Tag Archives: #SanctionsKill

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.

The Vatican’s mass for the “beloved people of Cuba”

The following homily was delivered by Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit who is prefect for the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, at a Mass for Peace and Social Development in Cuba. The mass was celebrated at the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Rome on May 15. 

We have heard the Word of God that the liturgy offers us on this Friday of the sixth week of Easter. A Word imbued with perseverance and hope. In the passage from the Acts of the Apostles, we see Paul weary, tried and faced with misunderstanding and rejection. Yet the Lord says to him: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking and do not be silent.” It is a word that sustains the believer’s heart in the difficult times of history. A word that preserves trust when everything seems fragile and precarious.

In the Gospel according to John, we have heard another powerful image: that of the woman suffering the pangs of childbirth who then, at the birth of the child, experiences a new joy, capable of transfiguring the pain she has endured. Jesus speaks thus to his disciples to prepare them for the time of trial, teaching them that the suffering of history is not alien to God’s work and that every authentic human journey toward peace and justice requires patience, discernment and spiritual courage.

Dear brothers and sisters, dear institutional representatives, ambassadors and authorities present here, this evening we bring before the Lord’s altar the sufferings, hopes and expectations of the Cuban people. We do so with respect, with sincerity, with deep affection for a land that cherishes a history rich in dignity, culture, sacrifice, faith and resilience.

The church’s social teaching clearly reminds us that true peace is founded on moral and spiritual pillars even before political or economic ones. In “Pacem in Terris,” St. John XXIII identified truth, justice, freedom and love as the indispensable conditions for a form of human coexistence worthy of the human person. These words retain an extraordinary power even in our own time.

Justice demands concrete attention to those who suffer most. 

Freedom calls for real opportunities for participation, listening and shared responsibility.

Truth becomes a form of sincere dialogue, capable of overcoming propaganda, hardening attitudes and mutual mistrust. 

Love opens the way to solidarity, to the sharing of material, cultural and spiritual goods amongst peoples.

From this perspective, any logic of constant confrontation risks exacerbating the burden already weighing on ordinary people, especially the poorest, the elderly, the sick and children. Pope Leo XIV, in his recent appeals to the international community, has reminded us that no stable order can arise from the force of arms or from pressure that humiliates peoples; human development, on the other hand, grows through dialogue, international law, cooperation between nations and the safeguarding of the dignity of every human being. In the same spirit, humanitarian aid should arrive in sufficient quantities and without hindrance and must never be exploited for political or geopolitical ends. 

During his 2015 apostolic journey to Cuba, Pope Francis also emphasized, in his historic homily at the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, the urgent need to place the concrete person at the center of social and political life, especially the vulnerable, the wounded and the poor. He said that service “is never ideological,” because it arises from genuine attention to the face of the other; “we do not need ideas, but people.” Those words remain highly relevant today.

The appeal of St. John Paul II still resonates with prophetic intensity: “May the world open up to Cuba, and may Cuba open up to the world.” It was not a political slogan. It was a spiritual and human invitation to break down walls of misunderstanding, to create spaces for mutual trust, and to allow peoples to meet without fear.

We are here this evening above all to pray. In a short while, the Eucharist will make present the Paschal sacrifice of Christ, the crucified and risen Lord who bears within himself the suffering of peoples and the wounds of history. Before him we entrust Cuban families, young people in search of hope, those in positions of authority, those who suffer, and those who await more peaceful days.

The Gospel offers us a promise: “Your sorrow will turn into joy.” This is no naive promise. It is the Christian certainty that God continues to work within human history even when darkness and confusion prevail. The Holy Spirit continues to raise up men and women capable of building fraternity, reconciliation and paths of peace.

Let us pray, then, that the beloved land of Cuba may know days of greater serenity, of authentic human and social development, of harmony and hope. Let us pray that every political, economic and international decision may be guided by wisdom, prudence and a sincere search for the good of all people. Let us pray that the Lord may turn the hearts of men and women towards universal brotherhood.

And we ask the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, so dearly loved by the Cuban people, to accompany this nation’s journey with her maternal protection and to watch over all her children in peace.

At the conclusion of the mass, the Cuban ambassador to the Holy See, Leyde Ernesto Rodríguez, expressed gratitude on behalf of the Cuban people and government for the mass, emphasizing that his country is a nation of solidarity, peace, sovereignty, and independence, and “does not pose a threat to the national security of any other nation.”

“We have the right to live in peace, without threats of military aggression, with respect for human dignity, and without obstacles of any kind to our comprehensive economic development,” the diplomat stressed.