Why
The US Fears Cuba
By
Seumas Milne
Guardian,
UK
01 August, 2003
Fifty
years after Fidel Castro and his followers launched the Cuban revolution
with an abortive attack on the dictator Batista's Moncada barracks,
Cuba's critics are already writing its obituaries. Echoing President
Bush's dismissal of Cuban-style socialism as a "relic", the
Miami Herald pronounced the revolution "dead in the water"
at the weekend. The Telegraph called the island "the lost cause
that is Cuba", while the Independent on Sunday thought the Cuban
dream "as old and fatigued as Fidel himself" and a BBC reporter
claimed that, by embracing tourism, "the revolution has simply
replaced one elite with another".
Bush is, of course,
only the latest of 10 successive US presidents who have openly sought
to overthrow the Cuban government and Batista's heirs in Florida have
long plotted a triumphant return to reclaim their farms, factories and
bordellos - closed or expropriated by Castro, Che Guevara and their
supporters after they came to power in 1959. But international hostility
towards the Cuban regime has increased sharply since April, when it
launched its harshest crackdown on the US-backed opposition for decades,
handing out long jail sentences to 75 activists for accepting money
from a foreign power and executing three ferry hijackers.
The repression,
which followed 18 months of heightened tension between the US and Cuba,
shocked many supporters of Cuba around the world and left the Castro
regime more isolated than it has been since the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Egged on by Britain and the rightwing governments of Italy and
Spain, the EU has now used the jailings to reverse its policy of constructive
engagement and fall in behind the US neo-conservative line, imposing
diplomatic sanctions, increasing support for the opposition and blocking
a new trade agreement.
But it's not hard
to discover the origins of this dangerous standoff, which follows a
period in which Amnesty International had noted Cuba's "more open
and permissive approach" towards dissent. In the aftermath of September
11, the Bush administration - whose election depended on the votes of
hardline Cuban exiles in Florida - singled out Cuba for membership of
a second-tier axis of evil. The Caribbean island, US under-secretary
of state John Bolton insisted menacingly, was a safe haven for terrorists,
was researching biological weapons and had dual-use technology it could
pass to other "rogue states". He was backed by Bush, who declared
that the 40-year-old US trade embargo against Cuba would not be lifted
until there were both multi-party elections and free market reforms,
while Cuba was branded a threat to US security, overturning the Clinton
administration's assessment.
Into this growing
confrontation stepped James Cason as the new chief US diplomat in Havana,
with a brief to boost support for Cuba's opposition groups. The US's
huge quasi-embassy mainly provided equipment and facilities, but millions
of dollars of US government aid also appears to have been channeled
to the dissidents through Miami-based exile groups. The final trigger
for Castro's clampdown was a string of US-indulged plane and ferry hijackings
in April, against a background of US warnings about the threat to its
security and Cuban fears of military intervention in the event of a
mass exodus from Cuba - a scenario long favored by Miami exiles.
Some have concluded
that a paranoid Castro walked into a trap laid by Bush. After 44 years
of economic siege, mercenary invasion, assassination attempts, terrorist
attacks and biological warfare from their northern neighbor, it might
be thought the Cuban leadership had some reason to feel paranoid. But
perhaps significantly, the US has in the past few weeks adopted a more
cooperative stance, returning 15 hijackers to Cuba and warning Cubans
that they should only come to the US through "existing legal channels",
which allow around 20,000 visas a year.
And however grim
the Cuban crackdown, it beggars belief that the denunciations have been
led by the US and its closest European allies in the "war on terror".
Not only has the US sentenced five Cubans to between 15 years and life
for trying to track anti-Cuban, Miami-based terrorist groups and carried
out over 70 executions of its own in the past year, but (along with
Britain) supports other states, in the Middle East and Central Asia
for example, which have thousands of political prisoners and carry out
routine torture and executions. And, of course, the worst human rights
abuses on the island of Cuba are not carried under Castro's aegis at
all, but in the Guantanamo base occupied against Cuba's will, where
the US has interned 600 prisoners without charge for 18 months, who
it now plans to try in secret and possibly execute - without even the
legal rights afforded to Cuba's jailed oppositionists.
Which only goes
to reinforce what has long been obvious: that US hostility to Cuba does
not stem from the regime's human rights failings, but its social and
political successes and the challenge its unyielding independence offers
to other US and western satellite states. Saddled with a siege economy
and a wartime political culture for more than 40 years, Cuba has achieved
first world health and education standards in a third world country,
its infant mortality and literacy rates now rivaling or outstripping
those of the US, its class sizes a third smaller than in Britain - while
next door, in the US-backed "democracy" of Haiti, half the
population is unable to read and infant mortality is over 10 times higher.
Those, too, are human rights, recognized by the UN declaration and European
convention. Despite the catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet support more
than a decade ago and the social damage wrought by dollarization and
mass tourism, Cuba has developed biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries
acknowledged by the US to be the most advanced in Latin America. Meanwhile,
it has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93 third world countries
(currently there are 1,000 working in Venezuela's slums) and given a
free university education to 1,000 third world students a year. How
much of that would survive a takeover by the Miami-backed opposition?
The historical importance
of Cuba's struggle for social justice and sovereignty and its creative
social mobilization will continue to echo beyond its time and place:
from the self-sacrificing internationalism of Che to the crucial role
played by Cuban troops in bringing an end to apartheid through the defeat
of South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988. But those relying
on the death of Castro (the "biological solution") to restore
Cuba swiftly to its traditional proprietors may be disappointed, while
the Iraq imbroglio may have checked the US neo-conservatives' enthusiasm
for military intervention against a far more popular regime in Cuba.
That suggests Cuba will have to expect yet more destabilization, further
complicating the defense of the social and political gains of the revolution
in the years to come. The greatest contribution those genuinely concerned
about human rights and democracy in Cuba can make is to help get the
US and its European friends off the Cubans' backs.
© Guardian
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