The Debt is Ours: Cuba, Solidarity, and the Obligation of the World
S. E. Anderson
The Debt is Ours: Cuba, Solidarity, and the Obligation of the World
African and Caribbean peoples owe the Cuban people an enormous debt. Cuba has been committed to the liberation of African peoples and to movements against imperialism in the Caribbean and globally. That support has not remained at the level of political and diplomatic statecraft — it has taken concrete, material form. Cubans have given their lives for the independence of African and oppressed peoples worldwide, intervening militarily in Angola (with an estimated 10,000 Cuban lives lost), Vietnam, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, and more recently in Venezuela. Cuban doctors have saved lives across Africa and the Caribbean, especially among the poor, rural, and oppressed urban populations who have long been abandoned by the international health system. Cuba has been one of the few countries unconditionally committed to the well-being of African peoples, providing much-needed general and specialist care at affordable levels.
All this has occurred while the Cuban people have endured 64 years of the most punitive US sanctions, imposed on a country that poses no credible threat to the United States. On 29 January 2026, President trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba a threat to US national security, enabling the imposition of additional tariffs on countries that supply oil to Cuba. This is the most recent escalation of the multilevel warfare, including economic, cultural, biological, informational, and military actions, that has been carried out against Cuba since 1959. Economic warfare and sanctions have affected the living and working conditions of Cuban peoples immensely, but have failed to bring down the Cuban government.
The US sanctions on Cuba are built on fictions manufactured by white supremacists in power in Washington, aligned with Cuban exiles who dream of returning to a pre-revolutionary island preserved for US oligarchs. Those who oppose the revolution are predominantly the elements of Cuban society who resented the extension of social services and dignity to the Black community.
No figure better embodies this than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose family represents precisely the class interests that the Cuban Revolution displaced. His recent speech in Munich — in which he effectively called for a restoration of colonial traditions — should be read as a declaration of intent, not merely a diplomatic provocation. African and Caribbean states and peoples must take note: the same vision that seeks to strangle Cuba also seeks to undermine CARICOM and reverse the gains of regional integration across the Global South.
What is a Debt?
In the dominant language of international political economy, "debt" has long been wielded as an instrument of discipline — a claim the powerful make on the poor, enforced through conditionality, austerity, and coercion. The contributions assembled in this issue take that logic and invert it. The debt that matters here, these writers collectively argue, is the one the world owes Cuba.
The theoretical foundation for that inversion is laid by Norman Girvan's essay, The Debt is Unpayable (2008). One of the Caribbean's most respected political economists, Girvan reframes underdevelopment not as a failure of governance or initiative but as the structural consequence of colonial extraction and imperial management. The debt accrued to colonized and formerly colonized peoples is not metaphorical — it is material, historical, and moral. That framework sets the terms for everything that follows. We thank our sister Alisa Trotz for permission to reprint this essay. Pambazuka leads with it because we believe it establishes the conceptual ground for understanding the debt owed to the Cuban people.
From that structural baseline, the collection turns to one of the most consequential expressions of Cuban solidarity with the colonized world: its military intervention in Africa to defeat apartheid. Horace Campbell's analysis of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale shows why that 1988 engagement was a turning point not only in Angola but in the broader struggle against white supremacy. Cuban and Angolan forces decisively defeated the South African Defence Force, shattering the myth of its military invincibility and creating the conditions for Namibian independence and Nelson Mandela's release. Campbell makes clear that Cuba's commitment was simultaneously military and medical — a model of internationalism that refused to separate armed solidarity from the care of human life. Africa's path to liberation bears a Cuban imprint whose full significance has rarely been adequately acknowledged.
That theme of healthcare internationalism is developed further in the essay on Cuba's global health contributions. Cuba's deployment of medical brigades across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond represents one of the most extensive programs of South-South solidarity in modern history. Rather than charity, Cuban medical internationalism is understood here as a model of human solidarity — one that now demands concrete support in return, as the US blockade systematically undermines Cuba's own health infrastructure. The question the essay poses is not whether Cuba deserves support, but why the global community has been so slow to provide it.
Tennyson Joseph's contribution on Cuba and Caribbean sovereignty brings this argument close to home. Caribbean states have drawn on Cuban solidarity across generations — in education, medicine, disaster response, and political support for sovereignty claims. Joseph argues that this accumulated history generates a genuine political and moral obligation, not merely sentimental affinity. The Caribbean's responsibility toward Cuba is inseparable from the broader Caribbean project of independence and social transformation. Pambazuka joins Tennyson Joseph in calling for vigilance and commitment in opposing the present racist onslaught on Cuba.
That context makes the documentation of US aggression all the more necessary. Rosemary Mealy's close reading of the trump administration's "fact sheet" on Cuba performs a methodical work of counter-documentation, exposing the distortions through which US policy justifies what amounts to an economic siege. The blockade — illegal under international law and consistently condemned by the overwhelming majority of UN member states — is not a response to Cuban governance failures; it is a decades-long campaign to force a small sovereign nation into submission. Mealy's six decades of commitment to the process of real change in Cuba lend authority to her analysis. As a long-standing revolutionary who has served liberation struggles in the United States, Cuba, and globally, her voice is especially welcome here. We urge Pambazuka readers to seek out her important book, Fidel & Malcolm X: Memories of a Meeting (Black Classic Press), which recounts the historic 1960 encounter between Fidel Castro and Malcolm X in Harlem and explores their shared commitments to self-determination and liberation. Recognizing this solidarity, the US military establishment hesitates to attempt another Bay of Pigs–style operation, knowing that the political and social costs would exceed what the United States can bear.
David Commissiong further extends this argument by insisting that the annual UN vote condemning the blockade, however symbolically important, is insufficient. The nations that vote against the blockade must translate formal condemnation into active material solidarity — diplomatic engagement, trade relationships, and practical support — if those votes are to carry real weight. Commissiong writes with the passion of a Caribbean patriot who for fifty years has led the commemoration of one of the region's most traumatic acts of terrorism: the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 on 6 October 1976, when two bombs exploded after takeoff from Barbados, bringing down the aircraft and killing all 73 people on board — among them 24 members of Cuba's Olympic fencing team, who had just won gold medals at the Central American and Caribbean Championship. Investigations by the governments of Cuba, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, and Venezuela identified Luis Posada Carriles as the mastermind, a CIA-trained operative who had long worked out of Venezuela and maintained deep connections to anti-Castro exile networks. Despite this, Carriles avoided terrorism charges entirely, and was acquitted on immigration and perjury counts in a US court in 2011 — an outcome Caribbean governments rightly denounced as a brazen double standard. It should not go unnoticed that Carriles operated out of Venezuela, a fact that illuminates the regional reach of US-sponsored terror and explains the depth of Venezuela's decades-long pursuit of his extradition — a demand Washington consistently refused. We urge Pambazuka readers to visit our archives to read further about this crime.
The statement from Trinidad and Tobago civil society organizations, social movements, and political movements gives these demands an organized, grassroots voice. Representing a broad coalition of actors, the statement calls unambiguously for an end to the illegal blockade and connects that demand to a larger vision of Caribbean and Global South solidarity. It offers a model of how civil society pressure can move beyond symbolic gestures toward concrete political action. This statement carries resonance because the political leadership of Trinidad and Tobago has betrayed the non-aligned traditions of Eric Williams, aligning instead with the current US war against the Venezuelan people.
The issue closes with two pieces that anchor the conversation in its wider intellectual context. The tribute to Michael Parenti — the prolific anti-imperialist scholar who died at 92 — honors a lifetime of work demystifying US power and insisting on analytical clarity about imperialism's operations. Parenti's legacy reminds us that solidarity is not only a moral stance but an intellectual one: understanding what Cuba is being defended against is inseparable from the act of defending it. Patricia Daley's review of Don Fitz's Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2020) closes the collection on a concrete note, offering a careful account of how Cuba has built and sustained one of the world's most effective public health systems under conditions of sustained external pressure.
Together, these contributions — spanning political economy, military history, public health, Caribbean politics, and anti-imperialist scholarship — build a case that is historical, analytical, and accessible. The unpayable debt does not belong to Cuba. It belongs to those who have benefited from Cuban solidarity and have yet to respond in kind. This issue asks, in practical and principled terms, what honoring that obligation looks like. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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