The drones, Jackie Coogan and Charlie Chaplin, the glazier

The distance between the cities of Kiev, Ukraine, and Washington, U.S.A., is 7,846 kilometers, while the distance between Kiev and Moscow is barely 753 kilometers. Whoever wishes to understand the meaning of the word “geopolitics” should take these figures as a starting point.

From the start of the Cuban Revolution, the United States refused to accept the presence of what it considered “a hostile regime,” or, what is the same, a rebellious people, a few miles from its shores. After its campaign of harassment and war without quarter to terminate that alternative model to its traditional dominion of the region, Washington considered Moscow’s strategic ties to Havana inadmissible and since then has offered no peace to the island, even though the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991.

Washington never accepted the challenge and 55 years later continues to maneuver to crush Cuba, as it did from the start.

The distance between Washington and Havana is 1,815 kilometers; between Havana and Moscow, 9,583 kilometers.

If the parade of spokesmen and governments, which included almost all governments in Latin America at the time (with the honorable exception of Mexico), accepted as valid the United States’ geopolitical reasons to blockade, isolate, erode and eventually liquidate the Cuban Revolution, why so much complicit silence and pseudo-nationalistic brouhaha about the situation in Crimea, in support of the stuttering operetta gestures made by Obama’s flaccid administration to try to show its muscles to Russia and regain the paradise of its lost world leadership?

The fact is that in this instance, as in all others related to true democracy, freedom, independence and human rights, we are seeing a dual standard: there are good and reasonable geopolitical interests (the United State’s) and wicked and irrational geopolitical interests (Russia’s). And thereafter, ladies and gentlemen, let the circus begin and the chickens squawk and the trained seals clap!

Only yesterday, the Russian defense forces intercepted a U.S. drone spying over Crimea and the border region from 4,000 feet above the ground. I have yet to read a simple critical analysis about the United States’ right to spy other regions of the planet with military aircraft in violation of the sovereignty of nations and international law.

The news — which cannot be concealed — has been broadcast without any analysis, with that odd “journalistic objectivity” that is only brought out of the trunk when directed against those who are excommunicated by the imperial dictum.

But the facts, as Victor Hugo always reminded us, are not declamatory but stubborn. The drone brought down from the skies over Crimea was not a U.F.O. but an earthly unmanned apparatus labeled MQ-5B, belonging to Company A, First Battalion Military Intelligence, known as “The Flying Eye,” part of the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade of the U.S. Army.

The 66th has its permanent headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, under the command of Col. Greg Zellmer, but since the beginning of March (oh, what extraordinary coincidence!), it deployed one of its bases to Kirovograd, in the center of Ukraine, in the absence of any military accord between Ukraine and the United States.

The 66th, also known as Brigade Six-Six-Em-Eye, was founded in 1944 and has participated in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of its members were identified as the cruel torturers at Abu Ghraib and were accused of killing their prisoners.

It is eloquent that their seal shows a sword and the Egyptian Sphinx, identified as a symbol of “observation, wisdom and discreet silence.” The brigade’s motto is also revealing: “Power Forward,” precisely what is doing in Ukraine — propelling the imperial power forward.

Amid the many disconcerting coincidences that have arisen after the downing of the spy drone in Crimea, is it a coincidence that the members of the 66th Brigade are renowned for their fluency in Russian and Farsi?

Let’s not fool ourselves. What’s in motion is a well-thought-out imperialist program to fence Russia in, threaten China and Iran and send a message to other emerging powers that do not accept Yankee hegemony. What happened in Kiev is part of this construct and what’s happening in Crimea are its inexorable and beyond-logic consequences.

Remember that in “The Kid,” that excellent silent picture of the 1920s, Charlie Chaplin sent Jackie Coogan, his young protégé, to throw stones at the windows in their neighborhood and then showed up — as if by coincidence — as a providential glazier offering his services.

I don’t know why this image came to my mind after I heard that it’s the start of the drone season over Crimea.

Elíades Acosta Matos, a Cuban intellectual, is a contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.