By Rene Vasquez Diaz on November 13, 2021
School in the Sierra Maestra, photo: Bill Hackwell
With the triumph of the Revolution, millions of humble Cubans discovered their own existence. And they learned to read and write. They built hospitals with free medical care, regardless of race or social or economic situation; even in the most remote areas of the mountains. And, for the first time in Cuba, immunizations were given against preventable diseases that had been killing people. Why did the Cuban people have to rise up in armed struggle in order for the rural people to become owners of the land that they worked? Why is it that only with a victorious Revolution, achieved at the cost of blood and sacrifice, that it became possible for Cuban children all over the country to go to preschool and school and even to universities created against the will of the United States’s pet preferred dictator?
Why were the despicable regimes that the United States supported in Cuba until 1959 unable to respect the lives and the concerns of millions of poor Cubans? Because the poor are not human factors that count for anything in the dependent capitalism that the United States needs in order to continue to exist as an empire. Tiny Cuba has for decades defied the will to exploit shown by the United States, which has invoked its imperialist democracy in Latin America to create and prop up bloody dictators like Somoza, Batista, Trujillo, Pinochet, Videla … and also to justify invasions and killings in Bay of Pigs, Iraq, Afghanistan… The United States has falsified the concept of democracy, even within its own borders, to the point where it loses all meaning.
This is exactly how imperialist democracy became synonymous for US domination. This does not only mean applying pressure and making threats like a mob of international gangsters, but total conquest by whatever criminal means it takes. To be powerful must mean to be right. Any country that opposes and resists this, especially when this resistance is widespread and unwavering, as it is in Cuba, will be assaulted with measures that choke the innocent civilian population. The historical blockade of Cuba is not merely “a Cold War anachronism.” It is simply a crime, the maximum expression of the savagery of a discredited empire, which has come to the point that it fears a tiny country like Cuba. The governments of Colombia and Chile have repressed with bloody cruelty those who demonstrate against their neoliberal policies. Neither the United States nor the European Union have demanded blockades or other sanctions against Ivan Duque or Sebastian Piñera or even raised an ounce of criticism for that matter. Imperialist democracy logic abolishes international law. How many times has the international community voted against the blockade? Yet Condoleezza Rice labeled the international community “illusory.” Does the 1996 Helms-Burton Law not stipulate that the president of the United States must be the only one in charge of determining who may form part of a hypothetical Cuban government, regardless of whom the Cuban people may elect, once the institutions of the Revolution may be destroyed? Is this the type of democracy that will crush the children of Cuba and turn back all the social gains on the island?
The Revolution that eliminated submission to the lords of the North has produced, generation after generation, a hysterical aggressiveness in the United States, which, with Trump, and now Biden, have reached an unprecedented level of extreme viciousness even now in a period of deadly pandemic. But also, generation after generation, the people of Cuba have had to learn to defend themselves. In order for imperialist democracy to be able to defeat the Revolution, the United States desperately needs to recruit local agents. Agents who will take advantage of the shortages of supplies and of the pain created by the siege of Cuba, and who will support imperial crime schemes. They need brawls no matter how small that they can magnify into media transmission. What Susan George has described as “construction of cultural hegemony for beginners” has been successful for the time of recruiting local agents who feel immune to punishment, and who at least pretend a total ignorance concerning the history of their country. They are allies who do not arise from our nation’s history, but rather from the history of United States infamy. Their mission is not to attack the aggressor even with a rose-thorn, but to act in the interests of a foreign power that continues brutally to mistreat the Cuban civilian population.
Source: La Pupila Insomne, translation Resumen Latino Americano – English