The real story on the USA's treatment of Cuba.

philipuso · 01-08-2008, 03:45 AM

Anybody need any more evidence that the USA is an empire???

Subsection to whole question and answer below:

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The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a "demonstra*tion effect" that follows from that-that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That's what they call a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region*--and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart.

"Understanding Power" by Noam Chomsky

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WOMAN: Mr. Chomsky, I'm wondering, how do you explain our embargo on Cuba-why is it still going on, and can you talk a bit about the policies that have been behind it over the years?

Answer: Well, Cuba is a country the United States has considered that it owns ever since the 1820s. In fact, one of the earliest parts of U.S. foreign rela*tions history was the decision by Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and others to try to annex Cuba. At the time the British navy was in the way, and they were a real deterrent, so the plan, in Adams's words, was to wait until Cuba falls into our hands like a ripe fruit, by the laws of polit*ical gravitation.28 Well, finally it did, and the U.S. ran it-with the usual effects-all the way up until 1959.
In January 1959, Cuba had a popular nationalist revolution. We now know from declassified U.S. government documents that the formal deci*sion to overthrow Castro was made by the American government in March
1960-that's very important, because at that point there were no Russians around, and Castro was in fact considered anti-Communist by the U.S. [Castro did not align with the Soviet Union until May 1961, after the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January and had sponsored an invasion attempt in April.] 29 So the reason for deciding to overthrow the Castro government can't have had anything to do with Cuba being a Rus*sian outpost in the Cold War-Cuba was just taking an independent path, which has always been unacceptable to powerful interests in the United States.
Strafing and sabotage operations began as early as October 1959. Then, soon after his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy launched a terrorist campaign against them which is without even remote comparison in the history of international terrorism [Operation MONGOOSE].3o And in February 1962, we instituted the embargo-which has had absolutely dev*astating effects on the Cuban population.
Remember, Cuba's a tiny country right in the U.S. sphere of influence*--it's not going to be able to survive on its own for very long against a mon*ster. But over the years, it was able to survive-barely-thanks to Soviet support: the Soviet Union was the one place Cuba could turn to to try to re*sist the United States, and the Soviets did provide them with sort of a mar*gin for survival. And we should be realistic about what happened there: many important and impressive things have been achieved, but it's also been pretty tyrannical, so there's been an upside and a downside. However, the country certainly was succeeding in terms that are meaningful to other populations in the region-I mean, just compare Cuba with Haiti or the Dominican Republic right next door, or with any other place in Latin America which the United States has controlled: the difference is obvious, and that's exactly what the United States has always been concerned about.
Look, the real crime of Cuba was never the repression, which, whatever you think about it, doesn't even come close to the kind of repression we have traditionally supported, and in fact implemented, in nearby countries: not even close. The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a "demonstra*tion effect" that follows from that-that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That's what they call a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region*--and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart. I mean, for thirty years, Cuba has been doing things which are simply intolerable-such as sending tens of thousands of doctors to support suffering people around the Third World, or developing biotechnology in a poor country with no options, or having health services roughly at the level of the advanced coun*tries and way out of line with the rest of Latin America.31 These things are not tolerable to American power-they'd be intolerable anywhere in the Third World, and they're multiply intolerable in a country which is ex*pected to be a U.S. colony. That's Cuba's real crime.32
In fact, when the Soviet Empire was disintegrating and the supposed So*viet threat in Cuba had evaporated beyond the point that anyone could possibly take it seriously, an interesting event took place, though nobody in the u.S. media seemed to notice it. For the last thirty years the story had al*ways been, "We have to defend ourselves against Cuba because it's an out*post of the Russians." Okay, all of a sudden the Russians weren't there anymore-so what happens? All of a sudden it turned out that we really had Cuba under an embargo because of our love for democracy and human rights, not because they're an outpost of Communism about to destroy us-now it turns out that's why we have to keep torturing them-and no*body in the American press even questions this development. The propa*ganda system didn't skip a beat: check back and try to find anybody who even noticed this little curiosity.
Then in 1992, a liberal Democrat, Robert Torricelli, pushed a bill through Congress called the Cuban Democracy Act, which made the em*bargo still tighter-it forbids foreign-based US. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba, it allows seizure of cargo from foreign ships that trade with Cuba if they enter u.S. waters, and so on. In fact, this proposal by the lib*eral Democrat Torricelli was so obviously in conflict with international law that George Bush himself even vetoed it-until he was out-flanked from the right during the Presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, and finally agreed to accept it. Well, the so-called "Cuban Democracy Act" was immediately de*nounced by I think every major US. ally. At the UN., the entire world con*demned it, with the exception of two countries-the United States and Israel; the New York Times apparently never discovered that fact. The pre*ceding year, there had been a U.N. vote on the embargo in which the United States managed to get three votes for its side-itself, Israel, and Romania. But Romania apparently dropped off this year.
But the U.S. makes its own rules-we don't care what happens at the UN., or what international law requires. As our UN. ambassador, Made*leine Albright, put it in a debate: "if possible we will act multilaterally, if necessary we will act unilaterally"-violently, she meant.33 And that's the way it goes when you're the chief Mafia Don: if you can get support from others, fine, otherwise you just do it yourself-because you don't follow any rules. Well, that's us, and the Cuba case illustrates it about as well as you could.
The enhanced embargo has been quite effective: about 90 percent of the aid and trade it's cut off has been food and medicine-and that's had the predictable consequences. In fact, there have been several articles in leading medical journals recently which describe some of the effects: the health sys*tem, which was extremely good, is collapsing; there's a tremendous short*age of medicines; malnutrition is increasing; rare diseases that haven't been seen since Japanese prison camps in the Second World War are reappearing; infant mortality is going up; general health conditions are going down.34 In other words, it's working fine-we're "enhancing democracy." Maybe we'll ultimately make them as well off as Haiti or Nicaragua, or one of these other countries we've been taking care of all these years.
I mean, putting sanctions on a country in general is a very questionable operation-particularly when those sanctions are not being supported by the population that's supposedly being helped. But this embargo is a partic*ularly brutal one, a really major crime in my opinion. And there's a lot that can be done to stop it, if enough people in the United States actually get to*gether and start doing something about it. In fact, by now even sectors of the U.S. business community are beginning to have second thoughts about the embargo-they're getting a little concerned that they might be cut out of potentially lucrative business operations if the other rich countries of the world stop obeying our rules and just begin violating it.35 So there's a lot of room for change on this issue-it's certainly something that ought to be pressed very strongly right now.

TurnBackTheClock · 01-08-2008, 04:14 AM

Interesting post, although it was rather long. The only thing that I can say, is that people in this country are truly unaware of the crimes that the US commits and the evil that it does. On top of that, I would say that most people don't know what is going on in Cuba and really don't care. IMHO.

Akkaid · 01-08-2008, 04:20 AM

Ok, I'll bite...

For one, the views of an anarchist carry little wieght IMO.

Second, I'm not sure how you are using our treatment of Cuba as evidence that the US is an Empire. For an Empire to be an Empire, it must exert control over other states. In the case of Cuba, we made attempts to steer Cuba down a path that we deem acceptable, but we have not directly involved ourselves there since the Spanish-American war. If the United States wanted to exert control over Cuba, we could have done so easily.

I am NOT saying that our treatment of Cuba is justified, simply that our treatment does not fit with the classic definition of Empire.

The United States could be called an Empire in a new sense. We exert control over other states not through force, but through economy and culture. This control is far less direct than is usually assosiated with an Empire, but we do it on a grander scale than perhaps any other Nation since Rome.

While these actions could win us the dubious title of Empire, we don't have to look very far back to see a true Empire, the Soviet Union. The USSR exerted DIRECT control over most of eastern Europe. Thier economies, militaries and political systems were directly tied to Moscow, much in the same sense that Rome created 'Allies'.

Its actually a rather amusing argument. At this stage in the game, if the collective will of the American people decided to become an Empire, the difference in what you like to call a US Empire and what would actually BE a US Empire would be very apparent.

Hope I didn't ramble too much, getting tired.

Akkaid · 01-08-2008, 04:28 AM

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Originally Posted by TurnBackTheClock

Interesting post, although it was rather long. The only thing that I can say, is that people in this country are truly unaware of the crimes that the US commits and the evil that it does. On top of that, I would say that most people don't know what is going on in Cuba and really don't care. IMHO.

Man, I wish people like you could have lived in a place like Cuba or Saudi Arabia, perhaps actually seeing evil with your own eyes would make your flighty conspiracy theories pale in comparision. Are we innocent? Ofcourse not. Are we evil? If you think so, get on a plane with Alec Baldwin and head north.

philipuso · 01-08-2008, 04:52 AM

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Man, I wish people like you could have lived in a place like Cuba or Saudi Arabia, perhaps actually seeing evil with your own eyes would make your flighty conspiracy theories pale in comparision.

Did you say "conspiracy theory"???
The quote in the first post is written by Noam Chomsky along with this following quote coming out of the book "Understanding Power".

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Well, this term "conspiracy theory" is kind of an interesting one. For ex*ample, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, "Look, here's what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this," nobody would call that a "conspiracy theory"-everyone would just assume that I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that's done by power in the West, then everybody calls it a "conspiracy theory." You're not allowed to talk about planning in the West, it's not allowed to exist. So if you're a political scientist, one of the things you learn-you don't even make it into graduate school unless you've already internalized it-is that nobody here ever plans anything: we just act out of a kind of general benev*olence, stumbling from here to here, sometimes making mistakes and so on. The guys in power aren't idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into "con*spiracy theory."
It's the same with business: business is again just operating out of a gen*eralized benevolence, trying to help everybody get the cheapest goods with the best quality, all this kind of stuff. If you say: "Look, Chrysler is trying to maximize profits and market share," that's "conspiracy theory." In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal ra*tionality to people with power-well, that's fine as long as it's an enemy, but if it's a part of domestic power, it's a "conspiracy theory" and you're not supposed to talk about it.
So, the first thing I would suggest is, drop the term. There are really only two questions. One is, how much of this is conscious planning-as happens everywhere else. And the other is, how much is bad planning?
Well, it's all conscious planning: there is just no doubt that a lot of very conscious planning goes on among intelligent people who are trying to maximize their power. They'd be insane if they didn't do that. I mean, I'm not telling you anything new when I tell you that top editors, top govern*ment officials, and major businessmen have meetings together-of course. And not only do they have meetings, they belong to the same golf clubs, they go to the same parties, they went to the same schools, they flow up and back from one position to another in the government and private sector, and so on and so forth. In other words, they represent the same social class: they'd be crazy if they didn't communicate and plan with each other.

~V~ · 01-08-2008, 05:07 AM

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Originally Posted by Akkaid

For one, the views of an anarchist carry little wieght IMO.

tsk. tsk.

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Second, I'm not sure how you are using our treatment of Cuba as evidence that the US is an Empire. For an Empire to be an Empire, it must exert control over other states.

The US occupies over 100 nations and is a major contributor in the UN, IMF, and World Bank.

Akkaid · 01-08-2008, 05:16 AM

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Originally Posted by ~V~

tsk. tsk.

The US occupies over 100 nations and is a major contributor in the UN, IMF, and World Bank.

As soon as I wrote that I KNEW V would show up.

And and I think our definitions of 'occupy' differ greatly.

TurnBackTheClock · 01-08-2008, 05:23 AM

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Originally Posted by Akkaid

Man, I wish people like you could have lived in a place like Cuba or Saudi Arabia, perhaps actually seeing evil with your own eyes would make your flighty conspiracy theories pale in comparision. Are we innocent? Ofcourse not. Are we evil? If you think so, get on a plane with Alec Baldwin and head north.

I know people who live in SA and have lived here. Sorry to tell you, but violence in the USA is at an all time high. The odds of you and I getting attacked by a terrorist, pale in comparison to an act of violence being done to us. Nevertheless, the point is that the USA is a big bully and brings violence upon itself. The USA needs to take care of home and stop trying to police the whole world!

Akkaid · 01-08-2008, 05:27 AM

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Originally Posted by TurnBackTheClock

I know people who live in SA and have lived here. Sorry to tell you, but violence in the USA is at an all time high. The odds of you and I getting attacked by a terrorist, pale in comparison to an act of violence being done to us. Nevertheless, the point is that the USA is a big bully and brings violence upon itself. The USA needs to take care of home and stop trying to police the whole world!

That's a helluva lot different than your first post. I can agree that we are a bully, that we have issues here that require attention, but to call us 'evil' is taking it a step to far. Sorry if that post seemed like a personal attack, but I get annoyed when the rantings of a linguistics professor are offered as evidence that the US is an Empire. Then you added Evil....it was just too much.

If we were an Empire, Chavez would be swinging from a rope and gas would be 25 cents a gallon. Bully, definatly, Empire, I think not.

My appologies clock dude.

philipuso · 01-08-2008, 05:52 AM

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If we were an Empire, Chavez would be swinging from a rope and gas would be 25 cents a gallon. Bully, definatly, Empire, I think not.

The US does have to be covert and limit itself on foreign operations lest its own population would catch on and revolt. Obviously the USA can still get away with a lot based on many Americans not paying attention in World Geography 101. Jay Leno proves this on the tonight show when questioning people on the street. It's hilarious to see how little the average joe knows about the world.