War crusade is extremely high, whether it's in Vietnam and Cambodia, or indeed in the Western Hemisphere, where we've led many regime coup operations that have led to tremendous death and destruction across the hemisphere. So we need to remember some of that history in order to make sense of what seems like a senseless policy, strangling an island that doesn't have an army, that represents no threat to the United States.

14:15Carlo:And on the contrary, year after year, at the level of the United Nations, the General Assembly, the entire world, the entire world, not communist countries, not poor countries, all of Europe, all of Africa, all of Asia, all of America, vote to condemn us for our economic, financial, and political blockade of Cuba.

14:36David Adler:So you mentioned this, the squeeze, right? So here's the way I see the squeeze. And you tell me, you know, if you think I'm wrong on this. So there's two parts to it, right? There's the blockade of the oil, which, you know, we have increased the pressure after we got Maduro out so that, you know, Venezuelan tankers can't reach the island. So now there's the second part, which is what you've mentioned, which is the tourism industry, right? And that started back during Trump 1. Cuba is obviously highly dependent on tourism, even though Americans can't go there except for that brief interregnum during the Obama softening, if you will.

15:09David Adler:But a lot of Canadians go, right? A lot of Canadians go. I think there's something like 40 percent of foreign travelers to Cuba come from Canada. Have you been surprised by the lack of solid area, I guess you could say, from the Canadian government? I mean, Mark Carney is somebody who was just at Davos and got, you know, a huge glazing, I guess you could say, in the media for this speech that he gave about sort of like taking on, you know, American imperialist power. He's been pretty quiet on this, hasn't he?

15:40Carlo:You don't say. Now, there's a generous read and an ungenerous read when it comes to the response of the international community, the same countries that condemn the United States and their blockade at the level of the United Nations General Assembly every year. Let's start with the generous read. The generous read happens to be very withering of the United States government, which is that the fuel blockade is not just that we're confiscating and blocking access of any petroleum tankers to reach the island to service critical infrastructure in Cuba. It's also that the Trump administration is menacing, threatening sanctions and tariffs on third party countries that dare to defy this unilateral and coercive action.

16:19Carlo:So if I'm Mexico, and I have a long standing relationship with Cuba that has endured through the entire Cuban revolution, all of a sudden, I'm not allowed to send on my sovereign terms, I'm not allowed to send Cuba to my friends in Cuba, just because the Trump administration said that they're going to go after me if I defy or undermine our foreign policy objectives. So the generous read would be to say they're scared that the United States is going to use this massive apparatus of financial and military power to pursue enemies it may have. And are they wrong, Carlo? Let's continue on the generous read.

16:53Carlo:The governments that have stood up for Palestine and basically made their voice heard in the name of humanity, decency, and international law in Palestine, have been punished by the United States. Colombia, the president was sanctioned. So was his entire family. South Africa was sanctioned, and they push a whole narrative around white genocide and getting Afrikaans in. Honduras, another country that stood up, there was an electoral coup. I mean, Trump pardoned this narco dictator and put his finger for Tito Asfura, whose first trip was to go to Israel as president of Honduras. Let's not be naive about the retribution conducted, exercised by the United States government on 30 countries.

17:31David Adler:You're seeing it now vis-a-vis Iran. We're talking about ending trade with Spain, which is part of the EU, because the Spaniards don't want any part of this. Now, that's the generous read.

17:40Carlo:The generous read is, you know, we are, this is a monstrous government in Washington that is trampling international law at multiple levels. The more generous, the less generous read is that all that diplomatic talk, all those fancy species at Davos, that rhetoric just does not translate into practice and into policy. That these governments, perhaps they're myopic geopolitically, perhaps they think it's just a small island nation over there. And what's it got to do with me? But that's that that geostrategic myopia is crazy, Because we know that if there is a tactic of siege that's normalized in Gaza, it can be exported to Cuba.

18:23Carlo:And if there's regime change in Cuba, it can be exported to other parts of the world. And if the Canadians or any other country think that they're safe from the whipsaw that is the Trump administration, that they can afford silence in the face of Cuban suffering and be spared the wrath of this administration, well, that's foolish. We know that this administration is sort of has enough energy and enough people running around the halls of the Pentagon that they can they can walk and chew gum when it comes to regime change. So I think that that's, you know, I think we need to be withering. And part of the role of this convoy that we've been organizing from civil society through political parties, social movements, trade unions from all around the world is to model the popular diplomacy that we want to see at the level of state diplomacy.

19:06Carlo:It should not be the responsibility of ordinary people to take humanitarian matters into their own hands, to sail and to fly and to pack bags full of medicine and full of critical materials that Cubans need to survive. That should be the job of friendly governments like Brazil's, for example. And it should be even the job of unfriendly governments like those in Caricom, those in the region, as the United States advances on the militarization of the Caribbean Sea that, sure, its attention is pinned towards Havana now. But God knows it's not going to end there.

19:35David Adler:Oh, well, I would agree with that. And I think people don't really understand, at least in America, don't really understand the level of poverty that does exist in Cuba, even though, again, it's only like an hour and a half from our shores. It is our neighbor. It's right there. Obviously, a lot of that is due to the embargo and the blockade and the ways that we have treated the Cubans over the last several decades. But there's also a good chunk of it is due to the mismanagement by the Cuban regime. So I guess my question to you would be how are you going to make sure that the aid that you get in is not mismanaged by the Cuban government and gets to the people who need it?

20:11Carlo:Oh, no. It's being delivered through civil social annals. This is not being delivered to the government. So that's not a problem. But the mismanagement thing, I mean, it gets me every time. There's multiple levels of this. First of all, I'm from Los Angeles. We've got 150 ,000 people living in the streets of Los Angeles, 150 ,000 people. How many homeless people are there in Cuba? Basically none. Okay, so what moral political authority do we have to lecture any country in the world about how we treat our poor, about how we deal with issues of poverty? None. Now, second of all, what kind of imperial mindset does it take to say they're mismanaging their economy, so we should coup them?

20:45Carlo:I mean, you know, we have to come back to the fundaments of international law, how we've normalized that Lindsey Graham goes on Fox News and says Cuba's next. Where's the outrage? Where's the leadership to stop these people and stand up for forget the communists, forget the regime type. This is a basic principle of self-determination. Sovereignty. Once considered sacred in the international system. And if you can hear it in my voice, it's not a strained, you know, it's an incredulity about how far we seem to have fallen from any basic principle, as you say, of national sovereignty, which in the domestic case, we hold dear.

21:21Carlo:It's our unilateral right to declare what is our national interest, how we're going to pursue it. But when other countries say, okay, well, us too, you know, and that's not to say that we shouldn't criticize the Cubans. And God knows those of us who are close to them or far away from them criticize their model of political economic governance for sure, whether it's electoral, you know, where there was a lot of criticism about social codes and, you know, homosexuality, LGBT rights, and they had to update their family code. We could spend all day speaking about the Cuban model. It is irrelevant, irrelevant to the task at hand, which is stopping a regime change operation of choice, not of necessity, founded on lies, founded on old school Cold War crusading that is determined to fail.