By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on April 18, 2019
Though no one in Cuba believed it then nor do they now, fake news about the alleged attack against diplomats in Havana with James Bond’s magical gun somehow managed to convince the U.S. public opinion.
According to Google Trends, “sonic attack” was not interesting for U.S. citizens until August 9, 2017. That day, the State Department disclosed a tale of aggressions on U.S. diplomats in Cuba, and then two Cuban officials were surprisingly expelled from Cuba’s Embassy in Washington, while the press and social media focused on convoluted conspiracy theories in an attempt to explain groundless suspicions. Shortly after that, the U.S. closed its Mission in Havana.
Scores of scientists have called for evidence of a story that defies the laws of physics. There is still a distinct lack of evidence but Google Trends tells us that the “sonic attack” continues to be linked to news about the island originated in the United States and that most of those who followed the unheard of dispatches about Cuba did not know about all the detailed refutations.
The global dictatorship normalizes nonsense and dulls the senses, as it did during the days of green light flashes, the first real-time television broadcast of a war that covered up the killings in Iraq. Tom Johnson, CNN chairperson during the first Gulf War in 1991, told Atlanta Magazine that Ted Turner gave him a blank check to cover the conflict: “You spend whatever you think it takes, pal.”
As far as we know, in social media times, infinitely more than what you need is invested to control social conversations and shatter confidence or cast doubts; these are basic principles for informative intoxication. Otherwise, Google or Facebook would not be what they are. It’s interesting though that the same old actors are playing their role in this discursive transformation from ” weapons of mass destruction ” to “sonic attacks”, but they are not as funny as James Bond once was.
John Bolton, one of the architects of the lies that led to the War on Iraq in 2013 and who also invented without success that Cuba was producing “biological weapons,” affirmed last November that Havana was making “brutal attacks” against the United States Embassy. He blatantly repeated this lie on April 17. He was also a mastermind for at least four strong measures against Cuba during the last months. From December through April, they enhanced the “restricted list” of Cuban entities with which financial transactions by U.S. citizens would be prohibited; they sanctioned shipping firms that transport oil between the island and Venezuela; and they ended an agreement between Major League Baseball and the Cuban Baseball Federation.
On April 17, at the Biltmore Hotel in Miami, Bolton strengthened the hatred speech against the “troika” of tyranny (Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba) and reaffirmed their decision, among other measures, to fully implement the Helms-Burton Act. So far, a secondary provision in that 1996 Act had been suspended every six months by the United States presidents, including Donald Trump, to prevent the chaos of involving in lawsuits those businesses of allied countries that invest in Cuba and hold or may have utilized an item that may have belonged to a U.S. citizen 60 years ago.
Starting on May 2, they will fully implement the Helms-Burton Act not to protect old owners as they say, but to suffocate even more the Cuban people. Anyone who looks at the past will find that the Caribbean Government reached compensation agreements with the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain and other countries when the Revolution took over, except with the United States. They refused to have any agreements because they were secretly planning the Bay of Pigs invasion and everything would go back to its colonial way.
“Following a frantic sequence of lies, what the Bolton gang tries to do is just wrong and dangerous for the interests of the two countries. They’re trying to present Cuba as a threat but they all know Cuba is not what it’s not,” tweeted Deputy Director for the United States division of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Johana Tablada.
Even though the new robbery will not change that much the difficult scenario entailed by this Act and other decades-old sanctions against the island, the fact that any simple judge can accuse firms and persons in Canada and Europe of “trafficking with confiscated property” is a scandalous testimony to extraterritoriality in U.S. policies. It is unprecedented in the history of jurisprudence and it subjugates any sovereignty to “the persistent scabs of colonial governments,” which anti-imperialist poet and leader Ruben Martinez Villena said should be eliminated once and for all.
The United States consecrates any alien territory as its own land, even the land of its unconditional allies. They do it through a cocktail of lies, abuse of power, greed and arrogance. As per usual .
https://medium.com/dominio-cuba/estados-unidos-contra-cuba-para-variar-72e75ee92733
Source: Dominio Cuba, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau