seek to create conditions conducive to incipient rebellion.” The “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support,” the State Department offered, “is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship…Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba… money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” While internal documents from recent administrations have not been declassified, the embargo continues to stand as a pillar of U.S. The goal, according to a State Department briefing paper, was to undermine Cuba’s economy, to “promote internal dissension erode its internal political support. Another, while committing the United States to establishing a “successor government” in Cuba, begrudgingly acknowledged “the impact that real honesty, especially at the working level, has made on the people” and “the fact that a great bulk of the Cubans…have awakened enthusiastically to the need for social and economic reform.” “This is one man rule with full approval of ‘masses’,” the ambassador concluded. ambassador at the time said “appeared united in idolizing” the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. They evinced much less concern for “the Cuban people” who, the U.S. We should decide if we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed” while another, a few months later, warned that “our attitude to date be considered a sign of weakness and thus give encouragement to communist-nationalist elements elsewhere in Latin America who are trying to advance programs similar to those of Castro.” One State Department official wrote that “there are indications that if the Cuban revolution is successful, other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model. corporations, as they managed to do in Bolivia in 1954? They worried especially about the larger impacts of a successful revolution. Could they control this revolution in the interests of U.S. But I was shocked to see NACLA now joining the chorus.Īfter the Jrevolutionary victory in Cuba, U.S. Regarding Latin American revolutions, liberal politicians and pundits have fallen right in line with the far Right and Donald Trump, whose administration famously dubbed Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba a “troika of tyranny” and vowed to “end the glamorization of socialism and communism.” The New York Times obediently chimed in with Trump at the time, denouncing Bernie Sanders for his visit to Nicaragua in 1985. voices, the few exceptions being academics who actually know something about Cuba like Louis Pérez and William Leogrande. It’s not surprising that President Biden, who had little to say about the dozens killed and hundreds injured by police during the protests in Colombia, other than to express his backing for Colombia’s right-wing President Iván Duque, gushed repeatedly about his support for Cuban protesters, with the obligatory denunciation of “Cuba’s authoritarian regime.”īiden’s words were mirrored across the entire spectrum of mainstream U.S. And the United States has actively promoted anti-government activity in Cuba with words, money, and arms. Cubans were protesting a government that the United States has officially declared an enemy and has been actively trying to overturn for over 60 years. In some ways the protests in Cuba were similar to those elsewhere in the region. Those in Latin America rarely merited notice in the U.S. Protests against scarcity, structural violence, police brutality, and corruption erupted everywhere from the United States to Colombia, Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala, Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina, just to mention a few. Covid-19 has brought economic and social crises to much of the world, and nowhere more than the Third World where poor infrastructure, poverty, resource export dependence, inequality, and lack of accountability are endemic.
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