NUMSA fully backs Free the Five Cuban protest picket to the imperialist US Embassy
13 October 2011
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) fully backs the protest march to the imperialist US Embassy against the unjust imprisonment of the Cuban Five and barbaric economic blockade or sanctions imposed on Socialist Cuba by the United States of America (USA).
Our members will join their comrades from the Friends of Cuba Society (FOCUS), South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC) during the protest picket happening tomorrow Friday 14 October 2011, US Embassy, City of Tshwane, to demand the immediate release or fair hearing for the unjustifiably imprisoned Cuban Five and lifting of the economic blockade or sanctions against Cuba. There is no doubt in our mind that the US and its allies imposed the economic blockade or sanctions against Cuban because of its chosen economic development path, Socialism, which is jealously hated by the US. We view this barbaric and unwarranted economic blockade or sanction as a desperate attempt by the imperialist US to liquidate the Cuban revolution and its success.
We will be part of this protest picket to vent our displeasure and anger against Barack Obama’s administration for imposing what we characterize as economic genocide against the Cuban revolution and her people.
The Cuban revolution remains a living footprint that a better and humane world order is indeed possible, where barbarity and greed will be in the dustbin of Capitalism’s history, and have a world order which is peoples’ centred, and puts humanity first.
The South African working class owes its freedom and democracy to the heroic Cuban fighters who perished in combat fighting hand-in-hand with our glorious uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) freedom fighters against the murderous and oppressive apartheid regime. When the apartheid regime was spatially defeated in 1994, the Cubans did not demand our gold and mineral resources in return for their support, but they left with coffins of Cuban fighters who died in combat. When others called us names and terrorist, the Cubans accommodated us and provided all the necessary support for our struggle to be recognised by the international community and which led to the United Nations (UN) declaring apartheid as a crime against humanity. Even today the Cubans, with the little they have continue to support us as we reconstruct our country to eliminate the disastrous legacy of apartheid’s past.
The Cuban revolution and its glorious success continues to be marveled at, and admired by the greatest majority of the Black African working class in our country today, given the reeling effects of the triple crisis of poverty, unemployment and deepening income inequalities imposed on our people by Capitalism and its barbarity.
In the words of our revolutionary icon and a colossal of our democracy Comrade Nelson Mandela “as much as Cuba was a home from home for many South Africans during the dark night of our oppression, we now welcome you home to the sunshine of our freedom…..As the beneficiary of international solidarity that helped make it a member of the community of free nations, democratic South Africa is proud to be amongst the majority of nations who affirm the right of the Cuban people to determine their own destiny, and that sanctions which seek to punish them for having decided to do so are anathema to the international order to which we aspire”.
We call on our members to join this protest picket en masse in honour of the legendary Cuban martyr Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who died at the hands of US-backed captors in Bolivia. Che Guevara remains a personification of Cuba’s greatest ideals of true humanity and selfless internationalism.
Contact:
Castro Ngobese, National Spokesperson – 073 299 1595