verbena-19

Gather: 10 am Malcolm X Park (15^th & Euclid, NW)

Gather: 12 noon Downtown Federal Building

March on Washington May 20^th to say “Hands Off Venezuela and Cuba”!

The US war against Latin America has entered a new phase when President George W Bush last night laid out his plans to militarize the border with Mexico. This time the war against the peoples of Latin America will also be launched inside the United States.

This is a blatant example of the racist and genocidal character of the government of the USA. It exposes the hypocrisy of its “democracy” and its true mission on behalf of the business community by proposing a new “bracero” program that will treat immigrant workers as slave laborers with absolutely no rights.

But while Bush increases funding to militarize the south and further repress the immigrant community, the countries of Cuba and Venezuela work incessantly to bring education, health care, jobs, decent housing, and dignity to millions of people. Not only to the population in their two countries, but to the peoples of the whole region and beyond. Even to the poor people in the United States, as the aid offered during the Katrina devastation and the delivery of subsidized oil through CITGO attest.

The development of a country to satisfy the needs of its people is something that the United States cannot tolerate and works round the clock devising ways to destabilize and destroy. Cuba and Venezuela, and now Bolivia, are the nations that the peoples in Latin America look up to while they construct a new future for the new generations. Venezuela and Cuba’s Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas or ALBA, the program of regional integration, cultural, economic and technical exchange based in solidarity and respect, is completely different from the cruel free trade agreements pushed by the US like NAFTA that destroy national economies and force the emigration of millions of workers from their homeland.

That is why the United States is desperately launching a hostile campaign to destroy them. The situation is urgent and needs the firm and loud opposition from the people of the US.

A nuclear-powered U.S. war fleet and 6,500 Marines are conducting maneuvers in the Caribbean that threaten Cuba, Venezuela and other anti-imperialist countries throughout the Americas.

According to the Cuban newspaper Granma, the scope of the U.S. military maneuvers dwarfs even the Pentagon’s naval deployment during the October 1962 missile crisis. Similar maneuvers in the past were used to gather information needed to launch aggression, like the “exercises” that preceded the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.

They can also be used to send a direct threat, as the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, which is published in the heavily militarized Hampton Roads area, noted in a March 28 article:

“Some defense analysts suggested that the unusual two-month-long deployment, set to begin in early April, could be interpreted as a show of force by anti-American governments in Venezuela and Cuba. ‘The presence of a U.S. carrier task force in the Caribbean will definitely be interpreted as some sort of signal by the governments of Cuba and Venezuela,’ said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a pro-defense think tank in Washington. ‘If I was sitting in the Venezuela capital looking at this American task force, the message I would be getting is America still is not so distracted by Iraq that it is unable to enforce its interests in the Caribbean,’ Thompson said.”

Radio Havana says this ominous show of force will be followed by yet another maneuver in the Caribbean involving 4,000 NATO troops and lasting from May 23 to June 15.

It is urgent to tell the Bush administration loud and clear: Hands Off Venezuela and Cuba!

On Saturday May 20^th join New York high school students, Cuban Americans, Bolivarian Circle activists and many other marchers from Detroit, Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Richmond, Va., Washington, D.C and other areas, who intend to say no in person to new anti-Cuba and anti-Venezuela measures planned by the U.S. government.