Milwaukee, August 27, 2026: “US Foreign Policy in a Troubled World. Where do we find signs of hope?” with Erik Sperling

“US Foreign Policy in a Troubled World
Where do we find signs of hope?”

with speaker
Erik Sperling
Executive Director of Just Foreign Policy

Thursday, August 27  –  7:00 pm
Friends Meeting House, 3224 N. Gordon Pl.
(Take Auer Ave. one block east of Humboldt Ave. to Gordon.
Free parking in Gaenslen School lot off of Auer.) 

& also see this NATIONAL APPEAL from ERIK of JUST FOREIGN POLICY: CUBA WAR POWERS RESOLUTIONEnd the Illegal Blockade of Cuba Nine million people were forced to live in the dark last week, and it was not an accident.Cuba’s entire national power grid has collapsed six separate times this year. Not a neighborhood, not a province… the whole island, all at once, over and over. Hospitals are rationing care. Ventilators are going quiet. Water pumps have stopped. In parts of the country the outages stretch past twenty hours at a stretch.This isn’t a natural disaster. It’s an oil blockade the Trump administration has enforced since January, letting a grand total of one tanker reach Cuban shores in seven months.Congress can end it. There is a privileged resolution sitting in the House right now, H.Con.Res. 106, that would force a vote to stop these unauthorized hostilities. House Democratic leadership just has to schedule it. It takes about thirty seconds to add your name. Will you sign the petition telling your member of Congress to call the vote?TAKE ACTION >> Here is what the world already knows, even if Washington won’t say it out loud. Last week UN human rights experts condemned the escalation and warned that without immediate intervention, Cuba risks becoming a “silent Gaza.” They said plainly that food must never be used as an instrument of political pressure.Children are DYING because the United States decided to weaponize fuel against a civilian population.And it is about to get worse. An island that cannot generate electricity cannot pump water, refrigerate insulin, or move food from the fields to the cities. Every week the blockade holds, more Cubans conclude that the only way to survive is to get in a boat. We have watched this happen before. In 1994, roughly 35,000 people crossed the Florida Straits on rafts in about five weeks. In 2022, more than 313,000 Cubans arrived in the United States, close to three percent of the island’s entire population.The most obscene part is that our own government sees it coming. Florida has already surged state forces into the Straits, with Governor DeSantis warning he will not accept a “massive armada” landing in the Keys. U.S. Southern Command has been running exercises specifically to rehearse a mass migration response.  Same government, both ends: manufacture the catastrophe, then prepare to intercept the people fleeing it.This is what a conflict spiral looks like from the inside. It just gets darker, and hungrier, and more desperate, until someone decides the only remaining option is force. The families rationing water in Havana tonight did nothing to deserve this, and neither will the ones who drown trying to leave.  Will you add your name for them, before this becomes the next crisis nobody wanted?