“I do believe I’ll be . . . .having
the honor of taking Cuba.”
----Donald Trump
Donald Trump tightened already suffocating sanctions on Cuba
on May 1, at the same time as he made renewed threats to “take” the island as
soon as he finishes committing the greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S.
history in Iran. The new measure to heap further unmerited suffering on Cubans
was justified on the laughable pretext that their government poses an
extraordinary national security threat to the United States, which, if it were true,
would constitute an equally extraordinary confession of military impotence on
the part of the United States.
That point aside, it’s a simple historical fact that U.S.
contempt for Cuban sovereignty long predates Washington’s fixation on “national
security” as a pretext for its interventions, so the problem does not lie in
Havana.
Over two centuries ago Washington was already firmly opposed
to independence for the island, mainly because it was “strategically situated
and rich in sugar and slaves,” in the words of U.S. foreign policy expert Piero
Gleijeses. Such advantages were not to be sacrificed to a heavily mixed-race
population of “mongrels” achieving independence, to use the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny.
Thomas Jefferson recommended that James Madison offer
Napoleon a free hand in Spanish America in return for the gift of Cuba to the
United States. Writing to Madison in 1823, he said that the U.S. should not go
to war over the island, since “the first war on other accounts will give it to
us, or the Island itself will give it to us, when able to do so,” sounding very
much like Donald Trump today. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams explained Cuba’s
strategic value, describing it as “an object of transcendent importance to the
commercial and political interests of our Union.” He, too, favored it remain under
Spanish control until it fell into U.S. hands by “the laws of political . . .
gravitation,” a “ripe fruit” ready for harvest. This view was almost universal
in the U.S. Executive Branch and Congress at the time.
Concern over Cuba on explicitly political grounds arose with the coming
of its national liberation movement in 1868. A key concern was the movement’s
democratic tendencies, which included such heresies as democracy, freedom, and
equal rights for everyone, not just white property owners. This was the
familiar imperial fear of a bad apple spoiling the barrel, in this case Cuban
independence possibly succeeding and inspiring other colonized peoples to
similarly strive for national independence. If Empire is to exist, that kind of
example has to be stamped out.
Some U.S. lives and property were lost in the initial stages
of Cuba’s war for independence, but the real crisis came in 1873 when Spain
seized the Virginius, a ship flying
the U.S. flag and carrying weapons to the Cuban revolutionary forces. The
Spanish executed fifty-three crew members. Hamilton Fish, President Grant’s
secretary of state, resisted calls for revenge knowing that the ship had been
breaking the law and wanting no part of the multiracial Cuban population. When
a cabinet member raised the idea of annexing Cuba, Fish quashed the idea with a
reminder that the U.S. already had terrible racial problems in “South Carolina
and Mississippi.”
In the end, Spain paid an $80,000 indemnity for lives of the
crew members and remained in control of Cuba when the war ended in 1878.
The war did not resume in full force until 1895, when
Madrid’s empire was near collapse. For
years it had been forced to simultaneously fight liberation movements in Cuba
and the Philippines. Its colonies on the American mainland had been liberated in
1825, but it clung hard to the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the last of its
colonial possessions in the Americas. Meanwhile, U.S. influence had grown to
the point that it could ignore British power and conquer Cuba, just in time to
prevent victory by what it openly regarded as the indigenous lesser breeds. The
New York press described the latter as “ignorant niggers, half breeds, and
dagoes.” General Samuel B. M. Young of the U.S. military command was of a
similar view, dismissing Cuban soldiers as “a lot of degenerates,” and “no more
capable of self-government than the savages of Africa.”
By
late 1895, the rebels claimed to have established a provisional government. But
neither Grover Cleveland nor William McKinley were willing to recognize the
revolutionary forces. To have done so would have released Spain from the
obligation to protect $50 million in U.S. property in Cuba. The U.S. government
preferred to hold “civilized” Madrid responsible for that property and U.S.
lives on the island, while pressing the Spanish government to give the
“uncivilized” Cuban rebels enough autonomy so they would lay down their arms.
Spain,
however, refused to grant the autonomy, at least at first. Its formerly global empire
had withered away to just Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and no
Spanish government could expect to remain in power if it lost control over any
of these. The Spanish took a hard line, sending 150,000 soldiers who tried to
destroy rebel support by rounding up thousands of Cubans and locking them in
barbed-wire concentration camps. But the revolution continued to spread, and
insurgents adopted a scorched earth policy that destroyed U.S. property.
Cuban suffering was incalculable. Typhus, smallpox, and
cholera stalked the island, and famine was widespread. A huge portion of the
population was sunk in disease, death, and despair.
As Spain lost control
over the deteriorating situation riots broke out in Havana in late 1897.
McKinley moved a warship, the Maine, into Havana harbor to protect U.S.
citizens and property. Days later an explosion sank the Maine, killing more
than 268 U.S. sailors. A naval court of inquiry investigating the sinking could
not determine blame for the disaster.
Nevertheless,
egged on by a sensationalist press that eagerly pinned the blame on Spain, excitement
for war with Madrid mounted. President McKinley opposed it, but he also wanted
U.S. property in Cuba protected, the Cuban revolution prevented from turning
sharply left, and restored confidence in the U.S. business community, among
other concerns. These outcomes could only be achieved through war.
Two
months after the blowing up of the Maine, Congress authorized it and events
proceeded in rapid-fire succession. Madrid broke off relations with Washington;
the jingoist press chorused, “On to Havana!”; a million men raised on romantic
tales of Antietam and Gettysburg rushed to enlist; the French ambassador
informed Paris that a “sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation;”
a rabid Teddy Roosevelt set off to “whip the dagoes.”
U.S.
and Cuban forces made quick work of the Spaniards, and yellow fever made quick
work of the Americans. Cuba emerged in ruins, its agriculture and industry
destroyed.
U.S.
investors seized the railroads, the mines, and the sugar plantations.
The
events of 1898 are often said to represent the launching of U.S. empire, but in
fact the U.S. was an empire from the beginning, deeply rooted in racist
assumptions that make Teddy Roosevelt’s overt contempt for “dagoes” appear mild
by comparison. These assumptions were on vivid display in the way black U.S.
soldiers were treated by their fellow
Americans as they went off to war in Cuba.
Tampa
shopkeepers snarled at members of the all-black 24th Infantry,
refusing to serve them on the grounds that, “We don’t sell to damned niggers!” Several
officers from the all black Eighth Illinois regiment were thrown out of a
Baltimore restaurant, which wanted nothing to do with them. A brewery worker in
Martinsburg, West Virginia loudly offered his opinion to black soldiers that,
“all niggers ought to go to Cuba where they’d get killed.” In Hampton, Georgia,
Private James Neely of the Twenty-fifth infantry was murdered after daring to
ask for a glass of soda water in a drugstore. On the outskirts of Macon,
Georgia, a sign at the entrance to a public park said simply: “No Dogs and
Niggers Allowed.” Visitors to the town could also see the lynching tree where
Will Singleton had recently been hanged, shot, and castrated. Implicit
justification for all this was provided by the Macon press, which complained of
a “riotous mood” among black troops headed for Cuba, whose contempt for Jim
Crow was said to have an “unhealthy” effect on local blacks, a large number of
whom worked the chain gangs.
Due
in no small part to such virulent racism, Cuban independence did not emerge in 1898.
U.S. plantation owners had never gotten over Haiti’s having established itself
as the first independent black republic in 1804, fearing the spread of
revolutionary ideas into the U.S. slave population, and almost a century later
the fear of Cuba’s black and mixed-race population was still palpable among U.S.
leaders. They did not want black people in power just 90 miles from the United
States.
So Spanish
rule was replaced by U.S. rule – military occupation until 1902 - and after that
de facto rule by the Platt Amendment,
an agreement between Cuba and the U.S. that allowed Washington “to intervene at
any time for the preservation of Cuban independence [and] the maintenance of a
government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual
liberty.” The Platt Amendment allowed the U.S. to acquire the naval base at
Guantanamo Bay in 1903, and was used to justify four U.S. interventions before
it was finally repealed in 1934.
Broken
by the war, and with most of its population poor, illiterate, and ill, Cuba was
left utterly dependent on the United States, which kept the island undeveloped
just as Spain had done. The lucrative sugar industry was modernized and
mechanized as a monopoly of the U.S., which was the dominant market and the
principal investor. By the mid-1920s, the United States controlled two-thirds
of Cuban agriculture. The sugar boom of that decade paid for stately public
buildings and luxury homes for the wealthy, but gave nothing to the poor. U.S.
firms constructed rails and roads and installed banks, electricity, and the
world’s first automated telephone system, but repatriated all the profits for
themselves.
It
took decades more of Cuba being an impoverished U.S. client state before revolution
was put back on the agenda. On July 26, 1953 Fidel Castro attacked the
Fort Moncada barracks at dawn with 120 young people long on guts and short on
weapons. Some of them died in battle but many more were tortured to
death by Fulgencio Batista’s army, which tore out the eyes of Abel Santamaría,
among others.
Instead of being cowed into submission, Castro, taken
prisoner, presented a forceful and unapologetic defense of the attack. The amazed
judges gave him their rapt attention, hanging on every word. Claiming the ancient
right of rebellion against tyranny, Castro accused Batista and his officers of
butchery and betrayal, and defiantly declared that, “This island will sink in
the ocean before we will consent to be anybody’s slaves . . .”
Putting forth a revolutionary program, he said that what was
inconceivable was not the attack on the barracks but the failure to provide
food and work for everyone:
“What is inconceivable is that there should be men going to bed hungry while an
inch of land remains unsown; what is inconceivable is that there should be
children who die without medical care; that thirty percent of our campesinos cannot sign their names, and
ninety-nine percent don’t know the history of Cuba; that most families in our
countryside should be living in worse conditions than the Indians Columbus
found when he discovered the most beautiful land human eyes had ever seen . .
.”
“From such wretchedness it is only possible to free oneself
by death; and in that the state does help them: to die. Ninety percent of rural
children are devoured by parasites that enter from the soil through the
toenails of their unshod feet.
“More than half of the best cultivated production lands are
in foreign hands. In Oriente, the largest province, the lands of the United
Fruit Company extend from the north coast to the south coast . . . .
“Cuba continues to be a factory producing raw materials.
Sugar is exported to import candies; leather exported to import shoes; iron exported
to import plows. . . .”
On New Year’s Day 1959 the Cuban revolution triumphed, and
almost immediately evoked Washington’s wrath. By late that year the CIA and the
State Department agreed that Fidel Castro had to be overthrown. One reason,
State Department liberals explained, was that “our business interests in Cuba
have been seriously affected.” Another was the threat of a good example, i.e.,
the tendency of a successful revolution to inspire other subjugated peoples to
challenge U.S. imperial control over their destinies. Or as the State
Department concluded in November 1959: “The United States cannot hope to
encourage and support sound economic policies in other Latin American countries
and promote necessary private investments in Latin America if it is or appears
to be simultaneously cooperating with the Castro program.”
What was this program? Nationalization of a billion dollars
in U.S. corporate holdings; carrying out the most extensive land reform in
Latin American history; creating state cooperatives; building thousands of
homes for the poor; cutting rents in half, providing jobs for the unemployed,
wiping out illiteracy, vastly expanding medical and public health programs; abolishing
racial discrimination; and opening the nurseries, resorts, and hotels of the
rich to the entire population. This was an immensely popular set of policies,
not just in Cuba, but wherever there were poor people.
In elite planning circles in the U.S., however, the reaction
was quite different. By October 1959, planes based in Florida were carrying out
strafing and bombing attacks against the island. In December, CIA subversion
was intensified, including supplying arms to guerrilla bands and sabotage of
sugar mills and other economic targets. In March 1960, the Eisenhower
administration formally adopted a 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.,” a self-contradictory goal that was to be accomplished “in such a
manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention,” due to Castro’s
popularity.
The logic of the terror and economic strangulation was spelled out by Lester
Mallory at the State Department, who wrote that “disenchantment and
disaffection based on economic disaffection and hardship” should be cultivated
in order to “bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”
During the 1960 presidential campaign Kennedy tried to be
more rabidly anti-Communist than Eisenhower and Nixon, accusing them of threatening
U.S. security by permitting “the Iron Curtain . . . .90 miles off the coast of
the United States.” In a Cincinnati speech he promised to overthrow the Cuban
government if elected.
He did his best to deliver on the promise. Sabotage, terror,
and aggression sharply escalated under Kennedy, as well as devastating economic
warfare that a tiny nation has no chance of withstanding for long. Havana’s
dependence on the U.S. for both imports and exports was immense, and could not
be easily replaced, and not at all without great cost. Kennedy and his “Best
and Brightest” brigade did everything they could think of to maximize Cuban
suffering.
“We were
hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs [April 1961] and
thereafter,” Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted to the Church
Committee. Much of Kennedy’s Latin American policy was based on the fear that
the Cuban revolution was a “virus” that would infect others and curtail U.S.
hegemony in the region.
As a 1964 CIA report put it: “[Cuba] is being watched closely by other nations in
the hemisphere and any appearance of success there would have an extensive
impact on the statist trend elsewhere in the area.”
Calling to mind Hitler’s rhetoric on Czechoslovakia,
President Kennedy accused Cuba of being a “dagger” pointed at the United States
and sent a proxy army to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961,
while plotting Fidel Castro’s assassination.
Castro’s crime was having abolished capitalist control of the Cuban economy,
which had terminated the Mafia-run play land that enriched foreign investors
while Cuba starved.
Aside from the preposterousness of tiny Cuba posing a threat
to a nuclear-armed superpower over eighty times its size, the U.S. had no legal
leg to stand on. Article 15 of the Charter of the Organization of American
States read: “No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly
or indirectly, for any reason whatever in the internal or external affairs of
any other state." The U.N. Charter stated: "All members shall refrain in their
international relations from the threat of use of force against the territorial
integrity or political independence of any state . . .”
Humiliated by the failed invasion, but determined to isolate
Cuba’s revolution, President Kennedy unveiled the Alliance For Progress,
embracing the rhetoric of social change while expressly proscribing revolution
or socialism. A major feature of the plan called for shifting the role of the
Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security,”
encouraging the CIA to establish death squads under the aegis of “police
training” while Kennedy rhapsodized about creating “a hemisphere where every
man has enough to eat and a chance to work, where every child can learn, and
every family can find decent shelter.”
Washington escalated its clandestine attacks on Cuba and
prepared a second American invasion. Hoping to deter the event while giving
Washington a taste of its own nuclear medicine, Cuba requested that the Soviet
Union install nuclear missiles on the island* in the fall of 1962. When Krushchev
complied, JFK opted for a game of nuclear chicken, imposing a unilateral
blockade on Cuba in violation of the UN Charter, rather than negotiate a quiet
solution, which he regarded as the sissy’s way out. In resolving the conflict,
the U.S. did not renounce its ongoing terrorist war against the island, which
included chemical and biological attacks, as well as regular attacks on
Castro’s life. Cuba went into permanent military mobilization and embraced the
Soviet Union, while Washington established a complete trade and credit embargo,
the prescribed remedy for states that infringe on the sacred privileges of
private investors.
Over sixty years later Washington is still obsessing over
tiny Cuba, a health and education superpower that ended illiteracy nearly
overnight at the start of its revolution, and now sends doctors all
over the world to cure blindness and many other illnesses, as well as provide critical care in the wake of natural disasters, all without charge to the
patients. This, while its far wealthier northern neighbor squanders trillions
of dollars on endless wars and remains the world’s only developed country
without universal health coverage for its people, who pay twice as much as
other developed countries do for a system that delivers far worse health
outcomes.
But these warped priorities are precisely the point. They
are immensely profitable for the owners of the private economy, which for some
time now has been a global economy. If these gluttonous few are to continue expanding
their wealth these priorities must become everyone’s priorities, which means
doing away with a revolution dedicated to what is regularly denounced as an
extremist agenda by Washington.
Just
what is this “extremist agenda”? In a nutshell, it’s the Cuban stance on human
rights, announced by Fidel Castro in his New York City speech to the UN in
1960:
“The
right of the peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruit of
their labor; the right of children to education; the right of the sick to
medical treatment and hospital attention; the right of youth to work; the right
of students to free education . . . ; the right of Negroes and Indians to full
dignity as human beings; the right of women to civil, social and political
equality; the right of the elderly to a secure old age; the right of
intellectuals, artists, and scientists to fight, with their work, for a better
world . . . the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of
peoples to turn fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers, peasants,
students, intellectuals, blacks, Indians, women, the young and the old, and all
the oppressed and exploited people, so they themselves can defend their rights
and their destiny.”
It
is to destroy the viability of this agenda that we fight forever wars.
God
Bless America.
*The
halting half-measures taken towards normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations by Barack
Obama did not address the criminality of longstanding U.S. policy, which he
regarded – incredibly - as having been undertaken with “the best of intentions.”
**Actually, Castro merely asked for Soviet help in deterring a second U.S. invasion of the island; Khrushchev came up with the idea of installing nuclear missiles. See Martin J. Sherwin, "Gambling with Armageddon - Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis," (Knopf, 2020), Chapter 18.
. “Trump Tightens Sanctions
Against Cuba, Threatens To ‘Take’ The Island,” La Jornada (Spanish), May 2, 2026
Daniel B. Shirmer, Republic
or Empire - American Resistance to the Philippine War (Schenkman Publishing
Company, 1972) pps. 51, 55-6, 72, 83; Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit, (Literary Guild of America, 1931) pps. 108,
125, 127, 139, 147, 174, 362, 364; Claude Julien, America’s Empire, (Pantheon, 1971) pps. 55, 74; Noel J. Kent, America in 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000) p.
12;
William B. Gatewood, Jr., Black
Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903, (University of Illinois,
1975) pps. 119-20, 140-3
Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Latin America – From Colonization To
Globalization, (Ocean Press, 1999), p. 70
