A C-130 Hercules aircraft from the Republic of Korea Air Force sits on the flight line at Rosecrans Air National Guard Base, St. Joseph, Missouri, May 12, 2022. C-130s from the ROKAF, Little Rock Air Force Base, and Dyess AFB were attending the Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Center’s Advanced Tactics Aircrew Course / credit: Michael Crane / U.S. Air National Guard
Editor’s Note: This analysis originally appeared in People’s Dispatch.
Between August 22 and September 1, the United States and South Korea concluded their largest joint military drills in the Korean Peninsula since 2017, under the name ‘Ulchi Freedom Shield’. Over the last four years, the scope of the annual exercises had been scaled back, first because of U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts at diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and later because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With these drills, however, the United States and South Korea seem to be attempting to send a clear message to both North Korea and China of their united military posture in the region, and come at a time when the U.S. encirclement of China continues rapidly.
The military relationship between the United States and South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), has a long history, stretching back at least as far as the Korean War. The United States has maintained a force of at least tens of thousands of troops in South Korea since prior to the Korean War, and, while South Korean forces are otherwise independent, at times of war they are subordinated to the command of a U.S. general as part of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, making it the country with the third-highest number of U.S. troops outside of the United States.
While the recent exercises have been conducted against a nameless enemy, it is not hard to see towards whom their message is aimed. The site of the exercises is only 32 kilometers from the border and De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Live-fire tank and troop maneuvers have been practiced as the United States and the ROK engage in simulations and seek to increase interoperability of their deployments and technologies. War-gamed attempts to seize “weapons of mass destruction” and mount a defense of Seoul suggest that they are preparations for potential conflict with North Korea.
Trump’s attempts to seek a diplomatic end to the North Korean nuclear program were unsuccessful, as have been U.S. economic sanctions and blockades. These exercises must be seen as a continuing show of force towards the same chief end. As part of his campaign and even more recently, new South Korean Premier Yoon Suk-yeol has touted his willingness to engage in “decapitation strikes” against the North Korean leadership, as part of a broader turn towards support for, and from, U.S. interests in the region.
He has also more recently offered a bouquet of economic enticements for North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, an offer that was rejected out of hand by Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, who pointed out that it was merely the restatement of a similar offer that had been made and dismissed in the past. The North sees its nuclear arsenal as non-negotiable and the key to its global legitimacy, and is no doubt also aware of what has happened to other countries, such as Libya and Iran, that have agreed to put holds on their military nuclear capabilities at the behest of the United States. With U.S. bases and troops having been positioned so close to its border for almost its entire existence as a country, it is easy to understand why North Korea does not see a reduction in its military capabilities as a particularly pressing or, indeed, sensible priority.
The resumption of these joint military exercises has also been viewed with alarm by China, which, like North Korea, has repeatedly pointed to U.S. attempts to set up a NATO-like organization in Asia. As tensions in the region reached unprecedented levels recently following U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, it seems the U.S. military presence in the region is only likely to increase in the near future.
South Korea and the United States also recently participated in trilateral military exercises with Japan near Hawai’i, signaling what might be a new low in hostilities that trace their roots to the Japanese occupation of Korea, which only ended in 1945, when the administration of South Korea was handed over briefly to the United States. This too has been noted with concern by China, and suggests that the United States is coordinating its allies in the region as it attempts to extend its global hegemony ever-further eastward.
PCB circuit board of electronic device / credit: Umberto on Unsplash
With the United States imposing technology sanctions on China, the world’s electronics industry is facing turbulent times. After the sanctions, Huawei has slipped from its number one slot as a mobile phone supplier—which the company held during the second quarter of 2020—to number seven currently. Commenting on this slide, Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping has said that the company’s battle is for survival right now. According to Reuters, Guo in a note circulated internally maintained that Huawei “will not give up and plans to eventually return to the industry’s ‘throne.’” On that count, Huawei is not only surviving but doing quite well. It is still the world leader in the telecom equipment market with a hefty 31 percent revenue share, which is twice that of its nearest competitors Nokia and Ericsson, and profits of nearly $50 billion in the first six months of 2021. But will Huawei be able to retain its market position without China catching up with the latest developments in chip manufacturing and design technologies?
It is not just the Chinese companies alone that are facing tough times. With growing chip wars between the United States and China, the global supply chain for electronic chips has been affected, leading to chip shortages across several sectors. Semiconductor chips are used in almost every product, from household equipment—microwave ovens and toasters—to the automotive and defense industries. The auto industry’s biggest bottleneck today is the chip shortage, which has badly hit their production. If the chip wars continue, the crisis of the chip shortage may affect other industries as well.
This crisis, meanwhile, has raised several questions: Is the crisis of the semiconductor industry the precursor to the fragmentation of the global supply chains? Will it lead to warring blocks, with the United States at one pole and China at the other? With this fragility of the supply chain, are we seeing the end of globalization as a paradigm?
The electronics industry is one of the most capital-intensive and research-and-development-intensive industries. No other industry has this characteristic. Power or steel plants are capital-intensive; pharmaceuticals are R&D-intensive. But no other industry is both. ASML, a little-known Dutch company that produces the lithographic machines for chip manufacturing, is worth more than Volkswagen, the world’s largest car manufacturer. This is due to the high R&D costs of ASML’s lithographic machines: it is the only company that can deliver the machines that the most advanced chips require. In order for a new fabrication facility to make the new generation of chips today, it will cost $20 billion, which is more than the cost of an aircraft carrier or a nuclear plant. Only two fabricators, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung, have the capability to produce the most advanced chips that the industry uses.
The United States and China compete in areas such as artificial intelligence, computers, mobile networks and phones. The basic building block for all these technologies is semiconductor chips. The more circuity we can pack into a chip, the more computing power it has. The bulk of the market consists of older fabricators using 180 nm to 28 nm level technologies, with only 2 percent of the chips below the 10 nm level. The only fabricators that can make such chips are TSMC and Samsung, the world’s largest chip fabricators. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) of China, the third-largest chip fabricator globally, has only recently moved from the 28 nm level to the 14 nm level. With Chinese government support, SMIC is investing in production lines that can go below 14 nm. Intel, once the world leader in chip manufacturing, is still stuck at the 14 nm level. However, it also has plans for developing the next generation of chips.
The United States has chosen the electronics/semiconductor industry as a battleground for its geostrategic competition with China. It believes that it has a significant technology lead and commands a major market share in this industry. China is a late entrant here. Though it has a comparable market share to that of the United States, it still depends on certain core technologies. The United States and its allies—the European Union, Japan and South Korea—control these core technologies. That is why the United States has chosen Huawei and SMIC, two major Chinese players in the technology and the semiconductor industry respectively, as its target for sanctions. The United States has put more than 250 Chinese companies on the entities list, which require a special license to import equipment or components. However, it is not a blanket ban.
The United States is following up on its sanctions against Huawei and SMIC with a plan to bar China from what it calls “foundational technologies” under its 2018 Export Control Reform Act. The argument that the United States is building is a simple one: they are ahead of China in certain critical technologies required for advanced chip manufacturing; all they have to do to maintain this lead is to deny China access to these technologies; this will ensure the United States lead for the future and its dominance over the electronics industry.
John Verwey, an investment analyst who writes about semiconductor technology on his website Semi-Literate, discusses what can be considered a foundational technology in the electronics industry. At first sight, chip-making could appear as a foundational technology and the target of U.S. sanctions. This is what the United States did when it barred Huawei from buying the latest 7 nm scale chips from TSMC.
SMIC then tried to set up its fabrication line for 7 nm chips and needed to import extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines from ASML, each costing around $120 million to $150 million. These lithographic machines are the critical part of the production lines of chip fabrication. Though the EUV machines are from the Netherlands, they use software developed in ASML’s U.S. subsidiary and therefore they fall under the U.S. sanctions regime.
This brings us to the question of how to define foundational technology. Though chips are the key driver of electronics, they are not as foundational as the machines that produce them. A country at the cutting edge of technology needs to master the technology of chip production and the machines that run such production lines. That is why ASML’s lithography machines are the bottleneck for China.
What then drives the advances in key technologies of the machines and chip production? As Marxists know, knowledge drives the productive forces—in this case, the advances in chip design. This knowledge is captured in the software design tools and the lithography machines. They are both highly knowledge-intensive and require people with very specialized skills.
The United States and its universities are still the major source of knowledge development, the key to the advances in this sector. But here is the long-term problem facing the nation: The research programs of the U.S. universities are mostly staffed by international students, with the bulk of them from China, India and other developing countries. Many of them stay back in the United States and provide the human power required for the advances in knowledge that the United States has today.
If Chinese students and researchers are not welcome in the United States, this source of knowledge development will weaken. Unfortunately, countries like India do not have high-quality education institutions and research laboratories to be a substitute for the stream of Chinese students who enter U.S. universities. China has invested heavily in its universities and research institutions and produces more Ph.D.s in science and technology today than the United States. It is also building a pipeline of innovations from the universities/research institutions to the technology industry.
China is the biggest market for the U.S. semiconductor industry’s chip designs and design software. The U.S. companies also design high-end chips, which are then manufactured in Taiwan and China. In the short run, the U.S. sanctions will damage China’s advanced chip production and the production of electronic devices based on such chips. But it will also mean that the U.S. companies will lose a significant part of the revenues that they now receive from the Chinese market from the sale of their design tools. It will also lead to a loss of revenue for advanced chips that the U.S. companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia design and then manufacture in Taiwan’s TSMC.
For the high-tech U.S. companies, the loss of this income means less money for their R&D and the slow erosion of the country’s position as the global knowledge hub. Suppose the U.S. companies lose the Chinese market and, therefore, a significant part of their revenues. In that case, it will seriously affect their ability to compete in the future. In the short run, they may gain, as they are doing with Huawei losing its number one spot in smartphones. But still, the loss of revenues will mean less ability to produce the knowledge that gives the United States its edge in technology. Less money in research means an eventual loss of leadership because, unlike other countries, the United States increasingly does not produce the chips or the machines, but the knowledge that goes into both of them.
This is what the U.S. semiconductor industry has argued in its submission to the U.S. Department of Commerce. If the U.S. companies delink from the Chinese market, it will mean a significant loss of revenue for them. In the long run, it will lead to a loss of U.S. leadership in electronics. Already, the U.S. sanctions have led the Chinese companies to remove the U.S.-designed components from their product lines. Sanctions are double-edged: they hit Huawei and other Chinese companies and their U.S. suppliers.
How long will China take to erase the lead in semiconductor technologies that the United States and its allies have? Analysys Mason, a leading consulting company, says in its May 2021 report that China will be able to attain self-sufficiency in semiconductors in three to four years. The Boston Consulting Group and Semiconductor Industry Association have modeled the impact of breaking up the global supply chain of China and the United States delinking their supply chain and markets. The model predicts that with such a policy, the United States would still lose its leadership to China. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the only way that the United States can preserve its lead is to export to China, except in the strategic military sector. The United States can then use its profits from these exports for developing a new generation of technologies. Of course, the loss for not exporting in the strategic sector must be compensated with hefty subsidies from the U.S. government.
Meanwhile, India missed the semiconductor manufacturing bus when it decided not to rebuild Semiconductor Complex Limited its premiere chip-making facility in the city of Mohali, after it was destroyed in a mysterious fire in 1989. Its policymakers decided that India should leverage its strength in software and systems and not worry about manufacturing chips. Vinnie Mehta, formerly the executive director of the Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT), had said to Mint, “A nation without silicon (technology) is like a person without [a] heart.” That heart is still missing in India’s technology ecosystem.
If the United States wants to retain its position of being a world leader in the electronics industry, it has to match China by investing in the generation of knowledge for future technologies. Why, then, is the United States taking the sanctions route? Sanctions are simpler to implement; building a society that values knowledge is more difficult. This is the pathology of late capitalism.
Nicaragua received the first 200,000 doses of a donation of 1 million doses of Sinopharm vaccines on December 12. The batch arrived from China with a Nicaraguan delegation headed by Laureano Ortega, who advises President Daniel Ortega on foreign investments, Nicaraguan Minister of Finance Ivan Acosta, and Chinese Foreign Affairs Representative Yu Bo / credit: Kawsachun News
Nicaragua leapt forward to defend its national self-determination against U.S. global hegemony when it announced earlier this month it had discontinued diplomatic relations with Taiwan and was ready to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
This move opens up the small Central American country’s economy to the People’s Republic of China, a country of 1.4 billion people that is rapidly edging toward surpassing the United States and becoming the biggest economy in the world.
Taiwan: Washington’s Beachhead In China
Nicaragua’s move to recognize China is no different than what the United States, Japan and Canada voted in favor of in 1971 at the United Nations General Assembly. Resolution 2758 stipulated the United Nations “expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” (the leader of the Chinese nationalists, whom the communists struggled against) and change China’s name as a member of the UN Security Council from the “Republic of China” to the “People’s Republic of China.”
Nicaragua first established relations with Taiwan in the 1990s, after U.S.-backed President Violeta Chamorro took power in 1989 in a surprise defeat for the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). Taiwan is an island off the Chinese coast that Chinese right-wingers fled to upon the 1949 communist victory.
The United States replied to the move using the language of humanitarian interventionism it has deployed to exploit and destroy countries around the world.
“The Ortega-Murillo regime continues to make self-serving decisions at the expense of the Nicaraguan people, who stand to suffer from the loss of a reliable, democratic partner in Taiwan,” tweeted Brian A. Nichols, assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs at the U.S. State Department. “We encourage the int’l community to continue strengthening its relationships with Taiwan.”
The Ortega-Murillo regime continues to make self-serving decisions at the expense of the Nicaraguan people, who stand to suffer from the loss of a reliable, democratic partner in Taiwan. We encourage the int’l community to continue strengthening its relationships with Taiwan.
Relations between the Biden administration and the Ortega government have recently taken a plunge. First, the United States intervened in Nicaragua’s elections by calling them a “sham” prior to Election Day and despite the presence of “232 international election observers,” said Michael Campbell, Minister Advisor for Foreign Affairs. After the FSLN won the election with 75.92 percent of the votes, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the “Reinforcing Nicaragua’s Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform Act of 2021,” also known as the RENACER Act. This law calls for the United States to monitor Nicaragua’s relationship with Russia as well as U.S. sanctions that would disrupt multilateral financing from institutions like the World Bank. Later, the Biden administration banned all Nicaraguan government officials, along with their spouses and children, from entering the United States.
Nicaragua is now the fourth country in the region to recognize China. Panama took the step in 2017, then came El Salvador and the Dominican Republic in 2018, and Honduras, which may make the same move after left-wing presidential candidate Xiomara Castro’s recent victory.
Recognizing one China comes on the heels of the Nicaraguan government’s decision to withdraw from the Organization of American States (OAS) on November 19.
“We have seen what the U.S. and the European Union are capable of doing and have to prepare accordingly,” Campbell said. “But it’s the FSLN government’s job to lead the Nicaraguan people toward development.”
Countries in blue have signed onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative / Wikipedia/Owennson
Nicaragua and the Belt and Road Initiative
The third China-CELAC Forum involved approximately 117 political parties and organizations from 30 Latin American and Caribbean countries. CELAC stands for Community of Caribbean and Latin American States. At the forum, they proposed strengthening their relationship and solidarity with China.
“Nicaragua actively supports and is ready to consult on Belt and Road cooperation documents, with a view to signing them as soon as possible,” Moncada said. In 2020, trade agreements between Taiwan and Nicaragua reached $168 million, while trade with China accounted for less than $50 million. A potential trade ceiling exists with the much-smaller Taiwan, with its population of 23 million.
In addition, the new initiative opens up markets for Nicaragua’s agricultural business.
“There is a lot of enthusiasm because communication channels have already opened up for the structuring of cooperation projects, commercial exchange and investment projects,” said Fausto Torrez. He leads international relations for the Rural Workers’ Association (Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo [ATC]).
The FSLN government has a record of working to ensure the rights of farmers, as well as of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the autonomous regions on the Caribbean coast. That includes bringing electricity and paved roads to these once-underdeveloped areas. The Red Nacional Vial, a 24,763-kilometer (15,387-mile) paved road, connects the Pacific Ocean coast with the Caribbean Sea coast. It has been touted as the key to connecting Nicaraguan farmers with international markets. The World Bank also praised the project for uplifting Afro-descendant people. “This region, before the road construction, could only be reached by air during most of the year owing to heavy rains and impassable infrastructure (the rainy season lasts nine months in that region),” a 2020 World Bank report stated.
Nicaragua belongs to the Central American Common Market (CACM), which includes Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The United States is CACM’s largest trade partner, while China is the second-largest.
“These agreements come in the framework of [defending] food sovereignty,” Torrez said. “Therefore, China arrives with many possibilities to improve the country’s situation.”
As some see it, China is repairing holes U.S. imperialism has left in the region.
“Latin Americans know only too well what imperialism looks like, in both its colonial and modern forms,” activist Carlos Martinez recently wrote. “They have witnessed CIA-sponsored coups from Guatemala to Chile, from Brazil to the Dominican Republic.”
The new wave of governments working with China are doing so based on mutual respect. In 2020, $315 billion in agreements between Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and China had been recorded.
“With projects such as the sea port on the Caribbean, improvements to our airports, roads, irrigation system and energy infrastructure, we will produce more and more efficiently,” Campbell said.
Nicaragua receives the first 200,000 doses of a donation of 1 million doses of Sinopharm vaccines. The batch arrived from China with a Nicaraguan delegation headed by @LaureanoOrtegaM, Minister of Finance Ivan Acosta, and Chinese Foreign Affairs Representative Yu Bo. pic.twitter.com/QF3thXADW5
China also has been at the forefront of providing the Global South with aid since the start of the pandemic. For example, between mid-February 2020 and June 2020, China donated $128 million worth of ventilators, test kits, masks, protective suits and many more life-saving items to Latin America and the Caribbean.
“This strengthens Nicaragua’s international relations in all fields,” Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said in his first public statement after the FSLN signed the agreement with the Communist Party of China (CPC). For example, the country’s National Human Development Plan will continue to prioritize poor and vulnerable sections of society, which includes rural producers. Campbell said this new relationship represents an opportunity to diversify exports in a large new market.
Two Revolutions
Ortega made clear the historic significance of acknowledging one China.
“It hurts (the United States) more when it comes to Nicaragua, which is a revolution meeting again with another revolution,” he said.
Both the FSLN and the CPC are products of national liberation movements against a colonial power. They agreed to develop friendly relations based on “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality, mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence,” stated the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Ortega also pointed out the hypocrisy of the United States demonizing countries that establish diplomatic relations with China while the United States continues to trade with China.
Yet, sanctioned and blockaded countries that establish ties with China weaken the U.S. stranglehold.
“Now is the time to improve and strengthen A.L.B.A.,” Torrez said of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, a political, economic and social alliance in defense of independence and self-determination in the Americas.
Abraham Marquez is a freelance journalist from Inglewood, California. He is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) and a 2021 University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Fellow.
Cuban activist Carlos Lazo getting ready to start his march from Miami to Washington, D.C. / credit: Tighe Barry
Carlos Lazo and a small band of Cubans are on a 1,300-mile pilgrimage from Miami to Washington, D.C., to end the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Despite the blistering summer heat and occasional death threats (including a trucker who tried to run them off the road), the marchers persist. Lazo’s group is called Puentes de Amor, Bridges of Love, and this grueling walkathon is certainly a labor of love.
While right-wing Cubans in Miami call him “comunista,” Lazo has no time for ideology. He is neither for or against the Cuban government; he is for the Cuban people, the Cuban families. And he is disgusted by the cruelty of the U.S. blockade and by politicians who use the Cuban people as a political football—especially during this pandemic.
Lazo portrays Cuba and the U.S. as his parents—Cuba is his mother, the United States his father. He sees his job as trying to stop them from fighting and instead to embrace each other. “We try to unite people, whatever their ideology, religion, race or nationality,” Lazo told me. “The important thing is to take down walls that separate us and build bridges between our people.”
Lazo and the marchers set off from Miami on June 27 and will arrive in Washington, D.C., on July 25. All along the journey, they have been meeting with community groups—black farmers, veterans, students—explaining their purpose and their demands. They are calling for a lifting of all restrictions on sending remittances to their families back home; the resumption of flights from the U.S., not only to Havana but to all major Cuban cities (right now U.S. planes can only land in Havana); the reopening of a fully staffed U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Havana instead of the skeletal staff that exists now; a restart to the program of family reunification that Trump suspended in 2017; the granting to U.S. citizens of the right to travel freely to Cuba; and robust economic relations, as well as scientific and cultural exchanges. Despite candidate Biden’s campaign promises to revert to Obama’s openings, the Biden administration insists that its Cuba policy is still “under review.” In practice, it has continued the brutal Trump agenda.
You couldn’t invent a better person than Carlos Lazo—a gregarious high school teacher/veteran who also plays guitar, sings and dances like a Cuban rock star—to lead a movement to change U.S.-Cuba policy. His trajectory reads like a movie script. The son of a cigar maker and a housewife, Lazo grew up in the small fishing village of Jaimanitas, west of Havana, and spent the first 28 years of his life there. After his mother emigrated to the United States, Lazo dreamed of following her. He first tried to leave in 1988 when he and his friend rigged up a makeshift raft. After two days adrift in the ocean, they were picked up by the Cuban Coast Guard. Lazo was thrown in jail, where he spent an entire year for illegally trying to leave the island.
Undeterred, in 1991 he tried again. After four precarious days on a rickety raft with six others, this time they were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard and allowed to enter the United States.
Lazo spent a few years in Miami working in restaurants, delivering pizzas and driving trucks, but moved to Seattle in 1998 to seek more economic opportunities. There he joined the Washington National Guard and studied nursing. When the United States invaded Iraq, he was sent as a combat medic. He participated in the battle of Fallujah and was awarded a bronze star for helping to save lives.
But in 2005, when this decorated veteran was on leave and tried to visit his two sons living in Cuba, he discovered that the Bush administration wouldn’t allow him to go. This was a turning point in his life, when Lazo realized that the U.S. blockade, which has existed in one form or another since the 1960s, was hurting both the Cuban people and Cubans in the United States who wanted to visit and help their families back home.
So Lazo began speaking out. In 2007, he testified before the U.S. Senate and met with more than 100 members of Congress. He was featured on CNN and MSNBC and in national newspapers.
President and Cuban President Raúl Castro on April 11, 2015, during the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama / credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
When Obama became president and started normalizing relations with Cuba, Lazo thought his political work was over. He got a teaching degree, became a high school Spanish teacher, and threw himself into building a unique cultural exchange program that took his students to Cuba. The “profe,” as he is known, taught his students to sing Cuban love songs and dance salsa, winning the hearts of their Cuban hosts. He called this project the Factory of Dreams.
These glorious exchanges, six in total, came to a crashing halt when Trump entered the White House. Trump tried to please right-wing Cubans in Miami by reversing Obama’s openings and adding 242 additional coercive measures designed to torpedo the Cuban economy.
While the pandemic left a trail of pain and death around the world, Trump insisted on restricting family remittances to Cuba, stopping fuel shipments that supplied electricity to Cuban homes and hospitals, and sabotaging Cuban medical brigades that were helping to save lives around the world. “The planet cried out for solidarity and cooperation,” Lazo fumed, “but Trump responded by trying to suffocate the Cuban people.”
Lazo decided to take action. Despite the raging pandemic in the summer of 2020, he and four family members got on their bikes and rode more than 3,000 miles from Seattle to Washington, D.C., to urge Donald Trump and Congress to lift the blockade. Lazo livestreamed their voyage on Facebook, gaining an enormous following along the way.
Carlos Lazo / credit: Prensa Latina
Lazo’s cross-country trip inspired a group of Cubans in Miami to begin their own caravan of bicycles and cars on the last Sunday of every month. Starting with just 11 bicycles last July, the Miami caravan has grown to more than a hundred vehicles and bicycles going down Calle Ocho in Little Havana. Carlos teamed up with Miami YouTube personality Jorge Medina (El Proteston) to galvanize hundreds of Cubans in the United States. For the older generation of Miami Cubans who, at great personal risk, have been proposing normal relations and opposing the right-wing “haters” of the Cuban government since the 1959 revolution, this infusion of energy is a thrilling development.
Inspired by the success in Miami, there are now monthly caravans taking place in some 30 cities in the United States and scores more throughout the world, including in Cuba itself. Clearly, Lazo’s rejection of hatred and his commitment to building “bridges of love” reflect the sentiments of a growing number of U.S.-based Cubans and their allies.
When the marchers arrive in the nation’s capital, they will be greeted by hundreds of supporters, including U.S.-based Cubans flying all the way from Miami. Lazo plans to stay in Washington to meet with members of Congress and present the Biden administration with a petition signed by more than 25,000 people calling on him to build “bridges of love” between the two countries—just as President Obama started to do when he was in the White House.
Lazo’s pilgrimage shows his understanding that opponents of the blockade in the Cuban community need allies among broader layers of people–the farmers, students, church people, truck drivers, etc.—that he is meeting on the way. He believes the bridges of love go both ways because many groups, besides Cubans, have an interest in ending the blockade. These include farmers who want to sell their crops; tourists eager to enjoy Cuba’s nearby beauty, culture, and history; and scientists and public health officials seeking to collaborate with the island’s advanced medical system and biotech industries. In his pilgrimage, he wants to give a voice to these allies as well.
The mushrooming of caravans across the country, the increasing number of city council resolutions against the blockade, the recent vote of the Longshore Union to condemn it, the $400,000 raised by groups sound the country to send syringes for Cuba’s COVID vaccinations—all show a growing feeling that it’s past time for the Biden administration to re-examine its cynical, electoral calculations in continuing Trump’s restrictions on Cuba.
Lazo is not naive. He is under no illusions that his trek to Washington, D.C., will be enough to change Biden’s policies. But his philosophy is both simple and profound: “Everything you do to make the world better helps to make the world better,” he says. And whether it’s a cross-country bike trip or a 1,300-mile trek in the summer heat, Lazo takes these bold actions with so much joy, love and enthusiasm that others can’t help but follow his lead.
Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK, is author of several books on Cuba, including No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today.
