The ANSWER Coalition is circulating the following urgent appeal from Manolo De Los Santos, Executive Director of The People's Forum, about a crucial new initiative to address food shortages caused by the U.S. blockade

What would you do if your neighbor was starving? This is not a hypothetical. Right now the U.S. government is deliberately starving the Cuban people 90 miles to our South. We all must act now.

A food crisis is unfolding on the island of an unprecedented scale. A country where hunger had been made a thing of the past is now running out of bread and other essential food items. Known worldwide for its health care system, it is now running out of medicine, too. Long fuel lines have become a source of constant hardship. Under the weight of intensified U.S. sanctions, hundreds of thousands have made the painful decision to emigrate, leaving their loved ones behind.

We are launching an emergency campaign — Let Cuba Live: Bread for Our Neighbors. Our goal is to send 800 tons of wheat flour to Cuba as legal humanitarian aid, so that millions of people have bread for a month. Can you join with thousands of others to make a donation, as you would for your neighbor next door?

We aren’t just trying to feed a family or a single block. We want to bring bread to whole provinces. A $100 donation buys enough wheat flour to produce 70,000 bread rolls.

The U.S. could end this suffering quickly if it were to lift the blockade and remove Cuba from the “State Sponsors of Terrorism List,” which Trump absurdly imposed on the island five years ago. This has totally blocked Cuba from a broad range of financial and trade transactions and made it impossible to get international credits. U.S. citizens are blocked from visiting for tourism, Cuba’s main economic engine. Ships that agree to go to Cuba find their insurance policies revoked, leading to lots of cancellations.

As an example: in the last three weeks we called 14 grain companies in the United States offering to pay market rate for grain to go to Cuba as urgent humanitarian aid. We haven’t received a single positive reply. At this point, we intend to ship hundreds of tons from Turkey, even while in the US there are massive grain silos just a few miles away.

It’s all by design. A declassified 1960 State Department memorandum explained the strategy behind it all: “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Sixty years later, the Trump and Biden administrations tightened the screws even further, pushing the Cuban people to the brink. A few weeks ago Cuba saw desperate protests for “Food and Power” in Santiago, but the US State Department didn’t relax their restrictions one bit. They feel they’re “working.”

This cannot stand. All people of conscience in the United States have to speak up and take action to let Cuba live. We’ve all been outraged to see the urgent aid for Rafah blocked at the border, while famine stalks the Palestinian people. We can’t allow the same thing to happen directly to our south.

Once the wheat flour arrives in Cuba, it will be received and distributed by the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Center in Havana, Cuba. The People's Forum will match all donations up $100,000.

Please make a donation today — give bread to our neighbor.