By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on November 10, 2021
Jake Sullivan
On November 7, 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was questioned on a CNN program about his boss’s delay in fulfilling campaign promises regarding relations with Cuba.
Sullivan’s literal response was that “on Cuba, things changed a bit this year. In July, we saw substantial protests, the most significant in a long time. And we saw brutal repression by the government that continues to this day, as some of those protesters continue to be sentenced.”
These words deserve some comment. The first is that the new administration did absolutely nothing about what was announced during the election campaign between January, when it took office, and July, when what he calls “substantial protests” took place. Biden did not even repeal those Trump measures that were implemented in violation of all the sacrosanct rules of interagency consultation, which must be followed before taking any step in foreign policy.
They could not even “rectify” Mike Pompeo’s illegal act of reinstating Cuba on the list of countries that allegedly sponsor terrorism. An act that was committed with escalation, under cover of night and with malice aforethought.
What happened in July, which Sullivan considers “significant,” is directly related to something called the blockade, which is genocidal in nature and, in lethal combination with the spread of COVID-19, would have wiped any nation off the map. For much less than that, the United States had a 2020 of social upheavals that shook the country from one end to the other, and on January 6, 2021, extremes were experienced in Washington, D.C., the full magnitude of which are yet to be understood.
Mr. Sullivan deliberately used (it is part of the script) the adjective “brutal” to describe the way in which law enforcement and the general public reacted to the events and tried to give an unreal sense of the duration of what happened by saying “to this day.”
It is striking that this is the same official who has prepared the agendas for the President and the Secretary of State on recent visits to countries in Latin America that are living in a quasi-permanent state of siege or emergency, where there are disappearances, mass graves and false positives, where journalists and social leaders are murdered, where it is difficult to differentiate between the means used by the police and those used by the army, where there is more corruption than drinking water. But there, Sullivan has been careful not to use the adjective “brutal.”
Mr. Sullivan, perhaps unintentionally, has made a triumphant entry into the long list of manufacturers of arguments to give a certain veil of justification to US policy against Cuba. It must be said that this is an old industry with notable products, but he already has his place in a story that began 62 years ago.
When Fidel Castro emerged from a personal meeting with then-Vice President Richard Nixon in April 1959, his fate was sealed. The leader of the Cuban Revolution had traveled to the US capital, not to seek enemies, but to explain why the Cuban people had mobilized against the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista. But the leader of the undisputed world power was struck by the guerrilla commander’s strong sense of dignity and, above all, by the fact that he asked for absolutely nothing in return: no scholarships, no loans, no recognition. Nixon wrote in his report on the conversation that, somehow, they had to “get rid” of this new type of Third World leader.
In reality, the intentions to physically eliminate Fidel predated this meeting and were never publicly discussed.
But with the emergence of a new Cuban state that preached health and education for all, attacked differences and racist manifestations, and restructured the pyramid of property and wealth distribution, the Pan-American domination scheme that the United States had designed for the Western Hemisphere felt a tremor. Being different in this part of the world, stepping outside Washington’s design, was a crime with serious consequences.
To demonize the Cuban Revolution, the United States would use all its tools, both to convince Cubans themselves that the new process was harmful and to create rejection among Americans and other governments and peoples around the world.
Someday, one or more authors will write an accurate document and organize all the arguments fabricated by US federal agencies to justify actions against Cuba, but it would not be wrong to mention among the first of these the nationalization of foreign companies based in Cuba.
It was practically impossible for the Cuban Revolution to change the existing state of affairs in the country without redistributing the wealth generated on the island, which was dominated by large landowners and transnational corporations from the US and other powers. This was even more so when those companies began to conspire and attempt to undermine the changes that were being implemented.
The revolutionary government, acting within the law, provided compensation schemes for the companies and countries that were nationalized, which were scrupulously fulfilled, except in the case of the United States, which acted against the funds (sugar quota) that would generate the income that would allow for compensation.
The alleged impact on the United States of the nationalization process in Cuba has since been part of the scaffolding of arguments used to justify the blockade policy, but it is essentially fabricated. Its constant repetition has even led a significant number of Cuban emigrants to adopt this narrative to justify their own decision to leave the country. If so many former landowners and big business owners actually lived in South Florida, Cuba would be the size of Australia, or larger.
As the United States gradually closed off economic options for Cuba and the latter sought alternatives in other destinations, ideological condemnations began to appear, questioning Cuba’s rapprochement with “extra-continental” nations such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. These associations are expressly cited in John Kennedy’s Presidential Directive 3447 declaring the blockade of Cuba, which remains in place today, despite the fact that the USSR ceased to exist 30 years ago and China has been the United States’ main trading partner for the last two decades.
Fear of “communist influence” was the driving force behind Operation Peter Pan, which saw 14,000 unaccompanied minors emigrate to the United States, and the political proselytism and armed actions of the “rebels” of the Escambray and other mountainous areas of the island, which claimed the lives of more than 600 Cubans in the 1960s.
After the military defeat at Playa Girón and the negotiated solution to the October Crisis, the White House put all its efforts into isolating Cuba from the governments of Latin American and Caribbean countries. While most of them broke diplomatic relations with Havana, links with progressive political forces throughout the region multiplied. Leaders and grassroots members of various organizations came to the island to learn how the poor could shape their own destinies in a tropical setting. Each returned to their place of origin with their own idea of how to replicate the Cuban experience according to the characteristics of their nation. At the time, the White House called this the “export of the Revolution,” which had a hint of illegality for those accustomed to the “imposition of capitalism.”
For the planners at the Pentagon and the CIA, the Sandinista Revolution, the popular struggles in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the victory of the Nueva Joya movement in Grenada could not be explained by people growing tired of being exploited or aspiring to a better world, but rather by “the evil influence of Cuba.”
During all the years when the “Cuban military presence in Africa” was the State Department’s slogan for trying to isolate Cuba, that same agency had no qualms about developing the theory of “constructive engagement” with the Apartheid authorities and keeping Nelson Mandela on the list of terrorists banned from the “land of the free.” When the South African leader became a beacon of freedom for the entire world, Washington tried to change the script and even questioned his relations with Havana. It still hurts some that the definitive peace for the South-West African region was signed in the heart of Manhattan in the presence, among others, of the victorious Cuban representatives in full dress uniform and with all their decorations.
When the Soviet Union and the socialist camp disappeared, a collective “now yes” was heard in English, as from Harvard to Oxford all prospective studies indicated that Cuba could not stand on its own two feet. Instead of building bridges, Washington set out (as it is doing now) to tighten the blockade with the approval of the so-called Torricelli Act.
It was obvious that the loss of 85% of foreign trade and a 35% reduction in GDP in Cuba would have social consequences, which were expressed, among other things, in an increase in the potential for Cuban emigration.
By 1995, as recognition of Cuba’s heroism in resisting and overcoming unique conditions grew, a draft of what would later become known as the Helms-Burton Act began to circulate in the US Congress. Its sponsors found it increasingly difficult to convince others that Cuba was a “danger.” But then came the provocation of February 24, 1996, and the debate died down, the atmosphere became tense, and the Cuban issue once again became toxic.
From 1998 onwards, new winds began to blow in Latin America with the rise to power of the Bolivarian Revolution, which continued with the election of leaders such as Rafael Correa, Nestor Kirchner, Luis Ignacio da Silva, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, and Pepe Mujica, with the consolidation of CARICOM as an integration entity and, finally, with the extinction of the Rio Group and the creation of CELAC.
Washington’s argument factory was having some quality issues at the time in producing new reasons to isolate Cuba, to the point that in 2009 the OAS reversed the agreement suspending the island’s rights. In other words, Pan-Americanism recognized a mistake that had been made more than 40 years earlier.
The most recent history is better known. But it is worth noting that even under the Obama presidency, reasons were fabricated to postpone changes in relations with Cuba. For five years, the name of a USAID “contractor” who came to the island to help subvert the internal order with federal money became headline news and a barrier to bilateral rapprochement, which simply vanished when the political will to move forward was expressed. And that would be one of the great lessons of the moment: when there is a willingness at the highest levels of the US executive branch to take steps in foreign policy (in one direction or another), the arguments that had previously been used to avoid doing so fade into the background and the excuse factory ceases production.
With the regression symbolized by the Trump brand, we returned to the state of affairs we know best. But it is still useful to dig into two of the most widely publicized arguments used to attack Cuba before Sullivan’s contribution.
Coinciding precisely with the election of the real estate magnate (more pretension than reality), who would have the mission of destroying everything bearing the signature of the first African-American president of the United States, a covert CIA officer in Havana reported from his bed symptoms that quickly spread to other officers of similar origin. Within a few weeks, State Department officials incorporated the term “sonic attacks” into their daily jargon, until it was “leaked” to the press in mid-2017. The narrative, without any evidence, developed exponentially, causing envy in television series such as “Game of Thrones” and diverting attention from conclaves dedicated to the rigorous study of UFOs.
Despite all the contradictions in the drama and the script, the symptoms that were first allegedly caused by the use of sounds and then by microwaves gave substance to a policy that not only froze actions and cooperation in countless areas of the bilateral relationship with Cuba, but also served as the basis for justifying a large part of the 243 measures to strengthen the blockade against Cuba implemented by the Executive.
With the same speed with which John Bolton arrived at the chair (let’s hope it’s not the same one) that Sullivan occupies today, at the end of 2018, another skeleton appeared in the closet of arguments against Cuba. Overnight, the “presence of 20,000 Cuban military personnel in Venezuela” was reported. At a time when Bolton and another character from the beyond (Elliott Abrams) had to explain to their bosses and the public that the government of President Nicolás Maduro remained in power despite the guarimbas, the theft of funds, attempts on his life, and other Machiavellian plans, it was necessary to resort to a patronymic that had been demonized for years before a public willing to believe such “reason.” The “Cubans were behind everything that moves in Caracas,” regardless of the fierce resistance of the Venezuelan people or the capacity of their leaders.
But in all fairness, we must acknowledge that Biden’s team, while approaching the issue of “unidentified health incidents” with some reserve and without knowing how to handle it, has not dared to revisit the story of the “20,000 Cuban troops in Venezuela” while they conspire around the still possible negotiation between the Venezuelan government and the opposition (organized or not).
This is a very quick summary of the great American tradition that Sullivan has just joined through the back door. In the age of labels, followers, and likes, it takes much less intellectual capacity to invent excuses and articulate campaigns. In fact, there are some who do so with just two thumbs, a group of gullible followers, and good connections among the leaders of digital platforms.
However, experience prevails: the more excuses, the less political will… and vice versa.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.
Source: Center for International Policy Research translation Resumen Latinoamericano -English