A policy review for Cuba: Isn’t 54 years of failure enough?

By Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdés

For over five decades, U.S. policy makers have attempted to overthrow the government in Cuba. Their arguments for doing so have changed over time, as have their methods. But the objective has remained: to deny Cuba’s right of self-determination and to impose from the outside the economic, social and economic arrangement that the U.S. government decides.

In 1959-60, after the Cuban revolution, Washington used anti-revolutionary organizations and CIA agents in Cuba to engage in sabotage and terrorist attacks so as to create impossible conditions for the new government. Cuba’s security forces, however, with popular support, captured, and imprisoned those anti-revolutionaries who did not flee the country.

In March 1960, before Cuba had made any military pacts with the USSR or nationalized most of U.S. property on the island, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to formulate a plan to overthrow the Cuban government. The plan included terrorist attacks ranging from sabotage of strategic property to assassination of Cuba’s leaders. In April 1961, the coup de grace was delivered by a CIA-backed Cuban exile invasion of the island. President Kennedy ordered the CIA to launch this attack, a move he regretted only three days later, when the incursion became known as the Bay of Pigs "fiasco".

Ever since, Washington has treated Cuba’s very existence as a challenge to its claim of Caribbean regional ownership. In January 1961, Washington broke relations with Cuba for its sins of disobedience: forging diplomatic and economic links with our Cold War Soviet enemy, exporting revolution and expropriating U.S. property owners.

Washington policy then evolved into CIA-sponsored violence. Agency officials initially supported groups in Miami, who, over the decades tried invasions, hit and run attacks, and even guerrilla landings, but these efforts also failed to dislodge Cuba’s government, or even weaken it. The CIA continued to use its resources to promote terrorist attacks on Cuba’s people and property.

In 1962, Kennedy took stronger economic measures than Eisenhower, and imposed on the island a devastating economic embargo. This punishment coincided with a diplomatic effort to isolate the island from its relations with all other nations. The U.S. succeeded in isolating Cuba from the Hemisphere.

In 1976, two Cuban exiles working for the CIA blew up a civilian airliner over Barbados. Seventy-three people were killed aboard that Cubana de Aviacion airplane. More recently in 2000, four Cuban exiles almost destroyed a university building in Panama where Fidel Castro was to speak to thousands of students.
Only during the Carter administration (1977-81) did low level diplomatic and consular relations get restored. But Reagan (1981-89) replaced Carter’s goodwill deeds with nasty propaganda. The Reaganites broadcast radio and TV programs filled with anti-revolutionary rhetoric into the island and actively opposed Cuba’s support to its progressive allies abroad. Indeed, Reagan went beyond U.S. law to supply counterrevolutionary forces in Nicaragua, Angola and El Salvador. But he did not countenance any overt attempt to overthrow the government in Havana. The Reaganites did, however, aid wealthy Cuban Americans to forge a lobby emulating AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) to shape Cuba policy.

In 1991-1992, with the fall of the Soviet bloc, U.S. rollback plans for Cuba, posed as carrot and stick diplomacy, returned as bipartisan policy to bring down Cuba’s government – without policy makers even reviewing their past results with similar approaches.

The post Cold War change in U.S. rhetoric also led to new rhetoric designed to subvert Cuba’s government. By codifying the embargo (Helms-Burton -1996) and by adding "democracy building" with the new technological measures, like promoting internet services to support "dissidents," Congress emerged as an active player in subversive U.S. policy on Cuba. The new laws placed responsibility on USAID to contract with private companies to perform the tasks of trying to undermine the Cuban government, albeit calling it "democracy building."

This new, 21st Century U.S. ideal would send agents, posing as tourists, to Cuba to recruit Cubans to build a "civil society." Since the U.S. elite found the real Cuba un-acceptable as a neighbor, USAID agents inside Cuba would encourage dissidents to try to establish an alternative parallel society.

The Polish in the 1980s had a real and independent labor movement (Solidarity), for example, but in Cuba, U.S. agents tried to invent or manufacture an unreal "independent labor" force, as it did with "independent librarians" and "independent doctors." These plans did not work. The Cubans, recruited by U.S. officials or contractors, wanted to earn some dollars to subsidize their livelihood – a sort of ‘dialing for counterrevolutionary dollars.’ Many of these supposed U.S. agents actually worked for Cuba’s secret service.

Although not one U.S. past plan has succeeded, U.S. decision makers, nevertheless, seemed unconcerned with reality, and unmoved by Cuban facts. Indeed, the 21st Century initiative became a virtual opposition operation that ultimately occupied only virtual "reality."

Thanks to U.S. help, Cuban dissidents can now organize a virtual internal opposition. That is, they sit at home with a PC, a tablet or smart phone and prepare for the Twitter revolt. Meantime, the revolutionaries continue to maintain real grass roots mass organizations, through which they mobilize the majority. Radio Bemba (Cuba’s gossip network) is as old as the Cuban people and it will defeat viral technology every time.

No high-ranking U.S. national security officials however, wants to learn facts about why Cuba’s government continues to enjoy popular support, and Cuba’s intelligence service stays ahead of U.S. planners.

Without using facts or history to sustain its policy, Washington has produced 54 years of consecutive failures. In their efforts to destroy the independence of the Cuban government, it has weakened international law and isolated the United States by violating fundamental principles of human decency. To establish a new policy toward Cuba, which the international community and the American public demand, the Oval Office and the State Department have to change the previous notions that are not based in reality.

Saul Landau’s FIDEL and WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP are available on DVD from cinemalibrestudio.com. Nelson Valdés is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico.