Does U.S. policy toward Cuba have a face?
Does U.S. policy toward Cuba have a face?
Iroel Sanchez • 2 January, 2014
If anything has been demonstrated by 55 years of confrontation between Cuba and the United States, it is the predisposition of U.S. foreign-policy officials to insult the Havana government.
A book that collected their statements to the press would have — conservatively speaking — thousands of pages. If that book were ever printed, we would realize how the pretexts to maintain a policy toward Cuba have evolved. The latest officials to recognize that the policy should be modified — even though with the same objectives of “regime change” — have been President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.
From assailing Cuba’s alliance to the Soviet Union, its support for national liberation movements in Latin America, its military presence in Africa, and its support for guerrillas in Central America, Washington has turned to wielding the state of human rights on the island to sustain its policy of economic blockade.
Because reality does not provide the U.S. with arguments on that subject, Washington creates them by assigning funds — $20 million a year to the State Department and $30 million to Radio-TV Martí — that bankroll people inside Cuba who are presented as being fighters for individual freedom.
As the U.S. diplomats accredited to Havana have stated in cables disclosed by Wikileaks about these people, “the search for resources is their main concern. The second and more important concern seems to be to limit or alienate the activities of their former allies so as to reserve for themselves the power and access to the scant resources.”
In sum, in the absence of pretexts to maintain its policy toward Cuba, the United States allocates $50 million each year to manufacture them. That’s not news. What’s really news is that, late this year, the international press found only one “high-ranking U.S. diplomat who asked for anonymity” to repeat the tired old speech favored by the Miami-based anti-Castro industry, which benefits from those handouts.
More:
http://progresoweekly.us/20140102-u-s-policy-toward-cuba-face/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Fidel didn't do that--he's retired. Raul did that.
But that wasn't what I was talking about. No one tried to "stop" Cuba from having a low infant mortality rate, but if you want to believe that, you go right on ahead.
