VanCubaSolidarity

Irish rap trio Kneecap will join an international aid convoy to Cuba next week, as the island nation faces an escalating humanitarian crisis caused by a brutal US blockade. The artists, who made global headlines last year for a Coachella performance at which they displayed the message “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine” will join activists who took part in the Gaza aid flotilla. This month’s Nuestra America Convoy was originally conceived as a flotilla, but was expanded so that aid will also travel by air and land after organisers said they were “inundated with requests to support this critical mission”. “The Nuestra America Convoy will challenge Trump’s imperial aggression,” Kneecap wrote on Instagram. “The Trump administration is strangling the island, cutting off fuel, flights, and critical supplies for survival.” The Cuban capital, Havana, is in the grip of an “acute sanitation crisis” because waste trucks are unable to operate without fuel, they added, while the risk of mosquito-borne diseases is increasing as fumigation trucks stand idle. Donald Trump has significantly escalated the decades-long US blockade by threatening to impose tariffs on any country that sells fuel to Cuba, leading to widespread blackouts and disruption to the delivery of food and the production and distribution of medicine. “This is the barbarity of the blockade, first conceived to ‘bring about hunger and desperation’ by the US state department in 1960,” Kneecap wrote, quoting from a government memorandum discussing the plot to bring down then-leader Fidel Castro. Despite the US blockade, Cuba has built one of the most successful healthcare systems in the world, and regularly sends its doctors to other countries to treat people for free. It has also helped more than 10 million people from over 30 countries learn to read through its literacy programme. “It’s time to break the siege,” Kneecap’s statement said, “and stand up for Cuba, as they have stood up for us.”