US-Cuba Policy Change Suits US Interests
By Ron Ridenour
HAVANA TIMES — The United States of America, the global policeman, is “changing its relationship with the people of Cuba”, as President Barack Obama put it. With this announcement of a resumption of diplomatic relations after John F. Kennedy severed them January 1, 1961 we need to evaluate what is behind it and what is positive and negative.
I feel compelled to spell out my take on this new policy after having Cuba in my heart for five decades, from the day of my first protest during the Bay of Pigs invasion, April 1961, and after living there and working for the Cuban government from1987 to 1996. (1)
The Positive
- The brave, patriotic Cuban Five are freed from US prisons and their torture chambers and reunited with their loved ones in their own country.
- Obama inadvertently admitted that Cuba is not a terrorist state when he instructed Secretary of State John Kerry, a former war criminal in Vietnam turned repentant, to reconsider the US designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terror”. While the US knows that Cuba has never supported terrorism nor has it conducted such, the US is clearly THE terrorist state of the times.
- Obama also inadvertently admitted that Cuba does not torture its people, including prisoners, as does the US, when he said that “no Cubans should face harassment or arrest or beatings”. These measures do not constitute torture, even if Cuban authorities have harassed or beaten some people. It can be argued that this is wrong but it is not torture. Just days before Obama’s speech, on December 17, the Senate issued a partial report on how the CIA has tortured people in many countries, including at the US military base on Cuban territory at Guantánamo, on land it stole from Cuba in 1898, and yet no one is to be held accountable. Just imagine reversing this reality. Imagine that Cuba stole land from the US and placed a military base on it and then brought people there from several countries without any judicial process, held them confined for years without recourse and tortured them consistently.
Beatings at US “blacks sites”, as they called them, or at rendition secret jails in countries the US now wars against (Syria and Libya), was kids play. These leaders of democracy and human rights rammed broomsticks up rectums, used water boarding or near drowning, sexual/rape abuse in many ways including tearing rectums apart, forced sleep deprivation for several days, shackling hands over heads without touching the ground for days, constant loud noises, threatened torture and murder of prisoners’ children and parents…And that is what is admitted.
The US has continually accused Cuba of torturing its people, and yet has never come up with evidence. Yet it has tortured hundreds of thousands of human beings, including in its own prisoners, for two centuries? The US even conducts torture training to Latin American military personnel at a military base at Fort Benning, Georgia, the School of the Americas.
![Havana by night. Photo: Bill Klipp](https://havanatimes.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Havana-Bill-Klipp.jpg)
The Negative
- The US government realizes that the socialist revolution in Cuba is dead. Its people are fed up with empty revolutionary sloganeering from the bureaucracy. The vast majority of the people are so disheartened with the lack of real socialism, implying real participatory democracy, that what they seek is what most people in the world of disillusion wish for: consumerism and every man/woman for him/her self. So Obama can coolly state: “I am convinced that through a policy of engagement, we can more effectively stand up for our values and help the Cuba people help themselves as they move into the 21st century.”
- US capitalists wish to end the blockade so that they can earn profits. Rockefeller and many other major and middle capitalists have long conducted an association that seeks an end to the blockade.
- The Cuban bureaucratic government also seeks an end to the blockade so that it can continue to avoid advancing the permanent revolution set in motion in the early days, which would require implementing true decision-making by the people, and ownership of the economy by those who produce and those who serve, thereby gradually eliminating an elitist leadership.
- Cuba is on the run backwards to capitalism, even neo-liberalism. What can be expected with this change of US policy is that Cuba will continue in reverse, begging for trade with capitalist-imperialist-warmongering US corporations and their government. A true socialist program both within Cuba and within the already stifled ALBA alliance (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and three Caribbean island states) is basically trashed.
As Paul Craig Roberts wrote (http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/12/regime-change-in-cuba/):
“Normalization is a result of US corporations seeking profit opportunities in Cuba, such as developing broadband Internet markets.” With normalization “comes American money and a US Embassy. The American money will take over the Cuban economy. The embassy will be a home for CIA operatives to subvert the Cuban government. The embassy will provide a base from which the US can establish NGOs whose gullible members can be called to street protest at the right time…Normalization of relations means regime change in Cuba.”
That comes from a former US government assistant secretary of the treasury. And that is what Cuban solidarity folk should be worried about instead of calling upon Cuban supporters to give thanks to Obama, the leader of the greatest terrorist state in the history of humanity.
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(1) See my CV and books about Cuba http://www.ronridenour.com/about.htm, and my analyses of Cuba at www.ronridenour.com
The Castro regime maintains control of all imports and exports in Cuba. Shop owners are not allowed to contract directly with foreign suppliers. All supplies must be purchased from the state-owned monopolies. The small independent self-employed sector will get the crumbs, but the Castro regime will take the biggest slice of the new US cash flow.
Cuba has had 50 years to establish it’s brand of one party rule. An embassy and a few more tourist will hardly challenge Raul, while it will make life easier for small shop owners who can now import supplies. The state has all the power it needs to control the economy. This is not the 1940’s with unfettered foreign interest running the show. Raul runs the show on who and how anyone can do business on the Island.
I think the author stands closer and closer to being alone in thier old views. It is selfish to hold on to these old biased views when the quality of life index for the entire country of Cuba will increase. This article stinks of a sore looser.
And I will be right there with cash in hand.
You’re right! I was bound to miss more than one. Your ‘squeezing the Charmin’ idea is a good one.
You missed the howeller that these rapacious capitalists are slavering over the chance to open up the fabulously lucrative Cuban broadband internet market. Right. If I wanted to invest in a new Cuban business venture ( which I dont) it would be to import toilet paper. Much bigger demand and a cleaner profit margin there.
HT does itself no credit when publishing drivel like Ron’s column.
What a load of crap! This writer has made so many mistakes, it is not worthwhile to list every one. Here’s a few of them:
1) The five Cuban spies were never kept in torture chambers.
2) The US does KNOW that Cuba has been a State sponsor of terrorism.
3) Rockefeller is dead.
4) The ALBA Alliance is made up of, albeit left-leaning, capitalist countries with the exception of Cuba. How exactly does a group of capitalist countries form a ‘socialist’ alliance?
5) Obama did not admit that Cuba does not torture. On the contrary, for the sake of the new relationship, he clearly avoided the subject altogether.
Despite the false premise of the post, it is clear that the writer does not want normal diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba. What he appears to support for Cuba is the fantasy-style socialism that has never existed anywhere and is counter the nature of human beings. Wait….is this John Goodrich?
Cuba is set to make a FORTUNE exporting classic cars!
What a superb history and analysis of the situation.
Of course, to the long-indoctrinated who believe that Cuba is either communist or socialist, the on-the-money analysis will seem to be very alien and unfamiliar territory.
What always amazes me is that the foes of both the revolution and socialism always shout out their support for democracy in Cuba while simultaneously calling for free-market capitalism which is, by its very nature, a totalitarian form .
The amazing part is that they can’t see that the two are mutually exclusive .
You cannot have both capitalism and a democratic society.