Cuba next?
Rashed Rahman
The US is intensifying its long standing campaign of collective punishment of the Cuban people for daring to resist since 1959 (the year of Fidel Castro’s revolution) the diktat of Washington’s drive for global hegemony. Escalating sanctions have further worsened the punitive decades-old US blockade. Oil imports have forcibly been blocked, from Venezuela after the Maduro raid, Russia and Iran since Trump came to power. The energy deficit resulting therefrom has deepened a deliberately created crisis, threatening supply of electricity, food, water, healthcare, fuel and other basic human needs. This cruelty is accompanied by the broader assault on Cuba’s sovereignty and socialist development.
Trump has been studiously dismantling since 2017 (his first term) the limited normalisation measures in US-Cuba relations agreed with the Obama administration. Cuba has once again, in Trump’s second term, been subjected to maximum pressure economic warfare, with severe consequences. This pressure has degraded material needs supplies across Cuba, accelerated the exodus of one million Cubans to the US, and imposed extreme suffering on the country’s already vulnerable population. This economic warfare has increased the infant mortality rate in Cuba, to take but one statistic, from 4.0 deaths per live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025, largely because of the shortage of medical supplies. Cuba attracts the hostility of Washington solely because it continues to insist on its right to determine its own political and economic structure and future, one based on its aspiration to construct a socialist society free of inequality. Meanwhile the US’s self-declared right to impose across Latin America, the Caribbean and the wider globe its domination, inflicts suffering that is a central feature of such a project.
Since 1959, Washington has pursued a singular, fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neo-colonial shackles once defining the US-Cuban relationship. Presently, it is no longer the fear that Cuba would aid revolutionary movements in Latin America or further throughout the developing world. Now even the example the revolution represents, an alternative to US hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment, sends the US leadership into a fit of gnashing its teeth. Recent threats to ‘take’ Cuba (part of a growing list that includes Greenland, Canada and what have you) cannot therefore be understood in isolation but help reveal a fundamental reality: a US invasion would not inaugurate a new conflict, but mark the bloodiest phase of a long war against Cuba for the ‘sin’ of reclaiming its national sovereignty from a US-dominated neo-colonial status that favoured not just US businesses, but even the Mafia controlling Cuba's now extinct gambling casinos and their accompanying decadence, including widespread prostitution. Cuba is being severely punished for its defiance and refusal to submit meekly to the dictates of the US empire. What Washington fails to understand is Cuba’s belief that nothing is more precious than freedom and independence.
Cuba’s independence has long been imperilled by its proximity to the US, just 90 miles away from Florida. Starting from the 19th century, Cuba occupied a central position in the US imperial desires. Washington viewed Cuba not as a soon to be sovereign nation when it fought Spanish colonialism for its freedom. It saw the conflict with Madrid as an opportunity to seize upon Cuba’s War of Independence to replace the colonial master in 1898. What followed was the debasement of Cuba to the status of an offshore island of moral corruption and decadence, held up by collaborative regimes in Havana. It was one such military regime led by Baptista that Castro and his dedicated, brave guerrillas overthrew in 1959. Fidel has passed away, so Washington is now looking at a repeat of the Venezuela operation playbook, starting with a federal indictment of Raul Castro for, as defence minister in 1996, ordering the shooting down of two planes attempting to break into Cuban airspace as part of counter-revolutionary campaigns by Cuban exiles in Florida. But the Cuban Revolution would prove a harder nut to crack than Trump can possibly dream of. Every Cuban man, woman and child will stand in the way and beat off any repeat attempt of the Maduro kidnapping.
Another lie being peddled currently to justify Washington’s aggressive aims against Cuba is the allegation that Cuba is gathering drones to attack the US! More absurdity would be difficult to imagine. Why would Cuba invite a military retaliation that, difficult as it may prove, it would then have to stave off? Absurdity Profundis.
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