By John Clancy
The 30-year US blockade of Cuba, recently condemned by the United Nations General Assembly, fits into a long history of US interference with the island. This is excellently summarised in Noam Chomsky's book Year 501, which devotes a chapter to Cuba and various US administrations' fears of the spread of independence in Latin America.
Thomas Jefferson, around 1810, described the USA as "the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled". He was content for Spain to maintain its colonial rule "until our population ... gain[s] it from them piece by piece".
Jefferson advised President Madison to offer Napoleon a free hand in Spanish America in return for the gift of Cuba to the USA. "We should not go to war for Cuba, but the first war on any other accounts will give the Island to us".
Cuban democrats in the independence movement advocated the abolition of slavery and equal rights for all. This was seen as a threat to US institutions, Chomsky notes.
By 1900, when the US took control of Cuba, US newspapers openly abused the population as "ignorant niggers, half breeds, and dagoes". They were "degenerates, ... savages", said the US military command.
Fidel Castro's overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959 soon elicited attempts by US governments and the CIA to bring Fidel down. But, the State Department warned, it was important that they not be seen taking "actions which would cause the USA to be blamed for his failure or downfall".
Hence the bombings, strafings, sabotage, terror and aggression were kept as clandestine as possible and combined with the economic warfare. Defence secretary Robert McNamara later testified, "We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs [the US-backed invasion in April 1961] and thereafter".
President Kennedy also sought, unsuccessfully, to organise Latin American collective action against Cuba in 1961. Chomsky quotes a Mexican diplomat at the time on one of the difficulties: "If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing".
Theoretically, medicines and some foods were exempt from the embargo, but food and medical aid were denied after Cyclone Flora caused death and destruction in October 1963. (This is standard procedure of the US. President Carter refused aid to any West Indian country struck by the 1980 hurricane unless Grenada was excluded. West Indians refused and got no aid at all.)
Terrorist operations against Cuba were taking place on the day of Kennedy's assassination. They continued after President Johnson formally called them off, and were escalated by Nixon with disinformation cover. Carter, with the support of US courts, condoned the hijacking of Cuban ships. "The Reaganites", Chomsky continues, "rejected Cuban initiatives for diplomatic settlement and imposed new sanctions on the most outlandish pretexts, often lying outright, a record viewed by Wayne Smith, who resigned as head of US Interests Section in Havana in protest".
The Cubans thought the Kennedy terror a prelude to invasion. The CIA concluded in September 1962 — before Russian missiles were detected in mid-October — that a Soviet military build-up in Cuba was to counter an expected attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.
Robert McNamara later admitted: "If I had been a Cuban or Soviet official, I believe I would have shared the judgment ... that a US invasion was probable."
Chomsky points out: "The March 1960 plan to overthrow Castro in favor of a regime 'more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.' remains in force ... as the US pursues its venerable task of preventing Cuban independence, with 170 years of experience behind it. Also in force is the Eisenhower directive that the crime should be perpetrated 'in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of US intervention.' Accordingly, the ideological institutions must suppress the record of aggression, campaigns of terror, economic strangulation, and the other devices employed by the Lord of the hemisphere in its dedication to 'the true interests of the Cuban people.'"
In the media, Cuba's plight, poverty and isolation, are regularly attributed to the demon Castro and "Cuban socialism" alone. Any problems, we are to understand, are the failure of a sterile communist doctrine.
In fact, as Chomsky continues over several pages, Cuba's advances in health, civil rights and education are the envy of all Latin America.
Cuban health care: see page 18.