This week marked a historical turning point on the United States’ decades old punishment of the tiny island country of Cuba. This Wednesday, it was announced that President Obama had ordered full restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, and plans to open an American embassy in Havana. There are plans by the Obama Administration to lift travel restrictions, remittances, allow banking and the export of internet hardware to Cuba, and open up dialogue for more economic exchange and trade. The embargo the U.S. has had on Cuba for the past 54 four years that began under President Eisenhower, still needs congressional action to be lifted entirely, but President Obama is reported to be using broad executive authority that will significantly weaken the current embargo.
The narrative told by mainstream American media, particularity the television news, begins, as American foreign policy propaganda often does, in the middle of the story, where the United States is of course the good guy, and generally offers no historical context. In this case the narrative given in soundbites is “Communist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in 1959, and relations with the United States deteriorated quickly, leading President Eisenhower to quickly enact an embargo. . . ” And then the Cuban missile crisis is mentioned, and opponents of renewing relations with Cuba, from politicians like Mark Rubio to Cuban dissidents, making claims of how Obama is caving into a dictator, etc.
The news doesn’t explain how the United States has spent considerable resources over the past twentieth century and spilled plenty of blood in it’s quest to dominate Latin America and control it’s natural resources. The devastated countries of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, and others, all have the footprints of U.S. imperialism. Over the past century the United States has waged proxy wars throughout Latin America, arming and training terrorist groups who murdered and tortured vast populations. President Ronald Reagan supported, illegally behind Congress’s back, the Contra terrorists (called “freedom fighters” by U.S. officials) in an effort to overthrow the popular democratically elected Sandinista government. A U.S. backed coup under President George W. Bush tried unsuccessfully to overthrow President Hugo Chavez, another democratically elected President of Venezuela, because he had the audacity, much as the Iranians did in the 1950’s, to assert the authority of his country to take control over their own oil. In short, the United States has a long history of supporting brutal dictators across the globe, so long as they serve Washington’s interests.
Until 1898, Cuba was a colony of Spain, before control was taken over by the United States. Up through 1958, there were oustings and coups of leaders in Cuba, military interventions by the United States, and dictators supported by the United States. When Castro seized power, he quickly moved to bar U.S. control over Cuba, nationalizing American corporations that ultimately led to the U.S. embargo, and the five plus decades since. In the 1960s. President Kennedy resided over a failed U.S. sponsored invasion known as the “Bay of Pigs.” After that, Kennedy and subsequent U.S. Presidents and the C.I.A. waged a vicious war of terrorism, sabotage. and assassination plots against Fidel Castro and Cuba, and even considered faking terrorists attack against the U.S. to blame on Cuba, such as blowing up a U.S. ship launched from Guatemala and blaming it on Cuba, as a pretext for a full military invasion. Hundreds of Cuban civilians were killed in U.S. sponsored covert terrorist attacks against various Cuban targets. Yet in the official U.S. narrative that completely ignores documented facts and history as if they do not exist, has kept Cuba on it’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. One has to wonder if the U.S. official who came up with that label for Cuba had a good and hearty laugh at the absurdity of the terrorist state, labeling it’s victim a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
As belligerent politicians like Senator Mark Rubio and others proclaim their love of freedom and longing for freedom for the Cuban people from what they call a brutal dictator, and accuse Obama of bowing to a dictator and sending a sign of weakness to brutal dictators world wide, the press seldom interjects any questioning of their statements or challenges to their assumptions, or fills any facts or historical context. It goes unmentioned that the U.S. considers many current world dictators its allies, and has a robust history of supporting and arming some some of post World War II’s most brutal dictators, from Suharto of Indonesia to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. So it is no surprise that many Americans have only a vague idea of what this latest turn in history regarding Cuba is about. Instead, they are made aware that there is a debate between U.S. leaders who think we can help bring freedom to Cuba through normalized relations, and leaders who claim that they love freedom too much to ever normalize relations with Cuba so long as a Castro is in power.
It is long past due, the move to normalize relations with Cuba. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union fell, China is our biggest trading partner and still a communist country. Cuba’s real crime was being 90 miles too close in the same Northern Hemisphere as the United States, and choosing to run its own affairs instead of taking orders from a U.S. puppet dictator. Their close proximity has inspired a much greater wrath and longer period of revenge than usual, and ending this long stalemate it is the right thing to do morally and economically. The Pope certainly thought so, and he deserves credit as well for nudging Obama and Raul Castro to come to the negotiating table.