"Through the independence of Cuba,it is my duty to
prevent the USA from spreading over the West Indies
and falling with added weight upon other lands of our
America... I have lived in the monster and I know its
entrails; my sling is David's".
Jose Marti (May 18, 1895)
"I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on
any other land."
Mark Twain (1900)
"The attitude above all others which I feel sure is no
longer valid is the arrogance of power, the tendency
of great nations to equate power with virtue and major
responsibilities with a universal mission."
Senator William Fulbright
"The Arrogance of Power" (1966)
Fidel Castro's leadership role during parts of six
decades has been a defining feature of revolutionary
Cuba. When he announced to his nation last month that
he would "neither aspire to nor accept the post of
President of the Council of State and
Commander-in-Chief" there was rampant speculation
about the state of Castro's health and Cuba's
immediate future.
The colonial master G.W. Bush, perhaps inspired by the
stellar success of his experiments in nation-building
and exportation of democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq,
said that the U.S. would help Cubans find "the
blessings of liberty", and that the events should
"signal the beginning of the democratic transition in
Cuba." Florida's Cuban-American National Foundation
(CANF) called for a civil and military uprising to
overthrow the Havana government. Nevertheless, there
was general calm after Castro stepped down. In
fact,Cuba is actually eight months post-Fidel. He has
not been on the job since undergoing intestinal
surgery in July of 2007. Despite predictions of "apres
lui le Deluge", the regime has not collapsed and there
has been no eruption of public protests. The system is
operating normally after his departure. Those
expecting an implosion in Cuba as there had been in
the formerly nominally socialist states of Eastern
Europe overlooked an important difference. Cuba has
undergone an authentically popularly-based social
revolution, while the system in Eastern Europe was
imposed from the outside by the Soviet army in the
aftermath of World War Two.
In reality, both Cuba and the United States have long
been planning for Cuba after Fidel Castro. Since his
intestinal surgery, Cuba has been led by a leadership
collective headed by Raul Castro, head of the Cuban
Armed Forces since 1959, Ricardo Alarcon, head of
Cuba's National Assembly, Prime Minister Carlos Lage,
and Foreign Affairs head Felipe Perez Roque.
The empire and its colonial lord G.W. Bush created the
"Commission for Assistance for a Free Cuba" (CAFC I)
in May of 2004. A neocon wet dream, its charter
recommends that the State Department "oversee" (they
use the term without irony) an interim (Cuban)
government's implementation of the commission's plans.
It also calls for a "Transition Coordinator" at the
State Department to facilitate expanded implementation
of "pro-democracy civil society building" as well as
the creation of a U.S.- Cuba Joint Committee on Trade
and Investment (JCTI) through which the Departments of
Commerce, State, Justice,Treasury,
Agriculture,USAID,and HUD would make basic decisions
about the Cuban economy, including the implementation
of an obligatory Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between
Washington and Havana. Castro referred to the plan as
"annexation".
Bushite bureaucrat Caleb McCarry was given the
presumptuous title of "Cuba Transition Coordinator" by
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. McCarry had been
previously involved in channeling money through the
International Republican Institute to the opposition
to elected Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide,
who was eventually overthrown in a U.S.-supported
military coup in February 2004.
According to The Financial Times of October 31, 2005,
"the inter-agency effort, which also involves the
Defense Department, recognizes that the Cuba
transition may not go peacefully and that the U.S. may
have to launch a nation-building exercise." (No talk
of our being greeted as liberators, showered with
flowers and sweets?) In other words, the U.S.
government contemplates launching a war of imperial
conquest in violation of international law, the
Nuremberg Statutes, The United Nations Charter,and The
Charter of the Organization States ,to all of which
the U.S. is signatory.
Article 3 of The Charter of The Organization of
American States reads,"An act of aggression against
one American state is an act of aggression against all
the other American states. Article 21 of the same
document states, "The territory of a state is
inviolable; it may not be the object, even
temporarily, of military occupation or of other
measures of force taken by another state, directly or
indirectly,on any grounds whatsoever." This would be
done in order to forcibly return a sovereign country
to its former position of subservience and dependence
in the U.S. economic and political "sphere of
influence" by bloodily overcoming the resistance of
its people.
Cuban dissident Osvaldo Paya leads an organization
inside of Cuba known as MCL (Christian Liberation
Movement). In 2002 his organization carried out the
Varela Project, which produced some 30,000 signatures
on a petition related to human rights issues and
calling for multi-party elections in Cuba. Paya's
reaction to the McCarry Commission? He stated that it
was counterproductive because "it will allow the Cuban
government to raise the spectre of foreign
interference in the national affairs of our country."
"Any transition in Cuba", added Cuba's leading
dissident, "is for CUBANS to define, lead, organize,
and coordinate."
When Bush speaks of a colonial "overseer" it is a
reflection of his bottomless and intractable
ignorance.("Do you have Blacks, too?" he asked former
Brazilian president Cardoso in May of 2002) Not
surprisingly, he has no awareness that the major theme
in Cuban political history and identity is its
struggle for autonomy from its powerful imperialist
Northern neighbor.
Hence the promise of lavishing millions of dollars to
the Cuban opposition only manages to discredit and
undermine those same groups, not to mention that it
would be illegal in the United States for opposition
groups to receive foreign money.
Perhaps for these reasons Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of
Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell,
called the commission's plans "the dumbest policy on
the face of the earth."
Wilkerson is correct, yet the ludicrous "commission"
is but the tip of the iceberg of Washington's absurd
policy toward Cuba. Washington wants to avoid a flow
of refugees from Cuba, yet it tries to increase the
level of economic distress on the island through its
economic embargo of the island. The U.S. postures
concern for human rights on the island. This is
transparent hypocrisy. The U.S. has normal diplomatic
and commercial relations with countries having far
worse records on human rights, including Saudi
Arabia(members of whose brutal authoritarian
theocratic royal family are dear personal friends and
business partners of Bush), Colombia, Indonesia,
Egypt, and of course China. (Asked why we trade with
China but not Cuba, Clinton administration
Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat responded,
"I could give you a billion reasons." ) The U.S.
rejects cooperation with Cuba in the areas of drug
interdiction and uprooting terrorist activities, areas
of paramount national security interest, solely for
the purpose of maintaining its adversarial
relationship with Cuba. In reality, the one and only
factor determining America's Cuba policy is the
determination of both the Republican and Democratic
Parties to be the most hostile to Cuba, even if it
means self-defeating and irrational measures, in the
competition for the votes of Florida's anti-Castro
Cuban-Americans.
Fantasizing of Cuba's servile return to the American
empire, Colonial Master Bush spoke as if he were
invoking the Platt Amendment, which the U.S. imposed
upon Cuba as the first article of its
post-independence constitution. The amendment granted
the United States the unlimited right to intervene in
Cuban internal affairs, which it did on several
occasions: from 1906 to 1909,in 1912, and again from
1917 to 1922.
By
the late 1920s, U.S. firms controlled 75% of the Cuban
sugar industry and most of the island's mines,
railroads, and public utilities. While the Platt
Amendment was abrogated by the Franklin Deleanor
Roosevelt Administration in 1934, the U.S. effectively
managed Cuba's economic and political life from 1898
until 1959. When Cuba was ruled by dictators
accomodating to American economic interests such as
Gerardo Machado (1925-1933) and Fulgencio Batista
(1940-1944,1952-1959) there was no U.S. posturing of
concern for human rights or democratic transition
commissions for Cuba.
The experience of being a defacto American colony has
left a large imprint on Cuba's history. The struggle
for sovereignty and autonomy has been a major theme
for Cubans ever since and a major reason for
continuing support for its revolution. Cuba's fervor
to safeguard its independence from external domination
contrasts and clashes with America's imperial
pretensions that it has the undisputed right to
intervene unilaterally in and to dominate the affairs
of all Latin American countries.
Change is under way in Cuba. There are likely to be
market-oriented reforms, including the establishment
of open farmers' markets, the conversion of many
state-owned farms into cooperative farms, and the
legalization of self-employment. The new Cuban
leadership collective has concentrated on addressing
problems related to food and transportation.
These sectors suffer from shortages and deficiencies
that have caused widespread dissatisfaction.
Other aspects of Cuba's transition include a broader
opening to foreign investment, the revitalization of
the already growing tourist industry, diversification
of trade relations,and greatly expanding trade with
Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, China, and Vietnam.
During the last ten years, Cuba's average annual
growth in gross domestic product was approximately 5
percent, among the highest rates in Latin America. In
2005 the country had a growth rate of 11.8 %.
Cuba faces many challenges,yet it also has many
assets. Due to the revolution's ongoing copious
investment in education, Cuba has the most educated
population in Latin America. According to UNESCO, Cuba
devotes about 11% of its GDP to education, a very high
percentage in comparison with the rest of the region
and the 6% UNESCO recommends as adequate.
While Cuba is renowned for its quality of universal
basic education, perhaps the crown jewel of the
educational system is the Latin American School of
Medicine (ELAM), established in 1999 with a mission to
teach students from around the world to become general
practitioners and primary healthcare providers for
impoverished communities throughout the world. ELAM
was first conceived as part of Cuba's humanitarian aid
response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch
in 1998.
Because the education of physicians has come to exceed
the number needed in the country, Cuba regularly sends
doctors on humanitarian aid missions. Nearly 2,000
Cuban doctors currently work in South Africa, Gambia,
Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and Mali. In the
Kashmir area of Pakistan, 1,400 Cuban doctors tended
to more than 200,000 victims of the October 2005
earthquake. In the poorest neighborhoods of Caracas
or in rural areas of Guatemala, Cuban doctors tend to
the poor who have long lacked access to quality
medical care.
The island has de-emphasized its former reliance on
sugar exports and has developed innovative
biotechnology and information technology sectors.
Cuba has the world's largest reserves of nickel, and
potentially up to 9 billion barrels of offshore crude
oil and vast natural gas reserves.
There is transition in Cuba, but there is no clamor
for a Bushite commission to show Cubans how to manage
their schools and farms efficiently. With "Made in
Washington" privatization, Cubans are aware they would
lose free education, housing, and health, and would
start paying high prices for services no longer
considered human rights, as they are in today's Cuba.
Those and all other services would be under the domain
of real-estate hungry Miami exiles.
In the words of Miami resident and Bay of Pigs veteran
Alfredo Duran, "Cuba has had tremendous social
changes. It's not going to be easy to turn back the
clock." Adds Osvaldo Paya, "We don't want the poor
becoming poorer and a (itl)nomenklatura(itl) in power.
We want to keep the health service free and education
free." (Paya is a Cuban dissident who is ignored by
America's corporate media.)
Loyalty by the majority of Cubans to their revolution
is based not only on nationalism, but also on the
island's health care, social, educational, and medical
research programs that remain the envy of the
developing world despite the devastating commercial
embargo the U.S. has imposed on the island for more
than 40 years. A March, 1997 Report from the American
Association for World Health entitled "The Impact of
the U.S. Embargo on Health and Nutrition in Cuba"
states only Cuba's remarkable health care system has
prevented "a humanitarian catastrophe." Despite all
of the adverse conditions, by the end of the 1990s,
Cuba's infant mortality rate was below that of the
United States.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, "Cuba
should be the envy of many other nations. Cuba
demonstrates how much nations can do with the
resources they have if they focus on the right
priorities-health education and literacy." At the
annual meeting of The World Bank, its then President
James Wolfensohn said, "Cuba has done a great job on
education and health."
In Cuba the emphasis is based on prevention, i.e.
preventing disease before it has to be treated.
Clinic visits are free, and the doctor patient ratio
is a favorable 1:175. Free quality health care and
emphasis on prevention may sound odd to Americans,
accustomed to our system of health care as a for
profit commodity, where profit-driven insurance
companies charge exorbitant prices for premiums on
"services" they may decline to provide anyway, because
they CAN. That is, after a large "deductible" has
been paid.
To the U.S., none of the progress made by Cuba means
anything, at least not anything positive. Policy
remains stuck in a time wrap: Bring, or force Cuba
back under control of the American empire. If this
were done, of course, the educational and health care
systems, would be destroyed. Though Cubans remain
poor by American standards, their very positive
economic growth rates point to a steadily rising
standard of living. This too would be wiped out, just
as Nicaragua was plunged back into economic decline
and massive poverty when it was forced back under the
yoke of American imperialism. If the U.S. has its
way, Cuba will cease to be the envy of anything.
>
Early in the JFK administration, presidential adviser
Arthur Schlesinger wrote to Kennedy in his Latin
American Mission Report that Castro was dangerous
because "the distribution of land and other forms of
national wealth greatly favors the propertied
classes...the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by
the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding
opportunities for a decent living." In July 1961 the
CIA cautioned that "the extensive influence of
'Castroism' is not a function of Cuban
power...Castro's shadow looms large because social and
economic conditions throughout Latin America invite
opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation
for radical change." In response, the U.S. launched
"Operation Mongoose", a program of economic warfare,
sabotage, and paramilitary operations intended to
"visit the terrors of the earth" on Cuba, in JFK's
words, in an effort to overthrow the regime. Kennedy
later wrote that U.S. allies "think that we're
slightly demented" on the subject of Cuba. In early
1964 the State Department Policy Planning Council
reported, "the primary danger we face in Castro
is...in the impact the very existence of his regime
has upon the leftist movements in many Latin American
countries...the simple fact is that Castro represents
a successful defiance of the U.S., a negation of our
whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a
half. Cuba, as symbol and reality, challenges U.S.
hegemony in Latin America."
Perhaps the peak of American dementia in its Cuba
policy was reached in 1971, when anti-Castro
terrorists in the employ of the CIA introduced African
swine fever to the island. This biological warfare
against Cuba was uncovered in the (Senator Frank)
Church committee's 1975 congressional investigation of
intelligence activities. It resulted in the first
outbreak of swine fever in the Western Hemisphere. As
a result of the epidemic, it was necessary to
slaughter the island's ENTIRE pig population of some
500,000 animals. This eliminated the supply of pork,
a staple of the Cuban diet. The disease eventually
spread to Haiti and The Dominican Republic, affecting
nearly one-third of Haiti's Creole Pig population by
1982.
In 1984, Eduardo Victor Arocena Perez, a member of the
Omega 7 anti-Castro terrorist group, was convicted in
Manhattan of murdering an attache of the Cuban mission
to the United Nations. During his trial, he admitted
his group had a mission to "carry some germs to
introduce them in Cuba to be used against the Soviets
and against the Cuban economy, to begin what was
called chemical war." "The germs" were a virulent
strain of dengue fever, as a result of which some
273,000 people became ill and 158 people died,
including 101 children. COVERT ACTION BULLETIN of
Summer 1982 details U.S. experiments with dengue fever
ay the Army's Fort Detrick chemical/biological warfare
center and its research into the Aedes aegypti
mosquito that carries and delivers it. Only Cuba
suffered from the dengue outbreak. Biological warfare
is a violation of international laws to which the U.S.
is a signatory, and it is a war crime.
In addition to engaging in chemical warfare against
Cuba, U.S. governments have harbored terrorists
involved in the mass murder of Cuban citizens. On
March 24, 2006, Bush II ran one of his oldies but
not-so-goodies when he told an Indianapolis
audience,"If you harbor a terrorist, if you feed a
terrorist, if you house a terrorist, you're as equally
guilty as the terrorist (sic)". The bald-faced
hypocrisy of this statement is probably lost on those
unfamiliar with the case of exiled anti-Castro Cuban
and self-described terrorists Orlando Bosch, Luis
Posada Carriles, and the CUBANA Airlines flight of
October 6, 1976. The airliner was blown up while in
flight from Caracas, Venezuela to Havana, Cuba,
killing all 73 people aboard. Declassified CIA
documents show that the agency quickly identified
Bosch and Posada Carriles as the masterminds of the
airliner bombing. At the time Posada Carriles was a
senior officer in Venezuela's DISIP, the national
intelligence agency. Bosch traveled to Venezuela to
participate in the bombing.
When Bosch applied for legal residence in the U.S. in
1990, President George H.W. Bush approved the request
despite the recommendations of the U.S. Department of
Justice, which stated that Bosch "has been involved in
terrorist attacks abroad and has advocated and has
been involved in bombings and sabotage" and urged that
the application be denied. Posada Carriles, in
addition to his participation in the CUBANA airliner
bombing, has publicly admitted his involvement in a
series of bombings in Havana in 1997, and was arrested
in Panama in 2000 for "endangering public safety"
because he was found with explosives in his
possession. He was planning to ignite the explosives
at a public gathering at the University of Panama in
order to kill visiting Cuban President Fidel Castro
and hundreds of others, mostly students in attendance.
Posada Carriles, "the Bin Laden of Latin America" is
today a free man in Miami. The U.S. government
violates its treaty obligations by refusing to
extradite him to Venezuela, where he is wanted on 73
counts of first-degree murder related to the CUBANA
airliner. George W. Bush harbors terrorists. If we
accept his statements about harboring, feeding and
housing terrorists, he is as guilty of terrorism as
are Posada and Bosch.
Not only do we harbor terrorists, we severely punish
those who attempt to thwart their activities. The case
of the Cuban Five has been practically censored in
America's corporate media, but is well-known
internationally. For more than 40 years, Florida-based
anti-Castro organizations have engaged in terrorist
activities on the island, causing the deaths of more
than 3,000 Cubans. Recently, as Cuba has tried to
revitalize its tourist sector in the decade of the
1990s, terrorists including Posada bombed hotels and
tourist buses in an attempt to discourage tourism in
Cuba. One Italian tourist was killed when a bomb went
off in Havana's Copacabana Hotel. Authorities were
able to deactivate a bomb in Havana's international
airport terminal. In response, five Cubans went
toFlorida for the purpose of infiltratingterrorist
groups in order to warn Cuban authorities of imminent
attacks. The five Cubans:Frnando Gonzalez, Rene
Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, and
Ramon Laban~ino, were arrested in Miami in September
of 1998 and held in solitary confinement for
seventeen months while waiting for their trial to
commence in November 2000. They were charged with
committing espionage against the government of the
United States. The charges were absurd because the
prosecutor had no evidence of any attempt by the five
to find state secrets of the U.S. They were, by their
admission, attempting to monitor the actions of
U.S.-based terrorist groups. Unfortunately, there was
no possibility of receiving a fair trial in Miami. The
defense five times asked for and was refused a change
of venue. The five were convicted and received
sentences ranging from two lifetimes to fifteen years.
In August 2005 a three judge panel of the circuit
court in Atlanta reversed the sentences, stating that
the five did not receive a fair trial, their
constitutional rights were violated, and ordered a new
trial for the Cubans outside of Miami. However, in a
very unusual procedure, U.S. Attorney General Alberto
"I have no recollection" Gonzalez intervened and
pressured the 11th Circuit Court to reverse the
decision of its 3-judge panel.
While appeals continue, the five linger in separate
maximum security prisons, even though they never
possessed weapons while on U.S. soil. The United
Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has
called on the U.S. government to remedy the situation.
There are international protests against the
incarceration of the five. In the bizarro world of U.S
Cuba policy, we posture that we're against terror
while we support it, and we savagely punish those who
try to stop it.
>
The U.S. began its economic embargo of Cuba in 1960
under the Eisenhower administration. It has been
repeatedly condemned in the United Nations and
practically every other international forum. It has
now been more than forty-five years since the U.S.
began its economic warfare and policy of unremitting
hostility against Cuba because of its "succesful
defiance...of U.S. hegemony in Latin America."
While the U.S. government has hoped to isolate Cuba
from the rest of Latin America, Cuba today has more
friends than ever in Latin America, and the U.S. is
virtually isolated in its insistence on maintaining
the economic blockade against Cuba. Moreover, in
perhaps his final victory, Fidel Castro leaves power
on his own terms, having outlasted the enmity of ten
U.S. presidents, at a time when U.S. credibility in
Latin America and throughout the world is at an
all-time low.
In conclusion, rather than imploding in the absence of
Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolution has shown it can
survive and initiate a process of change and reform in
order to renovate its socialist model. Cuba will not
move toward the failed and discredited "neoliberal"
model with the bayonets of American soldiers of
occupation to seal the deal, as in the fantasy of Bush
and his coterie of neocons. No matter how seriously
the U.S. tries to penetrate Cuba with commercial
saturation and health-threatening junk food on every
corner, Cubans will resist any path they have not
chosen themselves.
For the first time in modern history, Cuba does not
depend on a preferred partner as it did on Spain, the
United States, and the Soviet Union. Finally
independent, Cuba has joined in the broad offensive
against Latin America's catastrophic experiment in
neoliberalism. Its post-Castro leadership will be
unfaltering in maintaining Cuba's independence and
national sovereignty, in other words, keeping the
island from returning to economic and political
dependence on the United States, despite the predatory
dreams of Miami real estate tycoons and Batista
mafiosos.
When he heard of Bush's "Cuba transition plans", Jose
Miguel Insulza, head of the Organization of American
States rebuked Bush, saying, "Cuba is not your
country, and there is no transition." While there IS
a transition underway in Cuba, it is a transition in
which Cubans will draw on their own resources and
remarkable ingenuity in forging their own path, in the
spirit of Jose Marti.
By: Jeffrey
Thanks for reading the crap Jeffrey typed.
