By René Vázquez Díaz on July 9, 2025
US Chargé d’Affaires in Cuba Mike Hammer
Regarding the dispatch of General Enoch Crowder to Cuba by the State Department in 1919, with the express task of “solving the problem” of President Menocal’s succession, Julio Le Riverend wrote in his rigorous historical account La República (The Republic) :
“From interventionism as a right to daily interference, there was practically no break in continuity. Economically and politically subjugated, Cuba could only suffer these aggressions.”
In other words, the government of a foreign country arrogated to itself the right to send one of its officials with full powers to ensure that the presidency of another country, the Republic of Cuba, had a “convenient” president who would resolve the problems of US corporations and big interests, “without any concern for the interests of the Cuban people”.
Even at that time, the right-wing press called Mr. Crowder “the proconsul.”
But Proconsul Crowder achieved nothing.
The Menocal problem was ‘resolved’ with another president subservient to the US, Zayas, whom the Cuban people called “the money-grubber.” So the State Department once again exercised its “right” to interfere in Cuban affairs, and in 1921, Proconsul Crowder had to return to Cuba, this time with more threatening orders “to effectively govern the country through a personal representative of the US president”.
And the State Department envoy failed again.
However, he succeeded in one thing: prolonging the exploitation and suffering of the Cuban people. In response to the growing popular liberation movement, Mr. Crowder had the historical audacity to say goodbye to “his” president Zayas and welcome in “his” dictator Gerardo Machado with his regime of hunger and terror.
Today, it is Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, who is repeating this shameless tradition of bullying, sending Mr. Hammer to Cuba with the mysterious purpose of failing. Because a Secretary of State cannot be so inconsiderate and brutal towards his own diplomatic corps as to send an official who may have good intentions – but also arrives with unbearable ignorance – to make a fool of himself on an indomitable island in the warm Caribbean Sea.
Mr Hammer will fail just like Crowder.
He will fail just like Ambassador Guggenheim (1929-1933), a close friend of the dictator Machado during the 8 years, 2 months, and 23 days of his bloody regime supported by Washington. Hammer will leave a sad memory in Cuba because he acts like a mediocre official who needs urgent lessons on his own history. If he does not receive them from his boss Rubio, he will receive them from the Cuban people and will fail like Summer Welles, like Earl E. T. Smith, and like James Cason, whose resounding failure in Cuba I wrote about at the time in Le Monde Diplomatique (February 2004).
So what can Mr. Hammer preach—like a friar who does not believe in his own faith—to the Cuban people?
Well, he could remind those who wish for the defeat of the Revolution that the US intervened militarily in Cuba in 1898, 1906, 1912, and 1961, but that an invasion with bombs and fanfare is politically impossible in Cuba today. He could also threaten them with the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, since the future government that would magically replace the Revolutionary Government must be made up exclusively of individuals whom the President determines are politically acceptable to the US—and no one else. The phrase “when the President determines” is repeated 49 times in the text of the Helms-Burton Act. In other words, the President of a foreign power. I say that Mr. Hammer should threaten his little boys and girls, because if they do not loudly demonstrate their total and absolute submission to the President, they will not be taken into account when the Revolution disappears.
It will be difficult for Hammer to captivate the Cuban people in general with perfidious pirouettes of false bonhomie. With such figures, the Cuban oral tradition can be very accurate in its harshness. And he doesn’t even have to listen to it in Cuba. Hammer only has to check out the powerful influence of Cuban oral tradition in his own country. Because Mr. Hammer could be told, as in “Lengua Larga” (long tongue) by the Miami group Palo: “You are a library that only has fiction.”
Source: Cuba en Resumen