The truth on the other hand, is the unshakable reality that has driven every sanction, every sabotage attempt, and every assassination plot since 1959: Cuba is a threat only to an idea. It is a threat to the imperial doctrine that a small, poor nation in America’s ‘backyard’ must not be allowed to choose socialism, to provide free healthcare and education, and homes to live without the permission of Washington.
For this sin of self-determination, the crime of building a society where capital is not god, Cuba has been punished with the most enduring economic siege in modern history. This is not an ‘embargo’, which I consider to be a sterile, political term. It is a total blockade, designed to constrict and cripple. It is enforced by a plethora of laws with names like the Helms-Burton Act, which terrorises foreign companies from trading with the Island and allows the US to seize ships in international waters. Its goal, as US politician Robert Torricelli once admitted, was to…
‘Wreak havoc’.
yeah there was no way to deliver food there, especially not from foreign countries that offered aid. also not possible to let people leave
Food aid did arrive, though insufficient, but as I explained previously, the industrialization hinged on grain exports (the USSR being at the time a preindustrial society meant there was literally nothing else they could export) to import machinery and expertise to kickstart the industrialization. A delay in industrial development due to stopping the grain exports would have directly implied a Nazi victory.
There is absolutely no historical evidence of any intent of hunger against Ukrainians (unlike for example Israeli politicians explicitly discussing starving Palestinians to exterminate them), and the famine also killed millions of ethnic Russians and Central Asians. This is the consensus among contemporary historians.
The Bolsheviks correctly predicted that a delay in industrialization would lead to them being crushed by western imperialist invasion. There’s ample evidence for this even in the Western-edited Wikipedia article on Soviet industrialization:
That was as far as 1921 but they couldn’t industrialize at the time due to the civil war, hence Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” which lasted roughly until 1929. Stalin famously predicted the start of WW2 down to the literal year in which it would happen. From a speech by Stalin in 1929:
This is the reason why the agrarian collectivization was carried out in such a hurried fashion and a famine ensued. There was ample debate about this in the party, but ultimately, the international pressure and threat of invasion was too great, and fortunately the Bolsheviks reacted quickly enough to be able to industrialize.
Between 1929 and 1939 (the eve of WW2), the Soviet Union grew its output by 15% yearly, a miracle unseen in history ever before. Thanks to this industrialization, the Soviets could manufacture the tanks, planes, artillery and rifles necessary to defeat the Nazis, whose explicit purpose was to genocide the entirety of Slavic peoples between Berlin and the Urals. Had it not been for the heroic effort of the Soviet industrialization, sadly a lot of which was brunted by Ukrainians, the Nazis might have won WW2 and genocided the entirety of Ukraine. Glory to the Ukrainians and all different ethnicities of Soviet heroes of WW2 who contributed massively to the defeat of Nazism with their own work and blood.