By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on May 13, 2021
a scene from the movie Apocalypse Now.
Worse than forgetting history is twisting it to stir up resentment. British historian Peter Brown said that and on the other side of the Atlantic, at the Biltmore Hotel in Miami, they are asking to consider the invasion of Cuba.
José Steinsleger already spoke about the context in which such a demand was made in yesterday’s edition of La Jornada, when he reviewed the right-wing coven organized by the Inter-American Institute for Democracy (IID) of Florida. However, I would like to dwell on the words of the speaker whom Pepe describes as “legendary Cuban CIA pimp and all-terrain terrorist”, because the phrase he uttered is a jewel of resentment in an environment where Carlos Alberto Montaner is anything but odd.
“Cuba must be given an ultimatum” spouted Montaner. The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) could be used, as Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1965, before invading the Dominican Republic. Perhaps the threat of invasion or the destruction of the military apparatus would suffice? It is uncomfortable to think that force could be used, but perhaps there is no other choice,” says Montaner, stumbling over words.
It is as if he had been rushed out of a remake of an OAS meeting 60 years ago. With his shrieks, his guru’s nightmares, in the middle of the night he shouts: TIAR, invasion, ultimatum! Needless to dwell on the fiction of the famous movie Apocalypse Now, but Robert Duvall’s phrase I like the smell of napalm in the morning comes to mind when someone imagines the return of such a scenario, whose central core is a repudiated cowardice while spending one’s life projecting invasions and declaring so calmly that it is uncomfortable to resort to force.
The 1947 TIAR subscribed to the commitment of mutual defense among American nations. In other words, a military coalition can be created, the OAS can be kicked around to do the dirty work and invade the U.S. government’s last-minute enemy. Johnson invoked this mechanism against the Dominican Republic -to avoid a second Cuba- and dragged the dictatorships of Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras and Paraguay into this war adventure.
But Washington does not have the international or national conditions to legitimize a full-scale attack on Latin America, be it an invasion or open war. Montaner, who placed bombs in stores and movie theaters in Havana, knows this perfectly well, although he also knows that this does not annul or prevent accidents that could precipitate a war situation or a pretext for the CIA to put together the architecture of the final solution, as in Arbenz’s Guatemala, João Goulart’s Brazil, Salvador Allende’s Chile and in so many other places. In fact, when they have nowhere to draw from, loyal opponents twist history to the unimaginable, as Trump did with the fable that Cuba had a sonic weapon with which it selectively attacked U.S. diplomats, something impossible according to the laws of physics.
But in this matter of invasions and delirious inventions there is nothing new under the sun. Has the CIA reactivated the civil-military division called Project Blue Book? That highly secret martial body, the mother of today’s fake news, that investigated Soviets and aliens almost simultaneously in the middle of the Cold War. A surprising CIA report, leaked decades later, acknowledged that the U.S. government had lied when it invented false excuses to explain cases of UFO sightings, knowing that they were spy planes. “The Air Force made false and misleading public statements to quell fear and protect a highly sensitive national security project,” states the document entitled The CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs 1947-1990, which appeared unannounced on an intelligence agency website.
The data may give wheat to many conspiracy theorists, but it warns us that in the new cold war we are repeating scripts that have a bitter taste of something overcooked and overcooked in our countries.
The fine Marguerite Yourcenar, speaking of the image of ancient ruins, wrote that “observing them does not trigger an amplification on the greatness and decadence of empires and the instability of human affairs, but a meditation on the duration of things or their slow wear, on the opaque identity of the block that continues inside the monument in its long stone existence”.
She knew that resisting is a law of physics, as it is for Latin Americans the pedagogy of memory and never again, where there are feelings and resentments, some that grab the wind with their fingernails and others that are the nostalgic ambassadors of Apocalypse Now. The latter, as the Frenchman in the film would say, always fight for the greatest nothingness in history.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English