By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on June 6, 2024
Plaza of the Revolution, photo: Bill Hackwell
The Biden administration announced new measures for Cuba that eminent international analysts, usually drooling over the U.S. blockade, have interpreted as a gift to the Cuban government. According to the Treasury Department statement, only the island’s private sector can “open, maintain and remotely use bank accounts in the US.
It means that those citizens, after proving that they are not communists and have no ties with the Cuban government, can use U.S. online payment platforms, cloud services and Internet applications. What the Treasury Department does not say is the truth. The new measures evidence, like no other, the iron blockade of cyberspace for a Cuba accused for decades as “enemy of the Internet”.
The US has the key to the thunder of the Internet and now wants to appear as a life-saver in dribs and drabs on the much-trumpeted right to the free flow of information.
U.S. “expert” Larry Press coined in 2011 the phrase “dictator’s dilemma” to criminalize Havana, accusing it of needing access to the network, but suffering from an ancestral fear of the free flow of information. The “dictator’s dilemma”, in short, is not risking a certain political link in the hope that the private sector will finish off Troy by using the Internet, and then comes the solution: the Marines landing in Havana. A fool’s game with the Internet.
Therefore, the only solution of the hawks of the North to exorcise this mantra is to give access to the network of networks in Cuba, like digital glasnost, without any benefit to the “Cuban dictatorship”.
Washington’s recipe is not at all easy when applied to the island and the holy writ of Press has become a boomerang for Washington, which has no way of freeing up access to information and communications technologies (ICT) for Cuba with the greatest possible benefit for the North and without harming internal politicking.
That is to say, the current administrator in the White House, even if he does not want to, has to lift at least one iota of the swarm of coercive measures of the blockade. For example, Facebook, X, Apple, etcetera, have to unblock their ad systems for Cubans and guess who is a party member and who works in a funeral home, which is a public service.
Therefore, the recent Treasury Department announcement is a “booby-trap” report. Even Trump’s plan known as the Cuba Internet Task Force, from 2019, ironically acknowledged the inconsistencies of the Internet policy for Cuba due to the uncertainty caused by the continuous changes in the US regulatory system for Cuba.
It is very difficult for any announcement to be credible because it is subject to the political back-and-forth of the White House in its incestuous relationship with Florida to achieve the strategic objective of defeating the revolution initiated in 1959.
One does not have to be an expert to realize that the government’s cyberspace roadmap maintains its strategy for Cuba in the sinister game of digital blockade and cognitive warfare, which seeks to reset the brains of Cubans so that the island collapses on its own feet.
Washington has not understood that the development of ICT in Cuba owes absolutely nothing to Obama, nor to the loopholes of the blockade in more than 60 years. It has been the fruit of the revolution and a triumph of its policy of digital sovereignty and the extraordinary talent of Fidel Castro’s people. And this has been possible thanks to full access to education and culture, despite the many shortcomings and even its own mistakes, and the unforgivable U.S. sanctions.
A State Department spokesman, recently, was astonished at the wide scope of the measures of what they call “embargo”, when asked about the broad regime of sanctions against the island. He was referring to the plot of laws almost armored in thousands of artifices to encircle Cuba, when they decided to remove it from the list of countries that do not cooperate with terrorism, but it is still on the other list, the list of those that sponsor it. Pure circus. That incredible list of sanctions makes smoke out of any “measure” to “improve” life and give Cubans (in the private sector) permission to use the technologies now authorized by the Treasury.
What Washington’s amnesiac politicians have just discovered is the number of restrictions and prohibitions on digitally accessible tools, services and applications of all kinds, even for countries also included in the list of nations that support terrorism.
The logical question, in case one could be at the departmental spokesperson’s press conference, would be simple: How much more will they be banning that we don’t know about?
The capacity of the blockade makers to determine millimetrically what technology to prevent Cuba from developing is infinite. They have done it many times: announcements that have been impossible to fulfill because of the restrictive sanctions.
For example, Oracle may decide to sell supercomputers to the private sector no later than tomorrow, but its lawyers will tell it that there are 10 other laws that prevent it, in addition to keeping the island on the list of countries sponsoring terrorism. In practice, Oracle is not risking its mega-business for a gentleman who owns a MSME in Cuba.
Nobody is going to risk doing anything that will later be interrupted, with the consequent damage of time, money and politicking. In other words, be serious, gentlemen of the White House and other agencies, until when will the booby trap end!
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – english