When I began my teaching career fifteen years ago, if I had told you that I was the kind of firebreathing lefty who wanted his country’s soil to be free, its star to fly alone, you would have laughed at me, and I would not have disagreed.

I—who under the dermatitis have just enough olive to my skin to suggest some degree of Mediterranean heritage—spent the first decade of my working life as the ultimate cultural assimilationist.

I listened to Bruce Springsteen and Florence + the Machine, not reggaetón.¹ I told everyone about the weird stuff that happened back home, like the time pro-independence activists stormed the Puerto Rican Capitol while I was in high school, without bothering to investigate that they were protesting the territorial legislature for honoring² a man accused of involvement in several murders and involved with a right-wing Cuban terrorist organization. Unless I spoke to a fellow boricua, my Spanish accent was much more affected and deliberate, with all the letters I had learned to drop.³

Perhaps my greatest humiliation: I—a baseball fan who considers gridiron football a religious ritual that substitutes brain damage for communion—could hold my own in a conversation about Nathan Peterman’s debut.⁴ How many Puerto Ricans do you know who can say that?

Then came María, and the fake death counts, and the blue roofs, and the openly corrupt bidding process, and the lost food and supplies that spoiled away in a warehouse, and surgeries by the cellphone light, and the paper towels.⁵

Suddenly, no matter how many good-hearted people uttered words of support, asked how my family was, or simply let me vent and commiserated with me about the way the United States left thousands of its own citizens⁶ to die, it was clear that we had radically different ideas about what United States government officials do in response to a natural disaster.

We did not disagree on what they should do, mind you. We disagreed on the reality of what they do.

They believed that even a government led by Donald Trump and his pack of ghouls would eventually get off their collective duff, restore power, distribute food, and help residents recover, because otherwise they’d pay some sort of electoral price for malfeasance and neglect of United States citizens.⁷

Meanwhile, I remember Katrina, and Flint,⁸ so I know what even a federal government led by people who nominally want to use their power for good does: check whether the people involved are white, rich and/or right-wing enough to raise actual hell, and respond accordingly.

That lesson should have been learned over and over again by 2017. Not only did this newest data point fail to penetrate the gringo skull, famously impervious to new information as it is, but seven years later, it was entirely forgotten.⁹

Over the last few years, I have tried very hard not to hold the people of this country, among whom I did not count myself, collectively responsible for the absolute disaster through which we are all living. It is not a helpful point of departure if you want to convert, like I do, rather than scold.

More often than not, I fail.

None of this is to say that I covered myself in glory. I didn’t organize any fundraisers or distribute bottled water. I didn’t donate money to restore power or provide actual roofs instead of tarps. I didn’t go back and help rebuild.

I taught my classes. I bought a house. I celebrated when my team won the World Series.¹⁰ I left my people—my family—to fend for themselves.¹¹

Almost a decade has passed, and though I know now that I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the catastrophe and had no idea where to start, I also know that the only way to begin is by beginning.

Almost a decade has passed, and a federal government led by Donald Trump and his pack of ghouls is destroying the other Caribbean island whose heritage I claim.

Cuba y Puerto Rico son
de un pájaro las dos alas,
reciben flores o balas
sobre el mismo corazón . . .

Cuba and Puerto Rico
are the two wings of the same bird,
they receive, whether flowers or bullets,
upon the selfsame heart . . .

- Lola Rodríguez de Tió
(1843-1924)

For the better part of seventy years, Cuba has paid the price you pay for defying the United States. Officially, the Platt Amendment guaranteed Cuba’s independence; in reality, it enshrined Cuba’s subservience.

USian presidents, ambassadors, and capitalists treated the island as their plaything for the next six decades. From the United Fruit Company’s monopolizing prime agricultural land to La Habana¹² bursting at the seams with mob money, to the way president after president served at the pleasure of the United States government, it is extremely easy to see how history absolved Fidel Castro,¹³ at least insofar as the Moncada barracks and all the odious apparatus of stealth USian rule deserved assault.

In response, the United States imposed an embargo, which is what you call a blockade when you want to commit a war crime and get away with it. Not that you’re really in danger. After all, no one is likely to argue with the only country that has used nuclear weapons in warfare and has the diplomatic mentality of a rich toddler.

You know all of this.

You probably even know that the United States, under Trump and Marco Rubio, who like every other Trump official is a hard-faced liar, have tightened that blockade to successfully force the Cuban government to the negotiating table.

You may even know that despite the United States’ efforts to cut Cuba off from the international community, the Nuestra América Convoy, containing members of the Global Sumud Flotilla that the State of Israel illegally stopped in international waters¹⁴, found multiple ways to get aid to La Habana, and that China has donated rice and solar panels in another blow to the traditional view of the Caribbean as the United States’ imperial backyard.

You may know that conditions are getting extremely dire on the island itself, and that Cubans are characteristically clear-eyed about who is at fault.

What I want you to remember is that last point.

In the Current Affairs piece I linked above, Robinson mentions that Cubans want USians to come to the island. We have money, after all. We’re the international version of the people who are white, rich and/or right-wing enough to raise hell: we can’t stop invading other people’s privacy or disrespecting their space for clout and clicks and metrics. Partly, however, I imagine there’s also a desire for the people causing their suffering to witness even part of it.

I know it’s become en vogue to point at polls opposed to killing Iranian children or the masked Gestapo and insist that the US government operates without any reference to what its people want. I understand the reflex, but the US government is operating with reference to whether people care, and they don’t.

The ones who do, among whom I am certain I can count a number of cousins who have been nothing but wonderful to me, are generally in favor of starving the Cuban people out of some misguided idea that they should be punished collectively so that the United States can go back to running it, the way it runs Puerto Rico: through unelected viceroys and directly into the ground.

Every minute the people of Cuba suffer and we collectively allow it to happen in our name stains all of us like miasma.

Until we accept that responsibility, and fight—not just donate, not just vote, not just run for party office, but fight—to chart a new course, away from the inexorable bloody death that awaits all empires, we are all guilty of this crime. May God have mercy on us, because History won’t.