By Juana Carrasco Martín on January 22, 2024
protest at the White House calling to take Cuba off the List. photo: Bill Hackwell
The United States is rife with paradoxes and this is one of them. On January 11, 2021, a few days away from ceasing to be president of the powerful nation -reluctantly and not without trying with his fanatics to reverse the electoral process won by Joseph Biden-, Donald Trump took a low blow and put the name of Cuba in a counterfactual list of countries sponsoring terrorism (SSOT). The incongruity lies not only in the fact that it is without a grain of truth, it is that in fact Cuba and the United States have in place a bilateral cooperation agreement on counterterrorism.
But the unprecedented thing was that Biden put the poisoned cherry on the cake when he kept the our island in that register of falsehoods, contributing his own imprint to the unilateral and tendentious register, whose purpose is to cause the greatest possible damage and burden to the daily life of Cubans, with the pretense that the people rebel against the Revolution, an infernal machination that began as early as July 1960 when then President Dwight Eisenhower imposed the first economic measures against Cuba, suspending the sugar quota and thus depriving us of 89 percent of the income from that sector, practically the country’s only industry.
Eisenhower’s decision did not stop there. In October 1960, he prohibited all exports to Cuba, with the exception of raw foodstuffs and medicines, thus closing the doors to the island’s main market.
On April 6, 1960, the Memorandum of Lester Mallory, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, cynically and overbearingly laid out what U.S. policy toward Cuba was all about in a report entitled “The Decline and Fall of Castro”:
“Most Cubans support Castro […]. There is no effective political opposition. […]. The only possible means to alienate this internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. […]. All possible and imaginable means must be used quickly to weaken economic life in Cuba […] denying financing and supplies to Cuba, decreasing real and monetary wages, in order to sow hunger, desperation and to bring about the overthrow of the Government”.
They intended to nip in the bud and prevent in the most brutal and inhumane manner Cuba from setting an example for others in the hemisphere, an imminent danger to U.S. hegemony over what it considered its neocolonial backyard. “If the Cuban Revolution is a success, other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will take it as a model.”
Since the famous General Ike, and for more than six decades, 12 other tenants of the White House employed everything from counterrevolutionary terrorist activities, bandit groups, mercenary military invasion, nuclear world crisis, chemical and biological warfare with viruses and plagues against people, and crops, campaigns of lies, the use of the most advanced technologies used for disinformation, attempts to stir up segments of the population and even sweetened carrots, along with the biggest, most permanent and most powerful weapon, the commercial, economic and financial blockade.
The blockade was intensified by 243 economic measures dictated by Trump, and intensified the economic war when on January 12, 2021 he made the list in question reappear, labeling as “terrorist” those of us who have been the main victims of State terrorism, in which the United States is an expert.
President Obama, in 2015, recognized the obsoleteness of the blockade and had a policy of rapprochement to the possibility of normal and constructive relations between neighbors, but Trump reversed the situation.
Being on that list implies severe restrictions on Cuba’s access to international financial markets and limits the ability to do business with other countries and entities. It is a punishment even to third parties who are forced to choose between trading with the United States or with Cuba. It is no secret to anyone that the small Caribbean nation is the loser in this bidding of interests. The list is a perverse noose.
Biden, Trump, few differences
However, the current president, Biden, instead of fulfilling his promise to reverse Trump’s steps, followed in his footsteps and every year has renewed the decision to keep the Cuban people on the infamous registry, despite the fact that calls have multiplied from his own Democratic ranks to erase the Cuban people from the list.
Democratic ranks to erase the stain, in which, by the way, are only nations that respond to imperial orders (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iran and Syria), and not precisely terrorist states or their sponsors.
To put it in good Cuban, the Biden administration cleans itself with a basic premise: in order to designate a country as a sponsor of terrorism, U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to determine that the government of that nation has repeatedly provided support to terrorist groups. Impossible to prove the non-existent.
On January 2, an article in the influential Washington political publication, The Hill, opened the new year with a sensible exhortation, stating that two Democratic members of Congress criticized Cuba’s inclusion in the arbitrary and unilateral list, asking Biden to invalidate it.
“It was a vindictive action taken by the Trump administration in January 2021 when it left office, and the policy should have changed by now,” was what Massachusetts state representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley wrote in a December letter, but which, The Hill said, was not made public then. The letter was signed by other representatives (Seth Moulton, Lori Trahan and Stephen Lynch) and by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey.
Precisely, the legislators reminded Biden of the bilateral cooperation agreement on counterterrorism between Cuba and the United States and also of his electoral campaign promises: “As a candidate for president, you promised to address a new commitment with Cuba and return to the policy initiated during the Obama-Biden administration, and we support you in this commitment”.
That letter, which seems dictated by honesty and reasonableness, adds: “While there are multiple reasons for the economic crisis in Cuba, certainly a major contributing factor is the restrictions and sanctions faced by international financial institutions and other entities because Cuba is on the SSOT list”.
And he emphasizes: “The constant difficulties faced by all sectors of Cuban society are the driving force for tens of thousands of people to leave their homes and migrate to the United States”, therefore they consider that maintaining selective restrictions goes against the direct interests of the United States.
Here’s how things stand. Biden insists on a policy of coercion, reckless and unrealistic, of which all the presidents who have passed through the White House since the Lester Mallory Memorandum have been warned: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
They are gone and another one is already looking to leave as well, but here we are. Economically bruised, short of food, our magnificent health system battered by the lack of medicines and other supplies, practically without financing to be able to acquire what is necessary in the international markets where prices are rising daily, in a world of economic uncertainties for all. We are surviving, but that, alive and as I like to proclaim: Standing up.
Source: Juventud Rebelde