The covert struggle

U.S. Government Accountability Office analyzes covert programs run by the State Department and USAID in Cuba. [Translated by Progreso Weekly.]

Cuban Foreign Ministry – U.S. Directorate

CUBA – Last Feb. 7, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report about the implementation of subversive programs against Cuba by the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of State. That report had been requested in 2011 by the then-Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now Secretary of State.

The document describes how the USAID and the State Department have used the funds assigned to promote the overthrow of the Cuban government during the years 1996-2011. It emphasizes the total amount devoted by those agencies “to promote democracy in Cuba,” which rose to $205 million. Of this, 87 percent was spent beginning in 2004, in other words, the eight years that covered George W. Bush’s second term and Obama’s first term.

Not included in those $205 million are the funds that the U.S. has spent funding the subversive and illegal broadcasts to Cuba by stations Radio Martí and TV Martí, belonging to the U.S. government, which amount to some $30 million a year.

Also not included in that sum are the budget funds, presumably sizeable, secretly earmarked for the programs and activities of the U.S. intelligence community that derive from Washington’s anti-Cuban policy, and the discretional funds that the Executive Branch can use, also in secret, for the same purposes.

The sum total of all those funds would give a real measure of the efforts that the U.S. government is still making to prop up a failed policy at the expense of the taxpayers’ money.

According to the report, since 2008, i.e. basically under the administration of President Barack Obama, the USAID and the State Department have concentrated the granting of funds for the subversive programs against Cuba on organizations with a worldwide presence or [organizations] in Latin America, so as to avoid the corruption that characterized them for years, when [the funds] were held by the discredited counter-revolutionary organizations and were pocketed by the most recalcitrant sectors of the extreme right in Miami.

Likewise, the idea is to allow the funds to achieve their final objective, i.e., to promote a “regime change” in Cuba.

The GAO report deliberately avoids identifying the organizations and persons who carry out the projects on-site, which confirms the covert nature of said projects and their implementation outside the Cuban legislation. On the contrary, it stresses the actions of the U.S. government to perfect the covert design and concealment of the projects.

Another distinctive feature of those subversive programs in the past several years has been the emphasis on projects linked to the use of info-communication technologies, the creation of blogs and the expansion of the use of social networks, via the Internet.

Regarding the ineffectiveness of the traditional recipients of said programs in Cuba, the document also points out that the programs have been expanded to reach new sectors of Cuban society, such as poor communities in rural areas, religious organizations, small businesses, “independent” journalists, bloggers, young people, students, women, community leaders and people attracted by information technologies.

If to this is added the interest in influencing sectors not mentioned in this report but identified in other official documents that have been made public – such as blacks, homosexuals, professionals, intellectuals and artists – one can appreciate that, when applying its subversive policy with the doomed intention of overthrowing the Cuban Revolution, the government of the United  States leaves no stone unturned.

With relation to the subversive role of the USIS [United States Interests Section in Havana], the report claims that the Section allegedly no longer participates, for reasons of “security,” in the channeling of “assistance” from the State Department and USAID to groups in Cuba, although it continues to provide them with information and training courses in coordination with both agencies and supporting what they euphemistically call Cuba’s “civilian society.”

Although the objective of the report does not go beyond evaluating, from a “technical” point of view, the effectiveness in implementation and supervision of the funds allotted to the aforementioned programs, without analyzing their content or real results, the GAO document is extremely revealing of the strong hallmark of the Obama administration on that policy and the strong push it has given to [that policy], seeking to perfect its design, conceal it better and hamper its detection and neutralization by Cuba’s institutions and legal system.

One must ask how long the U.S. government will continue to misspend taxpayer money that could be used to respond to those taxpayers’ expectations of a constructive and respectful relationship between the two countries.

To read the complete GAO report or a summary of it, access: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-285