U.N. Votes Overwhelmingly to Denounce U.S. Embargo on Cuba as Hurricane Melissa Batters Island

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show in Cuba. On Wednesday, the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the U.S. embargo on Cuba for the 33rd consecutive year, with 165 countries voting in favor of a nonbinding resolution calling on the U.S. to lift the embargo, while seven nations that the U.S. reportedly pressured voted against it, including Ukraine and Israel.

On Tuesday, Trump’s U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz broke with tradition to give a long speech from the stage at the U.N. General Assembly during the debate on the embargo, urging countries to reject the resolution. Waltz was also Trump’s national security adviser and infamously set up a Signal group chat earlier this year to discuss plans to bomb Yemen and then accidentally invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to join.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla made a point of order as Waltz spoke.

MIKE WALTZ: They undermine democracies in our hemisphere.

ANNALENA BAERBOCK: I’m very sorry to interrupt, but there’s a point of order from Cuba.

MIKE WALTZ: Sure. Madam President, yes?

ANNALENA BAERBOCK: Yes, we have to give the floor to the point of order and the representative of Cuba.

BRUNO RODRÍGUEZ PARRILLA: [translated] The permanent representative of the United States not only lies by substantially deviating from the topic, but also speaks in a rude and arrogant manner. Mr. Waltz, this is the United Nations General Assembly. This is not a Signal chat, nor is it the House of Representatives.

AMY GOODMAN: Wednesday’s vote came as Hurricane Melissa struck eastern Cuba after hitting Jamaica, causing major damage, but no reported deaths, after more than 700,000 people evacuated.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Mikael Wolfe is associate professor of history at Stanford University, specializing in Latin America and the Caribbean. He wrote a Washington Post piece headlined “When it comes to hurricanes, the U.S. can learn a lot from Cuba.” And in the eastern Cuban province of Santiago de Cuba, we are joined by Liz Oliva Fernández, a reporter with Belly of the Beast, who’s on the ground covering the storm’s impact.

Liz, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you explain what happened? I mean, we’re talking about — we don’t know how many deaths in the rest of the Caribbean, from Haiti to Jamaica. What happened in Cuba?

LIZ OLIVA FERNÁNDEZ: Well, thank you for the invitation. It’s a pleasure for me being here.

Well, in Cuba, no one’s dead. There is no casualties that we can — there is no human lives that we lost. That’s because the labor and the work of the Civil Defense of Cuba, something that I’m pretty sure that the professor, Mikael, has a lot to say about that. But I’m just going to say that United Nations has been writing down that Cuba is one of example, is a role model when we talk about risk management disasters.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, 700,000 Cubans were evacuated leading up to the storm. If you can describe how that happened and what that model is?

LIZ OLIVA FERNÁNDEZ: Yeah. Well, this is something that starts before the hurricane touches land, the work of the Civil Defense. So, like, really early in this Wednesday — Tuesday morning — so sorry — so, they’re trying to evacuate as many persons — as many people as possible. And, for example, the way they look is the way they is focused on prevention. For example, if you lose — if you live close to the coast or if you live in a house where the infrastructure is weak, you’re going to be evacuated. There is different kind of evacuations that we have in Cuba, for example. Some is that you are taken to a government institution. They are going to take care of you. But the other one is you are going to a house that could be a friend’s, a family, a relative, a neighbor, that is going to host you during the hurricane, because their house is, like, better prepared for facing a hurricane than yours.

So, but it’s not just evacuating people. I think, like, the way that the Cuban informs the population is really good. Like, I did a report where people were talking about, like, they were, like five days before the hurricane came, talking about, “OK, this is a huge hurricane. You need to pay attention. You need to follow the news.” If you don’t have internet or connection or any sign because the power, the electricity power grid is down, they’re just going around the street in cars, like, talking to the people, screaming that “Stay in your home! Don’t [inaudible].” And they’re trying — I think, like, in Cuba, we have a really good culture about what is the things that we need to do in order — when you’re in a hurricane, is came to our country. And I think, like, people really learn about that. And people really listen to the Civil Defense. People really listen to the news.

Sometimes we have casualties. For example, in Hurricane Sandy in 2012, that was also in Santiago de Cuba, we had casualties in that. So, every time that something like that happen, I think, like, the work of the Civil Defense is strength. People learn more, because many of these casualties are because indisciplines, because they say don’t walk through the hurricane, because during the eye, everything is calm, but then the storm start again. And I think that in this point, people are really aware of the dangers of surviving — or, facing an hurricane.

And right now Santiago de Cuba is really calm. They just start the work of trying to normalize life, trying to clean the roads, because here in Santiago city, the main sign of a hurricane just go through is, like, you have a lot of downs, from the roots lay down on the streets. And it’s like the panoramic of the hurricane was like the entire picture of Santiago de Cuba has already changed. It’s like you barely recognize on a street or a neighborhood, because they’re full of trees on the floor.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the Cuban foreign minister, Liz, Bruno Rodríguez, speaking at the U.N. General Assembly yesterday.

BRUNO RODRÍGUEZ PARRILLA: [translated] In recent weeks, the deployment of pressure, intimidation and toxicity by the U.S. Department of State has been brutal and unprecedented on a large scale, so as to force sovereign countries to change their vote on the resolution that we adopt today. They have deployed all their weapons and particular coercion, but the truth, the law, the reason and justice are always more powerful and conclusive.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Liz, if you could respond to that, I mean, the impact of this economic embargo, and how Cuba nevertheless has the resources to mount this response to the hurricane?

LIZ OLIVA FERNÁNDEZ: Well, that’s a really good question, because the sanctions is affecting all the aspect of the Cuban lives. And the response to the disaster is one of them, because we don’t have enough money right now. Well, the government doesn’t have enough money to put in health or in public education, so they have, like, another kind of priorities. Imagine the amount of money that we have to recover a country after a hurricane as Melissa just passed by. It’s insane.

Like, I think — and this is one of question that I have for myself: How is going Cuba to be recovering after this hurricane pass? I don’t know. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to Cuba to fully recover, not just from this hurricane. We talk about we are on an island in the Caribbean. We face a lot of hurricanes and storms. So, how Cuba is going to recover for that? I don’t know, because, certainly, this hurricane is hitting — has hit Cuba in the middle of a deep economic crisis, increase on the top of by U.S. sanctions, because the goal of the sanctions is to cut Cuba of all kind of foreign investment, all kind of foreign currency that can come through tourism, through medical — international medical missions. So, they are trying to dip Cuba in an economic crisis. They’re trying to overthrow the Cuban government. So, cutting Cuba from funding is one of the ways that they are trying to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Liz Oliva Fernández is speaking to us from Santiago de Cuba. We’re going to go right now to professor Mikael Wolfe of Stanford University. You wrote this piece a while ago about, oh, “When it comes to hurricanes, the U.S. can learn a lot from Cuba.” If you can talk about that and put it in a larger context of what has just taken place at the U.N.? I mean, it’s happened year after year after year, around the U.S. embargo that crushes Cuba and also penalizes other countries from trading with Cuba.

MIKAEL WOLFE: Yes. Thank you, Amy. Thank you for having me on. It’s great to hear from you, Liz, too, on the ground in Santiago.

Yeah, so, the article I wrote a few years ago in The Washington Post occurred in the context of another hurricane that was hitting New Orleans. And, you know, if anybody was around 20 years ago, this is the 20th anniversary of Katrina, that destroyed much of New Orleans and the most vulnerable populations there. Compared to what happened then, when FEMA was really inactive, was not responding to that under the administering of George W. Bush, Cuba was handling these kinds of disasters really in an exemplary manner, as Liz pointed out. The United Nations, the Oxford international development organization, all independent experts on hurricane preparedness, or disaster preparedness, in general, have praised Cuba because of the way that it so comprehensively handles and prepares the population for disasters, and has organizations, has people on the ground on the local level, who know exactly what to do when they prepare for these hurricanes.

And this goes back many decades. I’m a historian, and this interested me. You know, how did this come about? It came about very early on in the revolution. A huge hurricane named Flora in 1963 — so this is just a year after the missile crisis, two years after the Bay of Pigs invasion — struck the same area of Cuba that Melissa just struck. It was a different kind of hurricane. It did a kind of a loop, double loop around. And it killed about 1,200 people, caused a huge amount of damage. And during that, Fidel Castro actually personally led rescue operations. And the lesson that Castro and the revolutionary leadership learned is that you needed a much more comprehensive kind of response. And the Civil Defense is what came out of that a few years later, basically embedding the Civil Defense within many different kinds of departments and organizations all across Cuba.

And Liz mentioned that, you know, people are educated. People know what to do. Some of the most popular people on the news in Cuba are meteorologists. People listen to their meteorologists in Cuba. And in fact, meteorologists are probably the only ones that are not criticized by Cubans in Florida, who criticize regularly Cuba — regularly criticize the Cuban government. I’ve seen Cuban dissidents and Cuban critics basically broadcast Cuban meteorologists based in Cuba uncritically. And this is something they never do for anything else. So, in this context, you know, Cuba is — 

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds, Professor.

MIKAEL WOLFE: Yeah, sure. So, obviously, the embargo affects this. It affects Cuba’s ability to recover from these and is often weaponized right in the moment when Cuba is the most vulnerable. So, the two go definitely hand in hand, and have for decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both for being with us. History professor Mikael Wolfe of Stanford University, speaking to us from Palo Alto, he specializes in Latin America and the Caribbean. And Liz Oliva Fernández, Cuban journalist with Belly of the Beast. We will link to her reports. You can also go to our website for an interview with them in Spanish. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for another edition of Democracy Now!