US claims of Cuba’s ‘unique threat’ jar with reality of hunger and blackouts | Cuba
The US government’s latest claims that Cuba was behind “many of the most significant uprisings in recent American political history” and that its leaders posed “a unique threat to American domestic security” were startling revelations for those living under a six-month US oil blockade in Havana, where desperate people searched through piles of uncollected garbage for food or were overwhelmed by power outages in their homes for more than 24 hours.
100 pages unsigned The report Cuba: Capital of 21st Century Communism, released Monday by the U.S. state department, blames Havana for “everything from the George Floyd riots to the rise of antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses.”
It is the latest move in a maximum pressure campaign to overthrow the island’s government, which began with the Jan. 3 kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, president of Cuba’s ally Venezuela. Since then, Cuba has come to a standstill with an oil blockade, sanctions on foreign companies and threats of military intervention.
This also appears to be an attempt to “otherize” those on the US left ahead of the November midterm elections.
“Cuba’s attack on the United States was never essentially a dispute over economic policy, sovereignty, or even ownership of a particular territory,” the report said. “This was a revolution against Western civilization itself, achieved in part by the new and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to oppose their own heritage.”
“Fidel would have been quite proud of this,” said one Cuban who was amused by the reading.
The US state department, led by Cuban-American Marco Rubio, refused to name the author, but it was clearly someone who knew his background. “Immediately after taking Havana in January 1959, Castro began planning armed attacks against neighboring governments, launching expeditions into Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama in that year alone.”
What he doesn’t mention is that Haiti was then ruled by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who killed an estimated 60,000 of his own people; Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, which launched the “parsley massacre” that killed 20,000 to 35,000 Haitians; and Nicaragua by the Somoza family, who are credited with the murder of up to 50,000 Nicaraguans.
Although there is no new evidence in the report, there is a suspicious emphasis on race. Cuban intelligence’s supposedly remarkable success in infiltrating US institutions was due to its weakness for “glamorous Latinos”; “‘We’re much more open to Latinos than we are to people with steel teeth and Slavic accents,'” an intelligence official was quoted as saying to the Miami Herald in 2002.
He also laments the ideological commitments of the spies Cuba recruits, but there is no mention that many of them were inspired by the CIA’s assassination attempts on Castro or the sanctuary the United States offered to exiles Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who bombed Cuban Flight 455 in 1976, killing 73 people.
Most shockingly, the report conflates the United States’ long internal struggle around civil rights and social reform and reframes it as an ongoing battle between the forces of foreign actors and “western civilization” over groups such as the Black Panthers, which it attributes to Cuba.
While many black revolutionaries found refuge on the island, the most famous of these was Assata Shakur, who paid a price of $2 million for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper; This experience was perhaps not as conspiratorial as the author suggests. One of the named fugitives, Nehanda Abiodun, has said in interviews that her politics and revolutionary anger came from her experiences growing up in 1970s New York, and not from her love for Cuba, whose government she resented for silencing her in exchange for asylum. He would say that the first thing that happened upon landing was that he was racially profiled by the Cuban police. If it was part of a well-oiled international conspiracy, it was not revealed.
For five years, the Cuban government has not even been able to feed its 9.5 million people, who mostly blame it for the crisis. But the report is ready for this: “To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to completely misunderstand the threat. Its material weakness has never been the measure of its danger.”
He concludes: “Today, Cuban agents and operatives are entrenched in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. Collectively, these groups represent one of the largest, most complex, and dangerous vectors of hostile foreign influence in modern American history.”
Before the report was released, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that the United States had fallen into the trap of “a new and more dangerous version of McCarthyism.”
But perhaps harsher criticism came from a Cuban academic who preferred to remain anonymous: “It’s just like a report that the Cuban state media could write about the United States.”
