Latin America
Related: About this forumThe Best Way to Support Cubans Is to End the US Blockade
BY
AVIVA CHOMSKY
The Lefts approach to Cuba should be simple: oppose US attempts to devastate the countrys economy through the blockade.
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. 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. That unrest in Latin America rarely merited notice in the US news media until it happened in Cuba.
. . .
A Legacy of US Subversion
After the July 26, 1959, revolutionary victory in Cuba, US officials pondered how to respond. Could they control this revolution in the interests of US corporations, as they managed to do in Bolivia in 1954? They worried especially about the larger impacts of a successful revolution. 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. We should decide if we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed. Another, a few months later, warned that our attitude to date [could] 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.
They evinced much less concern for the Cuban people, who, the US ambassador at the time said, appeared united in idolizing the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. This is one-man rule with full approval of masses, the ambassador concluded. 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.
One tool was the embargo. The goal, according to a State Department briefing paper, was to undermine Cubas economy, to promote internal dissension; erode its internal political support . . . [and] 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 . . . [to deny] 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 US policy, and it has been repeatedly strengthened and tightened.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/cuba-protests-embargo-american-media-biden
Tomconroy
(7,611 posts)TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)start opening trade?
Biden's got a lot on his plate, but it should be on the list.
Tomconroy
(7,611 posts)Was made into a law by the Republicans back in the 1980s I think..Obama couldn't formally recognize Cuba diplomatically.
riverbendviewgal
(4,254 posts)I had been going for cuban visits many winters but have not since having a quadruple bypass surgery late in 2017. Then covid came. My last cuban visit i was in Havana and there was a cruise ship docked from the usa.
Alas trump ruined what Obama was starting to do.
It is a beautiful country. The people are wonderful.
Stop the boycott.
I am Canadian. And thankful my quadruple bypass cost me nothing
sinkingfeeling
(51,490 posts)Obama's play book and ask Congress to lift the embargo.