US while defending embargo on Cuba cites concerns over political rights of Cuban citizens

For the 22nd consecutive year the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to condemn the US embargo against Cuba. Such condemnations are hardly new. The EU has repeatedly called upon the World Trade Organisation to condemn the embargo. The American Association for World Health’s study of the embargo found that it has “dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of large numbers of ordinary citizens…has caused a significant rise in suffering-and even deaths-in Cuba.” Even the Judicial Commission of the notoriously subservient Organization of American States declared the embargo illegal.

In usual fashion the US defended its actions, justifying an embargo that has imposed harsh punishments on false pretexts since 1962. Speaking before the General Assembly Ronald Godard recited the official line:

The international community cannot be — cannot in good conscience ignore the ease and frequency with which the Cuban regime silences critics, disrupts peaceful assembly, impedes independent journalism and, despite positive reforms, continues to prevent some Cubans from leaving or returning to the island. The Cuban government continues its tactics of politically motivated detentions, harassment and police violence against Cuban citizens.

At a time when the US government is waging an all out war on journalism, prosecuting whistle blowers under archaic espionage laws, detaining political activists without charges, and using under-covers to infiltrate and disrupt groups of political dissidents (apparently this includes Superstorm Sandy first responders who, before any state or federal agency, began supplying relief to victims) claims like Godard’s are high comedy. Where politically motivated detentions are concerned perhaps we can recall the mass arrests of 1800 protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention, the Pier 57 Guantanamo on the Hudson incident. As for police violence against American citizens? Stop and Frisk. Institutionalised racial profling. What about Jonathan Ferrell, gunned down three weeks ago by a white police officer after a woman called the police on him for knocking on her door at night? Ferrell had just been in a car accident up the street and according to reports was seeking help. How about Andy Lopez, the 13 year old boy shot in California last week when police officers mistook an air soft rifle for an assault rifle? Ferrell and Lopez are just two of the hundreds of unarmed black men shot to death by police every year. This of course does not constitute “harassment and police violence against…citizens.” At least not in the United States.

The United State’s interest in continued aggression against Cuba is best explained by US internal records. Many of these documents, available at the National Security Archive reveal that the United States could not have been less interested in the rights of cuban citizens. Noam Chomsky in Hegemony or Survival discusses the secret plans hatched as early as the Eisenhower Administration and carried out under Kennedy that sought to drag Cuba into a conflict that would justify American “retalitation”. While plotting the “covert means . . . to lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the US to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force and determination”, Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.” The real crisis that ensued, the so called Cuban Missile Crisis was part of a carefully constructed scheme to undermine any challenge to US dominance; in the words of then CIA Director Allen Dulles in “America’s backyard”. Like Guatemala where a prolonged democratic struggle against the Old Order of Guatemalan dictatorships was crushed by the US installed authoritarian regime of Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, Cuba represented a threat to American hegemony.

The CIA’s 1961 warning that “the extensive influence of ‘Castroism’ is not a function of Cuban power. . . . Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change,” is illustrative then, as it is today, of the American foreign policy establishment’s obsession with maintaining the privileges of ruling elites by securing the economic conditions required for plundering and profit.

When mouthpieces like Godard wax poetical about the United State’s concern for the political rights of cuban citizens a sober review of actual events make such words ring hollow.