By Johana Tablada on January 21, 2024 from Havana
Cuban-born journalist Maria Elvira Salazar. Photo: Scoop
The hearing held last week on January 18 in the U.S. House of Representatives’ Western Hemisphere subcommittee was a useful scenario to understand the circus of anti-Cuba policy. It uncovers, once again, keys to the current deceitful dynamics with which the U.S. government conducts itself and the true moral stature of one of the most hostile members of Congress and the sectors she represents that is dedicated entirely to trying to perpetuate the criminal policies inherited from Trump and prevent the approval of any minimal modification of the siege that would represent a real relief to our people.
Despite the fact that Congresswoman Maria Elvira of Florida is the chair of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee, today in the hands of the Republican party that controls the leadership in all the Committees and subcommittees of the Lower House of Congress, this event was also an opportunity to check the decorum of a larger number of legislators who promote a positive and real change in the policy towards Cuba.
Even under the harassment and aggression of Maria Elvira who tried to intimidate Congresswoman Barbara Lee and her colleagues with the most rude and, I believe, unprecedented discourtesy, there were more who insisted on raising their voices in defense of their positions, which, by the way, is the position of a majority of Cubans and Americans who join the demand for an end to the blockade against Cuba and other extreme measures that make the Cuban people suffer. It is noteworthy that in expelling Lee, Congresswoman Salazar nevertheless admitted the notorious anti-Cuban representative Debbie Wasserman Shoultz who refused the invitation explaining that she could not accept the treatment given to her Democratic colleague Barbara Lee.
Among the more genuine approaches prevailed in the interventions, as opposed to the evidence-free assertions of Salazar, the call by legislators Kam Lager Dove and Joaquín Castro to put an end to the inclusion of our country in lists to which it does not belong, such as that of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT), without a single reason that could be heard in that room, neither by the representatives of the executive branch nor by the congresswoman, to justify such designation, beyond the rhetoric of fiction and ignorant exclamations of the history of the hemisphere displayed by María Elvira. Nor did she succeed in demonstrating that there are no Ministries of Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Cuba or that they are all made up of people from the Cuban government.
In this context, the disdain with which the key actors in the prolongation and intensification of the measures that have provoked the largest migratory wave of Cubans in the face of the unprecedented increase in the abuse against Cuba and its daily consequences was made loud and clear.
The general elections are approaching in the United States, the most expensive simulacrum of democracy of our times, dominated by disinformation, political polarization, the role of money and the advance of fascism, racism, xenophobia, selfishness and the most primitive instincts of the human race.
In this scenario, each aspirant to keep or win a place in the piñata of positions, budgets and funding programs in the Executive or Congress, among other candidacies, rushes and runs to position himself according to what he considers necessary to guarantee the support of his donors and to try to adjust public positions to attract contributions while, in many cases, deceiving the voters about the reasons for his more controversial positions.
But let’s put aside the rhetoric and look at the recent facts. Let someone say that María Elvira has not been the protagonist and defender at all costs of the closing of the consulate in Havana that separated the families, author of the bill that today advances in Congress with gigantic lies to try to prevent any President, with the political will to put an end to the fraud, from having the decency to remove Cuba from unilateral and arbitrary lists to which it does not belong such as State Sponsors of Terrorism, religious freedom, human rights or human trafficking among other biased and politically motivated designations with no connection to Cuba’s actual performance in the matter. It would be worthwhile to watch the videos in which she tries to intimidate and threaten Assistant Secretary Jacobstein in a ridiculous and exaggerated histrionic manner, who seemed displeased with such aggressiveness but did not lose his composure and tried to please the hypocritical and farcical congresswoman as much as possible.
Of course, she is not the only one and she is not alone in this effort of hatred and destruction. Her positions are complemented by those of Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Diaz-Balart and other legislators who, thanks to the generous contributions they receive from wealthy sectors that benefit from the absence of ties between Cuba and the United States (businesses that may be for many remain among a few), have only used the name or Cuban descent to lie, extort and profit at the expense of promoting with their statements and daily actions the increase of the economic and financial siege against Cuba and the suffering and shortages of our population. In this list, which today is longer than ever in Congress, stands out the mafia-like management of Senator Bob Menendez, whose unlimited ambition and corruption seems to have extended to other dimensions beyond the domination of the anti-Cuban agenda of the White House, which until very recently he publicly and rightly presumed to control completely.
That is why no one can be surprised that Maria Elvira organized a hearing to question the existence of new economic actors in Cuba, especially MSMEs, agricultural cooperatives or self-employed workers when there has been talk for months and some mistakenly believe that measures have even been adopted to alleviate somewhat the impact on the sector that the United States declares as its favorite, of the measures of the government that claims to defend it. Nor is it surprising to anyone that in the end she asked for help from the government and other business counterparts of Cuban origin to ensure that his friends could open private businesses in Cuba that three minutes earlier he assured did not exist. We have seen it all.
The truth is that the idea of the U.S. government is to discriminatorily segment the Cuban economy, which is one, in order to attack it. It is also true that Cuba has said that we will not oppose measures to ease the siege even if they are not for everyone. And of course we are serious when the Cuban government explains that we support that sector in its internal development and natural links with the exterior to operate, but like any other country it will not allow the United States to use it to violate the law or intervene in Cuba’s internal affairs, something for which the United States assumes it has support in the emerging Cuban private business sector, but there is no evidence of that assumption.
It is not idle to remember that although politicians and disinformation media ignore it, these spaces exist today thanks to the policies and updating of the model adopted by the Revolution after its democratic approval by the Cubans to the Cuban population, under the protection of our legislation, the Constitution of the Republic. The existence of this sector of the economy is not proven in a circus audience with a vociferous hostess, formerly a journalist-talk show hostess who became a professional politician of the Miami hate machine. This existence is easily detected in the updated online public records where the 492 pages with 10,079 entities appear on January 15 and in the daily activity and complexity of Cuba’s current economic scenario that continues to transform according to the debates, interests and decisions adopted in the face of the Cuban people and not under any pressure or interest of the United States.
What is certain is that, to this day, the United States punishes the entire Cuban population with its absurd and cruel measures without any measure of reciprocity from the Cuban side in the face of so much outrage or any real reason for the excessive abuse that the United States commits against Cuba.
And this is how Congresswoman Maria Elvira, in the midst of the harshest effects of the pandemic and the difficulty to obtain medical supplies for our pharmaceutical industry shortly after the inclusion in the terrorist list, a decision of the Trump executive, which she now intends to convert into law so that no one can change it, spoke then of the comedy of placing balloons to put internet in a country supposedly without internet. In the same vein, the Congresswoman opposed those who asked to open the U.S. consular section in Havana so that relatives could meet in the U.S. and when she was flooded with pressure, she loosened up with the invention of facilitating the granting of visas in the occupied territory of Guantanamo.
She also supported all kinds of interference and intervention in Cuba; she watched over the State Department to pursue cooperation programs and the income of the public health system for all Cubans including our children and the elderly, while she posed in the Florida disinformation media with a girl, a single girl, whose visa was granted.
What does the congresswoman have to say to the fathers and mothers, to the health personnel, to the family members that we have seen suffer when their loved ones suffer for lack of medicines as an immediate result of the impact of the additional blockade measures that made up the “maximum pressure” experiment invented by the Trump administration’s wrecking crew, Marco Rubio and his allies in Congress under the logic that if enough pressure is put on Cuba to make the blockade “perfect”, we will lack everything, the country will be destabilized and eventually they will succeed in overthrowing the government of Cuba to fulfill all the frustrated dreams of domination and annexationism.
That was what Congresswoman Maria Elvira was dedicated to assuring while more than 100 of her congressional colleagues like California Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, one of the most respected women legislators, who was president of the Black Caucus added her signature to the letters that demanded the Biden administration to pay attention to the reality of Cuba, stop Trump’s measures that were doing so much harm and that contributed to the increase in Cuba’s infant mortality, to the increase in the uncontrolled migratory flow and affected the well-being, integrity and standard of living of the people of Cuba that Maria Elvira says she wants to liberate.
The convenient dilemma is false, as an excuse for the paralysis, that it is the pressures of the extreme sectors that pressure her government that prevent the reversal of the measures that Biden criticized so much by calling them inhumane. It is an option and a choice of the Executive to bet on the policy of maximum pressure which, although it has failed in its ultimate objective of regime change, has been effective in deteriorating the standard of living of Cubans to the point of affecting areas of interest and priority for the bipartisan policy of the United States, such as the excessive migratory flow.
Finally, although I have a few years working on U.S. issues, I can perfectly remember the insistence of the then young and also ambitious and opportunistic journalist who tried to interview on more than one occasion the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro. It seems unbelievable that today she would go after one of her most prominent colleagues, who by the way have traveled to Cuba many times meeting with the heads of government of a neighboring and sovereign state.
That is why no one should be surprised that today she is calling a hearing to make sure, while talking about Cuba’s welfare, that the Biden administration will do nothing at all to help even the sector she claims she wants to favor and which has developed under the decisions of the Cuban government and despite the blockade, the immobilization and the countless obstacles imposed by the U.S. economic warfare measures.
Needless to say that, beyond the embarrassing show of pressures, lies and insults staged by the woman who says she wants to liberate and bring democracy to Cuba, all those who know at least a little about the U.S. political system know that neither the hatred nor the opportunism of Maria Elvira is the real explanation for the decision of President Biden’s administration to keep almost intact the policy and criminal measures of Donald Trump that cause so much damage to Cuba, to third parties and to the Americans themselves. In the absence of political will and shared aspiration for interference, political intervention and domination are and remain the real causes of the status quo.
The real “myth” of the day is that the welfare of the Cuban people really matters a great deal to the sponsors of mistreatment.
Johana Tablada is the deputy director for U.S. affairs at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English