Garry Leech
Reposted from counterpunch.org
In his speech to the Cuban people in Havana, President
Barack Obama declared, “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold
War in the Americas. … I’ve urged the people of the Americas to leave behind
the ideological battles of the past.” But Obama made clear that his desire to
end the decades-long US economic blockade of the island is not based on the
fact that it constitutes the bullying of a small country by the world’s most
powerful capitalist nation, nor is it a response to the sheer inhumanity of the
blockade, it is simply an acknowledgement that the policy has failed to bring
down Cuba’s socialist system and return the country to capitalism. Obama then
proceeded to spend much of his speech telling Cubans that they should live
under a US-style democracy and a capitalist economy. In other words, he has no
intention of leaving behind “the ideological battles of the past.” He is simply
shifting strategy.
During his trip, Obama frequently referred to human
rights in Cuba, particularly “political prisoners.” In his speech to the Cuban
people, he declared, “I believe citizens should be free to speak their mind
without fear, to organize, and to criticize their government, and to protest
peacefully, and that the rule of law should not include arbitrary detentions of
people who exercise those rights.” Not surprisingly, the US press corps
covering Obama’s visit obediently fell in step with the president’s message on
the issue of human rights.
But Cuba has been forced to survive in the face of
repeated aggression by the world’s most powerful nation. For more than half a
century the United States has actively sought to bring down the Cuban
government and replace Cuba’s socialist system with capitalism. To this end, it
launched a failed attempt to invade Cuba, has made countless attempts to
assassinate Fidel Castro, and has supported and funded Miami-based Cuban exile
groups that have exploded numerous bombs in Havana and who blew up a Cuban
airliner in mid-flight, killing all 78 people on board.
In addition to all of these efforts to topple both the
Cuban government and its socialist system, Washington has enforced the
oppressive economic blockade of the tiny island for the past 55 years. And,
under Obama, the United States has continued to fund pro-US groups in Cuba in
violation of Cuban law. This history of aggression, which is ongoing, has been
largely ignored by the US mainstream media, which has instead chosen to focus
on the “political prisoners” in Cuba’s jails.
But who are these so-called political prisoners?
Political prisoners are defined as those accused or convicted of crimes committed
to achieve political objectives. In other words, they have broken the law. Such
offenders are not “prisoners of conscience,” which are people engaged in
non-violent activities that have been imprisoned solely for their political
views. According to Amnesty International’s latest report, there are currently
no prisoners of conscience in Cuba.
Media coverage of Obama’s visit has repeatedly focused on
the Ladies in White organization, which protests weekly in Havana in support of
so-called political prisoners in Cuba. The US media highlighted the fact that
the Ladies in White protesters were rounded up by police during a demonstration
on the day Obama arrived in Havana. These arrests have been repeatedly pointed
to by the media and pundits as a graphic example of how Cuba violates the human
rights of peaceful political protesters. As such, it would appear that arrested
members of the Ladies in White constitute prisoners of conscience. But these
analysts have conspicuously ignored an important component of Amnesty
International’s definition of “prisoner of conscience,” which states, “We also
exclude those people who have conspired with a foreign government to overthrow
their own.”
Last August, Wikileaks published a memo dispatched from
the US Special Interests Section in Havana to the State Department requesting
$5,000 in funding for the Ladies in White. The memo also revealed that the US
government had previously funded the group. It is illegal under Cuban law for
Cuban organizations to receive funding from the US government, which is not
surprising given that Washington’s stated objective for decades has been the
overthrow of the Cuban government and socialism. Consequently, imprisoned
members of the Ladies in White cannot be considered prisoners of conscience but
they could be considered political prisoners that broke the law by receiving
funding from the US government.
The Ladies in White are not unique, the US government has
supported and funded many anti-government groups in Cuba in its efforts to
replace socialism with capitalism in that country. Consequently, the Cuban
government claims that many of the so-called political prisoners in its jails
are Cubans who have received funding from a foreign government that is intent
on achieving regime change. One such foreign program was conducted by the US
Agency for International Development (USAID) which, under the guise of
“democracy promotion,” distributed Internet and satellite communications
equipment to Cuban opposition groups in direct violation of Cuban law. The
project came to light when US aid worker Alan Gross, under contract to USAID,
was arrested by the Cuban government in 2009. Such activities make it clear
that it is the United States that has failed “to leave behind the ideological
battles of the past.”
One can only imagine the outcry in the United States if a
foreign government such as the Soviet Union or China were funding
anti-capitalist organizations in the United States during the Cold War in an
effort to bring down the US government and overthrow capitalism. Undoubtedly
any American citizens receiving such funding from ideological enemies in order
to engage in activities that sought to overthrow the US government and bring
down the capitalist system would have been considered traitors and charged with
sedition.
And one can only imagine the response if a leader of the
Soviet Union had visited Washington, DC and began publicly lecturing the US
president and the American people about how flawed their capitalist system was
and, during his visit, met with Soviet-funded, anti-capitalist groups in the
United States that were seeking to not only overthrow the government but to
bring down the country’s capitalist system. I think it’s safe to say that most
Americans would be outraged. And yet Obama met with Cuban dissidents in the US
Embassy while in Havana. Consequently, Obama’s visit to Cuba constitutes the
21st Century equivalent of such arrogance. In fact, it’s worse because it isn’t
one superpower lecturing another, it is a superpower continuing to bully a
small nation that poses no threat whatsoever to the United States.
Furthermore, according to the human rights group, The
Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation, there are
currently 60 political prisoners in Cuba. But this neglects the part of Cuba
that has been under US colonial rule for more than 100 years: Guantanamo Bay.
The United States currently holds 93 political prisoners in its internment camp
in Guantanamo, most of whom have been held for more than 13 years without being
charged with a crime or having their day in court. More than 50 of them have
been cleared for release but there is nowhere for them to go because they are
now, effectively, stateless. Perhaps Obama should have been more focused on
living up to his campaign promise to remove these political prisoners from Cuba
during his visit to Havana rather than lecturing the Cuban government about
human rights.
In actuality, Cubans have no qualms about criticizing
their government. I have visited Cuba on numerous occasions including living in
Havana for three months last year. I have never encountered a Cuban who didn’t
freely criticize their government’s policies in the same way that most
Americans and Canadians gripe about their governments’ policies. In fact, the
Cuban government encourages public debate about how to improve the country’s
socialist system. However, advocating for the overthrow of the government and
socialism is not permitted.
But then, in the United States, there is very little
space in which to advocate for the overthrow of the US government and the
capitalist system. The US Congress is overwhelmingly dominated by
pro-capitalist Republicans and Democrats; all Supreme Court justices are
appointed by the two dominant capitalist parties; alternative parties are
barred from participating in election debates and have difficulty accessing
campaign funding (even public funding); the corporate-owned mainstream media
refuse to present anti-capitalist perspectives; and the grade school system
does not educate our children about socialist or anarchist alternatives to
capitalism. (And, by the way, Bernie Sanders is not a democratic socialist, he
is a social democrat, which is a capitalist). The hegemonic structures that
marginalize anti-capitalist views in the United States are much more insidious
than those that defend socialism in Cuba, but they are nonetheless just as, if
not more, effective.
Obama also promoted US-style democracy for Cuba when he
declared, “I believe voters should be able to choose their governments in free
and democratic elections.” The US president either ignored, or was ignorant of,
the fact that Cuba is a democratic nation. This is because the United States arrogantly
views liberal democracy as the only legitimate form of democracy. Why? Because
liberal democracy is the only form of democracy compatible with capitalism.
A liberal democracy almost inevitably results in major
political parties serving the interests of economic elites, which means
corporations and their owners—the one percent. The result is gross inequality
as the rich get richer and the poor struggle desperately with minimum wage jobs
and under-funded social programs. In contrast, Cuba’s democracy is a socialist
democracy in which citizen’s vote for individual candidates because political
parties are not allowed to participate, thereby limiting the influence of
private sector wealth to influence political policymaking. So the problem for
Obama and corporate America is not a lack of democracy in Cuba, but the lack of
a liberal democracy that serves corporate interests.
The United States uses its massive wealth and power to
influence political parties in Latin American countries that are multi-party
liberal democracies to ensure that they serve US interests when in power. But
when, despite Washington’s best efforts, a party comes to power that challenges
US interests, then Washington’s support for democracy goes out the window. The
United States has repeatedly ousted democratically-elected governments in Latin
America when those governments failed to serve US geo-political and corporate
interests in the region. Just in the past 14 years Washington has overthrown
three democratically-elected governments in the region that challenged the
interests of US corporations and capitalism in general.
The 2002 US-supported coup of Venezuela’s President Hugo
Chávez failed when millions of Venezuelans took to the streets demanding that
their democratically-elected leader be returned to power. The Venezuelan
military capitulated and returned Chávez to office three days after his ouster.
In 2004, the US military—with Canadian and French support—ousted Haiti’s
democratically-elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide because he dared to
raise taxes on foreign corporations and double the minimum wage in the
hemisphere’s poorest country. The new US-installed regime then proceeded to ban
Aristide’s political party—by far the most popular in the country—from
participating in future elections. And in 2009, under Obama’s presidency, the
United States supported a military coup that ousted Honduras’ left-leaning
president Manuel Zelaya and turned that country into the worst human rights
disaster in the Americas. These examples are further evidence that it is the
United States that cannot leave behind the ideological battles of the past
whenever capitalist interests are threatened in Latin America.
US policy in Latin America—and throughout the world—has
not been motivated by the promotion of democracy and human rights; it is
intended to serve US corporate interests and entrench capitalism. This is why
the most brutal right-wing dictatorships in Latin America during recent decades
have been supported by the United States. And this is why left-leaning
democratically-elected governments are ousted by Washington. It is only the
most naïve and ignorant Americans, and the most naïve and ignorant US
journalists, who take Washington’s rhetoric about democracy and human rights at
face value. After all, if US foreign policy were motivated by democracy
promotion and the defense of human rights, then how do we explain Washington’s
support for undemocratic and repressive regimes such as the Saudi Arabian
dictatorship?
The dominant human rights model under capitalism
prioritizes individual rights—particularly the right to private property to
establish corporations—to the degree that they cannot be significantly
infringed upon in order to ensure that the collective—social and
economic—rights of everyone in society are protected. This is why there is no
right to food, housing or healthcare for citizens of the United States where,
according to a 2009 Harvard University study, 45,000 people die annually due to
a lack of access to the latter. But when a country such as Cuba defends the
collective rights of all of its citizens with regard to access to food,
housing, education and healthcare against the threats posed by those who seek
to prioritize individual rights in a manner that violates the country’s socialist
constitution, the Cuban government is portrayed as a major violator of human
rights.
Obama made clear his desire to promote corporate
capitalism in Cuba when he referred to the blockade by declaring, “It’s a
burden on the Americans who want to work and do business or invest here in
Cuba. It’s time to lift the embargo.” Such a declaration should come as no
surprise given that his delegation was filled with US corporate CEOs. He then
proceeded to tell Cuba how it should manage its economy by stating, “But even
if we lifted the embargo tomorrow, Cubans would not realize their potential
without continued change here in Cuba. It should be easier to open a business
here in Cuba.” And then, in an effort to ensure that US corporations can
exploit Cuban workers in the same manner they exploit poor Latin Americans in
capitalist countries throughout the region, he declared, “A worker should be
able to get a job directly with companies who invest here in Cuba.”
Furthermore, in contrast to Obama and the US media’s suggestions that the
economic reforms implemented in Cuba in recent years constitute a shift towards
capitalism, in actuality they represent a redefining of Cuban socialism that
seeks to improve the degree of economic democracy in country.
So while Obama is urging the US Congress to end the
economic blockade of Cuba, it is clear that his objective remains the removal
of Cuba’s socialist government and the replacement of socialism with
capitalism. He disguises his imperialist objectives with arrogant rhetoric
about democracy and human rights along with suggestions that Cubans could live
like Americans under capitalism. But Obama ignores the fact that,
geographically-speaking, the closest capitalist country to Cuba is not the
United States; it is Haiti. And, in Haiti, 70 percent of the population lives
in poverty and life expectancy is 20 years less than in socialist Cuba.
Furthermore, Haiti is closer to the reality experienced by most Latin Americans
living under capitalism than the standard of living enjoyed by most Americans.
After all, it is not capitalism that allows us to live so well, it is
imperialism.
Garry Leech is an independent journalist and author of numerous books including How I Became an American Socialist (Misfit Books, 2016), Capitalism: A Structural Genocide (Zed Books, 2012); Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia (Beacon Press, 2009); and Crude Interventions: The United States Oil and the New World Disorder (Zed Books, 2006). ). He also teaches international politics at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada and Javeriana University in Cali, Colombia. For more information about Garry’s work, visit garryleech.com
No comments:
Post a Comment