Does U.S. policy toward Cuba have a face?
If anything has been demonstrated by 55 years of confrontation between Cuba and the United States, it is the predisposition of U.S. foreign-policy officials to insult the Havana government.
A book that collected their statements to the press would have — conservatively speaking — thousands of pages.
If that book were ever printed, we would realize how the pretexts to maintain a policy toward Cuba have evolved. The latest officials to recognize that the policy should be modified — even though with the same objectives of “regime change” — have been President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.
From assailing Cuba’s alliance to the Soviet Union, its support for national liberation movements in Latin America, its military presence in Africa, and its support for guerrillas in Central America, Washington has turned to wielding the state of human rights on the island to sustain its policy of economic blockade.
Because reality does not provide the U.S. with arguments on that subject, Washington creates them by assigning funds — $20 million a year to the State Department and $30 million to Radio-TV Martí — that bankroll people inside Cuba who are presented as being fighters for individual freedom.
As the U.S. diplomats accredited to Havana have stated in cables disclosed by Wikileaks about these people, “the search for resources is their main concern. The second and more important concern seems to be to limit or alienate the activities of their former allies so as to reserve for themselves the power and access to the scant resources.”
In sum, in the absence of pretexts to maintain its policy toward Cuba, the United States allocates $50 million each year to manufacture them. That’s not news. What’s really news is that, late this year, the international press found only one “high-ranking U.S. diplomat who asked for anonymity” to repeat the tired old speech favored by the Miami-based anti-Castro industry, which benefits from those handouts.
According to Agence France-Presse, the only agency with access to the exclusive statement, the anonymous gentleman from the State Department said that the U.S. government is “focused on the need to improve the condition of human rights and the respect toward the fundamental freedoms in Cuba.”
That statement merited headlines like the one in El Nuevo Herald: “There will be a dialogue if human rights improve in Cuba, U.S. answers Raúl Castro.”
The statements made by Cuban President Raúl Castro at the closing of the Second Ordinary Session of the Eighth Legislature of the National Assembly, to which AFP alludes, were the following:
“While in recent times we have been able to carry out some exchanges on issues of mutual benefit between Cuba and the United States, we believe that we can solve other issues of interest and establish a civilized relationship between the two countries, in line with the wishes of our people, the vast majority of U.S. citizens, and the Cuban Émigrés.
“As far as we are concerned, we have expressed on many occasions our willingness to maintain a respectful dialogue with the United States, on equal terms and without compromising the independence, sovereignty and self-determination of our nation. We do not ask the United States to change its political and social system, nor do we agree to negotiate ours. If we really want to advance in our bilateral relations, weíll have to learn to mutually respect our differences and get used to coexisting peaceably with them. That’s the only way. Otherwise, we are prepared to endure another 55 years in the same situation.”
It is interesting, very interesting, that nobody in Washington wants to show his or her face to answer that position statement and defend a policy that even Obama himself considers no longer the one adopted in 1961.
Rejected are those who want to invent an enthusiasm for the past after a year when 188 countries condemned at the United Nations the U.S. blockade against Cuba, when Cuba was reelected to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, when John Kerry, questioned about the State Department “contractor” who is imprisoned in Cuba for subversive activities, said “we are involved in some talks about which I cannot speak in detail,” when meetings were held on issues about postal mail and migration, and when Barack Obama had no recourse but to shake the Cuban president’s hand during the funeral for Nelson Mandela.
I have the impression that reality goes in one direction and the “U.S. diplomacy that asked for anonymity” — as well as those who pump it up with enthusiasm — goes in another.
Iroel Sánchez is a Cuban engineer and journalist working at the Ministry of Computer Sciences and Communications. He is a former president of the Cuban Book Institute.
(From Tercera Información.)
