 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Welcome to People's Dispatch. I'm so happy today to be joined by Roger Waters. Roger, there's a lot of conflicting reports about what's happening in Cuba. We know that there are great moves being made by the United States government to once again, once again, after six decades to try to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. What are your thoughts or feelings about Cuba and what has Cuba meant for you? Cuba has always been a great figurehead in the struggle against American imperialism. They have held out, since they got rid of Baptista and the American-led and run dictatorship, that they have managed to stay there, a thorn in the side of the Monroe Doctrine and everything else that's bad about United States imperialism. I was watching a TV, I think it was the beginning part of a series, very, very moving, about one of the massacres in 1982 in Guatemala. You can't talk about Guatemala in 1982 without talking about Cuba and about Cuba's leadership to Honduras, Guatemala, or Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, all of these Latin American countries who have been attempting to govern themselves on principles of egality and fraternity and liberty. Along with Santo Domingo, obviously, Haiti, and we're seeing the same effing thing happening again in Haiti now, American interference to try and maintain the stranglehold of big business north of the border on that island as well. But Fidel Castro and the Revolution and the people of Cuba, the good people of Cuba in their steadfast struggle, not only have resisted the attempts by the United States and some of them crude, crude invasions, the Bay of Pigs being the most notable example, but they have spread their enduring love for their brothers and sisters all over the globe in small and large ways, whether it was in West Africa, where they actually sent troops back in 1970 whenever it was. I don't know, so Cuba has been immensely important and now, of course, a lot of the medical help in the COVID pandemic that has been going over the world came from Cuba because they train a lot of doctors and they train doctors with big hearts. I'm not saying that they're the only country, there are doctors from all kinds of Western countries as well, but in Cuba, it's enshrined almost in their constitution that this is who they are and this is what they do. But the fact of the matter is, as you know and as you said that Cuba has stood as a beacon of hope against really suffocation and during the pandemic, the United States government has intensified the blockade. Trump put 243 new gripping sanctions against Cuba and so there's been a real social impact of these sanctions, this blockade. At the same time, a wave of the pandemic has kicked in on the island and there was some protests on Sunday against the situation. Immediately, the US government said that, yes, go out on the streets and overthrow the government. They attempted to make it into a rebellion. Biden made a statement saying, go and fight for freedom and the Cuban president Miguel Diaz Canel went out on the streets and met people and said, look, we are facing a serious challenge, but let's not convert a social problem into a political problem. And in fact, around the world, there's a lot of confusion because people are saying, oh, maybe the government needs to be overthrown. How casual people are with their language, maybe the government should be overthrown, not 11 million people, but people outside like Biden deciding like the Pope, which government should be excommunicated. Well, they've almost had their way in many countries. So they've succeeded in the Philippines and in Honduras and probably now again in Guatemala, but they have failed in Perú and they have failed in Nicaragua and they have failed in Venezuela with the weight of the IMF and the Treasury and the printing of dollars and the blah blah blah, but they have failed to overthrow the will of the people. Hopefully they will fail in Chile as well in the upcoming presidential elections there and in the rewriting of the constitution to give the people of Chile more of a chance of developing a society more like Cuba. Of course, they want to get rid of it because imagine Cuba without having to live under the jackboot of American international financial muscle like Cuba has had to since its inception and like Venezuela has had to for the last 20 years and like Nicaragua has to, you know, how they have to fight against this huge weight of money pouring in all the time and also pouring into the mainstream media all over the world explaining how these countries are communists and they're disgusting and the people are imprisoned and blah blah blah, but we all know what thank goodness. I mean, thanks somewhat to the people's dispatch, obviously, and globetrotter and the work that you do and some other things. I mentioned RT recently, there are people who are trying to say, whoa, hold on a minute, can we have a grown-up conversation about some of this and actually look at the reality of what goes on in the world and fight our way through it and eventually figure out in a sanguine fashion how to come up with collective and responsible programs in order to alleviate the sufferings of our brothers and sisters all over the world and that's what we're trying to do and to some extent we're succeeding. So if I was a betting man, I would bet that there are economic problems in Cuba and I would bet that some of the people are suffering and wondering even where maybe probably not whether the next meal's coming from, but you know, why they haven't got a TV set or something, I've no idea what it might be. I'm sure that may be the case, but if you hand the country back to the gangsters, back to the mob, back to the United States government who has a history of doing nothing but rape and pillage, wherever it is in the world, will the situation be better for the people? No, it won't. Any more than it would be better for the people if you gave them Venezuela, which they desperately want, because they want the oil and they want all the other minerals. They want the lithium, they want the this, the that, the other, they want all the stuff that's under the ground and they want to come and steal it and they can do that if they allow the Spanish or the Portuguese or the English or the Germans or the Belgium, so whoever it might be, whoever the colonial master, if they let them go on running the show, they can do business with them and as Raoul Peck, have you seen his new series? It's excellent. I highly recommend it. I'm glad you watched it. Yeah, Exterminate the Brutes. Yeah, Exterminate all the Brutes is what it's called by the way. I got that wrong when I was talking about it the other day, so it's called Exterminate all the Brutes and yeah, everybody, you have to watch this documentary. It's fundamental to all of our lives and our understanding. So yeah, what else should we talk about? Well, I wanted to ask you a personal question about this. Could you reflect a little bit on when something like Cuba or Cuba itself came onto your consciousness? When did you first start thinking about Cuba and in what way? Well, I probably started thinking about it a lot before many other people do because I was, you know, after school, my mother used to take me to British China Friendship Association meetings in the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge and whatever. So I used to sit in the cold on the hard wooden floor and watch grainy eight millimeter movies of the people struggle against the puppet government of the Japanese and so I watched all those movies of the Great March in 1948. Well, in 1948, I was five, so the films must have started coming out soon after that. So maybe when I was seven or eight or whatever, sometime like that. So Cuba would have been the name of a country that was on the lips of people like my mother who were members of the Communist Party in England and stayed with the Communist Party in England up until 1956. When to a man and woman, they all left and the Communist Party almost disappeared in England simply because it refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Hungary, which it did. It refused. It said, well, Uncle Joe can do no wrong, you know. And luckily enough, there was enough heart and soul in the body politic of the car. No, well in the body of the people who were who were card-carrying members of the party in England that they went, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Which does some huge credit, people like my mum. But Cuba was always there, you know, from whenever it was. When was Baptista gone in 1959? Yeah, there you go. And so it wasn't long after that that our friend, you know, Ray McGovern was sitting in the cabinet room as an advisor to John Kennedy and we came within a hair of all being emulated in a proper nuclear war over Cuba, the missile crisis. And so, okay, so before 1959, all I knew was that it was a Caribbean island run by gangsters and despots. It was run by a despotic dictatorship, the Baptista regime. But the basically, all the pieces were moved by the mob. And how wonderful that the Cuban people had their revolution. And they have now, at least they've had a chance to build a society that is, to some extent, egalitarian, or maybe completely, I've no idea, because I've never been, it's been hard to travel there because of the blockade. And so that's Roger, this is interesting, because when your memoir comes out, and it's going to come out soon, and it's going to be an international bestseller, you and I are going to travel together to Havana, to the Havana Book Fair, and we shall do a big event under the stars, talking about your life in Cuba, to the Cuban people who you know, they are going to not allow their process to be detailed. So what do you think about that? Yeah, I would love to do that. I'm trying to remember the name of the documentary that I recently watched about Cuba, extraordinarily eloquent, but brilliantly kind of colorful and deeply, deeply moving, heartwarming documentary about contemporary Havana, which still obviously, you know, utopia is still a way off. Let us put it that way. And, you know, it's interesting, would we want to live there or not? I sort of don't know. I don't, I know I don't want to live in God's heaven. You know, I wrote this piece in my memoir, the other, I shouldn't really say this, but I'm going to, which was a sort of a bit of a, a little bit of a joke at the expense of parts of Roman Catholicism. And it says about, it's like asking a question of a nun and saying, well, how much fun is it being married to a dead bloke like Jesus? And her answer, of course, is none. N-U-N. It's quite, it's quite a good new use of her name, you know. And I know you're, you're chuckling now, which is a very good thing because so am I. I find it hard, but it is one of the things that breaks my fucking heart is that when I, I was, there's a new documentary I was watching last night called Oscar. I think it's just called Oscar. Anyway, it's searching for the survivors of the Dos Aires massacre in Guatemala in December 1982. I think it was in December. And as you know, they, they, they went into this village because there had been an ambush on some government killers and then stolen 23 rifles. So they went in and they slaughtered 200 people and threw them all in a well, all of them, men, women, children, babies, everybody, boom, all together. And they've been, they exhumed them slowly over, after, you know, once, once there was a change of, of, of government. And I can't name you the year, but it's incredibly moving. And they found two survivors who had been adopted. So it's like, oh, it's the same story that I've been involved in in Argentina with the Disaparacidos, you know, and the madres, the Cinco Mile and, and their extraordinary work in finding the children of dead patriots and, and activists who, who the hunter and the servants of the hunter kidnapped back in the, you know, back in the days when the colonels were in Georgia and Argentina and took them and just stole the babies and brought them up. And they found hundreds of them with DNA testing and whatever. And obviously then the problems begin. You tell some kid who thinks his father is this army officer and says, no, your father would, they killed him. Bloat, you think your father was actually the bloke who killed your father, your father was this other person in Charlie, part of the resistance, a hero or your mother. Anyway, I'm, I know I'm rambling, but no, no, no, this is all the same fucking story, isn't it? It's all the same story over and over and over again, you know. And it's the same story from the Argentinian child to the Native American child in Canada. I mean, also taken from a family raised in this way that bodies found in, you know, shallow graves and, you know, the way we're saying, do we want to return to these thugs? I think that's the question in Cuba now is that, okay, we are suffering a problem because of the blockade, but do we want to return to the thugs and look at that choice? I mean, God, well, you would be choosing, exterminate all the brutes. And guess what? You're the brutes. He's quite, Raul Peck in his documentary, where he's completely clear about it because of course, he's Haitian. His roots are in Haiti or whatever. And Barth, because of his father's profession and who was a scientist, I think, he traveled all over the world. And so he never, he never adopted his given position as being one of the brutes. He was thought, whoa, hold on a minute, this doesn't sit right. That's why he was able to make that amazing documentary with James Baldwin. I am not your Negro. He's a remarkable filmmaker, I think. But yeah, this is all global. So when you and I, and those of us who are in this club, the People's Dispatch Club of people who give a fuck, look at everything, we go, wow, isn't it strange how it all fits together? And it's all masters ruling class trying to maintain control, holding sacred, not holding sacred human life, holding their lives sacred. And maybe their children, maybe their wives and children as well. But nobody else, no worker, no native, no indigenous person anyway, they are worthless. They are all the brutes. Amazing. When those things, I mean, I read, I lay awake nights when I was reading the Leopold Bloody Book about the Belgian Congo, which I read about 15 years ago or something. You'd go, oh, they did that. Oh my God, they did that. All for a bit of rubber. Wow. Generation after generation of children with no bloody hands, you know, because they did the wrong thing or because they didn't work fast enough or quickly enough. And you go, wow, only just now, only just now are a few of the descendants of the real brutes who did all of that, beginning to come out of the woodwork. Just occasionally one will pop their head out and go, I'm sorry. What? Speak up. It's amazing, isn't it? It is amazing. Roger Waters, thanks a lot. We're keeping Cuba in our thoughts and hopefully we won't return to the gangsters' paradise of the past. Thanks a lot for that. Not at all. Thank you for having me as usual.