The campaigns against Cuba and the war of yawns

By Elíades Acosta Matos

Much more than economic, diplomatic or military, the war against Cuba has been and is a total cultural war, and that explains its duration and viciousness. If anyone has any doubts, he should see how things are going on the media front, how all its weapons, technologies and efforts are used to demolish the resistance of a rebellious island that refuses to dilute its nationality or surrender its social project.

When armies, fleets or armored brigades confront each other, it can always be determined when the hostilities will begin and when they will end. Truces, armistices, even international laws rule the conflicts. None of this applies to the battles where ideas, visions of the world and values are pitted against each other. Some believe that anything can be used as a weapon to demoralize, isolate, wound or deride the opponent. The idea is to demonize him, turn his cause into a motive for shame, into an anachronism.

It matters not what is published, what lies are spoken, what swinish methods are used, such as photographic trickery or the publication of images that offend human dignity. Calls to violence or vandalism are legitimate. All’s fair if Cuba’s enemies can isolate our nation, weaken it, make it a valid target for invasions, “stabilization operations,” “the reconstruction of a failed state” or “humanitarian interventions.”

It is known that Cuba acts on some sectors of U.S. policy the way the full moon acts on the Wolf Man. That clever description was made by Wayne Smith, who directed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana during the Carter administration and knows perfectly well what he speaks of.

What is the deep, almost Freudian reason for an irrational and vicious siege that has lasted for more than half a century and survived more than 10 Republican and Democratic administrations, even the Cold War itself? Part of the reason can be found in a report written in 1965, 45 years ago, by Albert Wohlstetter [1], one of the strategists of the American neoconservative movement, who advised all the presidents who occupied the White House between Eisenhower and Bush Sr.

“The release of […] political prisoners […] has much to recommend it from our point of view. First, as a humane act, second, as a possible step toward the formation of an opposition to Castro. […] Sending them abroad would also be a humane act, but aside from swelling somewhat the already large Cuban exile movement, would be perhaps less valuable for the future of the Cuban opposition to Castro.” Wohlstetter recommended that no accord should be signed to limit the U-2 spy flights over the island.

In the commercial sphere, Wohlstetter said, we should not talk about a “normalization” of relations between the two countries; that’s not desirable. The blockade against Cuba should be maintained, among other reasons, “to demonstrate to the people of the American republics that communism has no future in the Western Hemisphere.”

“The fact that such a new Communist outpost can so easily survive our hostility and possibly even flourish by dealing with us, can – when the time is ripe – encourage future imitations of Castro.”

Therefore, let us set aside those mantras – repeated until exhaustion by many of those who live from the industry of confrontation and hostility toward Cuba – to the effect that their struggle is due “to moral or patriotic reasons.” This is a prefabricated war for ideological and geostrategic reasons that began – with some justification – in the context of those Cold War confrontations, but that has persisted for a long time against all logic, other than an imperial logic.

And in that scenario, can we accept the protestations that the harassers act in an independent manner detached from the gravitational force of the nutrient source and outside the plans of those circles for whom Wohlstetter worked? Recently, Mark Falcoff, one of the neoconservative “Cubanologists,” updated (if that is possible) the reasons for this never-ending hatred and persecution.

“From the point of view of politics, ideology, and culture, Cuba is more important than its small population or its negligible gross national product indicates,” Falcoff said during a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in January 2003.[2] The cult of the Revolution survives in Latin America, and Cuba is the only country that carries forward the ideal of total transformations, to the final consequences. While many resent our power, only Cuba, little Cuba is willing to pay the full price of its position, Falcoff says. It is the kind of banner that brings together all the anti-American leftists and the utopian tendencies in the world, he says.

No matter how highly the Diaz-Balarts or the ineffable Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen think of themselves, no matter if they see themselves (and sell themselves to the public) as idealistic crusaders in quest of rights and freedoms, the truth is that they’re only bolts and pulleys of a machine that is way bigger than them. They are part of a troupe whose real entrepreneurs are a lot higher in the food chain of the world’s most powerful nation. The rest is makeup and masques – a way of life.

Once we’ve seen the real reasons for those campaigns that every so often galvanize the world’s media through tragedies and comedies, real and faked pain, shortages and excesses, let us see how they are structured, how this factory of cultural wars against Cuba and leftist ideas operates. By the way, the factory is also working full-time against a liberal, the current President of the United States.

There is a thick manual on how to stage campaigns against the enemies, real and imagined, of the United States. It contains, for example, the campaigns to demonize Spain and Germany and “sell” to the Americans their entrance into the war in Cuba in 1898 or into World War One.

Members of this encyclopedia of manipulation include William Randolph Hearst, father of yellow journalism, and Jean Louis Bernays, father of the Engineering of Consensus and Acceptance. Both applied methods that were almost identical: a saturation of the information market, a demonization of the enemy, an emotional agitation to influence the rational choice of people. Does this sound familiar?

The Cold War battles on the cultural front, when the U.S. intelligence agencies acted as a U.S. Ministry of Propaganda and Culture, created a valuable know-how whose only defect is to repeat the same “successful” formulas till the end of time. There is no creativity there, and what against the Soviets may have been brilliant and creative, effective and difficult to counteract, against the Cubans is only a mediocre repetition and a source of yawns.

A panoply of predictable weapons, methods extrapolated by force and therefore ridiculous, stale slogans, and puppet spokespeople expose the decadence of a style of battle based on the ideas and concepts of brilliant strategists like George Kennan, Llewellyn Thompson and Loy Wesley Henderson. They understood the ideological and cultural nature of that confrontation and used a wide range of tools.

What remains today, in the case of Cuba, is the forced elevation to the altar of any arriviste, any loudmouth. The war used to be about ideas; today, it is waged by Pánfilos. You can’t fall any lower.

To Winston Churchill, the way in which the CIA deposed Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, through the intensive use of armed subversion, the encouragement of betrayal and desertion, the fomenting of religious conflicts, press campaigns, psychological war, clandestine radio stations, caricatures and documentaries costing a million dollars, within the framework of Operation PBAJAX, constituted “the most successful operation since the end of World War Two.”

The same team, including the CIA’s Art Group that wrote the editorials signed by “Iranian independent journalists,” and designed posters and caricatures, was mobilized one year later, to overthrow, in a similar manner, President Jacobo Arbens of Guatemala. The only difference was in the name and cost of the operation. In Guatemala, it was called PBSUCCESS and cost three times more than the Iran job.

Against the Soviet Union and the socialist camp the same techniques were used, among them the fabrication of serial dissidents and “independent” organization by the bushel. The international press campaigns and the propaganda barrages rose to demential pitch.

Nothing was omitted, not the design of washing machines and kitchens or the records exported with Wurlitzer victrolas, or the books translated into Russian or Arabic by the Franklin Books Project, or the repertoire for the “good will tours” of the José Limón Dance Group, or the People to People programs, or the Fulbright scholarships, or the Jazz Ambassador Program, which purposely included Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong as public-relations trump cards to show Hungarians and Poles that racism did not exist in the United States. And let’s not even mention Hollywood and Radio Free Europe.

Although many U.S. government agencies don’t like public light to shine in their closets, there is a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that is the result of the struggle of the American people to control, as much as possible, the government’s actions, especially in the wake of Watergate.

The Act has brought to light the illegal application of programs for domestic counter-insurgency, for the annihilation of dissidence, and the manipulation of public opinion, such as “Cointelpro,” a program thoroughly investigated and condemned by the Church Committee. Thanks to the FOIA and the Internet, today we know in detail how a campaign is organized against “hostile” governments, real or imagined enemies and rebellious countries.

Meanwhile, the industry of subversion against Cuba continues to use native manual labor, inside and outside the island, and continues to be guided by the idea that all is fair in war. Nothing new under the sun; the same campaigns with the same objectives, guided by the same principles and with similar investments.

So, waiting for the day when FOIA will enable us to learn the name of this operation against Cuba by the usual creative boys, how the dissident’s blogs were set up, how organizations, journalists, librarians, union leaders, activists and all kinds of independents were fabricated, how the “walk-ins” were managed, how prefabricated writings were delivered to the inspired creators who signed them, who provided the “talking points” to the Spanish newspaper El País and the worldwide press network, all that’s left for us to do is to sigh from boredom, yawn, and realize that the idea of progress is not always justified.

To the machine of subversion against Cuba, there’s no time like the old days.

Elíades Acosta Matos, philosopher, doctor of political science and writer is a member of the Progreso Semanal/Weekly team.

[1] Albert Wohlstetter: “On Dealing with Castro´s Cuba,” Part I. Jan. 16, 1965.

http://www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/D17906/D17906.html

[2] Mark Falcoff: “Cuba´s Future and Ours,” AEI, Bradley Lectures, Jan. 13, 2003.

http://www.aei.org/article/15649