It was designed as a luxury ship until its last owner, Livio Lo Monaco (yes, the one with the mattresses that Constantino Romero advertised so much), understood that it could be more useful than a simple pleasure boat. Aware that in the Mediterranean, the sea in which he “lives like a king”, thousands of people die every year, Lo Monaco gave the Astral sailboat to Open Arms so that they could use it in rescue tasks. The businessman got it right. Since 2016, the Astral has rescued more than 15,000 people, in addition to serving for observation, surveillance and training ship tasks.. And not only that. For a few days now, the sailboat sails to Havana as part of the Heading to Cuba missionwhich aims to bring photovoltaic panels to the Juan Manuel Márquez Pediatric Hospital, dependent on .
One of the promoters of the initiative is Miguel Urbán, member of Anticapitalistas, founder of Podemos and former MEP. Urban serves El HuffPost by phone shortly after it became known that several Spanish companies announced that after the threats of sanctions by the United States. “This is anything goes,” says Urbán. “Where is the EU? Where is the most progressive Government in history? This is affecting Spanish companies… If it is no longer for Cuba, and to speak in their terms, what are they waiting for to protect the interests of Spanish companies? They don’t realize that the US objective is to remove, for example, hotel companies and then add their own companies,” he points out.
Beyond the 150,000 euros in photovoltaic panels that the Astral carries on the way to Havana, the objective of the Heading to Cuba mission is also similar to that of the different flotillas to Gaza. “The fundamental thing is to report the blockade. The Astral is a political argument, a symbol that becomes more important when the United States no longer even allows ships with food to enter Cuba. Only China can do it, but China thinks only of China. We are accepting a geopolitics of new imperialisms,” he explains.
The tightening of the US blockade on Cuba is increasing, which has subjected the island to a situation of suffocation, economic but also vital. “What they are looking for – Urbán points out – is for there to be a popular uprising, for people to say that they can’t take it anymore, and it is understandable that they say this, because they are getting worse and worse. On the best of days they go 20 hours without electricity. What does this mean? There is no way to refrigerate food, hospitals are without light for incubators, to operate…And not only that, the months of June and July are the worst in terms of tropical heat, and it’s not that they don’t have air conditioning, it’s that they can’t even plug in a fan.”
Faced with this perspective, and despite a resistance that has lasted for years, Cubans are beginning to not see a future, much less when the international community does not seem to come out to protect them either. That’s what the United States plays. “This in international law is considered a war crime, in the Israeli style on Gaza, but without bombs, at least until it’s time.“, denounces Urbán, who recognizes that the Government is not perfect either, “but the one who beats him is responsible for the other bleeding, it is not that he just threw himself on the ground.”
For the promoter of the initiativePalestine and Cuba are the confirmation of “the death of the liberal order, of international law and of the conglomerate that existed in international management”. “The UN has 20,000 tons of aid in Cuba that the United States has prohibited it from distributing. How can a country prohibit the United Nations from distributing aid, especially in the context of a humanitarian crisis? I have missed the paragraph, the regulation, that says that the UN must pay attention to something like that,” he points out.
Urbán also gives an example of this “anything goes” in which not even the United Nations dares to contradict the United States. “When the CIA chief’s negotiation with the Cubans took place, one of those who was with the American was responsible for the military operation in Venezuela that killed 38 Cubans. Imagine that you start a meeting like this: ‘Hello, I am So-and-so and I was in charge of killing the Cubans who were protecting Nicolás Maduro.’ That’s the level of brutalism American,” he says.
