[NYTr] An Enduring Madness: US Cuba Policy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Op-Ed News - Nov 1, 2007
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__071101_an_enduring_madness.htm


An Enduring Madness

by Michael Roberts

Recently, the United Nations General Assembly voted in near unanimity
to lift the 47-year old United States blockade and embargo of Cuba even
as US president George Bush loudly rattled his jingoistic saber a
little louder in a chillingly militaristic and bellicose diatribe to a
hand-picked section of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami. Cuban Foreign
Minister Felipe Pérez Roque in his recent address to the UN said that
the near half a century embargo had damaged the Cuban economy at an
approximate cost of over $222 billion. He said that the economic
blockade represented a US attempt “to subdue the Cuban people through
starvation and disease.”

Perhaps the true harshness and outdated nature of this blockade/embargo
can be better explained by going back in history to the year 1960 and
the alarm that the United States government felt over the triumph of an
avowed socialist revolution right in its so-called “backyard.” When
Cuba aligned itself with the then Soviet Union, the Dwight Eisenhower
Administration in Washington, then engaged in the Cold War, was
determined that the Soviets would not get a foothold in the Western
Hemisphere – its sphere of national security interest.

The United States State Department presented a policy document to
Eisenhower that would spell out the aggressive, punitive and inhuman
methods that would be used against Cuba for all of 47 years. This
document, in its intrinsic form, has not been altered, deviated from or
discarded by successive American presidents since Eisenhower. Indeed,
under the Bush Administration the Eisenhower Document has been added
to, “improved” if you will, and tinkered with to the extent that the
end-product is a harsh, inhuman document that seeks to punish the
people of Cuba simply because they chose a different socio-economic and
political path to their development that Amwerica does not like.

True, many opponents and critics of the Cuban political system and its
leader, Fidel Castro, have argued that the political climate in Cuba is
one of a pervasive and enduring dictatorship. The United States and its
allies have branded Cuba with the “communist” brush that allows
successive Administrations to whip up the “red frenzy” at home by
throwing “Cuban-made red meat” to the most backward and rabid sections
of the American population.

Over the years the American propaganda machine has literally isolated
Cuba resulting in many Caribbean countries, for example,  treating it
as a giant red pariah. Indeed, the absurd stories about Cuba are
laughable today but found real believability in the region in the
1960s, 7os and even 80s. Stories like: nobody can own land in Cuba,
Castro kills old people, everybody has to cut sugarcane, Castro will
make you marry a donkey etc. helped to reinforce – in the absence of
valid, truthful counter-information – the picture of Castro as a
ruthless dictator and Cuba as a society gripped in fear and paranoia
with a population that is waiting for the American “Big Brother” to
rescue and save it.

So let us listen to the language of destabilization written by the
United States State Department on how to handle Cubathat was formulated
and implemented 47 years ago. It is a "Blue Print" for the
destabilization of nations, a playbook for subversion, that finds use
even today.  Here is what the documents said in part:

“There is no effective political opposition in Cuba...the only
predictable measure we have today to alienate internal support for the
Revolution is through disillusionment and desperation, based on
dissatisfaction and economic duress. Every possible means should be
undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. Money and
supplies must be denied to Cuba in order to decrease real wages, bring
about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of government.”

Today, a world ashamed of its enduring, loudly conspicuous silence on
this barbaric treatment of Cuba and Cubans is desperately trying to
make this dreadful wrong right. But the United States is a superpower
and with a neoconservative element in the Bush White House and an
Administration with a militaristic ideology there is very little that
the compassionate world community of humankind can do at this juncture
– except to keep hope alive.

In fact, the UN General Assembly vote came weeks after President Bush
went throwing red meat about to the Miami Cuban sharks and suggested
that Washington was now, in the light of Castro’s failing health,
stepping up its actions to force regime change in Cuba. The tone,
language and stance of President Bush were taken from the same playbook
used to justify his misadventure in Iraq and the harsh rhetoric now
directed against Iran. This is the 16th time that the United Nations
General Assembly has voted so unanimously on a nonbinding resolution.

With a tally of 184 to 4 this vote demonstrated that a number of
countries are now supporting what many see as “a criminal embargo.”
Predictably, the four who voted with the United States included Israel
that is paying back the United States for it blind, consistent and
unwavering vetoing of any and all UN resolutions – at the General
Assembly or the Security Council – that call for Israel to cease its
occupation of Palestinian lands and its aggression against the
Palestinian people.

 Two other South Pacific US “protectorates” – another name for colony –
Palau and the Marshall Islands -  also voted with the United States as
expected, while Micronesia (another former US colony) abstained and
Albania, El Salvador and Iraq did not vote.

In his address to the United Nations the Cuban Foreign Minister
detailed the damaging extent of the effects of the embargo and how
things has escalated and intensified under the Bush Administration.
Perez Roque told the UN General Assembly that President Bush’s new
measures “bordered on madness” and that it was a significant departure
from that of the 10 previous United States presidents who maintained
the embargo.

>From penalizing churches doing humanitarian work to economic pressures
on businesses that continue to do business with Cuba, to harsher travel
restrictions, and limitations on remittances from families in the US to
relatives and parents in Cuba, the embargo is now making life very
difficult for ordinary Cubans.

“Cuban children have been particularly harmed by the blockade that
President Bush has promised to strengthen,” said the Cuban foreign
minister. He pointed out that in response to the US government’s
threats, the American pharmaceutical company, Abbot, had cut off
supplies of the anesthetic Sevorane, which is the best for use in
operations on children, forcing Cuban hospitals to use inferior
substitutes. Similarly, the US company Saint-Jude, which supplied
pacemakers for children suffering from arrhythmia, was compelled to end
its exports under pressure from the US Office for Foreign Assets
Control, which enforces the blockade.

And the US government has not stopped there. No American company can
provide Internet service to Cuba and the Administration in Washington
has ordered United States-based hotel chains, like Holiday Inn, to
cancel contracts with Cuban musicians working at these hotels around
the world. Under new Bush Administration rules Americans wanting to
visit Cuba as tourists or a Cuban resident in the US wanting to visit a
sick relative on the island now risks penalties as severe as a
US$250,000 fine or up to 10 years in prison.

More ominous, said Cuba’s Foreign Minister, is the fact over the past
year at least 30 countries have been sanctioned by Washington. Among
the examples he cited were the freezing of the assets of the
Netherlands Caribbean Bank and the barring of US citizens and companies
from doing business with the bank because of its Cuban ties and the
fining of the British company PSL Energy Services $164,000 for
exporting oil industry equipment to the island. He also listed several
companies that were barred from exporting products to Cuba after being
taken over by US-based multinationals or because the products included
as little as 10 percent American components.

Long-shot Democratic Presidential candidate, Rep. Denis Kucinich of
Ohio said from the campaign trail late last week, "The United States'
Cuba policy is a failure. The unilateral embargo must be lifted. The
persistently hostile and aggressive rhetoric must cease. We must lift
not only the trade embargo. We must also lift the travel ban. We must
cooperate with Cuba on issues of national security."

Part of the Bush policies that Mr. Kucinich was talking about includes
the following:

    * Strictly enforcing (via the Department of Homeland Security) an
existing US law forbidding Americans from traveling to Cuba for
pleasure.

    * Cracking down on illegal money transfers.

    * Imposing controls of shipments to the island.

    * Aggressive campaign to inform Cubans of safer routes to reach the
United States.

    * Increasing the number of Cuban immigrants in the US.

    * More US radio, television, satellite and internet broadcasts to
break the "information embargo" Mr. Castro had imposed on his people. 

While some supporters of the embargo argue that it denies Fidel
Castro’s government much-needed foreign currency and that it was
necessary in the era of the Cold War, I reject this rigid, reactionary
thinking by saying that the Cold War ended in 1991 and even at its
height the embargo did not work for a myriad of reasons.

And today any cold-sober analysis of the effects of the embargo would
reveal that it has failed abysmally and remains one of the most
illogical pieces of American foreign policy ever concieved and enacted
and is a hold-over relic of the Cold War past. Indeed, the embargo’s
long-term effects has been to punish the people of Cuba, deny Cubans
access to American food products and medical supplies, and created
incredible hardships for ordinary poor Cubans.

 By prohibiting free trade between American and Cuban businesses
successive US Administrations have effectively locked themselves out of
a potentially lucrative market right  on its doorstep or backyard. Cuba
still remains a poor Third World nation of 11 million struggling people
- but a large untapped market for goods and services - that poses no
threat to the great, big United States. So why continue this senseless
embargo?

Finally, the United States has become the very thing that it despised
and hated: by persisting in maintaining this inhumane embargo,
restricting Americans’ right to travel and do business with a country
that never attacked or harmed it, America now resembles the former
Soviet Union that in its heyday was criticized by the United States for
doing the very same things that it is doing today.


[MICHAEL D. ROBERTS is a top Political Strategist and  Business,
Management and Communications Specialists in New York City’s Black
community. He is an experienced writer whose specialty is
socio-political and economic analysis and local community relations. He
has covered the United Nations, the Caribbean and Africa in a career
that spans over 32 years in journalism. As Editor of New York CARIB
NEWS, a position that he’s held since 1990, he is in a unique position
to have his hands on the pulse of the over 800,000 Caribbean-American
community in Brooklyn, and the over 2.5 million members resident in the
wider New York State community.]