A chara,
Many seem to believe that China holds the silver bullet for helping the Cuban Revolution, struggling at the moment against the intense and vicious US blockade, and threats of military invasion. This is a simplistic criticism of Beijing that essentially amounts to wanting China to do a deus ex machina and break the blockade at one stroke. Reality is more complex.
After the 1959 Revolution, the Soviet Union was able to supply Cuba’s energy needs up to its dissolution in 1991, in a way China cannot replicate today. For one, the USSR was then one of the world’s largest energy suppliers. The PRC, however, has little indigenous reserves, and relies on imports from the Gulf, Russia and others. Additionally, it has to balance its supply distribution across a nation of 1.3 billion people. Despite China’s immense achievements in poverty eradication, it is still classed as a “developing country” with areas in its isolated interior in need of significant energy reserves to modernise and catch up with the rest of the more advanced coastal cities.
The US blockade on Cuba is a total and extra-territorial blockade. Chinese energy, shipping companies, insurance, financial etc. companies would be placed under American sanctions for going around the blockade, which would hurt China’s ability to use its economic growth to build its influence in the Global South. At this point in time, China’s leadership does not believe a direct confrontation with imperialism is desirable. The world is still at an early stage of multipolarity, with the BRICS taking slow, mostly incremental, steps towards building an alternative.
For China to directly break the US blockade in the way people are calling for, it would also be directly provoking imperialism to respond by doing similar on China’s Taiwan, possibly causing war. The US sees Cuba as within its sphere of influence and key to their strategy for Latin America. The ongoing offensive against Iran is also causing havoc on global energy supply, the submission of Venezuela and its critical oil supply, and the growing surge of right-wing governments in Latin America, are also important external factors in Cuba’s ongoing crisis, caused directly by imperialism.
Russia too, is kept away from more support, given the focus on its war effort, and the attacks by Ukraine on Russian energy sites.
China has indeed stepped up with meaningful political support for Cuba, beyond just rhetoric condemning the blockade, with efforts in transforming Cuba’s energy matrix away from oil, towards solar power, supply of spare parts for the necessary machinery and supply of needed food items.
The Cuban Revolution and people are putting up a great struggle and need concrete political solidarity, not tokenistic gestures that would make leftists in the imperial core feel better about China. The emphasis should not be put on criticising China’s supposed lack of action, but instead on putting it up to the Irish government, and certain Irish opposition parties, who all claim to be against the blockade but say nothing to their friends in Washington about it, and take no meaningful political action on challenging the blockade.
Graham Harrington
East Asia
