CUBA SITUATION IS LIFE & DEATH - CANADA IS NEXT !!!

Hey there, Midas Canada viewers, Resisters from all over, Charlie Angus here.On today's episode, we're going to Cuba, where the people of Cuba are facing a life and death situation right now from the ongoing threats and illegal blockade by Donald Trump and the United States.A blockade that is contrary to international law and that is causing the death of children, the sick in Cuba.the elderly and having a huge impact on a sovereign nation.And this happens at the same time as Pete Hoekstra, who's insulting Canada and saying that the future of our sovereignty could be up for discussion, up for discussion in the upcoming Kuzma talks that we learned that the U .S.

Embassy in Canada, Pete Hoekstra, is pressuring our government to support the Americans enforcing regime change in Cuba.They went after Venezuela.They're going after Cuba.They will come after us next.We are interviewing with Ed Augustin, a journalist who's worked with The Guardian, who's worked with The New York Times, NBC, a voice on the ground to explain the situation in Cuba right now and what Canadians need to do to stand up to the gangsters in Washington.

Please check this out.They sent you down to save you, gave you tools instead of favors, but there was a revolution nowhere to be found.

Hey there Midas Canada viewers, Resisters who join us from all over the globe.We are looking at the situation in Cuba because the threat of the United States government against the people of Cuba is the latest escalation in Donald Trump's war on the world and it has serious implications for Canada.We are longtime friends of the Cuban people.Many Canadians have connections to Cuba and we know that after Venezuela, after Cuba, Canada's next on Donald Trump's list, and they're already intimidating us and intimidating us to support so -called regime change in Cuba.We're really, really pleased to be talking with a journalist on the ground in Havana today.Ed Augustin has been following the situation.

He understands what's going on.Ed, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us.

Pleasure to be here, and thanks for inviting me.

What is the situation right now on the ground in Cuba?

Well, Cuba's been in a massive crisis for the last six years.Ever since 2020, when the pandemic hit, two things happened.It was a one -two punch.It was the pandemic, but it also got hit with these powerful sanctions from the first Trump administration.And ever since then, in a sense, the country's just been a different place.You had longstanding power cuts, you had food shortages.

Cuba's always been a poor country and there's always been plenty of problems.But things really deteriorated from 2020 on.And then the Biden administration kept the core of those sanctions in place.And while other countries in the Caribbean that rely largely on tourism recovered after the pandemic, the US kept the boot on Cuba's neck, playing into its long two -thirds of a century of strategy of trying to overthrow the Cuban government.What's really changed this year is that the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, of course, has upped the ante.And their weapon of choice has always been economic warfare.

And they've really taken the mask off this time.They have declared and instituted an oil blockade on Cuba.Cuba's in theIt produces some oil, but it imports most of its oil.And the United States is stopping oil getting into the country.And I believe in climate change.

I think that it's nice to transition away from oil.I think that that's a good idea.But I think every single country in the world relies on oil, certainly poor countries.And if you just think through the amount of things that rely on oil, It's pretty much everything you can think of, you know, and I'm kind of in my journalism kind of going down the list.So take healthcare.Cuban doctors are telling me that more people are dying, civilians, babies particularly, young children in the hospitals.

Why?Because doctors can't get to work to operate on people, because patients can't get to hospital.If you go to a Cuban hospital right now, it's quite eerie.You almost kind of think everything is fine because there's so little people, but it's because they're dying in their houses.Vaccines and medicines cannot be distributed because there's no oil.Cuba has a biotech sector which produces or produced about 60%, 70 % of its medicines and sells them to the population at very cheap prices that everyone can afford.

They rely on diesel to produce them.Those plants are not working right now.Food, I've just come back from eastern Cuba, Farmers there have not received a drop of diesel for their tractors since February.And they're going back to animal traction.Food inflation is rampant.People in the cities are being particularly hard because the food that is being produced cannot be transported from country to the city.

Again, there's no diesel, there's no gasoline.And we're really sitting on a ticking time bomb in terms of food, because at the moment, it's the food that was planted and produced before this January's oil blockade that can't be distributed.But in a few months time, we're going to be seeing that we're going to be weeping.the food that was produced during the oil blockade.And I can tell you that what you can do, well, forget what I can tell you, what farmers in the East are telling me, what you can do with a tractor in a day, you do with oxen in a month.Cuba's capacity to produce food is rocketing downwards.

This is a country that had all but eliminated hunger.This is a country that had all but eliminated malnutrition amongst children.Right now, according to the World Food Programme, I shouldn't say the stats because it's something I shouldn't have.According to diplomats here, let's say, hunger and food insecurity in Cuba has climbed in recent years and is rising every single week.So we've spoken about public health care.We've spoken about food.

That would be enough.I'll just give you two more examples.I had an article out in the New York Times this week about how you have piles of trash in Havana, but also in other cities.Residents this year have started to burn them because there's no, again, diesel or hardly any diesel for the trash lorries to take them away.So now you have people inhaling toxic fumes, people having to live like meters away from this.And that's a direct result of the oil blockade.

I'm pretty sure the same thing would happen in Canada.If the United States attacked the energy of Canada, what would happen to health?What would happen to rubbish collection?What would happen to water?In Cuba at least, 80 % of the water that's pumped to people's homes and hospitals and businesses relies on electricity.And in Cuba, that electricity is overwhelmingly generated by oil.

We're an oil -based economy.Sorry to drive at home, but it's not just taxis and buses that get affected by this.It's the whole infrastructure that sustains life.And the United States, with this oil blockade, is effectively destroying the infrastructure that undergirdslife in the country, makes it possible.You don't see the bombs dropping on people like you do in other countries, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza.

You don't see the bombs, so it's not this kind of spectacle.You don't see it on CNN in the same way.It's almost an invisible massacre that's going on.But what I can tell you is that if you look at Raul Castro, he's been in the news this last month because he's now being indicted.It's quite difficult to imagine that as the former president of the country, a dictator, if you will, for many, that he's going through the same power cuts as the average people.Looking at Cuba president Miguel Diaz -Canel, the man's overwhelmed.

So a lot of their military figures, the United States says they're trying to hammer.They are not being hit by this.It's the population.It's the civilian population.And by definition, it's the vulnerable.And you know, there was a big study on sanctions around the world.

It came out in a prestigious health journal, the Lancet Global Health last year.They found that every single year sanctions kill more people than wars, number one.And number two, it's mainly children that die.Fifty one percent of people in this calculation that die are children under five, because life is less fragile when it's young.And so I think it's very important that people around the world, particularly in the United States, and I know this goes down in Canada, are conscious that this is an attack against the civilian population, it's killing, and it's killing the most weak, particularly children.And I'd like to think, my friends in the US tell me I'm naive, but I'd like to think that if people in the United States knew what their government was doing and how it's, again, killing civilians systematically, that this policy would not be possible.

It's politically possible because of ignorance and because the way it's presented in the United States is turned on its head as if somehow it has something to do with democracy and human rights.

I mean, it's...many things in what you said that my head is just spinning.The fact that it was Biden who maintained these heavy, heavy sanctions, that it wasn't it didn't start with Trump.You know, the culpability of the Democrats in putting this situation in place against a sovereign nation.But we've seen the escalation, deadly escalation with Trump.I mean, a blockade at sea.

is a violation of international law, the international law of the sea.Certainly, we see how Trump is outraged that there's a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, and yet they're blockading, and they're blockading Canadian aid as well.But I want to go to the medical issue because, again, American viewers may not be aware of this.I think Canadians who travel to Cuba understood the power of the incredible Cuban health system, but Life expectancy was higher in Cuba than it was in the United States.The doctors, the medicines, the vaccines, Cuba's played such a great role in public health care.But the death rates amongst children I'm seeing in the reports, the death rates now of people getting sicker and the calamity that's occurring in the health care system.

Can you speak about that?

Yeah, for sure.And just before I answer that, I'd point out about Canada.Canadians are much loved in Cuba.When the Cuban Revolution happened in 1959, shortly after the United States pressured every single country in the Americas to break diplomatic relations with Cuba, there are only two countries that still up their pressure.One of them is Mexico, the other is Canada.And Canada has historically sent more tourists to Cuba.

than any other country.So Canadian tourism in Cuba has been really, really important in, for example, funding the public health care system.And you're right, until fairly recently, the Cuban health care systemwas an example of what could be done in four countries for public health.We have, and we still have, so you had and you still have, universal public health, free at the point of use.That's not the case in, for example, the United States.

You didn't have big pharma setting patents and having drugs out of reach.The state ensured that drugs were available for most of the population.In fact, Cuba decided to set up its own biotech industry, pharmaceutical industry, in the 1970s, just four years after the first ever biotech company was established in the United States.That was the first ever one in the world, just four years after Cuba, precisely to try and sidestep the US embargo, precisely because the US pressures other multinationals, and I've seen it in my reporting, pharma companies not to sell to Cuba.So you have this really incredible system that's rooted throughout the country that is preventative, that tries to stop people getting sick in the first place rather than reacting to it, that focuses not on profit making, but on human health as its first goal.And one incredible statistic for you, until the roundabout of the pandemic, Cuba had the highest proportion of doctors to people in the world.

in the world.One in every 100 Cubans was a doctor.And you met them everywhere.You know, you kind of couldn't avoid doctors.I should caveat that.There are a few tiny countries and populations of less than a million, for example, in the UAE where it was higher than Cuba.

But for any country that, you know, with a population of over a million, Cuba was far and away, had far and away more doctors.I'm English, as my accent portrays.And I think at that time, Cuba had three times as many doctors per capita.in the UK.And so what they lacked in money, what they lacked in technology,they made up for with human resources.

And as you say, the indicators brought that out.Life expectancy was comparable with Canada, with European countries.It was 79 until a few years ago.Now it's going down.And infant mortality was lower than in the United States.Cuban culture prioritizes health care.

and children.And so that those two things came together.He was also the only country in Latin America to come up with its own covid vaccines during the during the pandemic.And they were really good.You know, it was difficult to report this on U .S.

media.

Wow.I worked with NBC News and they were great.They allowed me to report it.But seeing the YouTube comments, people saying, oh, this is disappointing.This is propaganda.NBC, this is, you know, why have you been tricked?

It's unfathomable.to the United States, to a lot of people in the US, that this could be possible.But it was.And so what we're seeing now, unfortunately, is the decimation of Cuba's proud public health care sector.Salaries have always been minuscule.The states tried to push them up, but failed.

And right now, doctors are earning less than the equivalent of $20 a month.It's difficult to kind of translate what that really means to someone outside Cuba because you can buy a lot more with $20 a month than you could in Canada, because otherwise everyone would be dead, right?And they're not, they're still surviving.But suffice to say, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny salary.And also you can earn literally 10 times more in a bar.If you're a young, pretty thing that's just graduated, you can earn 10 times more in a bar from tips to rich Cubans and tourists when they're still work than in medicine.

And so you're having a gutting of graduates.People are graduating and you have, you know, it's not an exaggeration to say almost nobody who graduates now becomes a doctor.So you've got a real problem there.but that's not the only one.If this older code stays in place, hospitals, which are on protected circuits right now, at some point will run out of oil.And power cuts are increasing.

Of course, the United States' policy towards Cuba is aimed not just at starving it of oil, but starving it of hard currency.And the Cuban, I should say, the Cuban economy is moribund and is very dysfunctional and so has a lot of fault in that as well.But the U .S.policy is to purposely sabotage the Cuban economy and to purposely make sure that there can't be hard currency coming in.And so that's one of the reasons why they haven't been able to build new power plants.

That's one of the reasons they haven't been able to transition to solar.That's one of the reasons that they haven't been able to repair the power plants.And so you're having more and more national power cuts and the causation of its complex that it does have to do with this U .S.sustained economic warfare.And that's the health.

Final comment.a really basic one, because I spent a lot of time in cleaning hospitals these last months.Really, really simple.Because the public transport is so difficult, the cleaners are coming less and less because it's difficult to get there.The cleaners are also coming less and less because increasingly, because the power plants typically stretch for over 20 hours a day now in Cuba, people are prioritizing staying at home and washing and cooking and looking after loved ones with these few bursts of power you get, and increasingly skimping off work.because they're thinking, you know, if I go to work, it's really important, but I just need to be at home because otherwise, when will the power come on to cook the night's meal?

And so because of that, because there's less oil and more power cuts, less cleaners are getting into hospital.I was in a maternity hospital and the doctor told me, look, it's simple.We're seeing more sepsis.We're seeing more sepsis in mothers because the hospital's dirtier and because the state can't afford antibiotics anymore because it doesn't have diesel to be able toproduce them.And so that is driving a rising infant mortality rate.

And yeah, it's tragic.And speaking to the doctors that are still there, these people are heroes, because these guys could have left, they could be earning far more money.Lots of them chose to stay in the country, they could have stayed abroad, because a lot of them have worked abroad as human doctors, as a medical program.And they are bearing this weight of their colleagues that have left, people that come depressed and angry, working in conditions where they don't have the right materials.Cuban doctors are heroes.I salute them.

I've met few people that have impressed me more in my life than Cuban doctors.

Wow, that's amazing.You know, in Canada, again, we have these, there's a great love for Cuba and the Cuban people.I've been getting many messages from people who are growing increasingly concerned.Now we are learning that the American embassy in Canada is pressuring Canada to support so -called regime change in Cuba.We've seen the attack in Venezuela, the kidnapping of Maduro.We see Raul Castro now being indicted, which sets up the stage for a similar situation.

But it's happening at the same time that the American ambassador is ridiculing our sovereignty and saying, you know, that in American discussions with America on trade, our sovereignty is going to be put on the table.So there's a sense in Canada that if Cuba falls, we're next.And yet we're being asked to support regime change.What would be your message to the Canadian people right now?

I don't want to hammer it out too much, but just based on the way you've laid it out, you could be next, because the United States whole United States posture towards Cuba has always ridiculed the notion that Cuba is a sovereign country, and Cuba stands up to that.That's why thisproblem exists fundamentally.Cuba had a revolution.It pulled itself out of US political and economic control before 59.Huge amounts of the Cuban economy were run by US corporations.

Sugar, electricity, utilities, rail, you name it.And the U .S.ambassador to Cuba even said in Senate hearings in the 1960s, I was the most powerful person in the country, often, more than a Cuban president.So there's the elements you want for political control.They pulled themselves out of de facto U .

S.political control and the U .S.does not abide it.And so you kind of have to decode, I think, a lot of the media coverage of Cuba these days.You know, it's presented in media in the United States that, you know, Cuba and the United States are in negotiations.

That's true.and that the United States is saying, you must enact the political and economic changes we say, or else.Otherwise, we'll keep on destroying your economy, keep on killing your people, and potentially invade.President Trump has said that recently.It would be difficult to imagine a situation that disrespects a country's sovereignty more than that.International law is very clear.

States, whether they're democratic or not, states determine their own future, the people in those states rather, determine their own future.The United States policy of regime, overthrowing a government you don't like, that does not respect sovereignty, and it's a violation of international law.And I think we see it.And I think that Canadians particularly cognizant of this, probably more than I, but just examples off the top of my head, you know, like Canada, Greenland, Panama, Cuba, with Latin America, they say our hemisphere.This is, it seems to me, a colonial administration, at least in its rhetoric.You know, when Cuban people are kind of bored of talk of U .

S.imperialism, it's talked about a lot by the Communist Party here.I think we're a level up from that now with this current administration.When Trump tweets and Hagsworth tweets our hemisphere, that's colonial, not imperial.When Trump says, I think I could take Cuba, that's colonial.And of course, I don't need to tell you that when he puts on TweetSocial, I think it was this year or last year, 51st state with Canada with the United States flag on it.

colonial.And unfortunately, it's not just rhetoric, as we all know, that's why we're talking, that they're trying to enact it.And so I think that Canadians helping Cubans stand up to this, helping Cubans survive, helping Cuba, chipping in to help Cuba transition to green energy, which is the only way they're going to get out of this, and helping the Cuban people determine the future they want, not elites in Washington and not the former land -owning class in Cuba that's now in Miami to determine their future.I think that is the way in which Canadians can defend themselves.Sorry, a way, not the only way, of course, but a way in which Canadians themselves can help shield their own sovereignty.And it's not just Cuba, of course, you know, to the extent they can help Denmark, Greenland and Canada.

I think that what we're seeing is that they're able to pick countries off if they Well, we're seeing right now with Canada, certainly a major military buildup.

partly because our border is being threatened, but also to support Greenland, to support Denmark.But our prime minister seems to be tiptoeing around Cuba, which is very concerning to people.We see a lot of grassroots organizations, one is Canisters for Cuba, C4C, led by labor activists around Canada who are sending shipments pretty much every month, I think, to the eastern provinces, getting medical supplies, other supplies.How important is it to get around that?blockade?Are there ways that we can work in Canada to pressure government to get supplies to help the people of Cuba who've been our friends for so long?

Well, that's the first question.How important is it?It's life or death.People are dying right now in Cuba because of the U .S., long existing U .

S.sanctions and the U .S.fuel blockade that's down to its fifth month, started in January.when they kidnapped President Maduro and when the White House threatened any country that sends oil to Kibbutz's house.So we're now in the fifth month of it.

And the longer it goes on, the more people will die of hunger, the more people will die of not having drinking water, the more people will die in hospitals, the more people will die of having trash and cockroaches and rodents and mosquitoes in their homes.in their houses because piles of trash and I could go on.So in terms of borders, it's life or death.

That's a very powerful message.Thank you, Ed, so much.We'd like to be able to follow up with you.I mean, if the threats increase, our people are very, very concerned and we want to maintain a way of having links and solidarity.So we really, really appreciate you coming on Midas Canada and giving us a perspective of what's happening on the ground in Cuba.

Thank you so much.Charlie, thanks so much for having me on your show.I'd just like to say two things in closing.First of all, Canadians can help.They can donate money to Cuba, to Cubans, and also the Cuban state, which I've seen it here on the ground, is currently putting solar panels up in hospitals and in farms and in the homes of vulnerable people that need, for example, solar panels to keep their children alive.In an article I had out two months ago in the New York Times,

a child who was paralyzed and has breathing problems, he now has a solar panel.And that's the Cuban state setting up.So first of all, donate.Second of all, and this is a hard mountain to climb, I would say if you care about human rights of people in Cuba, push the Canadian government to send oil to Cuba.break the oil blockade.At the moment, we've only had one country, and unfortunately, it's Russia, sending oil to Cuba.

And we can see that this is a deal being set up between Trump and Putin.You know, you can send a little bit in and then don't send more.The world needs to break the oil blockade.The oil blockade is illegal.I've been told by legal experts that may be a crime against humanity.Is it plausible that if Vladimir Putin was doing this to the Ukrainian people, the President of Canada, sorry, the Prime Minister of Canada would not be condemning it?

I don't think it is plausible.And this is a connection that this is this is the same hemisphere.And as you've said, many Canadians love Cuba and have a special connection with it.And it's vice versa for Cubans towards Canadians.And so I'd make that point, pressure the Canadian government to send oil because every barrel of oil that gets to Cuba is going to improve people's lives.

Thank you so much, OK Midas viewers and viewers who are all over the world.We've got a big task ahead of us.We certainly need to be pressuring the government.I'm asking you to do that right to Prime Minister Mark Carney.We've got to break that oil blockade.But also thinking of ways that we can increase support ideas like solar panels would make such a huge difference.

So this is a conversation we're going to be having.We're going to continue.We are going to support Keep shining a light, my friends, and kicking at that darkness till it bleeds daylight.Thank you, merci, and meegwetch.