Let Cuba Live! Young Voices Against the Blockade w/ CODEPINK Dir. Danaka Katovich

The blockade imposed by the U.S. on Cuba intentionally strangles the Cuban people’s ability to obtain goods, materials, equipment necessary for life and well-being. It also deprives people living in the U.S. of all of the medical, economic, cultural, and intellectual benefits that Cuba can offer, particularly for young people embedded in the struggle for a society based on care and solidarity, not profit and exploitation.

Join this panel to hear the perspectives of young leaders of social movements in the U.S. on what we can learn from the Cuban project and their strategies and proposals for building solidarity and ending the blockade.

Speakers:

Cheryl LaBash, United States

Cheryl LaBash was an Executive Board Member of her Detroit Health Department union in 1985 when Black infant deaths made horrible headlines in Detroit. That year she saw the solution while visiting May Day in Havana for the first time. Cuba’s commitment to reducing infant and maternal death made a lifetime impression. Through Doctors4Detroit she works to recruit and support scholarship students for Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine. An organizer for the victorious freedom of the Cuban 5, she is now a writer and one of the five co-chairs of the 30-year-old U.S. Cuba solidarity umbrella, National Network on Cuba.

Deja Gaston, United States

Deja Gaston (she/they) is an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Salt Lake City, UT. As a PSL organizer they participate in a number of anti-capitalist struggles including the fight for reproductive rights, Black liberation, LGBTQ+ liberation, and the building of multinational working-class unity. With an increasingly destructive and exploitative system, capitalism, their task as an organizer is to fight for and build a revolutionary socialist system in the belly of the beast. For the people and planet to live, capitalism must die!

Danaka Katovich, United States

Danaka Katovich is CODEPINK’s National Co-Director. She graduated from DePaul University with a bachelor's degree in Political Science in November 2020. At CODEPINK she works on youth outreach as a facilitator of the Peace Collective, CODEPINK's youth cohort that focuses on anti-imperialist education and divestment.

Ashley Elias, United States

Ashley Elias is a member and community organizer with Union De Vecinos, the Eastside local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union. She has been organizing with Union de Vecinos for 4 years organizing neighborhood committees and tenant associations in Boyle Heights to fight against landlord harassment, illegal rent increases, better living conditions and fighting to keep tenants in their homes. Every day, she is led and taught by the community how to create and establish community-based solutions to build a better world.