5 Ways Paid Hacks of the Cuban-American Exile Lobby Try to Mislead Us About Cuba
AUGUST 13, 2021
BY PETER BOLTON
In the month that has now passed since protests erupted across Cuba, much media commentary has focused on how President Biden would react. Earlier this year Biden’s press secretary had said that “a Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” However, the Biden administration is now clearly shifting policy, but not in the direction that Cubans in Cuba and US progressives had been hoping. On August 10, The New York Times published an article titled Biden Ramps Up Pressure on Cuba, Abandoning Obama’s Approach. The article states that, far from pivoting back to the Obama-era normalization process, “Mr. Biden is taking an even harder line on Cuba than his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, who tightened restrictions on travel and financial transactions.”
Throughout this time corporate media accounts have been loyally parroting Washington’s line that the protesters were primarily motivated by the “authoritarianism” of the Cuban “regime.” As was the case in the run up the Iraq War, the purpose of these reports is to manufacture consent for Washington’s coercive foreign policy and obscure its self-serving and hypocritical agenda. As would be expected, these reports also ignore growing evidence suggesting that the protests were in part orchestrated by Washington as part of its ongoing plan destabilize the country and, in turn, bring about regime change. In a competitive field, one essay in particular stands out for its shamelessly tendentious propagandizing. Published at the online journal The Conversation, the article is condescendingly titled 5 ways Americans often misunderstand Cuba, from Fidel Castro’s rise to the Cuban American vote.
In a bizarre inversion of reality, the article’s author, one Caroline McCulloch, claims that the US public has been fed not an overwhelmingly pro-Washington narrative for the last six decades, but rather a steady diet of pro-revolutionary, anti-imperialist talking points. Fortunately, McCulloch has been sent from the heavens to correct these delusions that supposedly possess the minds of the zombified, Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing masses of North America. McCulloch’s article purports to address “five common areas of confusion about Cuba, Cuban Americans and the U.S.-Cuba relationship.”
The first of the “myths” that she wishes to debunk is about Cuban Revolution itself. She states: “The revolution was a nationalist revolution for most Cubans… not a communist one. When Castro installed a socialist economy and a one-party political system, many fellow revolutionaries felt betrayed.” True enough, the disparate parts of the revolution were not consolidated into the Cuban Communist Party until 1965, a full six years after the multi-tendency 26th of July Movement toppled the US-backed Batista dictatorship. What McCulloch leaves out, however, is that Cuba immediately found itself under foreign attack from the Western Hemisphere’s hegemon, the US. In the final months of the Eisenhower administration, Washington imposed a trade embargo that since then has largely isolated Cuba from the global economy. In 1962, the Kennedy administration then launched the CIA-orchestrated Bay of Pigs invasion, which had a similar, if not worse, effect on the island than the 9/11 attacks had on the US.
In the midst of this dire situation, a dialectical relationship emerged in the aftermath of Batista’s toppling between the US and liberal bourgeois factions within Cuba on the one hand, and revolutionaries on the other. This relationship ultimately had the effect of pushing the revolution to the left out of necessity, rather than as a cynical attempt by communists to manipulate the post-Batista era to their liking. Before 1959, the majority of Cuba’s economy was controlled by US corporate interests. And Batista’s government was backed by the US because it obediently facilitated this process. The post-Batista government was initially dominated by liberal sectors of the Cuban bourgeoisie. But as their benefactors in corporate America began to pull out, they were increasingly eclipsed by more radical factions who wanted to move transition Cuba toward socialism. As the government began bringing the economy into public ownership, large sections of the bourgeoisie who had overseen US economic imperialism began to flee abroad. This sudden loss of technical expertise along with the embargo translated into a society that was increasingly both in crisis and under siege. This situation meant that revolutionary leaders needed to reorganize society along more collectivist lines in order to maintain national sovereignty and provide for the common good in the face of extreme US hostility.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/13/5-ways-paid-hacks-of-the-cuban-american-exile-lobby-try-to-mislead-us-about-cuba/
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They helped elect Trump.
