The change of history

By Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera
From the Segunda Cita blog

Since the 19th century, the United States began to expand beyond the 13 colonies created in eastern North America.

The expansion was made through several means: by purchasing, like it happened with French Louisiana, and by war, which made Mexico lose almost half of its territory. It also took place at the expense of Native Americans, who were exterminated or corralled in reservations all over the territory of what would become the great nation.

Its own spokespersons say that the first modern democracy was founded there. That modernity lies on the date of the foundation, but that democracy differed little from the old Athenian democracy, save that it did not have playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Like the one at Athens, it was a democracy for its free citizens; as the one in Greece, it was also an enslaving democracy. The noble declaration of independence that proclaims “that all men are created equal, that are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” did not have in mind blacks captured on the coasts of Africa that slave traders brought here and sold during a century of democracy. Right from the start the double standard and hypocrisy were inaugurated. “Saying one thing and doing another.”

In 1890, when the United States opposed Latin American monetary unity, José Martí warned that the union would only take place for subordinating our countries to the interests of powerful North America, because the United States believes in the uncontrastable superiority of “the Anglo Saxon race against the Latin race.” They believe in the lowliness of the black race, which they enslaved yesterday and ill-treat today, and of the Indian one, which they exterminate. They believe the Spanish-American peoples are formed mainly of blacks and Indians. (*)

The doctrine of Pan Americanism was instituted and became the ideological basis of the Organization of American States (OAS) on the premise of the uncontested U.S. leadership that supposed the unrestricted respect to U.S. interests and of its numerous possessions all over the continent. The OAS is created after the UN, in the wake of World War II. At that moment the United States had come a long way down the road of domination that included the enthronement of abominable rulers (Trujillo, Somoza, Batista) and the overthrow of democratically elected governments that did not do, to the letter, what the U.S. metropolis demanded. (Its epitome was the CIA plot for overthrowing Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz because of his agrarian reform.)

As the Guatemalan face of the invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency chose Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, the man who had been defeated by Árbenz in the presidential elections. The CIA’s obedient colonel never invaded Guatemala: he just placed his exile troops across the border on Honduran territory, while American airplanes bombed the capital until the Guatemalan army demanded the president’s resignation.

Castillo Armas inaugurated the first of a series of tyrannies that lasted 20 years and that committed countless crimes against anything that resembled a leftist in Guatemala. Cardoza y Aragón tell us that prisoners were thrown alive in volcano craters.

Half a century ago that history began its end. I am not saying it totally ended, because Yankee power had been too absolute and too brutal to end all of a sudden.

Hardly four years later, thousands of U.S. Marines landed on the Dominican Republic to prevent a constitutionalist movement from putting liberal Juan Bosch back in power. Bosch had been legally elected and then overthrown by the military.

Twelve years after those day in 1961, in September 1973, democratic Henry Kissinger, honored with no less than the Nobel Prize for Peace, organized, together with the CIA, the coup d’etat that brought Chilean fascism to power, under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, who murdered thousands of Chileans.

Three years later, Argentine and Uruguayan democracies were struck down and tens of thousands of young people in those countries were simply “disappeared.”

After the massacre of the Latin American left, U.S. administrations believed that democracy could be reinstated, because there were no more communists to put it in danger.

But other leftists emerged and now they win pluralist elections, because the peoples are tired of remaining in the hands of U.S. managers that claim to be their fellow countrymen.

From radical Hugo Chávez, against whom a coup that failed after two days was attempted, to liberal Mel Zelaya, who was overthrown, but in the process made the people conscientious and who took to the streets to defend their rights.

One way or the other, in Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Ecuador, governments emerged that strayed, with a greater or lesser intensity, from U.S. policy that in contrast reached its most deplorable blindness with the George W. Bush administration.

It is perfectly coherent that all those (more or less radical) governments have a reference for that change of history that began, without a doubt, on April 19, 1961. Cuban militiamen – workers, peasants, students, and intellectuals – routed the troops that attempted to repeat at the Bay of Pigs the 1954 Guatemalan adventure that would find its definite defeat on the sands of Playa Girón – 50 years ago this April.

The Cuban Revolution demonstrated that it could be done. They have never forgiven us for it.

(*) José Martí: “La Conferencia Monetaria de las repúblicas de América”, en Letras fieras, Ed. Letras Cubanas, Havana, 1981, p. 168.