There is a public perception that the Obama administration has opened up a new era in U.S.-Cuba relations, in which the United States has “reached out” to Cuba by easing the U.S. blockade. In fact, Washington’s aggression has not let up at all.
The misconception about a shift to a less aggressive policy—what the corporate media absurdly refers to as a “thawing” in U.S.-Cuba relations—comes from the lifting of two provisions implemented by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. These had severely limited the right of Cubans living in the United States to visit and to send remittances to their families in Cuba.
These provisions were repealed by the Obama administration mainly because they were detested by the vast majority of the Cuban American community. Most still have family back in Cuba, and wish to visit their loved ones.
In this way, the Obama administration was able to curry favor among larger numbers of Cuban American immigrants without abandoning the principal aspects of a bipartisan strategy to overthrow Cuba’s social system.
Sanctions punish entire population
The U.S. empire’s long-standing strategy is to use scarcity and underdevelopment as a weapon to strangle the Cuban people. That is the essence of the U.S. blockade on Cuba. According to Cuba’s calculations, its economic losses from more than 50 years of the blockade total $975 billion.
Economic sanctions against Cuba, which would otherwise expire, must be re-authorized on a yearly basis. For the first three years of his four-year term in office, President Obama has signed the legislation necessary to extend all aspects of the financial and commercial blockade against Cuba (most recently in September 2011) despite the “change in politics” so often trumpeted by the corporate press.
Sections of the U.S. ruling class view the global economic crisis as an opportune moment to intensify the blockade against Cuba. Because socialist Cuba has no choice but to buy and sell commodities in the global capitalist market, the island is greatly affected by the capitalist crisis. This has led to problems of hardship and scarcity that Washington knows it can amplify by tightening the blockade.
On June 12, the U.S. government announced it was imposing a $619 million fine on the Dutch bank ING for facilitating commercial transactions with Cuba. In half a century of economic sanctions, this is the heaviest fine ever handed out by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, a body responsible for monitoring and enforcing sanctions against Cuba.
The $619 million fine accounted for half of ING’s net profit in the first quarter of 2012. Far from signaling an easing of restrictions against Cuba, the Obama administration’s actions are an open and immediate threat to any foreign company or country that chooses to do business with Cuba.
A press release issued by OFAC states that ING is also required to conduct an internal revision of its future operations, policies and practices, and to assure Washington that no “OFAC-sanctioned transactions” are occurring. This exemplifies the coercive power of U.S. finance capital. In order to avoid U.S. sanctions for doing business with Cuba, Dutch-based ING had to agree to open its books to the U.S. Treasury Department for scrutiny!
Financing internal subversion
The Obama administration has increased funding—through agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development, and National Endowment for Democracy—to counterrevolutionary elements inside Cuba to undermine and attack the Revolution.
Using misleading and false terms like promoting “democracy,” “human rights” and “freedom of information” inside Cuba, the U.S. government has increased funds by tens of millions of dollars to foment subversive activity. Part of the money is used to bribe Cuban individuals to form opposition groups, who are then instructed by U.S. officials to falsely accuse Cuba of repression.
Encouraging acts of sabotage and terrorism are also on the agenda. The groups are tiny, often numbering less than a handful of persons, but they are magnified by the U.S. government to justify aggression against Cuba.
The funding includes the introduction of sophisticated surveillance and communications equipment into Cuba for the opposition to set up a network, undetectable by Cuba.
The people of the United States are barely aware of these programs, even though taxpayers foot the bill. But one case has made recent headlines; that of Alan Gross, a U.S. employee of Development Alternatives Inc., in turn financed by USAID.
Gross received at least $500,000 and traveled to Cuba several times in 2009. Each time he brought in high-tech equipment, including Internet satellite phones. A breaking story by Desmond Butler of Associated Press on Feb. 13 explained that Gross also brought in “a specialized mobile phone chip that experts say is often used by the Pentagon and the CIA to make satellite signals virtually impossible to track.”
Gross was tried and convicted for “undermining the integrity and independence of Cuba.” He received a 15-year sentence. The White House has demanded his unilateral release. Cuba says it would favor a prisoner exchange on humanitarian grounds between the Cuban Five, political prisoners unjustly held in the United States for almost 14 years, and Gross. But the Obama administration has refused, instead using Gross’s case to justify its ongoing hostility.
The electronic plots continue. As recently as June 28, USAID announced a program for organizations that can establish “digital democracy” inside Cuba through technological means, for a total of $18 million in the next three years.
The government and people are not sitting idly by. Cuba’s security and vigilant population have helped unmask some of these operations, dealing a blow to Washington’s aims.
One example is Raúl Capote, a young Cuban professor who was recruited in 2005 by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, an operating base for the CIA. He revealed his real identity as a double agent for Cuba two years ago, and has since written numerous exposés of the sinister attempts by the United States to create divisions within Cuban society, focusing on youth, Black Cubans, LGBT people, intellectuals and artists—in short, divide-and-conquer.
U.S. government employs right-wing terrorists
A historic outgrowth of the U.S. ruling class’s drive to overturn the Cuban Revolution is the nurturing of an extreme right-wing anti-Cuba terrorist network in Miami, a network the Obama administration allows to operate as freely as all past administrations.
In the run-up to the United States’ failed land invasion of Cuba in 1961, known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA recruited thousands of members of Cuba’s former ruling class and Batista henchmen. It armed them, trained them and attempted to fashion them into an anti-communist paramilitary force.
With the disastrous U.S. defeat at the Bay of Pigs, the consolidation of Cuba’s revolution and its alliance with the Soviet Union, imperialist hopes of bringing down the revolution militarily were postponed indefinitely.
But the counterrevolutionaries based in Miami did not simply vanish. They increasingly turned toward committing acts of terrorism against Cubans and anyone within reach who sympathized with the revolution, or advocated for a normalization of relations with Cuba.
In one example, during an eight-year period beginning in 1975, Omega 7, one organization of terrorists among many, was responsible for up to 50 bombings and two assassinations carried out in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Miami.
Although the U.S. government may at times contain or restrict the activities of the Miami terrorist network, the U.S. government has always allowed them to exist and operate with impunity.
On April 27, after years without such incidents, the Miami terrorists bombed a Miami charter company specializing in flights to Cuba.
Airline Brokers Co. provided air travel for 340 Cuban-Americans who flew from South Florida to Cuba for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit at the end of March. This simple act of charter service brought terrorist threats and finally a firebombing. “We had to have armed security guard around my house for about a month” said business owner Vivian Mannerud. “There were many, many threats … other threats with a suspicious package in my car and so on,” she added. Weeks after the incident the FBI claims to have no suspects.
It is important to remember that part of Cuba is currently occupied by the U.S. military. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which has been run by the U.S. military since 1898, has thousands of soldiers and a massive arsenal on Cuban soil.
Stand with the Cuban Revolution!
Raúl Capote explained Cuba’s resistance in a recent interview by Aday del Sol Reyes: “The enemy will never stop trying to destroy the Revolution. Why? Because Cuba is an example too powerful and Cuban revolutionaries are by far the most active dissidents within this world of global capitalist power, because we are managers and promoters of a culture that is a deadly opponent of capitalist culture … because we ended half a century of absolute dominion of the empire over the land and we sow hope in the land of a possible better world.”
It is the duty of socialists and revolutionaries to help bring Cuba’s truth to the people of the United States, and stand with Cuba against the relentless onslaught of the U.S. empire.
