Bush
Threatens Escalation Of Aggression Against Cuba
By Bill Van Auken
25 October, 2007
WSWS.org
When it comes to profaning the
name of freedom, there have been few speeches given anywhere that could
seriously compete with the diatribe on Cuba that President George W.
Bush delivered at the State Department Wednesday.
Bush used the word 25 times
in a brief address that called for the continued tightening of the 47-year-old
US economic blockade of Cuba and implicitly promoted violent upheavals,
a possible military coup and stepped-up US aggression against the island
nation.
The speech was timed to fall
between Cuba’s recent municipal elections—the first held
since the ailing Fidel Castro relinquished the reins of power—and
next week’s vote in the United General Assembly on a resolution
condemning the trade embargo that the US has employed in an attempt
to strangle Cuba’s economy since shortly after the 1959 revolution.
A similar resolution was passed by a vote of 183 to 4 last year, and
this time Washington can expect to be similarly humiliated.
Once again Bush demonized
the Cuban regime as one that has “denied their citizens basic
rights,” “bought generations of misery,” and “offered
Cubans rat-infested prisons and a police state.” Not content with
these denunciations, Bush assured his audience of State Department flunkies
and members of the Miami-based, right-wing Cuban exile mafia: “Cuba’s
regime no doubt has other horrors still unknown to the rest of the world.
Once revealed, they will shock the conscience of humanity.”
The immediate question raised
by the US president’s speech is: who the hell is he to lecture
anyone about democracy, freedom and human rights? If anything has “shocked
the conscience of humanity” in the present period, it is an American
president who came to power through the fraudulent overturning of an
election, has waged unprovoked wars of aggression—killing over
a million people—rejected the most fundamental democratic rights,
and defended the use of torture.
As for prisons in Cuba where
innocent people are held without charges and subjected to brutality,
Bush should certainly know whereof he speaks, as he has run one for
nearly six years at Guantánamo Bay.
Deriding Cuba’s economy,
Bush declared, “Housing for many ordinary Cubans is in very poor
condition, while the ruling class lives in mansions.” Apparently,
this is the only country in the world where the American president has
been able to detect the existence of a “ruling class,” as
he presides over an American economy that has produced what is arguably
the greatest polarization between wealth and poverty in the world.
The thrust of Bush’s
message, however, was one of violence. This is hardly a new element
in US-Cuban relations, which has seen the abortive CIA-organized Bay
of Pigs invasion of 1961, several hundred assassination attempts against
Castro and innumerable terrorist attacks. The latter include the murder
of 73 people in the 1976 bombing of a civilian aircraft by Luis Posada
Carriles, the CIA-trained terrorist who is now being harbored by the
Bush administration in violation of extradition treaties with Venezuela,
where he is wanted for trial.
Bush’s rhetoric invoked
armed uprisings and violent repression. “The operative word in
our future dealings with Cuba is not ‘stability,’”
he said. “The operative word is ‘freedom,’”
which in his Orwellian usage means bringing the island back under US
domination by force.
He addressed himself directly
to the Cuban military and security forces, declaring: “You’ve
got to make a choice. Will you defend a disgraced and dying order by
using force against your own people? Or will you embrace your people’s
desire for change?”
For more than a year, since
Fidel Castro formally relinquished power to a provisional government
headed by his brother Raul Castro, Washington and the right-wing exile
groups in Miami have been envisioning upheavals and the massive flight
of exiles, neither of which have materialized. This political reality
lent an air of desperation and seemingly irrational provocation to Bush’s
speech.
Pointing towards Washington’s
real aims, Bush announced his intention to set up an “international
multibillion-dollar Freedom Fund for Cuba” to “help the
Cuban people rebuild their economy and make the transition to democracy.”
The fund, he said, would be used to give loans to “Cuban entrepreneurs.”
A precondition for this fund,
he added, was the “restoration of ... basic freedoms.” Principal
among them was that the Cuban government end its “stranglehold
on private economic activity.”
The “restoration”
that Washington seeks is the US semi-colonial domination of Cuba and
its economy. It wants a return to the conditions that existed prior
to the 1959 revolution, when three-quarters of the country’s arable
land as well as the lion’s share of its industry and banking were
all in American hands.
The growing indications that
Cuba may be sitting on significant offshore oil reserves no doubt contribute
to Washington’s desires to restore the country to what it once
referred to as its “backyard.”
American capitalism’s
economic rivals are hardly likely to be lining up to contribute to Bush’s
proposed restoration fund. Europe, China, Canada and other countries
have all concluded major trade and investment deals with Cuba—despite
US attempts to impose punitive sanctions on foreign companies doing
business there.
It is this fact—in
addition to the immensely disproportionate role played by the anti-Castro
Cuban exile groups in American politics—that underlies the Bush
administration’s opposition to any form of gradual political transition
in Cuba and its support for a violent counterrevolution. It sees in
such an upheaval a means of abrogating contracts and economic relations
established between Havana and other major capitalist powers and restoring
unchallenged American hegemony over the island.
Cuba’s foreign minister,
Felipe Perez Roque, described Bush’s speech as “a call to
violence” and an “irresponsible act” that indicated
the American president’s “level of frustration, of desperation
and of personal hatred toward Cuba.” He said that the Cuban people
opposed the restoration of US domination and that the predictions of
a US-backed popular revolt were a “fantasy” and “politically
impossible.”
On the eve of the speech,
with its general line already all too predictable, Fidel Castro, 81,
published his own short essay entitled “Bush, hunger and death.”
Castro warned that Bush would
“announce that he is adopting new measures to speed up the ‘period
of transition’ in our country, which means the reconquest of Cuba
by force.”
He charged that the US president
was “threatening humanity with a third world war, which this time
would be with atomic weapons.”
The question posed by Bush’s
provocative speech is whether, as part of this war, the administration
in Washington is preparing to launch a “preemptive” attack
on Cuba.
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