By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on June 5, 2025
Mike Hammer, chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Cuba, during his meeting with Cardinal Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez on April 25. Photo taken from X @USEmbCuba
“Excuse me, but I am the one who handles Cuba’s affairs.” Fidel Castro’s blunt response to a US State Department official has been circulating in diplomatic circles for decades.
The scene took place on April 16, 1959, in the South America Room of the Statler-Hilton in Washington, after a lunch with acting US Secretary of State Christian Herter. There, William Wieland, director of the Office of Caribbean Affairs at the US State Department, introduced himself by saying, “Dr. Fidel Castro, I am the person who runs things in Cuba.” The Cuban leader stopped him in his tracks. It was not just a brilliant phrase, it was a historical rectification.
Until 1959, US ambassadors in Cuba had a habit of acting like proconsuls accustomed to giving orders, removing and installing governments under the assumption that the island was an extension of Florida. In the early 19th century, John Quincy Adams already fantasized that Cuba would fall like “ripe fruit” into the hands of the United States. Years later, after the Spanish-Cuban-US War, Washington imposed the Platt Amendment, which allowed it to occupy Cuba militarily, illegally install the Guantanamo Naval Base, and appoint an interim governor whenever it saw fit. It was the prelude to what historians called the “mediatized republic,” governed from the United States by delegations of tyrants in turn.
One of the most scandalous cases of State Department intervention took place in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Ambassador Sumner Welles to “mediate” in the political crisis caused by the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He brought an express message: “If Machado did not control the henhouse, the gunboats would return to the port of Havana.” Welles negotiated with the dictator, then with the opposition, and finally imposed a provisional president who failed to stop the revolution that ensued that year and then “went to the dogs,” with enthusiastic US complicity.
Such was the prominence of the US ambassadors that the provisional government formed in 1934 after a coup d’état is known in Cuban history as the “Caffery-Batista-Mendieta triumvirate,” with Sumner Welles’ replacement, Jefferson Caffery, at the head of the country’s political power.
Earl E. T. Smith, the ambassador caught up in the 1959 revolution, was candid in his testimony before the US Congress: “Cuba was (until then) like a US republic.” With the triumph of the revolution, the “manipulations” from Washington ceased, but not the blatant interference of US officials.
The head of the diplomatic mission in Havana during the Bush Jr. administration is famous, known to the Cuban people as “Cabo Cason” for turning the US Interests Section into a center for conspiracy and financing of ‘dissidents’ under the banner of “human rights.”
Today, the ambassador is Mike Hammer, formally in charge of the US embassy in Havana. Hammer, who exudes forced joviality, has taken to touring the country like a busybody, meeting with “opposition figures” who are on the payroll of US agencies and insulting the national hero José Martí, the first great anti-imperialist in Cuban history, with his supposed “honors.” Always in front of a camera, on social media, where people ask him point-blank if this continued provocation is in response to Marco Rubio’s order to wear down the Cuban government’s patience.
A few days ago, he held a press conference in Miami that could have been more of an attempt at self-affirmation and confidence in the State Department’s publicity mechanisms than a (bad) exercise in propaganda. Hammer’s speech tried to dress itself up as a cause of solidarity, to create psychological reasons to support the climate of interventionism that US ambassadors have done little to hide in more than a century. He repeated the refrain that the blockade does not exist and that US sanctions only punish the government and not the Cuban people, as if the diplomat were accredited on the moon.
Simply because the United States has assumed its status as an empire with the desire that all of us assume the status of subjects, Hammer wants to imply that “Washington runs Cuba.” But he is wrong, and he makes it even worse when he plays at being an Instagram influencer with a style of lying that smells so old that it seems more appropriate for videotapes and the Golden Girls than for the Internet age.
Source: La Jornada translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English