Cubad - Village Magazine

7 6 December - January 2017

INTERNATIONAL

Cubad

US and Them

by Patrick Horan

HREE YEARS before he was assassi-

nated, in 1898 US President William

McKinley, noticing that the Spanish

Empire was financially emaciated and

reeling under the pressures of subdu

ing its restive Cuban colony, decided it was time

for the USA to have colonies.

Decrying 'Spanish cruelty' towards the native

Cubans, McKinley, aided by the pliant William

Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, succeeded

in whipping up public support for a war with the

perplexed Spanish.

Having fought the Spanish to a standstill, the

Cubans were within touching distance of secur

ing independence for themselves when McKinley

unhelpfully dispatched the marines. Forgetful of

the reason he had sent his troops there in the

first place - the welfare of the Cuban peoples of

course - the usually humanitarian McKinley then

proceeded to dictate a peace of unprecedented

severity.

For the next 20 years a succession of dictators

(the favoured term is ‘strong men’ or, ideally,

'moderates') was imposed by Washington on

Cuba to serve the interests of US corporations

and their shareholders, eager to exploit the

island’s rich soil and temperature, conducive to

the growth of, amongst other things, bananas

and sugar cane. Real wages for Cubans plum-

meted and poverty soared, but this was ignored

and rendered irrelevant because it interfered

with the received wisdom that freedom brought

only wonders for the natives, a wisdom that

could never be refuted and has therefore never

been refuted.

Most important was the profits that would

accrue to US corporations which now descended

on Cuba in biblical droves, squawking overhead

like vultures spying a fresh carcass. Conditions

for the native Cuban workers were little better

than indentured servitude, but as long as the US

had 'their man in Havana' who enjoyed preferen-

tial status in return for crushing occasional

native labour disputes, (by 1930, 75 of the larg-

est sugar mills were owned by US corporations

who themselves controlled 5 million of the

island's total 27 million acres) Washington slept

soundly.

This policy was abruptly brought to an end on

New Year’s Day 1959 by Fidel Castro's popular

revolution. US-sponsored 'strong man', Fulgen-

cio Batista, departed Cuba with both a heavy

heart and $300 million of the bankrupt island's

wealth. This was a revolution from 'the ground-

up'. In other words Castro had the support of the

masses .

Unhelpfully, Castro did not completely break

ties with the United States, thus making it harder

for Washington to denounce him as ‘pure evil’ or

a ‘Communist stooge’. At first he even asked for

support under the US strategic umbrella. When

he heard of this request, President Eisenhower

balked: Castro was a Communist, so no dice.

Castro was made to feel even more like a bad

smell when he insisted that his revolution was

here to stay and the preferential treatment here

tofore accorded US corporations was over.

Dismissed by the stiff and austere Eisen-

hower, Castro, hopes raised, was then

December - January 2017 7 7

introduced to the robust sophistication of the

dandy, Ivy League-educated President John F.

Kennedy in 1961. Like any first date, the introduc-

tion was fumbling and a little awkward. Kennedy,

barely in power a wet three months, tried to kill

Castro by launching the infamous Bay-of-Pigs

attack, an act of unprovoked aggression. Poorly

planned and executed, the attack was beaten

back by Castro's forces. Jack, we know, was no

gentleman.

Now on notice of what to expect from his

superpower northern neighbour, Castro, still

unwilling to acquiesce to his own liquidation for

the crime of refusing to obey orders from the

Master, frantically looked around for support. He

found Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet

Union who was immediately drawn to the idea of

installing medium-range ballistic missiles on

Cuba. In his memoirs Khrushchev explained his

actions: “The Americans had surrounded our

country with military bases and threatened us

with nuclear weapons and now they would learn

just what it feels like to have enemy missiles

pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than

giving them a little of their own medicine”.

The Bay of Pigs débacle only led to a sense

that stronger measures were called for to get rid

of the annoying Castro. JFK handed the brief to

his hyperactive brother, Bobby Kennedy, an

uppity graduate of Milton and Harvard who

demanded more and more elaborate CIA plots to

kill the man who refused to do the obvious thing

and expire quietly. But Castro refused to inhale

the poisoned cigars.

In 1962 a vulnerable world was subjected to

the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event precipitated

by the incompetence and recklessness of Ken-

nedy. Historians (chiefly in the guise of court

historians such as Arthur Schlesinger) have

always contended that it was JFK’s coolness and

imperturbability that headed off World War III.

This is only partial truth. The real debt of thanks

which humanity owes is not to Kennedy but to

Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer. Arkh-

ipov was aboard a nuclear-powered submarine

and it was his casting vote (2-1) which overruled

his captain’s decision to launch a nuclear missile

strike against the United States after the Soviet

submarine found itself repeatedly depth-

charged by US destroyers in international waters

off Cuba on 27 October, 1962. The fact that you

are reading this today is due to Arkhipov not Ken-

nedy. But since Arkhipov was Soviet he has been

air-brushed from history.

It is often alleged, mostly by people who’ve

never visited Cuba, that Castro was a brutal dic-

tator who gave short shrift to dissidents. This

may be so but he’s never been in the same

league as the rogues gallery of third world des-

pots that the United States has installed in

Central and South America since the 1950s.

These stalwarts, chiefly drawn from the military,

have been armed, assisted and trained by the

US in, to quote Charles Maechling, US Counter-

Insurgency Chief and head of Internal Defense

Planning from 1961-1966, “the methods of Hein-

rich Himmler’s extermination squads”.

To give one example, when future Secretary of

State Henry Kissinger met the Argentinian gen-

erals in 1976, the number of ‘disappeared’

(citizens kidnapped and murdered by the secu-

rity services) was 1,022. Three years of

substantial US military and economic “assis

tance” later, this number had rocketed to a

minimum of 15,000.

Moreover, at least Castro's dissidents could

(and still do) voice their complaints and launch

demonstrations against his rule. People who

complained in Chile, Brazil and Argentina (to

name just three) at their treatment by agents of

the state were never heard from again.

Nor did the bewitching Shah of Iran advance

civilisation much. He was installed over the

heads of his people by the US and UK in 1953 and

accumulated, during his roustabout twenty-six

year reign, one of the worst human-rights

records of the age. However, the West never com-

plained about these trivialities because, in the

ambivalent political lexicon of Washington, “the

Shah was our guy”.

Suharto in Indonesia is reckoned to have

slaughtered at least 500,000 of his fellow coun-

trymen, not to speak of his atrocities in East

Timor which went unmentioned in the West). The

more presentable President Mubarak of Egypt,

became a byword for oppression amongst his

impoverished countrymen during his thirty-year

ascendancy. Washington showered them and

their military with largesse to help them “pro-

mote democracy”.

Then there are those tyrants who have been

excoriated by history but who rather unhelpfully

had started out being armed and supported by

Washington. The Transylvanian Wallflower,

Romanian Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaus-

escu was among the first to get the red-carpet

treatment. He was invited to Washington to be

feted by President Nixon primarily because he

had broken ranks with Moscow by criticising the

suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. The

annoying fact that Ceausescu, marshal of one of

the most feared and violent internal security ser-

vices in Eastern Europe, the dread Securitate,

was a Communist, was deemed irrelevant. Prov-

ing that there is no bar to true friendship, the

irrepressible Ceausescu banned abortions and

docked the wages of doctors in whose areas

women weren't producing the correct quota of

babies, but was officially reclassified as a 'friend

of the West' and in 1983 became, in the words of

another man of peace, George H.W. Bush, a

“good Communist”.

Ceausescu's bona fides thus secured, it didn't

matter that he went on to level entire districts of

ancient Bucharest, expelling thousands of his

countrymen in order to build his megalomania-

cal Palace of the Parliament, thereby draining

the scarce resources of his already impoverished

country; as far as Washington was concerned,

he was an endearing friend and henceforth

exempt from impolite human rights criticism in

the Western press.

Similarly, after the Russian invasion of Afghan-

istan in 1979 the Taliban was cultivated by

Washington and former British Foreign Secretary

Robin Cook wrote that the word al-Qaeda should

be translated as "the database", and originally

referred to the computer file of the thousands of

mujahideen militants there who were recruited

and trained with CIA help to defeat the Russians.

The US remains only unevenly squeamish about

Saudi Arabia and indeed Syria.

As if to show the richness of history’s tapestry

there are others still who moved from pariah to

friend to pariah. In 1982 Reagan, banner-wielder

for folksy American decency, demoted Saddam

Hussein from the unhelpful designation of 'dan

gerous and maniacal terrorist dictator' and

In 1898 US PresidentWilliam

McKinley decided it was time

for the USA to have colonies

and that Cuba would be ﬁrst

Kissinger with Argentina's Videla ('Disappeared' are out of shot)

7 8 December - January 2017

INTERNATIONAL

promoted him to the much more palatable clas-

sification of 'dangerous and maniacal dictator'.

Saddam, no longer a terrorist, Reagan was free

to ship massive quantities of arms (including

chemical weapons) to Baghdad which were

immediately deployed in Saddam’s brutal war

against Iran, a salient feature of which was his

casual use of poisoned gas against hapless Ira

nians. Happily, Saddam was later ousted by the

US-led invasion in March 2003 and put on trial

for genocide of and gassing 50-100,000 Kurds in

1987-1989, at precisely the time when he was a

client of both Washington and London, using the

chemical weapons supplied by them. Only his

previous execution on charges of crimes against

humanity saved him from conviction for this.

So, having established that Washington cares

not a hoot about whether a leader is a despot,

democrat or communist, why has Fidel Castro

fixated Western attention for so long? What

could possibly be the underlying reason for a

superpower to repeatedly break international

law by applying illegal embargoes and economic

strangulation on a helpless island for so long?

The 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidar-

ity Act was signed into law by President Bill

Clinton with the express purpose of preventing

third countries (e.g. Ireland) from trading with

Cuba and bringing, as Peter Schwab in his book,

Cuba: Confronting the US Embargo, described it,

“extra-territoriality under the rubric of the

embargo”.

The illegal US-imposed embargo exacted its

toll. Within five months of the passage of Clin

ton’s 1996 Act, The Lancet medical journal (1

April, 2000) was to report that the food shortage

caused by the Act had contributed to the worst

epidemic of neurological disease in Cuba in the

entire twentieth century. The symptoms included

deafness, spinal disorder and impaired bladder

control, similar to the effects noted in US

marines who had been held captive in Japanese

prisoner of war camps during World War II. In a

report filed in February, 1998 the Washington

Post reported that Havana’s mammography

programme had been shut down through lack of

X-Ray film and “a paediatric ward had no medi-

cines to suppress nausea in children receiving

chemotherapy treatments” and as a result “the

thirty-five children in the ward were vomiting on

average 28 to 30 times per day”.

All of which brings us to our own political class

here in Ireland. For decades no one from Fianna

Fáil or Fine Gael denounced the US-led embargo

that caused so much misery to Cuban women

desperately awaiting mammography's or Cuban

children forced to repeatedly vomit for want of

vital medicines that could not be imported.

According to UCD History Professor Diarmaid

Ferriter, it was not until 1995 that Ireland voted

for the first time for a UN resolution condemning

the continuing US economic blockade of Cuba,

but diplomatic links between the two countries

were not established until 1999 and it took until

2009 before an Irish foreign minister, Micheál

Martin, travelled to Cuba in an official capacity

where he expressed concern at the US embargo

but squarely admitted: “I don’t propose to tell

the American administration how to proceed”

and largely focused on trade.

When President Michael D Higgins described

Castro, on his recent death, as a "giant amongst

global leaders", that he was "of a generation of

leaders that sought offer an alternative global

economic and social order", he was assailed. Our

civil war parties echoed the Washington mantra

of “We, good; Cuba, bad”.

Fianna Fail’s spokesman on foreign affairs,

Darragh O’ Brien asserted that President Higgins’

statement “was not as balanced as it could have

been”. Higgins was excoriated in the Sunday

Times and Irish Independent. A Senator said he

had fawned. A spokesman for the President was

forced to insist that his statement had referred to

human rights abuses in Cuba: "The President’s

statement clearly referred to the price paid for

social and economic development in terms of civil

society and the criticisms it brought”.

It is contrariwise notable that since Barack

Obama re-opened diplomatic relations with

Cuba two years ago both Martin and O’Brien

have been silent on the Cuban regime; at no

point did Martin take to the airwaves and

denounce Cuba or Obama’s incipient rapproche-

ment. He didn't do it because he was observing

his obsequious role in the dynamic that has long

characterised the actions of our political class in

their dealings with Washington, the one he had

referred to in 2009.

However, Castro wasn't dead five minutes

before Donald Trump took to social media in his

role as Twitterer-in-Chief, to denounce Castro as

a brutal dictator who had enslaved his people.

Micheál Martin, sensing which way the political

winds are now blowing hoist himself on the anti-

Communist bandwagon. Eager to burnish his

credentials as a loyal company man ahead of the

inevitable bowl of shamrock which he undoubt

edly hopes to deliver to Trump in the White House

one day, although he actually defended Higgins

Martin followed up by fiercely denouncing Castro

in his usual ‘tough-librarian’ style though he was

denigrating a just-deceased ninety-year old man.

Wiser heads, more aware of the fractures in

rich-world ideology, of the difficulty of promoting

equality in a world where freedom to the point of

licence is the domineering value, were gentler.

Higgins had done the complexity of the legacy

of Castro in Cuba, some service.

President Michael

D Higgins did the

complexity of the

legacy of Castro in

Cuba some service

MicheálMartin, sensing

which way the Trumpian

political winds are now

blowinghoist himself

on the anti-Castro

bandwagon