Eugene Robinson: Hard-Line Lunacy on Cuba

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/30/AR2008053002119.html

Hard-Line Lunacy on Cuba

By Eugene Robinson
Saturday, May 31, 2008; Page A13


For nearly five decades, the United States has pursued a policy toward Cuba that could be described as incredibly stupid.

It could also be called childish and counterproductive -- and, since the demise of the Soviet Union, even insane. Absent the threat of communist expansionism, the refusal by successive American presidents to engage with Cuba has not even a fig leaf's worth of rationale to cover its naked illogic. Other than providing Fidel Castro with a convenient antagonist to help whip up nationalist fervor on the island -- and prolong his rule -- the U.S. trade embargo and other sanctions have accomplished nothing.

Now, with Fidel ailing and retired, and his brother Raúl acting large and in charge, the United States has its best opportunity in years to influence the course of events on the island. George W. Bush, as one might have expected, won't do the right thing. It will be up to the next president.

snip//

Barack Obama appeared before the Cuban American National Foundation -- one of the most powerful and most strident of the Miami-based anti-Castro groups -- May 23 and said that if he were president, he would conduct "direct diplomacy" with Cuba's leadership. Earlier last week, John McCain essentially vowed to continue Bush's hard-line course.

Obama's into-the-lion's-den performance may win him some points for bravery, but it may not get him a lot of votes in South Florida. He has the right idea, however. The United States can attempt to influence any changes that eventually take place in Cuba, or it can harrumph from the sidelines. Several of Cuba's leading dissidents have urged the White House to end the decades-old trade embargo and the draconian restrictions on travel to the island. Bush pays no attention to those on the front lines of this struggle.

Stubbornly sticking with a policy that has achieved nothing in nearly 50 years is a pretty good definition of insanity.

[Peace Patriot]

1. Ah, yes, the Washington Post! What right does the U.S. have to "influence" change in Cuba?

They never pose that alternative--leaving them the fuck alone.

"The United States can attempt to influence any changes that eventually take place in Cuba, or it can harrumph from the sidelines."

And, frankly, it's rather a toss-up, in my book, whether an Obama Latin American policy of meddling, consulate-building, Peace Corps-sending, "war on drugs"-pushing, WEAPONS-pushing, World Bank loan sharkism, and global corporate predator "free trade" with labor and environmental protections ON PAPER, is better than what the Bush Junta has been designing--Oil War II. I suppose it's always better if people don't get killed directly, and Obama may think that it's better if surrogates do it (Colombian paramilitaries, and fascist cabals in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia), not our soldiers. His speech to the Miami mafia was both arrogant and delusional--arrogant in his presumption that Latin America requires U.S. "leadership," and delusional in the notion that anybody but fascist greedbags and thugs desire it. Is this better than the civil wars that the Bushites have been setting up in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, and the war they've been trying to spark between Colombia (U.S. surrogate) and Venezuela/Ecuador? Or is it all of a piece?

I really don't know. I was appalled by Obama's speech in Miami--even granting that he was walking into a minefield, and perhaps felt that he had to couch his message that he intends to "talk to Cuba" in U.S. "Manifest Destiny" terms. Talk to Cuba, that is, with the Bushite-reconstituted 4th Fleet (a nuclear fleet) now roaming the Caribbean off Venezuela's coast. Talk to them about what? Our not being assholes? Our not nuking Venezuela, if only they will give the state of Zulia (where all the oil is) to Exxon Mobil and fascist tyranny?

What is going to happen with this policy of fucking U.S. arrogance is that South America is going to form its own Common Market, and its own defense--both already well in the works--without the United States. They are going to be the economic powerhouse in the western hemisphere. It is going to be their century. We are bankrupt, in more ways that just financial. They are the ones with the thriving democracies, the transparent elections, the REAL leftist (majorityist) leaders, the REAL social justice agendas, the unity, the cooperation and the momentum for change. And they are the ones with all the resources--oil, gas, minerals, fresh water, fertile ag land, forests--that we are running out of, or have let our corporations destroy.

What we need to do is show some respect, and be grateful to be included in their century as equal trading partners with an equal commitment to social justice, here and there. I was hoping that Obama would signal a new era in U.S./Latin American relations--after decades and centuries of rapacious U.S. exploitation and imposed heinous dictatorships (one of the worst of which was in Cuba before the revolution led by Fidel Castro --and the remnants of which fled to Miami to add their fascist destructiveness and insanity to our political system). And maybe he will. Maybe. But if his Miami speech is any guide, we're in for more corporatism and injustice, if not U.S.-instigated war--a war, whether by surrogates or direct intervention--that we will lose--and PERMANENT alienation between the northern and southern portions of the western hemisphere.

[brindis_desala]

2. Think multinationals. It is no longer useful to think

in terms of US hegemony. What we have beginning with Nixon's "opening" of China is a global corporate elite backed by the US military, NATO and allied mercenaries. McCain's approach is interesting in that he wants to institutionalize the capitalist powers to include India and Brazil setting up a return to a Cold war scenarios where the so called 'free-marketers' would battle China and Russia for dominance in the Middle East and Africa.

Clearly as it stands, Cuba is allied with the quasi-socialists emerging in Latin America but is more valuable as a propaganda vehicle providing reliable reactionary voters than a troublesome client state whose principle resources are artists and technical elite.

[Peace Patriot]

4. I don't think Brazil is going along with this.

--Brazil led the 20-nation, third world revolt at the WTO in Cancun a few years ago.

--Brazil's president, Lula da Silva, has sided with Chavez and the Bolivarians at every turn.

--Da Silva also recently proposed a South American defense pact--at their South American "Common Market" meeting last week--neither entity (market or defense) to include the U.S.

--Brazil and Argentina may have foiled the Bushite white separatist/secessionist scheme in Bolivia--both said they would not trade with any secessionist state.

--Da Silva called Chavez "the great peacemaker" (for his role in foiling the war that the Bushites tried to start between Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela); he also said of Chavez that, "You can criticize Chavez on a lot of things, but not on democracy."

--Da Silva has shown great enthusiasm for the Bolivarian-inspired goals of regional independence, self-determination and cooperation. Example: He is preparing the way for Brazil to re-negotiate hydroelectronic contracts with the new leftist government of Paraguay; this will be a financial loss to Brazil, but a great boost to regional solidarity. He's thinking in terms of cooperation, not dominance.

Da Silva is more center-left than left--and more open to bad corporate schemes (like biofuel production), but he seems very unlikely to approve a McBush economic plan, which would necessarily be predatory capitalism. He may not be as socialist as Chavez, but he is very committed to social justice, and he's very into regional cooperation and Latin American sovereignty--and not bending to U.S. directives or interference. And he (like Chavez) is hugely popular. I don't believe he would want McBush in office; I'm sure he hates the Bushites as much as we do, and wants no more of their bullshit in South America--and he would much, much, MUCH prefer Obama. Obama may be into U.S. "Manifest Destiny," like the rest of our political establishment, but at least he is INTELLIGENT, and culturally much more simpatico--not only his brown skin, but born poor. Da Silva (and other South Americans) can relate to that--whereas McBush is an alien Bushite creature. That's why I think the Corporate Rulers are going with Obama. They need his help in South America, which is heading fullspeed away from U.S. Corporate Rule.

[brindis_desala]

5. I agree about Lula. He can't stray far from his roots without

risking his base and Brazil has made some really smart moves to control their currency. I sometimes think the neocons want to undermine their own agenda because their tough love with Argentina when they were screwed by the IMF has really helped to put South America on a much more independent center-left footing.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Unbelievably stupid to keep assuming the U.S. should "influence the course of events"

in Cuba.

CUBANS are the ones who want to influence the course of events in Cuba. They did that by overthrowing the sadistic, brutal, wildly corrupt, death-squad loving, U.S. Mafia entertaining, collaborating, sponsoring dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Cuba has had a special meaning to U.S. tyrants as it has been the first country to really fight BACK at a U.S.-supported monster puppet and overthrow him, and remain beyond the reach of all attempts to conquer and re-enslave it. Sure, it has driven them nuts. As former U.S. Interests Section Head in Havana, Wayne S. Smith has said, Cuba seems to have the same effect on American administrations that the full moon used to have on werewolves.

Look what kind of acceration developed when Cuba won its revolution on January 1, 1959:

The Unholy Trinity - From Latin America To Iraq

Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture

By Greg Grandin

An Unholy Trinity

~snip~
Like rendition, disappearances can’t be carried out without a synchronized, sophisticated, and increasingly transnational infrastructure, which, back in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was instrumental in creating. In fact, it was in Latin America that the CIA and U.S. military intelligence agents, working closely with local allies, first helped put into place the unholy trinity of government-sponsored terrorism now on display in Iraq and elsewhere: death squads, disappearances, and torture.

Death Squads: Clandestine paramilitary units, nominally independent from established security agencies yet able to draw on the intelligence and logistical capabilities of those agencies, are the building blocks for any effective system of state terror. In Latin America, Washington supported the assassination of suspected Leftists at least as early as 1954, when the CIA successfully carried out a coup in Guatemala, which ousted a democratically elected president. But its first sustained sponsorship of death squads started in 1962 in Colombia, a country which then vied with Vietnam for Washington’s attention.

Having just ended a brutal 10-year civil war, its newly consolidated political leadership, facing a still unruly peasantry, turned to the U.S. for help. In 1962, the Kennedy White House sent General William Yarborough, later better known for being the “Father of the Green Berets” (as well as for directing domestic military surveillance of prominent civil-rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr.). Yarborough advised the Colombian government to set up an irregular unit to “execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents” — as good a description of a death squad as any.

As historian Michael McClintock puts it in his indispensable book Instruments of Statecraft, Yarborough left behind a “virtual blueprint” for creating military-directed death squads. This was, thanks to U.S. aid and training, immediately implemented. The use of such death squads would become part of what the counterinsurgency theorists of the era liked to call “counter-terror” — a concept hard to define since it so closely mirrored the practices it sought to contest.

Throughout the 1960s, Latin America and Southeast Asia functioned as the two primary laboratories for U.S. counterinsurgents, who moved back and forth between the regions, applying insights and fine-tuning tactics. By the early 1960s, death-squad executions were a standard feature of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam, soon to be consolidated into the infamous Phoenix Program, which between 1968 and 1972 “neutralized” more than 80,000 Vietnamese — 26,369 of whom were “permanently eliminated.”

As in Latin America, so too in Vietnam, the point of death squads was not just to eliminate those thought to be working with the enemy, but to keep potential rebel sympathizers in a state of fear and anxiety. To do so, the U.S. Information Service in Saigon provided thousands of copies of a flyer printed with a ghostly looking eye. The “terror squads” then deposited that eye on the corpses of those they murdered or pinned it “on the doors of houses suspected of occasionally harboring Viet Cong agents.” The technique was called “phrasing the threat” — a way to generate a word-of-mouth terror buzz.

In Guatemala, such a tactic started up at roughly the same time. There, a “white hand” was left on the body of a victim or the door of a potential one.

Disappearances: Next up on the counterinsurgency curriculum was Central America, where, in the 1960s, U.S. advisors helped put into place the infrastructure needed not just to murder but “disappear” large numbers of civilians. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Washington had set out to “professionalize” Latin America’s security agencies — much in the way the Bush administration now works to “modernize” the intelligence systems of its allies in the President’s “Global War on Terror.”

Then, as now, the goal was to turn lethargic, untrained intelligence units of limited range into an international network capable of gathering, analyzing, sharing, and acting on information in a quick and efficient manner. American advisors helped coordinate the work of the competing branches of a country’s security forces, urging military men and police officers to overcome differences and cooperate. Washington supplied phones, teletype machines, radios, cars, guns, ammunition, surveillance equipment, explosives, cattle prods, cameras, typewriters, carbon paper, and filing cabinets, while instructing its apprentices in the latest riot control, record keeping, surveillance, and mass-arrest techniques.

In neither El Salvador, nor Guatemala was there even a whiff of serious rural insurrection when the Green Berets, the CIA, and the U.S. Agency for International Development began organizing the first security units that would metastasize into a dense, Central American-wide network of death-squad paramilitaries.

Once created, death squads operated under their own colorful names — an Eye for an Eye, the Secret Anticommunist Army, the White Hand — yet were essentially appendages of the very intelligence systems that Washington either helped create or fortified. As in Vietnam, care was taken to make sure that paramilitaries appeared to be unaffiliated with regular forces. To allow for a plausible degree of deniability, the “elimination of the agents must be achieved quickly and decisively” — instructs a classic 1964 textbook Counter-Insurgency Warfare — “by an organization that must in no way be confused with the counterinsurgent personnel working to win the support of the population.” But in Central America, by the end of the 1960s, the bodies were piling so high that even State Department embassy officials, often kept out of the loop on what their counterparts in the CIA and the Pentagon were up to, had to admit to the obvious links between US-backed intelligence services and the death squads.

Washington, of course, publicly denied its support for paramilitarism, but the practice of political disappearances took a great leap forward in Guatemala in 1966 with the birth of a death squad created, and directly supervised, by U.S. security advisors. Throughout the first two months of 1966, a combined black-ops unit made up of police and military officers working under the name “Operation Clean-Up” — a term US counterinsurgents would recycle elsewhere in Latin America — carried out a number of extrajudicial executions.

Between March 3rd and 5th of that year, the unit netted its largest catch. More than 30 Leftists were captured, interrogated, tortured, and executed. Their bodies were then placed in sacks and dropped into the Pacific Ocean from U.S.-supplied helicopters. Despite pleas from Guatemala’s archbishop and more than 500 petitions of habeas corpus filed by relatives, the Guatemalan government and the American Embassy remained silent on the fate of the executed.

More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18920.htm