[Twenty-one members of Congress last week called for lifting US
sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, including most of the Squad. The
pushback is needed: sanctions are a cruel economic weapon that hurts
average people — and has spurred a surge of economic refugees.]
[[link removed]]

THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS SUPPORTING SANCTIONS ON CUBA AND VENEZUELA
IS BREAKING  
[[link removed]]


 

Branko Marcetic
May 16, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Twenty-one members of Congress last week called for lifting US
sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, including most of the Squad. The
pushback is needed: sanctions are a cruel economic weapon that hurts
average people — and has spurred a surge of economic refugees. _

Activists carry Venezuelan and Cuban flags during a protest rejecting
President Joe Biden's policy of sanctions on June 10, 2022 in Los
Angeles, California. , Ringo Chiu / AFP via Getty Image

 

One of the defining features of our era has been the loss of a
domestic political appetite for more US wars. But a similar pushback
to Washington’s use of sanctions has been slow to follow, despite
the fact that US sanctions are demonstrably cruel
[[link removed]],
indiscriminate
[[link removed]],
ineffective
[[link removed]],
and often illegal
[[link removed]].

The near-term prospects for a groundswell of US opposition to
sanctions are basically nonexistent at this point. But we may be
seeing the beginnings of one taking shape: last week saw twenty-one
House Democrats send Joe Biden a letter calling on the president to
end US sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela and review Donald Trump–era
sanctions policy more generally, in light of the “border crisis,”
which has seen a surge in migrants at the southern border (though one
that is lower than expected
[[link removed]])
since the expiration of the Donald Trump–era Title 42 order
[[link removed]].

Calling the sanctions “a critical contributing factor in the current
increase in migration,” the letter
[[link removed]]
points to “their grave humanitarian toll on the peoples of those
countries” and the “significant logistical challenges” it is
creating for US authorities. But the letter also stresses that
“there are also strong moral grounds” to lift the sanctions and
that US policy should seek to not “exacerbate the suffering of the
innocent people whose freedom we seek to advance.”

Organized by two representatives of border states, Reps. Veronica
Escobar (D-TX) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) — a cochair
[[link removed]]
of Biden’s 2024 campaign and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) very
first congressional endorser, respectively — the letter was cosigned
by a number of progressive elected officials, including Reps. Ro
Khanna (D-CA) and Chuy García (D-IL), and six of the newly expanded
“Squad” of progressive and socialist members of Congress.

The signatures of Squad members Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, and Ayanna
Pressley were missing from the letter. Massachusetts representative
Jim McGovern, who has repeatedly
[[link removed]]
called on [[link removed]] Biden to lift
sanctions against Venezuela in the past, also didn’t sign the
letter, and his Northampton office was met by protests
[[link removed]]
from the Anti-Imperialism Action Committee, an anti-capitalist
activist collective based in Western Massachusetts, and other
activists as a result.

Some of the progressive signatories have taken this message to other
platforms. At a May 11 House Agriculture Committee meeting
[[link removed]],
Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) — one of the newly minted Squad members who
won his seat in these past midterms
[[link removed]]
— spoke about the failure of the decades-long US blockade on Cuba in
fostering democracy and called for
[[link removed]] “revisiting
our policies that push people out of their home countries,”
emphasizing [[link removed]]
the economic costs to the US economy that result.

“I don’t think that it serves us to be starving people abroad,”
he said. “I think it helps Americans for us to be feeding people all
over the world.”

Khanna similarly took this message to a venue where viewers are
unlikely to have heard criticism of Biden’s continuation of
Trump–era sanctions policy: MSNBC, on the _Morning Joe_
[[link removed]]
show.

“Look at what’s causing people to flee Venezuela and Cuba,” he
urged. “The Republicans are saying, ‘let’s sanction them
more.’ That’s causing more people to actually leave. Let’s look
at rational sanction policy so we’re not causing the influx.”

Progressive criticism of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela — both
of which are explicitly
[[link removed]]
aimed
[[link removed]]
at fomenting regime change in the countries — have been backed up by
Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy advisor for former president Barack
Obama.

“This is an obvious thing that is sitting right in front of the
Biden administration, to just go back to the kind of openness that we
had at the end of the Obama years [and] make life better for the Cuban
people,” he said
[[link removed]] in a recent
MSNBC appearance, warning that the political cost for Biden stemming
from events at the border would be worse than for lifting Trump’s
“maximum pressure” sanctions.

This course has also been endorsed
[[link removed]]
by leftist Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said
he had personally urged Biden to attack the root causes of migration
to the US southern border, namely the “poverty and abandonment”
endemic to those countries — and which US sanctions have
unquestionably
[[link removed]]
played a major role
[[link removed]]
in causing. This comes a month after the US envoy of the Venezuelan
opposition itself, which only a year ago was demanding
[[link removed]]
that Biden not waver on Trump’s policy, implored
[[link removed]]
the administration to end the sanctions, lest it turn Venezuela into
“another Cuba.”

Despite this diverse chorus of voices pushing for sanctions to be
lifted, it’s also running into a wall. That’s because, according
to
[[link removed]]
the _Washington Post_, the Biden administration is worried about
alienating Cuban-American Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who wrote a counterletter
[[link removed]]
claiming, as all sanctions enthusiasts do, that the policy has nothing
to do with the exodus of people from both countries.

Menendez is a hard-line supporter of Trump’s sanctions policy, and
is currently under federal investigation
[[link removed]]
eight years after already once being indicted
[[link removed]]
on separate bribery charges. When he finds time away from potential
criminal prosecution, Menendez is a full-time hawk
[[link removed]]
who teams up
[[link removed]]
with neocon Lindsey Graham to push legislation undermining peaceful
coexistence with China
[[link removed]] and Iran
[[link removed]].
Since it relies on him to push through appointments blocked by the GOP
and to pursue its wider geostrategic goals, the administration has
tended to give Menendez enormous leeway in driving its own foreign
policy decision-making, something that likely won’t change anytime
soon.

Still, the fact that there’s any disquiet being heard at all in
Washington toward the ruinous and largely pointless US overuse of
sanctions — a weapon that the Biden administration has used with
record frequency
[[link removed]]
— is an important development. Political shifts in the halls of
Congress don’t happen overnight and are usually the fruit of months
and years of small, symbolic measures like this letter, adding up bit
by bit to slowly shift what’s politically acceptable. This
progressive challenge to a president — one who’s otherwise
enjoying near-dictatorial levels of obeisance from fellow elected
Democrats — is a first step, and one that couldn’t have happened
without the election of progressive insurgents to Congress.

====

* US Sanctions; Cuba; Venezuela;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]