We say “no” to the U.S. war on Cuba. Why won’t Canada?

by Jim Hodgson

Today, Canadian churches, labour unions, development agencies and solidarity groups are calling on our government to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Cuba – cornerstone rights of all states guaranteed in the United Nations Charter. 

The statement (reproduced below) appears as an ad in the Hill Times, a newspaper in Ottawa whose audience is made up of politicians, public servants and those of us who try to influence them. Look at them: 28 organizations, representing millions of Canadians.

For more than three years, I have worked as a volunteer among a loose network of civil society groups to press the government of Canada for action. We began with a letter April 17, 2023, sent to the ministers of foreign affairs and international development. 

We followed up with other letters and statements, and I wrote or co-wrote several opinion pieces: Hill Times in 2023, Canadian Dimension in 2024 and at rabble.ca a few weeks ago. Sometimes, I wrote these together with John Kirk, retired from teaching at Dalhousie University but still, like me, pressing our government for the sake of our many friends and co-workers in Cuba – and in favour of a different way to live together on our planet.

Several times, our inter-agency group called on Canadians to send letters to our politicians. (We’re still doing so, here.) Some of us met with members of Parliament and with staff at Global Affairs Canada and at the Embassy in Havana.

Earlier this year, we were joined by an ad hoc group of trade unionists who used a series of labour conventions and other gatherings to lift the campaign to a whole new level, with hundreds of postcards sent to the prime minister.

The government’s response, to put it mildly, has been feeble. A few million dollars here and there for humanitarian relief delivered through UN bodies or Canadian NGOs, but no calls to end the vicious U.S. sanctions, no shiploads of supplies (like those sent by Mexico, Colombia and other countries, and no fuel. Not even support for a humanitarian corridor so that fuel can be supplied to those agencies that are providing aid. No protest to the United States over its extraterritorial measures that harm Canadians who have worked alongside Cuban state enterprises in mining and tourism.

This afternoon, Canada’s parliamentary Subcommittee on International Human Rights (SDIR) is holding a Briefing on Human Rights in the Caribbean Region with a focus on Cuba. But, like the Feb. 26 Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development hearing before it, the witness list is tilted in favour of right-wing exile groups, raising concerns about the balance of views brought forward to the committee. This time, fortunately, the Canadian Network on Cuba is being allowed to share a more progressive perspective.

It’s pretty clear now that the Carney government will not speak up for Cuba so long as its talks to renew Canada’s free trade deal with the United States and Mexico continue.

At risk here is not just Cuba’s sovereignty, but Canada’s too. What many of us warned about in the free trade debates of 1998 and 1993 was the loss of Canada’s sovereignty. The long U.S. history of invasions, coups, electoral interference and sanctions has been made more acute in this second Trump administration. 

The Canadian government must be bold and defend Cuban sovereignty, international law and the lives of Cubans.

Please write (again) to the prime minister and to your member of parliament. If you are in a country other than Canada, please write to or call your representatives to ask for their solidarity with the people of Cuba.

Hey Canada! Just say NO to U.S. threats against Cuba

by Jim Hodgson

“The U.S. government is going crazy with its shameful war on Cuba,” writes Medea Benjamin of CodePink. “Every week, there’s a new sanction, a new restriction, a new way to punish the Cuban people.” She goes on to describe measures directed against U.S. travellers and solidarity groups. 

Here, I want to focus on the measures that are forcing foreign investors to abandon holdings in hotels, mines and other joint ventures – and forcing cancellations by still more airlines and abandonment of Cuba by the credit card duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. All of these actions hurt the Cuban people, directly or indirectly.

Unilateral sanctions applied by the United States are reaching new levels of cruelty in Cuba. The latest wave is rooted in the U.S. International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that allows a president to regulate international trade after declaring a national emergency in response to some extraordinary threat. It’s the law Trump used to apply his tariffs in early 2025, a move the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in February. Now he’s using the same law to punish Cuba. Milton Feng outlines Trump’s use of IEEPA to back his newest sanctions on Cuba in an essay here.

On May 1, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order, effective June 5, that freezes U.S. assets of foreign companies and people that conduct business with the Cuban government.

A week later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced more details: the U.S. would impose additional sanctions on Cuban state-owned businesses that manage joint operations with foreign companies across tourism, retail, mining and distribution. The move had an immediate impact on Canadian investment in Cuba, notably nickel-miner Sherritt’s surrender to Gillon Capital LLC, the family office linked to Ray Washburne, a former adviser and appointee of Trump himself. 

Montreal-based Royalton Hotels (which includes Blue Diamond, above) and Spanish hotel companies Melia and Iberostar ended their management and licensing operations in Cuba. Air Canada, WestJet and Air Transat have indefinitely suspended flights and vacation packages in Cuba. They had previously planned to resume service to Cuba this fall.

Many of the U.S. measures were aimed at partnerships with GAESA, a company linked to Cuba’s military. On June 2, the Cuban government defended GAESA, saying its joint ventures had funded housing, schools, clinics, and infrastructure.

The Spanish foreign minister said the moves against the hotel companies would aggravate the “humanitarian hardship” faced by the Cuban people in the wake of other U.S. sanctions and the fuel blockade underway since early this year. Church leaders from Canada and other parts of the world saw first-hand the impact of the U.S. blockade on ordinary people when they visited earlier this year.

But Canada has said nothing. 

Like the European Union, Canada has law to protect its companies from the kind of extraterritorial reach demonstrated by Trump’s executive order. Amendments in the 1990s to its Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act (FEMA) explicitly prohibit Canadian corporations from complying with US extraterritorial measures that affect trade and commerce with Cuba. 

Nick Gottlieb’s op-ed comment in The Hill Times, Ottawa.

“If the Canadian government refuses to invoke FEMA at the precise moment it was designed for, then the legislation becomes little more than symbolic theatre,” wrote Dalhousie University’s Isaac Sainey in a Facebook post May 20. “Worse still, Canada effectively concedes that Washington possesses the right to determine Canadian economic policy and punish Canadian firms at will. This is not sovereignty. It is subordination.”

But CUSMA. Under Mark Carney’s leadership (not that he has said so yet), it seems Canada will not support Cuba as long as its free trade relationship with the United States is facing re-negotiation. In 2019, when Justin Trudeau was prime minister and Chrystia Freeland his foreign minister, Canada strongly defended the interests of Canadians doing business in Cuba.

When Trump threatened Canada last year, most of us joined with Carney in saying “#ElbowsUp.” That defiance needs to extend in solidarity with people in Cuba and in other parts of this hemisphere threatened by resurgent U.S. imperialism.

Please write (again) to the prime minister and to your member of parliament. If you are in a country other than Canada, please write to or call your representatives to ask for their solidarity with the people of Cuba.

In Colombia, “mass mobilization” needed to counter Trump’s candidate

by Jim Hodgson

U.S. President Donald Trump has again interfered in a Latin American election, this time endorsing far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Trump called him a “smart, strong, and tough leader” and described his opponent, Senator Iván Cepeda, as a “radical left Marxist.”

I beg to differ. Cepeda is a long-time human rights defender. My first awareness of his work dates from 2008 when he was with the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE). The first time that I can remember meeting him was in November 2015 at a breakfast meeting in Bogotá. By then he was a senator and had joined about 60 people from church and other civil society groups to hear reports from the peace negotiations that sputtered along in Havana ahead of the 2016 agreement.

Cepeda and de la Espriella will face each other in a second round of presidential voting on June 21. They were the top two candidates after a first round of voting May 31. De la Espriella won 44 per cent of votes, while Cepeda obtained 41 per cent. 

Petro urges mass mobilization

Colombia’s incumbent president, Gustavo Petro, swiftly condemned Trump’s backing of de la Espriella as a threat to Colombian sovereignty.

“When a country interferes in the decisions of another country, freedom dies,” Petro wrote. “I invite all of Colombia to vote in full freedom and not become either slaves or a colony of anyone.” Petro invoked Simón Bolívar and Antonio Nariño, the founding fathers of Colombian independence from Spain in the early 19th century, to draw a parallel between historical colonial subjugation and what he characterized as modern American meddling. “If the heart of the world loses its freedom and sovereignty, the hope of the world and of Colombia fades away.”

Petro had earlier cast the presidential runoff as a historic struggle between democracy and what he called “mafia fascism,” accusing de la Espriella of ties to paramilitary death squads and alleging widespread vote-buying during the first round. Petro argued that fascist movements have produced catastrophic human suffering wherever they have ruled and said Colombians have a moral obligation to defeat them at the ballot box.

For his part, Cepeda challenged his opponent to a public debate and called for an investigation into what he described as 885,000 electoral irregularities in the first-round vote, also alleging foreign interference in the election.

“Every single ant is out moving mountains”

Among international observers, Rev. Emilie Teresa Smith of the Anglican diocese of New Westminster (B.C.) said in a Facebook post June 3 that “the forces of manipulation and corruption are deep and powerful.”

She looked at the context: that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had already re-configured the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine and declared Abya Yala (Latin America and the Caribbean) “their territory to control, exploit and destroy.” 

Smith also pointed to the April audio leaks of Honduran leaders, including convicted drug-trafficker and former president Juan Orlando Hernández. Together these comprise “Hondurasgate,” an international conspiracy to influence the last election in Honduras and to “extend the same operation across the region, targeting the progressive governments of Latin America.”

She also wrote of preparations for the next round of voting: “Every single ant is out moving mountains.”

In its observation report, the San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange said that for the first time in Colombian history, the U.S. embassy sent 86 observers to the polls. Among them was Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, born in Bogotá and now a close Trump ally. Weeks earlier, he warned that Washington might refuse to recognize results if evidence of coercion emerged and conditioned future U.S. assistance explicitly on the election’s outcome. A Florida member of the House of Representatives, María Elvira Salazar, went further. She publicly endorsed de la Espriella and urged Colombians to vote for him. After the vote, Moreno reported that the elections were “completely free and well run.”

The first-round result was unexpectedly close. The vote for a third candidate, Paloma Valencia, seemed to collapse, despite backing from former hard-right president Álvaro Uribe. 

The election also had a higher voter turnout – almost 58 per cent – than any first-round vote since the new constitution came into force in 1991. To win, Cepeda will need to add to Petro’s coalition. 

“What happens in Colombia on June 21 will not stay in Colombia,” concluded the Global Exchange report. “It will send a signal to every progressive movement in the hemisphere about whether it is possible to govern — and to be succeeded — under the weight of the Donroe Doctrine.”