By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on June 25, 2022
State Department spokesman Ned Price, photo: Ron Przysucha
It’s a matter of size, but it depends on the yardstick with which you measure it. In a press conference at the State Department last week, spokesman Ned Price went on a grand peroration against large states bullying small ones and preventing them from “exercising their sovereignty, choosing their own associations, adopting their own foreign policy (…) Domination is the name of this game.” Power is a very distracted lord. Price was obviously referring to China.
AP’s Matt Lee, no doubt a very attentive reporter, asked the question that fell out of the blue: “Let’s talk about the Biden administration and its policy towards Cuba, which still has the embargo, right? Isn’t that a case of a large state trying to dominate a smaller one?” Ned Price’s uncomfortable smile was followed by the usual, the US government sees no contradiction but a volatile and complex world where it is impossible to formulate a rigid policy that is applicable in all situations. And the punch line: “This is a case in which the United States seeks to help promote the democratic aspirations of the Cuban people,” added the spokesman, who barely managed to hide that Cold War nostalgia that is always hovering in Washington’s foreign policy expert bubble.
“You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun,” confessed the glamorous, pinstripe-clad mobster Al Capone to Real Detective Tales magazine in an interview conducted behind bars nearly a century ago. To this day, there has been no better definition of American politics in the world. Its catastrophic effects for the small states are there, even though the long shadow of amnesia may possess the spokespersons of the State Department.
The blockade policy, from John F. Kennedy to Joseph Biden, has been poorly thought out, poorly evaluated, poorly judged, poorly calculated. It is also perfectly illegal and probably the one that will end up putting the last nail in the coffin of the OAS, as was expressed at the IX Summit of the Americas, where the blockading and excluding country was left more alone than one. As was Luis Almagro, marshal of an irresponsible, warlike and arrogant diplomacy that provokes grimaces of disgust even in Latin American conservatives and who can no longer even walk around with armed security guards without being reminded of his complicity with the coup d’état in Bolivia and without being shouted at for having his hands stained with blood.
That mixture of selective forgetfulness and arrogance shown by Ned Price in his routine press conference is that of his government. The megalomania of the smile and the gun prevented them from seeing in Los Angeles that Latin America does not accept the twisted logic of a sphere of integration with exclusions and that the countries of the region are demanding, more and more strongly, an association free of any U.S. influence. This is one of the powerful reasons for the return of the left to the governments of the continent, with an unprecedented and humiliating event for the White House, with the victory of Gustavo Petro in Colombia, which can serve as a kick to unite the still dispersed energies of Latin American progressivism.
The great failure of Pan-Americanism must be attributed, as Jorge Castañeda (the good one) pointed out more than half a century ago, to the practice of intimidation by a large and powerful state that never allowed coexistence under equal conditions and to the fact that Washington imposed its policies and interests on the countries of the South, preventing them from “exercising their sovereignty, choosing their own associations, adopting their own foreign policy”.
It is a question of size, yes, and of common sense. Common sense is one of the few resources that exist for small states, ordinary people and decent journalists to defend themselves against the official story, written by the victors of that game called “domination” and which Ned Price knows very well, even if he pretends to be a fool.
Source: Cuba Periodistas, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English