By Karthik Puru on November 21, 2024
June 2023 protest to end the blockade of Cuba in front of the White House. photo: Bill Hackwell
Interview with Vijay Prashad: Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad’s latest work shows how the blockade is a long-term effort to undermine their sovereignty and revolutionary ideals.
On October 30, at the United Nations General Assembly, 187 countries voted in favor of a non-binding resolution to end the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba. This resolution was adopted with almost unanimous support every year (except in 2020) since the fall of the Soviet Union, a fact that deprived Cuba of a major trading partner and plunged the nation of then ten million inhabitants into an economic depression known as Special Period. Shaken by natural disasters, migration crises, sabotage attempts and a global pandemic, the Cuban Revolution weathered its challenges by relying on public policies along with some international support.
The UN resolution aims to normalize trade relations between the US and Cuba, frozen since Kennedy imposed the blockade, following the 1962 Missile Crisis. In 1982, Reagan labeled Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism (SSOT), a designation reinstated by Trump and Biden after Barack Obama briefly lifted it in 2015. In his recent book, On Cuba : Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad trace the hostility of the United States towards Cuban sovereignty even further back, to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, contrasting Cuban and Haitian stories to shed light on America’s renewed sense of ownership over the nearby islands.
In this interview, Prashad exposes the history of Washington’s hostility to Cuba, arguing that U.S. politicians long perceived Cuban independence as a threat to his vision of an obedient Western hemisphere. Prashad explains how this hostility reflects a broader pattern, which aims to undermine the self-determination of all of Latin America and shows how the US considered regional sovereignty as incompatible with its own strategic and economic interests.
Defying the blockade
In the book’s introduction, Manolo De Los Santos writes about the important role played from the beginning by American intellectuals – such as Noam Chomsky and Malcolm X – and movements such as black liberation in support of the Cuban Revolution, as the U.S. government delayed recognition. Since Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel is now seeking support for Palestine, can you tell us about how international solidarity was crucial for the survival of the Cuban Revolution?
VP: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered a serious crisis called the Special Period. There was a wave of solidarity around the world. In India, the communist movement actively participated with peasant movements to collect 20,000 tons of grain that were sent from Calcutta to Havana. Fidel Castro delivered an emotional speech, saying: This is the bread from India we will eat. Later, Hugo Chávez’s victory and the beginning of Venezuela’s Bolivarian movement in 1998 became a lifeline for Cuba. However, with the intensification of attacks on Venezuela over the past ten years, Cuba re-entered a serious crisis, and the US tightened its blockade.
For the past thirty years – all the years except those of the pandemic – all countries in the world, except the United States and its ally Israel, voted against the illegal blockade of the United States on Cuba. The blockade is illegal, according to the UN Charter, because the US does not have the Security Council resolution necessary to impose it. The U.S. may choose not to trade with Cuba, but it is illegal to use its influence on the world economy to impose sanctions on third parties who want to do so.
Without international solidarity, Cuba will have difficulty recovering from its electrical crisis. The US will not allow the shipment of machines to help them rebuild power plants damaged by hurricanes and fires. Without the help of Mexico, Barbados, Russia and Venezuela, Cuba will be in a difficult situation. To those who say that the Cuban government is to blame, I say: why not end the blockade and let the government fail on its own? It is not the government that is failing, but the blockade is strangling the country. The US knows that the blockade works. That’s why he keeps it.
In the book, the history of relations between the United States and Cuba goes back not only to Cuba’s independence and to the U.S. invasion of 1898, but also to the founding of the United States and the Monroe Doctrine. How are those who argue that calling American politics “imperialist,” is too simplistic, especially for describing Cuba as a virtual colony?
In 1804, when the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and others toppled the slavery system, French, British and Americans tried to crush it. Why is that? Because he sent the powerful message that slavery was the antithesis of civilization, and that freedom, fraternity and equality mean the end of people’s slavery.
The Haitian Revolution raised fears of contagion – the concern that its ideals would extend to plantations in the south of the United States or to other Caribbean islands – so it had to be beaten and restricted. That was an aspect of the post-1804 mentality. As for the second aspect, when reading Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, it is clear that the intellectuals of American slavery were interested in creating a political economy along the Mississippi River and in the Caribbean, which would of course include Cuba, a very important island of slavery at the time.
In the early 19th century, senior U.S. officials fantasized about the idea that the entire Mississippi economy would be managed by these overseas islands that would provide ports. I’m not a great reader of John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, but when I introduced Johnson’s book into our conversations, Chomsky elaborated on how the U.S., especially after the Haitian Revolution, began to get to the idea that Cuba was going to fall into its hands. Eight decades later, the U.S. hijacked the Cuban War of Independence of 1898 and assimilated Cuba to U.S. rule. By then, the economy of the Mississippi’s laugh of dark dreams, of course, had disappeared, so the project changes. Cuba after 1898 becomes the “paradise of the gangsters,” a place for tourism and play.
The 1959 Cuban Revolution was a break with the post-1804 fantasies about the U.S. plans for Cuba to become part of the United States, displacing the island into sovereignty, something the US considered unacceptable. This sense of law about Cuba remains rooted in the high spheres of administration.
Two revolutions, an imperial strategy
You describe this feeling of law as derived from the affirmation of hemispheric dominance of the Monroe Doctrine, which the Roosevelt Corollary takes further with what you call its mafia principle: to cement not only the control of the U.S. government over the Western Hemisphere but also the corporate control of the U.S. government itself. This sounds like you’re describing capitalism in its current form; then you’re going back to Teddy Roosevelt?
To understand the Roosevelt Corollary, you have to go back to the Venezuelan crisis of 1902 and 1903. At that time, Venezuela’s president was, curiously, a man named Castro — who told European creditors that the Venezuelan government should not pay the debts of previous wars. Essentially, he argued that they were odious debts – for using an anachronistic term – and that creditors had lent to all kinds of unscrupulous entities, so why should the Venezuelan people bear the costs?
In response, Britain, Italy and Germany blocked Venezuela with their navies. Castro thought the U.S. would protect Venezuela by telling Europeans to leave. But instead, Roosevelt issued his corollary, and I’m glad you’ve looked at his most fascinating look.
The original Monroe Doctrine of 1823 says the US has the right to intervene throughout the hemisphere to protect it from European intervention. In fact, it can even be read as a relatively progressive document that states that the US will protect the Western Hemisphere from European colonialism, although it also has the arrogance to present the US as a city on the hill with right over the hemisphere. Roosevelt, thinking like a capitalist, takes him in a direction away from James Monroe’s aristocratic and pastoral vision. His corollary says that if you borrowed money from someone – European or not – you have to pay your creditors and if you don’t, the US will intervene.
So, instead of protecting Venezuela from its European creditors, the US intervened to protect the rights of financial capital. That is why there are so many coups, because the US feels entitled to intervene in a country – Chile, for example, in 1973 – to protect capitalism against socialist development. When the Organization of American States (OAS) is formed in 1948 in Bogotá, Colombia, its letter in fact incorporates the Roosevelt Corollary, establishing an anti-communist alliance. That is why, when a leftist revolution takes place in Cuba, the OAS will stand against it.
I am glad that you mention the OAS, which in the book is used as a starting point to contrast the history between the United States and Cuba after 1959 with the history between the United States and Haiti after the 1961 “countrevolution,” as they call it. How do you argue in the book that the differences in treatment between Haiti and Cuba by the OAS and the United States make it clear that the blockade of Cuba is an imperialist measure?
During our conversations with Chomsky for the book we compared the Cuban Revolution to other historical movements. C. – L. A. James connects it to the Haitian Revolution of 1804, comparing Toussaint and Fidel in an interesting epilogue to The Black Jacobins.
I found it more enlightening to compare Cuba with the revolution of Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier in Haiti in 1957, a seizure of power by a right that imposed terror with the death squads Tonton Macoute. Two years later, there is a revolution in Cuba in which there is nothing of the culture of Haiti’s death squads. There was violence, but that violence didn’t become permanent. In Haiti, violence was the tool that kept Pope Doc, and later ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, in power, and also what led to his fall. The Cuban revolution survived, among other things, because it did not depend on repression and violence in the same way.
If the OAS had principles, it would have condemned the Papa Doc regime and called for a return to elections in Haiti; it could even have sanctioned Duvalier or encouraged the United States to intervene. None of that happened. After the 1959 revolution, the U.S. tried to kill Fidel more than six hundred times, tried to invade the island in Playa Girón (Baia de Pigs) and elsewhere, and did not allow Cuba to enter the OAS because of its communist government. Neither the U.S. nor the OAS acted on principle,
but it was pure geopolitics. Haiti, as an ally, was given a pass while Cuba was treated as an adversary, even though Cuba has never taken an adversary position towards the United States.
Imperialism and sovereignty
The book points to the hypocrisy of calling Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, while the US carries out explicit acts of terror against Cuba, as part of what Chomsky calls its “frenetic” response to the revolution. In the United States, events such as Playa Girón, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Operation Condor and Operation Mangosta are measured as a Cold War story, but the book explains that Cuba’s actions were defensive measures against U.S. aggression. Can you tell us about it?
Before talking about the label of “Sup sponsoring the terrorism” State, which applies to Cuba, let’s talk about what the US is doing today: sending a thousand kilo bombs to Israel, with which Israel is annihilating the Palestinians of Gaza. Israel is carrying out acts of terror and the US is backing them. Don’t trust my word: Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA, said the search attack that Israel carried out in Lebanon was an act of terror.
There are many examples of the U.S. supporting, encouraging and sometimes funding acts of terror against the Cuban Revolution, while Cuba never exerted any momentum to commit acts of violence against the U.S. government.
It should be noted that the Cuban Revolution took place in 1959 and yet the United States did not qualify Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism until 1982. What changed? Under Reagan, the U.S. was waging dirty wars in Central America, funneling illegal money in the Iran-Contra affair, despite congressional restrictions, to carry out massacres in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. At the time, the Cuban government was training revolutionaries from all over Latin America, but Cuba did not intervene with troops or supply weapons. Conditions in some countries became so appalling that, in fact, Venezuela’s Social Democratic government intervened to provide air support to some of the guerrilla groups. However, Venezuela was never labeled a state sponsor of terror.
In the 1980s, the U.S. supported apartheid South Africa, a terrorist regime, but it was the Cubans who sent troops and intelligence agents to Angola to help the liberation forces. With South Africa’s defeat to Cuban troops in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987, the apartheid state was finally forced to dialogue with the African National Congress. When Nelson Mandela left prison, he went to Havana on his first visit abroad and thanked Cubans.
When I was in Namibia, the people of the People’s Organization of South East Africa told me that Cubans are the only ones who intervene without wanting anything in exchange for their intervention. They intervene on principles, unlike the US, which intervened in South Africa for geopolitical reasons and — recaptured the Roosevelt corollary — to protect the interests of capital.
In your opinion, Cuba represents not only a challenge to the U.S. dominance over the hemisphere of the Monroe Doctrine but also a beacon of socialism. Why is it important that we see the Cuban Revolution as a model of resistance to imperialism and as an inspiration for governments moving towards socialism?
For any country in the world, the first priority is to put the interests of its people first. To do this, it needs to exercise sovereignty over its territory, demanding control over its resources and resisting
external forces that will insist on owning their mines, their energy systems, etc. Private property, even beyond international borders, is sacrosanct. That’s the Roosevelt Corollary.
The tendency to establish sovereignty directly collides with imperialism. Take the example of Guatemala under James Arrbenz: he was not a socialist; he was simply a liberal who wanted a dignified life for Guatemalans. For the poorest Guatemalans to live with dignity, he said some land had to be taken from multinationals – not all of them, just those they did not use – and give it to small owners and farmers. The United Fruit Company, which owns large swathes of land, did not even want to give barbedd land to landless peasants. For them, it set a bad precedent, so they pushed for a hit, with the support of officials like John and Allen Dulles, who had action at United Fruit. Che Guevara witnessed this and realized that any attempt at national sovereignty would be met with the imperialist reaction.
All Cuba is saying is: we want to control our own electrical systems and just conditions for our sugar cane, and we want to build a dignified society. But this vision clashes with multinational corporations and the idea of ownership. Imperialism and sovereignty cannot coexist. One has to triumph over the other. That’s the fight in Cuba.
Breaking the blockade
Cuba is now facing many things: hurricanes, energy crisis, mass emigration to the United States and, of course, the blockade and attempts to overthrow the revolution, a policy rooted in the Roosevelt Corollary and carried out through the OAS. How are Cuba and other Latin American countries fighting similar pressures?
Look at the efforts of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). When Cuba was excluded from the Summit of the Americas, AMLO was outraged and said Mexico would not attend either. Since then, Mexico has led the fight against Cuba’s isolation. When he was president, AMLO was bold and tried to build post-OAS international forums that were not anchored in anti-communist history. Why should the OAS be based in Washington? Why should Washington dominate the OAS agenda? If you want a hemispheric organism, why isn’t Cuba included?
The real issue in this recurring cycle of crisis facing Cuba is that no one was able to confront the US directly, apart from the votes at the UN to try to break the blockade. Why didn’t the ships from certain countries move on? Cuba rented Turkish electric ships for a while, but it can no longer. Ultimately, the blockade has to end. If the embargo ended, Cuba could transform its pharmaceutical industry, export life-saving medicines and form international partnerships for joint patents. Right now, Cuba’s innovative medicines cannot reach the world because of the embargo.
The people of Cuba remain strong because they know that if the revolution falls, it would return to the days before the Cuban Revolution from 1956 to 1958. And no one wants to go back there. Can you move forward? They need capital, they need resources and they need to get them from somewhere. From where? We don’t know. Perhaps from one of the BRICS countries or possibly Turkey.
Source: La Haine, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English
https://www.lahaine.org/mundo.php/vijay-prashad-el-bloqueo-a