By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on February 4, 2021
The winds of change are blowing in Washington. New Secretary of State Anthony Blinken offered a fleeting statement on Cuba this week in an interview with MSNBC in which he toppled, piece by piece, the global chessboard of his predecessor Mike Pompeo. When asked by journalist Andrea Mitchell whether he would revoke the island’s listing as a sponsor of terrorism, the new Secretary of State’s response boiled down to “we’re looking at everything”.
The “everything” is the bundle of sanctions that Donald Trump left as a poisoned gift for Joseph Biden. The tightening of the screws that began in the spring of 2017 on the pretext of sonic attacks on US diplomats in Havana – which to this day no one has been able to prove – ended in the last four weeks of the Republican administration with dozens of unilateral measures and the inclusion of the Caribbean country on the cursed list.
But the hostile role of US administrations in the face of the Cuban Revolution’s irritating habit of defending its sovereignty did not begin with Trump, nor did it remain solely at the level of the White House’s public decisions.
Since 1959, the United States has taken over the Cuban “opposition”, both inside and outside the island. In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s proposal to take out Fidel Castro was “a powerful propaganda offensive”, a “covert intelligence and action organization” on the island and “a paramilitary force outside Cuba for future guerrilla action”.
When the counterrevolution began to show signs of indolence, Eisenhower ordered CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell: “If you can’t tame them, don’t help them”. In his book Reflections of a Cold Warrior, Bissell recounts that the Agency’s main task in Cuba was a program to “manufacture” an opposition that was “responsible, appealing and unified”. In 1961, the CIA loaded everyone it could onto boats and chartered them for an invasion of Playa Giron, on the southern coast of Cuba, with the idea that the internal “opponents” would complete the job within 24 hours. The military actions were planned by Republican Eisenhower and implemented by Democrat Kennedy, by the way.
Since then, they have failed time and again, but still insist on running and funding this “responsible, attractive and unified” opposition, unlucky that it has lacked all three qualities. It has not even been able to become an opposition, strictly speaking, because of the US government’s mania to run it with chutzpah and millions of taxpayer dollars. Until today. Trump’s State Department officials called these “dissidents” “colleagues”. Timothy Zuñiga-Brown, acting ambassador to Havana, not only received them warmly in an embassy that has cancelled consular procedures in the midst of a pandemic and forces Cubans with family in the US to apply for visas in Mexico and Guyana, but he also acted as driver and bodyguard for the aforementioned “opponents” who gratefully claimed on Facebook that Trump was (and still is) their president.
Zúñiga-Brown has the intellectual stature of Romulus M. Saunders, the US minister to Spain during the administration of James Polk, who negotiated a secret deal with Madrid in 1848 to buy Cuba for 100 million pesos. The then Secretary of State complained of “having placed in such hands the mission of acquiring the Pearl of the Antilles… It must be admitted that a more skillful agent could have been chosen, in order to unravel the negotiation with Spain, since our present Minister in Madrid speaks no other language but English, and even that sometimes kills him”.
One of the most notable Cuban intellectuals of the 19th century, Domingo del Monte, who as a good Creole of the time who did not have a single atom of appreciation for the imperial representatives, defined Saunders as “the wimp who was ambassador – a country bumpkin, very obtuse and watered down…” Obtuse and watered down, as if he had had Trump’s envoy in Havana in front of him!
In the White House, it is too often forgotten that Cuban society tolerates neither prefabricated opposition nor imposition, and is what it is because it rejects the bicentennial intention of its northern neighbor to buy itself, by hook or by crook, an island in the Caribbean. Che himself wrote that the Cuban Revolution “became Marxist” not because of a preconceived attitude, but as a logical solution to the problems posed. And one of the problems posed was the colonial depredation of Cuba and being used as a big whorehouse, and a big casino of the United States.
If the Biden administration tries to change Trump’s chessboard, it should take into account once and for all that the key piece in this chess game with Cuba has always been the Queen, the Sovereign. She is a piece with a long shadow in national politics.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau