By Susan Bassein

On Saturday, my 62nd birthday, I will board a Pastors for Peace “Friendshipment” Caravan bus at the Davis Farmers Market on its way to deliver material aid to Cuba.

Since 1992, Pastors for Peace has run 21 such caravans; this will be my second, and the sixth to stop in Davis. Each caravan of about a dozen school buses, with each bus on a different route through the United States, delivers more than 100 tons of material aid to Cuba in defiance of the U.S. blockade.

But the most important purpose of the caravans is to educate Americans about the illegal, immoral and internationally condemned U.S. blockade of Cuba and thereby end it.

“But Obama ended the blockade.” Not even close.

President Barack Obama ended just a part of the travel ban, by allowing those with family members in Cuba to visit and send them money, and by granting travel licenses to more organizations than President George W. Bush did. (Under President Jimmy Carter, the travel ban was lifted completely.)

However, the blockade is much more than just the travel ban, which still applies to most Americans. The cornerstones of the blockade are the Trading with the Enemy Act (1917), the Torricelli Act (1992) and the Helms-Burton Act (1996).

Together, these laws not only prevent U.S. citizens and companies from freely trading with Cuba, but they impose severe fines on any foreign company that trades with or has financial dealings with Cuba, if that company also trades with the U.S. or has a subsidiary here.

Foreign companies have been fined almost every year, sometimes as much as hundreds of millions of dollars. For 50 years, the blockade has cost Cuba hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars by making Cuba’s trade and financial transactions with other countries more difficult and expensive.

“Internationally condemned?” Each year, Cuba presents a resolution against the blockade to the United Nations General Assembly. Each year, the General Assembly votes nearly unanimously for Cuba and against the United States.

In the 2010 session, 187 nations voted against the blockade, three small Pacific island nations abstained, and only the U.S. and Israel voted for the blockade. Countries that our government considers allies — England, Canada, France, India, South Africa and Brazil — as well as those it considers enemies, all voted against the blockade.

Despite the Israeli government’s vote, an Israeli company, with a subsidiary in Miami, was fined $250,000 in 2003 for doing business with Cuba.

“But Cuba is our enemy.”

Cuba has never attacked the United States overtly or covertly. On the other hand, the U.S., through the CIA, supported and trained Cuban exiles in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, worked with Cuban-exile organizations based in Miami that attacked Cuba for decades and plotted many times to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Why choose Guatemala as the cover for attacks on Cuba? In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala with 60 percent of the vote. He appointed Communist Party members to government posts and expropriated land from the U.S.-based United Fruit Company.

Although Guatemala, like Cuba, never attacked the United States, President Eisenhower (whose administration had ties to United Fruit) sent weapons and the CIA to Honduras and Nicaragua to help exiled Guatemalans overthrow Arbenz by force in 1954, thereby initiating a series of repressive Guatemalan governments allied with the United States.

(Che Guevara was in Guatemala during the coup, before he joined the Cuban revolution.)

The U.S. reached the height of hypocrisy in the arrest, trial and conviction of five men that the government of Cuba had sent to Miami to monitor Cuban-exile terrorist groups and to warn Cuba of impending attacks. These agents never spied on the U.S. government or its legal agencies.

After conviction in an unjust trial in the anti-Castro environment of Miami, the Cuban 5 have been in U.S. prisons for more than 12 years. The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, Amnesty International, and former President Carter have criticized the trial of the Cuban 5 as deeply flawed. Carter recently called for their release from prison.

“But Cuba is a Communist dictatorship.”

I disagree, but even though the U.S. government says so, it has never applied a similar international blockade against Communist China or the former Soviet Union. The U.S. has permitted open trade with brutal capitalist dictatorships, including that of Chile after the CIA helped overthrow its elected president, and even Nazi Germany when it was overrunning U.S. allies in Europe.

But Cuba was too close to home, as was Guatemala, during the Cold War and small enough to bully. The Cold War is over.

The express purpose of the blockade is to starve Cubans into overthrowing their government. How has Guatemala fared after the U.S. “prevented a Communist takeover” by overthrowing its democratically elected government?

Despite the U.S. blockade, Cuba’s per capita gross domestic product is 2.7 times higher than Guatemala’s and increasing faster. Cuba’s universal health system is world-renowned and its infant mortality rate is about one-quarter of Guatemala’s (and comparable to or lower than that of the U.S.). Every social and economic indicator places Cuba far above Guatemala.

Come to the Farmers Market between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday, meet some caravanistas, learn more and help send the caravan on its way to Cuba.

— Susan Bassein is a Davis resident.

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