As they announced a pittance of assistance, Ottawa imposed sanctions on a vessel seeking to defy Trump’s oil embargo on Cuba. Contrary to nationalist myth, Ottawa has largely been antagonistic to the socialist nation. Yesterday foreign affairs minister Anita Anand announced $8 million in assistance to Cuba. It’s mostly food though Ottawa has prohibited the government from distributing it. The assistance will go through the UN and some have suggested it may not even be new money just the speeding up of already planned assistance. To put the sum in perspective, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced 250 times more worth of arms to the Ukrainian government a day earlier. That $2 billion pushed Canada’s contribution to the NATO proxy war above $25 billion. In another way to look at the $8 million sum, Cuba has certainly lost far more due to Ottawa’s travel advisory, which dovetailed with Trump’s bid to squeeze the island. The three-week-old statement dissuading travel to the tourist-dependent economy led Canadian airlines to cancel flights and the cancellation of tens of thousands of trips. The economic cost to Cuba could well top $100 million. The Carney government has yet to criticizes the criminal US oil blockade of Cuba. After illegally seizing Venezuelan oils shipments to the island and kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro, Washington has sought to starve Cuba of oil, which it still relies on for much of its electricity. Trump threatened to impose sanctions on any country that continued to sell Cuba oil. Unfortunately, Mexico’s state-owned PEMEX buckled to US pressure and cut oil shipments. In response to the blockade, a Hong Kong flagged tanker recently announced plans to defy the illegal US embargo with some 200 000 barrels of Russian oil. Instead of celebrating this move or dispatching a Canadian oil ship to assist in defying Trump’s criminality, Carney imposed sanctions on the Sea Horse tanker. The Sea Horse is now prohibited from docking in Canada and entering Canadian waters. Additionally, any person in Canada or Canadian abroad is prohibited from providing any services (financial, technical, etc.) to the vessel. In a long post about the sanctions on the Sea Horse, the former head of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, Richard Sanders, asked “Is Canada sheer evil? Is Carney evil in Carnate?” US regime change efforts seem to be escalating. Yesterday a boatload of armed men from Florida fired on Cuban authorities. Four were killed. It’s unclear if this effort was a replay of the 1961 US backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which Ottawa endorsed. Just days after the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker claimed Fidel Castro was a threat to the security of the hemisphere. On April 19, 1961, he told the House of Commons that events in Cuba were “manifestations of a dictatorship which is abhorrent to free men everywhere.” The next year the Canadian navy participated in the US blockade commonly known as the Cuban missile crisis. According to Lieutenant Bruce Fenton, they “assumed responsibility for surveillance of Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic while the United States Navy was engaged in operations around Cuba.” A Canadian aircraft carrier, two submarines and 22 specialized antisubmarine ships searched for Soviet subs in the Atlantic. Despite tacit support for US actions against Cuba Ottawa never broke off diplomatic relations, even though every other country in the hemisphere beside Mexico did. Three Nights in Havana explains why Ottawa maintained diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba: “Recently declassified State Department documents have revealed that, far from encouraging Canada to support the embargo, the United States secretly urged Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well positioned to gather intelligence on the island.” Ottawa did not let Washington down on intelligence gathering. For half a century Canada has spied on Cuba. The Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s NSA, listened to Cuban leaders’ secret conversations from an interception post in the Canadian embassy in Havana. A senior Canadian official, close to Washington, “admitted that the U.S. made ‘far greater use’ of our intelligence during the Cuban Missile Crisis than has been revealed.” Pentagon and State Department sources cite the U.K. and Canada as the only countries that “supply any real military information on Cuba” with Canada providing “the best” military intelligence. As part of its response to the 1959 Cuban revolution Ottawa announced it would not permit the sale of any military equipment to that country. It’s maintained that policy ever since. “Meanwhile,” noted Sanders, “over those decades, Canada has sold more than $100 BILLION in military goods to the USA”, which has constantly threatened Cuba. Canada is no friend to Cuba.

NDP caucus should have booed loudly