A humane view of the blockade

Yet, it exists…

A humane view of the blockade

By Luis Sexto

“The embargo? What embargo?” Juan Clark told El Nuevo Herald, and then added: “U.S. companies already are sending Cuba rice, poultry and now posts for power lines. The embargo is a myth.”

In turn, citizen Luis Manuel Sánchez, from a Cuban hospital, asks: “Is that what he said?” And then he challenges the well-known sociologist, former member of Brigade 2506: “Well, let him come here and assume the paternity of a boy who’s sick with cancer, so that he can suffer the anguish of not knowing if in the next cycle of chemotherapy his son will be able to access cytostatic medication.” The foreign company that supplies it, perhaps a subsidiary of an American company, could void the contract if the U.S. government learns that it’s “trading with the enemy.”

It may be necessary to invite to Havana all those in Miami and Washington who concoct and promote tactics, lie, grumble, vote and make decisions that enable the U.S. Congress and government to classify the government of Cuba (and, by extension, the nation) as an enemy. Then they’ll learn that many of the burdens and material limitations of the Cubans in the archipelago come from the blockade euphemistically called “the embargo.”

What answer does Juan Clark and others who talk like this glib professor deserve? The excuse of ignorance? Rather, we’d have to object to his opinion: he manipulates reality. This expert on Cuban affairs does not ignore that what certain businessmen today sell to Cuba – in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane – is an apparently charitable gesture by the White House, conditioned by payment in cash prior to delivery of the merchandise (only agricultural produce) with one-way commercial rules. In other words, Cuba can only buy; it is denied the opportunity to sell some of its export products to the Americans.

We do not exaggerate when we say that, with $l.4 billion in poultry, rice, onions and street-lighting posts, among other items, Cuba can transcend its supply shortages, stimulate its investments, repair and equip its hospitals, where many Cubans wait for the purchase of a repair part or a tomographer that no manufacturer dares to sell, under threat of a fine.

Everything Cuba has bought in the U.S. since 2001 has been for survival, never for development. Let us ask ourselves if it is false that the Cuban government cannot obtain credit from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank to reproduce its capital goods, modernize its technology and tackle sufficient social works.

Who prevents this? The blockade, the mythological embargo that, like Argus, has 100 eyes and 100 arms. One of the latter was extended by President Obama on Sept. 11 to renew for one year the application to Cuba of the Law on Trading with the Enemy, a label that only Cuba has worn since 1963. Goliath must feel extremely “threatened” by the tiny and skinny David to award it such a privilege.

It is true, if you think about it sensibly, that at various times in the past 46 years, the blockade seemed to some like the story of the mischievous shepherd who scared his colleagues on the pasture fields with the false cry, “Here comes the wolf!” Or that the blockade grew old, wrapped itself in a ghost’s sheet and became barely visible.

Cuba’s commercial relations with the former “socialist camp” attenuated the material insufficiencies produced by the American prohibitions. But by forcing Cuba into a technological reconversion, by closing the credit windows and forbidding a bilateral trade between Cuba and its nearest market, the blockade facilitated the creation of a new and distant dependence.

The blockade has been an old prescription in the United States’ foreign policy. Washington has wielded it more than once, at least against the Cubans, as the formula that’s most convenient to its interests.

Reading an old book – oh, how educational old books are – I learned that the U.S. government attempted to impose on the 1918 sugar harvest a price that might agree with the calculations of Wall Street. When Cuban sugar producers balked, Washington imposed an embargo on the food that Havana had bought from U.S. suppliers. It was a way to persuade the island that, among other dependences, it depended on the U.S. markets for its food.

The episode ended with the triumph of President Wilson and Mr. González, the U.S. Ambassador  to Cuba, although the diplomat’s surname sounded of Latin origin, as happens today. Liberals and conservatives, generals and doctors, sugar traders and sugar-mill bosses allowed themselves to be persuaded. And the sugar coffers in the U.S. filled with $600 million at the expense of “our Cuban colony,” as Leland H. Jenks wrote in a book whose title brazenly and possessively described a situation that was brazen and possessive.

A concept as old as war, the blockade – and its synonyms “siege” and “encirclement” – implies a strategy to defeat the enemy through isolation, hunger, thirst. When neighbors engage in a domestic quarrel, they talk about denying the other “his salt and water” as an irresistible way to hurt and dominate him.

The world’s chronicles tell of the siege of Troy, Jerusalem, Numancia, Leningrad. And they’ll cite the blockage against Cuba, perhaps recalling it as the longest. And they’ll point out that it is different from the previous ones because it does not surround a fortress or a city with war machines. Instead, it relies on extraterritorial laws, circulars, letters, warnings, threats. And it is conducted in times of peace against an entire country, without discriminating among victims or objectives, using economic, financial and commercial goods as weapons.

In view of this activity, turned into a process of aggression, Suárez, Vitoria and Vives – founders of international law – would be horrified and write new laws that perhaps the powerful could not read, blinded by their own arrogance and for their dependence on a strangulating strategy that, like the ball in roulette, propelled by the shortages, someday might achieve the expected result.

In Cuba, however, we not only read about life; we suffer it. And though we know that some internal resistance to renew and readjust the socialist model we inherited is also responsible for our economic stagnation, the Cubans who are less permeable to apparent truths (like Juan Clark’s) also know that the extraterritorial laws of the blockade and the political hostility of the United States, in addition to causing material damages, have helped to generate in Cubans a mentality of siege, of defensive entrenchment that has turned internal initiatives into hostages of our caution, in the face of the United States’ destabilizing thrusts.

The caution is partly justified, because enmity should not be rewarded with courtesy or prejudice with trust. Meanwhile, Luis Manuel Sánchez and his wife, in the hospital, pray that for the next cycle of their child’s cancer treatment the medication will arrive without impediment.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist, won the 2009 José Martí award. He is a regular contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.