Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation.

— Lenin

On September 13, 2010 the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) – the mass trade-union organization that is a central component and pillar of the Cuban workers’ state and the revolutionary government headed by Raul Castro – issued an announcement which codified and specified new measures and significant changes in economic, financial, and commercial policies that will be implemented in Cuba over the coming months and years. These new economic policies have been long-debated and broadly discussed inside Cuba from local grass-roots mass organizations and work places to the highest levels of government and state. They come as a surprise to no one in Cuba.

We can expect these measures to be implemented prudently, deliberately, transparently and over time without the slightest sense of panic, extremism, or adventurism. Their purpose is to develop, modernize technologically, and industrialize Cuba’s economy and bolster its finances in order to preserve and strengthen Cuba’s workers’ state and socialist revolution in the concrete objective domestic and international situation it faces. They signal that correcting Cuba’s economic weaknesses, imbalances, inefficiencies, and low labor productivity can be put off no longer. At the center of the measures is a radical reduction in the number of Cubans employed in state and government bureaucracies, some 500,000 in the coming months and year.

Propaganda Campaign Against Socialism

The Cuban announcement sparked a one-note campaign in the US and internationally presenting these measures as “capitalist” and “free market” and more confirmation of the “failure” of “socialism” in general and “Cuban socialism” in particular. (It should be added that this bourgeois propaganda campaign has been pathetically complemented by a layer of ultra-left sectarians, most of whom were already hostile to the Cuban Revolution and its historic leadership, who assert these measures are a “sellout” or “capitulation” to “capitalism.”)

It would certainly be a boon for capitalist propaganda if the revolutionary government of Cuba were indeed throwing in the towel, particularly at a time when the world capitalist system is at the opening stages of its greatest structural crisis since the so-called “Great Depression” of the 1930s. But the opposite is the truth.

The measures announced in Cuba were presented in the international big-business press as analogous to the harsh austerity measures that are being carried out – at varying paces and degrees and with mounting working-class resistance – in the advanced capitalist countries by conservative, liberal, and social-democratic governments. Under the guise of resolving government “deficits” these include large-scale layoffs in the “public sector” complementing mass unemployment in the “private sector;” cuts in social services and benefits in health care, education, child and family support; and attacks on pensions and unemployment benefits.

None of this has anything in common with the new policies unfolding in Cuba. There will be in Cuba no growth of mass unemployment – or as Marx put it a “reserve army of labor” that suppresses the cost of labor power for capitalist employers – and the subsequent growth of poverty and destitution as is now becoming the norm in all of the advanced capitalist economies not to speak of dependent “Third World” capitalist economies. Individuals let go from redundant, unproductive state and government positions will be able to return to university or technical schools for specialized training, with wage support, for new jobs in addition to those choosing to be self-employed, or join newly established co-operatives. Savings from the reductions in state expenses and budgets will go to preserve social services, modernize and improve free medical care and education, and so on. Cuba’s advances in implementing these measures and confronting its serious economic weaknesses is deeply in the interests of the world working class and is in reality a great aid in the developing struggles against capitalist austerity worldwide.

Washington’s 50-year-old economic and political war to subvert and overturn the Cuban Revolution continues under the Barack Obama Administration. Cuba needs time and space to continue to hold out until new revolutionary triumphs of workers and peasants, new socialist revolutions occur out of the mounting long-term world capitalist depression that first burst into the open in 2008. To do so and not be swamped and drowned under the weight of economic stagnation and obstacles, Cuba must raise its level of labor productivity which also means it must increase the size of the agricultural and industrial proletariat. Cuba needs more industrial workers and farmers and less government officials and bureaucrats. The Cuban workers state needs to reduce the size of its government bureaucracy. Entrenched privileged state and government bureaucracy is also the main source and mass base of any potential capitalist restoration in a workers’ state, not particularly the small layers of “proprietors” that are likely to emerge in Cuba in the coming years.

What the revolutionary government in Cuba is attempting to consciously and deliberately implement is a process that will lead to the numerical growth, social expansion, growing political weight of industrial workers, agricultural workers, and working farmers – private-family and cooperative . This will be greater than the inevitable rise in petty-bourgeois layers involved in retail services, brokerage, and speculation. These class demographic changes will emerge out of the accompanying decline (a good thing!) in the numbers of bureaucrats in state institutions and enterprises whose official jobs breed demoralization insofar as they register nonproductive activity which, in the framework of scarcity and economic pressure,  can foster corruption and thievery.

The concomitant growth of petty bourgeois layers will undoubtedly foster relative social inequality, but, of course, this has been happening and reproducing anyway in the form of the so-called “black market” and illegal economic activity unregulated by the workers’ state. And if labor productivity and the social surplus product increases, within the framework of the workers state, the material basis (and also the political basis) for advancing social equality will also advance. Increases in labor productivity and a radical expansion in agricultural output will allow for large savings in foreign exchange currency that can then be used for industrialization and the “light industry” production of consumers products and quality services.

Cuba is a Workers’ State

Cuba’s political economy will continue to be guided by rational, economic planning to which commodity and exchange “markets” will be strictly subordinate and which will be mediated and creatively guided by increasingly democratic mass participation, most importantly by the expanding Cuban working class organized in the CTC, and less by rigid bureaucratic “models.” It is no accident that it was the CTC that made the initial announcement about the scale and scope of the slashing of government functionaries and the restructuring goals and policies.

Cuba’s banks will continue to be the property of the workers’ state. Cuba’s international trade will continue to be solely mediated by organs and institutions of the workers’ state. There will thus be a state monopoly of foreign trade, one of the fundamental characteristics and criteria in the origins and character of a workers’ state. (Others include the destruction of the previous capitalist state’s police, military, and juridical institutions; the nationalization of the major industrial means of production and finance; the establishment of new social and economic relations that obviates the existence and reproduction of a modern bourgeoisie or capitalist class; and the primacy of conscious planning and cooperation for human needs within the new state over the profit-seeking dynamics and mechanism of the capitalist market and competition.)

The foreign trade monopoly is of decisive importance, or as stated by V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, “in the present epoch of imperialism the only system of protection worthy of consideration is the monopoly of foreign trade.”¹

While private foreign capitalists will be able to invest capital and make a profit in partnership with Cuban state firms, they will be subject to Cuban social relations that have been forged by fifty years of socialist revolution and which are dominated by the interests and political weight of workers and farmers. The problem at hand, however, is not the solidarity of Cuba’s marvelous social relations compared to the atomized, every-man-for-himself fostering of privilege and submission in capitalist societies but increasing labor productivity, industrialization, and modernization. Clearly bureaucratism, waste, corruption, and theft of social property are in Cuba today the greatest threat to the social relations forged out of the Cuban Revolution.

Lenin put it like this in the last year of his active political life as he struggled to reorient and rebuild the economy and finances of the young Soviet republic after the devastation and ruin of the 1918-1921 civil war and imperialist interventions. This included strong efforts to attract foreign capital and business deals with capitalist firms and states. “The capitalists are operating alongside us,” Lenin spoke. “They are operating like robbers; they make profit; but they know how to do things. But you – you are trying to do it in a new way; you make no profit, your principles are communist; your ideals are splendid; they are written out so beautifully that you seem to be saints, that you should go to heaven while you are still alive. But can you get things done?”²

The challenge for Cuban “business people” – the agents of the workers’ state – will be to negotiate the deals and contracts that are mutually beneficial to the Cuban economy and the representatives of foreign capital. This requires cadre with particular revolutionary qualities, including a steel disposition, political consciousness, and diplomatic personality skills to carry out such tasks and remain uncorrupted.

As Fidel Castro put it in the November 2005 speech:

Some of our businessmen make million dollar deals, and the fine art of corruption as it is practiced in capitalist circles is as subtle as a serpent and worse than a rat. They will anesthetize you while you are being ‘bitten’ and it can rip off a hunk of flesh in the middle of the night.  This was the way the Revolution was being put to sleep so that a piece of flesh could then be ripped away. In a few cases, corruption was out in the open.  Many knew about its existence, or they suspected it, when they observed the life-style changes the new car, the house being redecorated, adding little decorative touches here and there because of pure vanity.  We have heard such stories time and time again, and measures must be taken even though it will not be resolved easily.

In no way will the proposed restructuring foster the formation of a Cuban national capitalist bourgeoisie, although it is certain and inevitable that there will be an expansion of petty-bourgeois layers in Cuban society which may coagulate into a political opposition to the socialist Cuban government with a real social base inside the country, as opposed to the pathetic current gang of so-called “dissidents” that are appendages of the US government. But this is by no means certain or inevitable. It depends on many national, and especially international, political factors, first and foremost the coming big developments in world politics – depression, war, and revolution. In any case, this is a risk that must be accepted and struggled against consciously and intelligently.

The expansion of “self-employment”

Clearly the revolutionary government has concluded that traditional “services” such as shoe repairers, barbers and beauticians, plumbers and myriad other small scale operations are not now – if they ever were – most productive and efficient as a category of central economic planning. Such essentially retail functions which are voluminous but atomized in society become a burden and an obstacle to increasing labor productivity and may be more useful as a category of self-employment or co-operative arrangements autonomous or independent from central government planning and direction and subject to taxation. The logic of this measure is underlined when the existence of the extant and widespread “black market” in Cuba – by definition private, unregulated, untaxed, and having a parasitical relation to a “state property” – is recognized. It is better for this reality – which objective material conditions do not allow to be transcended – to be legal, transparent, above board, and revenue-producing, that is, taxable for the workers’ state and the social needs of Cuban society.

Expansion of retail operations, small merchants and peddlers, and self-employed services are not the same thing as capitalist commodity production. Any expansion of small-scale private retail consumer goods sales and services will not be supplied directly by capitalist manufacturing but by enterprises owned or controlled by the Cuban workers’ state. Any such private “businesses” will not be able to transition their monetary wealth into private ownership and financing of means of production. The Cuban State Bank is, as part of the new economic policies, studying and discussing, with the purpose of formulating rules, policies for loans to the small businesses that are going to be established.

The main question and problem for the still-underdeveloped, still far from adequately industrialized Cuban workers’ state – literally an island of the dictatorship of the proletariat in an ocean of the dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeoisie – is not the individual, family, or co-operative that repairs your shoe, cuts your hair, fixes your leaking roof, or paints your house. On the contrary, it is producing in factories with financing, raw materials, modern machinery, and a skilled, trained industrial working class that can actually make the shoes, utensils, roofing materials, and paint in the first place.

Attractive restaurants with good food are fine (and I’ve been to quite a few very nice ones, both family-run and “public” in Havana) and nothing in Marxist theory or revolutionary practice mandates the “nationalization” of small businesses, private professional services or retail operation in principle.

It should also be pointed out that, under conditions of monopoly capitalism in the United States and other advanced capitalist societies, more and more of these small “family service businesses” are subsumed by large-scale corporate chains. “Mom and Pop” retail operations may start to flourish in “communist” Cuba even as giant chains and national brands make them, under monopoly capitalism, a dying breed in the United States.

From the point of view of the political power of the working class, these petty bourgeois, normally capitalist-aspiring layers can be won as potential allies to a regime where industrial and agricultural producers dominate. Like the overwhelming majority of Cubans, many incorporating these layers that will expand are imbued with a patriotic and anti-imperialist consciousness and the understanding that it was Cuba’s socialist revolution that conquered and has defended genuine national independence and social dignity for the Cuban people. But this is a political question and – again – for a Marxist must be viewed concretely.

The real question here is whether the Cuban workers’ state is better off with bloated government payrolls stacked with people doing no productive labor and of very little use or value to anyone, or by releasing those layers into production and service where they can learn skills, even if working in a joint venture or private business that can raise the productivity of labor in Cuba. Is it better for the workers’ state to have workers engaged in productive labor — that is, engineering, constructing, manufacturing, and transporting means of production, infrastructure, items for consumption, or retail services to meet the pent-up needs and demands of the Cuban working people — or to retain government officials whose “jobs” are increasingly parasitic (and thereby demoralizing to the people involved) even if this means working in a joint venture with foreign capital or even a private enterprise?

Is it better to have more employed, productive workers and less government officials and bureaucrats even if it means having a larger layer of “proprietors” and other petty-bourgeois elements? Who is more useful, who contributes more to the Cuban workers’ state and Cuban society: a new family farmer, self-employed plumber, or member of a barber’s cooperative on the one hand, or the Assistant to the Assistant in Charge of Blah-Blah-Blah in the Ministry of God-Knows-What on the other? Cuban working-class public opinion is fed up with a reality where work needs to be done and, despite scarcity of resources, can be done, but is bottled up by bureaucracy, waste, and the theft of state resources.

In any case, and again contrary to the spin in capitalist media outlets, public or state property in industry will not be weakened but strengthened, and the controls of the Cuban workers’ state and Cuba’s highly progressive labor laws, will be fully applicable to any “joint” enterprises established in negotiations with private capital. What is most useful and progressive socially for Cuba is to create more machinists, millwrights, lathe operators, steelworkers, railroad workers, carpenters, and so on.

The absorption of the projected 500,000-person reduction in state bureaucracy will not be – as implied by all the nonsense being written – primarily via the category of self-employment; that is, in retail sales and exchange of goods and services. Certainly there will be space opened up –- and there is nothing “wrong” with this from the standpoint of state power firmly in the hands of the working class and peasantry –- of small business owners, primarily in retail sales and services. But it should be emphasized that many of these operations and services will have forms other than family businesses, mainly co-operatives.

The key mode here for the foreseeable future will be the management by the Cuban government, unions, and farmers’ organizations of a process that will necessarily involve both centralization on the so-called macro scale, and decentralization on a so-called micro scale.

The “revolutionary offensive” of 1968

Most private retail operations and private professional services were “nationalized” in Cuba in 1968 under the so-called “revolutionary offensive” The context for the “revolutionary offensive” was the defeat of Ernesto Che Guevara’s attempts, carrying out the strategic line of the Cuban Revolution and government, to organize a continental revolutionary battleground and army in Latin America, and the developing rout of the revolutionary guerrilla forces in other countries. Cuba was thoroughly isolated in Latin America and the Caribbean; only Mexico maintained diplomatic relations with it. Reactionary oligarchic regimes backed to the hilt by Washington dominated the continent and would for more than a generation.

Economic problems on the island were mounting. An effort to lessen dependence on the Soviet Union led to a huge effort to produce 10 million tons of sugar. The labor mobilizations involved cause severe disruptions in other economic sectors and the effort eventually fell short by nearly 2 million tons. In this context the revolutionary government was clearly worried about the existence of points of support for US-backed counter-revolutionary forces and aggression.

There is in 2010 a very different objective and subjective reality. US imperialism is much weaker politically and no longer able to dictate and control politics and economics in its Latin American “backyard.” Cuba has normal, good, or excellent relations, and growing economic ties, with virtually every Latin American and Caribbean country.

Genesis of the Cuban Economic Crisis

It is certainly no secret that revolutionary Cuba has been in a permanent structural economic and financial crisis within which concrete advances and setbacks have unfolded since the late 1980s and early 1990s. The onset of this crisis – known in Cuba as the “Special Period” – was catalyzed by the collapse of the ruling governments in the former Soviet Union and its allied Eastern European states from 1989 to 1991.

Insofar as Cuba had carried out some 85% of its economic exchange with these regimes, the so-called “socialist camp,” the impact of what was, in effect, an overnight amputation of the overwhelming majority of its previous economic relationships was drastic and devastating for the Cuban economy and population. Almost instantly a dynamic of severe economic retraction unfolded that reached around 35%, perhaps over double that of what is referred to as the Great Depression in the United States. At one point the Cuban currency was so debased that the US dollar was the functional currency for the country.

It was taken for granted by Cuba’s powerful enemies in Washington, its former ruling classes exiled in Miami and the US, the Latin American reactionary oligarchies, and even many sympathizers and friends of Cuba that the revolutionary government could not possibly survive such overwhelming material blows. Washington, of course, moved in for the kill. Under the first George Bush and then expanded under the Democratic William Clinton Administration, the US economic and political war against the island was intensified. The passage of the notorious Torricelli and Helms-Burton legislation attempted to implement a de facto international economic blockade against the Cuban workers’ state.

Under these concrete conditions Cuba and its revolutionary government had no choice but to develop and forge economic and commercial relations and exchange within world capital markets and legal mechanisms utterly dominated by the advanced capitalist countries, and with capitalist states, private firms and enterprises, pursuing whatever openings it could in the face of US hostility.

Fidel Castro described what Cuba faced with the Special Period in a landmark speech at the University of Havana in November 2005, a speech which was the template for the extensive debates and discussions in Cuban society that culminated in the new economic policies now being implemented:

[We] had been left without oil overnight, with no raw materials, no food, no cleaning products, nothing…the country suffered a shattering blow when overnight [the Soviet Union] fell and we were left alone, all on our own, and we lost all the markets on which to sell our sugar and we stopped getting supplies, fuel, even the wood with which to give a Christian burial to our dead. And everyone thought: ‘This will fall apart’, and the idiots still believe that it is all going to fall apart here and that if it doesn’t fall apart now it will fall apart later.

The Cuban working people, defending the revolution and social relations deeply rooted in their unity and consciousness, clawed their way to survival and a certain stability and progress through wrenching adaptations and flexibility. Most amazingly this was done without in the slightest compromising on fundamental revolutionary principles and in particular maintaining a revolutionary internationalist foreign policy based on solidarity.

Among the measures adopted by the Cuban government, then led by Fidel Castro, at the origins of the Special Period, were great efforts to find and secure capital to rebuild the tourism industry and other economic projects, which were done in partnership with various foreign capitalist firms. This large expansion of tourism – which involved huge investment in the construction and fitting of hotels and other accompanying tourism infrastructure – was successfully carried out and soon began to bring in significant amounts of so-called hard currencies; that is, the foreign exchange that was used to maintain, among other priorities, Cuba’s excellent – and free – health care and education systems. Some private commercial activity, particularly in the sales of agricultural output, including through brokeraging, became legal and contributed to relative agricultural advances from a deep depression marked by a great scarcity of farm implements, machinery, fertilizer, and chemicals.

All of these necessary measures increased social inequality, speculation, and street hustling and were never idealized by the Cuban government. Previously eradicated social problems, such as prostitution, reappeared, not in the traditional pre-revolution large-scale business of organized crime, with pimps, brothels, and a flourishing commercial sex industry, but individual Cuban women catering to tourists to get cash.

Nevertheless the measures prevented a total economic collapse and the social dislocation – the goal of Washington’s blockade policies – including famine, which would have created the conditions for direct US military aggression and the final, violent destruction of the Revolution.

By the mid-1990s the Cuban economy as a whole began to revive as new economic partnerships developed. Among the most important were with China. Further crucial advances occurred as a result of Cuba’s political and diplomatic campaigns in Latin America and the growing atmosphere of solidarity that made possible increased economic ties with Latin American and Caribbean countries. In particular, the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, registering a growing class-conscious militancy among Venezuelan working people, led to strong and growing economic ties between Cuba and Venezuela.

Following the mass mobilizations in Venezuela that defeated pro-imperialist coup attempts in 2002 and 2003, large numbers of Cuban doctors, other medical workers, and teachers volunteered for work in Venezuela leading to great advances in access to medical care and education for working people there. Venezuelan oil and energy exports and expertise were expanded to Cuba at favorable prices, a central factor in the stabilization of the Cuban economy and finances.

The University of Havana Speech

As mentioned above on November 5, 2005, eight months before his near-fatal medical emergency and surgery that led to removing himself from his formal leadership posts in the government and state, Fidel Castro gave a remarkable, sweeping speech at the University of Havana (To read the entire speech, which I strongly recommend to understand the current developments) which laid out the framework for the economic and social crisis facing Cuban socialism and the general line of march on how to move forward. It is a good starting point to understand the origins of the new economic policies that are now being concretely formulated and codified.

The speech was brutally frank, nothing less than a tour de force revealing, explaining, and attacking – with facts, humor, anger, sarcasm, and real passionate humanity – examples of corruption, inefficiency, bureaucratism, and the administrative mentality that had to be addressed and transformed for the viability of the socialist revolution and its survival. “This country can self-destruct; this Revolution can destroy itself, but they can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.”

At a time when Cuba was producing less than one-and-a-half million tons of sugar a year, Fidel, to cite just one example, said to the gathered students, “You will be amazed when I tell you that, according to its inventory, the Ministry of Sugar has 2000 to 3000 more trucks than it had when it was producing 8 million tons of sugar. It’s tough, but I’m going to tell it like it is.”

At the time of Fidel’s November 2005 speech the Cuban economy and finances had been steadily advancing, with several years of regular, and in some years strong, economic growth. Economic ties with Latin America and China had increased significantly. Revenues from tourism were high and growing. And it was in this framework, ascendant from the miserable depths of the Special Period, that Fidel addressed head-on the structural and systemic problems, the new contradictions that were accumulating.

New Blows

Within a few years, however, the revolutionary government now led by Raul Castro was grappling with the same problems as laid out by Fidel in 2005 but now magnified many times over by a number of concrete national and international developments. First and foremost was the extensive material devastation caused by the 2008 Hurricane season, particularly the effects of Hurricanes Gustav and especially Ike (no relation to the author of this essay).  In the hurricane damage over 320,000 houses were destroyed or severely damaged with over 2 million Cubans displaced. In the agricultural province of Villa Clara over 70% of agricultural production was destroyed. Over 3300 tobacco houses were destroyed. And so on. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated damages at nearly $4 billion.

What truly marked the beginning of an unfavorable new dynamic in the Cuban economic reality was the world-historical concrete new fact of the 2007-08 world capitalist financial crash. Among other direct consequences of this for Cuba was a radical drop in the world market price of nickel, a major Cuban-produced raw material commodity essential in many modern manufacturing processes. (Of course, the modernization of Cuban nickel-mining operation was a result of a Cuban partnership with foreign capitalist firms – those with the capital – most notably the Canadian Sherritt International Corporation.) There was also a significant drop in the revenues brought in by tourism as the effect of the world capitalist crisis and retraction hit consumer spending in the advanced capitalist countries where much of the vacation travel to Cuba comes from.

Acquiring Capital for the Cuban Workers’ State

Given the paucity of capital in Cuba – that is, the monetized savings in hard currency for investing in agricultural and industrial machinery, factories, rolling stock for railroads and other industrial infrastructure, and so on – it is inevitable that, for the foreseeable future, what the revolutionary government must do, will necessarily involve co-operative and contract agreements with private or “state” firms in capitalist countries. These firms will invest, of course, not out of the goodness of their hearts but in order to generate profits. (Although some individual “investors” may harbor sentimental feelings or affection for Cuba. Good if that’s the case, but even those will want and need to make money.) In that sense they will be allowed to siphon off a portion of the surplus value created by the labor output of the Cuban industrial workers employed in these enterprises.

Cuba, of course, has much to offer to firms willing to invest in Cuban means of production; in particular, a highly educated and healthy population. Cuba also has a number of products and services from its already existing industries such as biotechnology that with further development and market access will have high demand on world markets

Within the borders of Cuba, the capitalist market is no longer dominant but Cuba functions in a world economic framework where private capital — that is, a handful of giant capitalist firms operating through a handful of advanced capitalist states — utterly dominate world production and exchange. Cuba must trade in hard currency (that is, the currency of advanced imperialist countries) which it can obtain only with great difficulty due to the US attempts to blockade it.

Developing Cuba’s Oil Fields

Perhaps the most crucial economic project being undertaken now in Cuba involves the extraction of apparently large oil deposits discovered in Cuban territorial waters. This will involve deep-sea drilling from massive platforms. Years of searching, chartering, mapping, discovery, and preparation are now finally giving way to actually building the platforms and extracting the oil. These fields, once they start producing, will be a tremendous boost to the Cuban economy. But Cuba is nowhere near having the capital, technology, or management expertise to undertake this huge task without the assistance of foreign capital and either foreign private capitalist monopoly enterprises or state-owned firms from capitalist countries.

After these firms take their slice – and it will have to be enough to make it worth their while – then the remaining surplus value created will go to workers wages, plant maintenance, and the Cuban workers’ state to bolster, among other things, free medical care and education. Not a dime will line the pockets of a private bourgeoisie in Cuba.

(Washington, which waived safety rules and regulations and turned a blind eye to the recklessness of BP leading to the 2010 Gulf oil spill disaster, has tried to stoke fears about the Cuban project.)

The legacy of Che

Cuba needs capital in the form of advanced technology and the financing of means of production in order to industrialize, digitalize, build and rebuild its railroads, bridges, aqueducts, water systems, electrical grid, and other infrastructure and also create myriad light industrial projects that can produce quality consumer items for the Cuban people and for the tourism industry. Cuba also needs to modernize and render more rigorous and transparent its accounting methods, which suffer especially from bureaucratism as Fidel Castro stressed in his University of Havana speech. This was a central theme in the economic writings and methods of Che Guevara in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

Central to the development of the Cuban economic and financial system as it developed under siege from US imperialism has been political and moral appeals to working people and revolutionary-minded intellectuals to defend their revolution and state power. This is particularly identified with the figure of Che Guevara and his writings on the “new socialist man and women,” moral and material incentives, voluntary labor, and revolutionary internationalism. One example of this precious legacy is in the Cuban medical and educational internationalist missions around the world and the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana.

This will continue within the new orientation and the new drive to raise productivity, living standards, technological advances in the modes of production, industrialization, and increased production of materials for housing and other pressing needs. But appeals to working-class and revolutionary consciousness can turn into clichéd phrase-mongering if bureaucracy, inefficiency, and deteriorating work habits due to scarcity and corrupt mismanagement come to dominate the process of work and production.

Moral incentives, as formulated and practiced by Che Guevara, were always promoted as part and parcel of hard work, raising productivity, strict control and accounting of resources, application of the most modern technology, absolutely minimum bureaucratism, and integrity, honesty, and personal sacrifice at the center of everything.

No change in Cuban socialist internationalism

If the new economic policies announced in Cuba indicated a subjective embrace of the capitalist market and capitalist methods on the part of Cuba’s communist leadership, then this would be reflected in a shift toward renunciation of revolutionary struggle and accommodation with imperialism; that is, the movement of Cuban foreign policy to the right. There is, of course, no evidence of this whatsoever. Neither is there any signal whatsoever that Washington, under the Obama Administration, has any perspective of ending US sanctions and normalizing relations with the island. Washington continues its goal of subverting and eliminating the socialist revolution and workers’ state in Cuba.

The revolutionary government of Cuba continues to expect, look for, and, above all, politically be in active solidarity and promotion of new upsurges and victories of workers’ and peasants’ power anywhere in the world. It is a government, true to the legacy of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, which has tied its fate ultimately to the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity.

1. Lenin’s Final Fight, Pathfinder Press, p. 207
2. Lenin’s Final Fight, p. 58

The times we live in reflect that in Latin America and the Caribbean the confrontation between historic forces is getting worse.

─ Raul Castro

On February 23, 2010 incarcerated Cuban Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a prolonged hunger strike, despite the efforts of Cuban medical personnel to treat him and prevent the ending of his life. Over the past several years Zapata Tamayo identified himself with Cuban opponents of the Revolution who are directed by and sustained from Washington. His political “awakening” followed a career in petty crimes such as burglary and fraud that escalated into more serious offenses of assault landing him several separate stints in prison.

Zapata Tamayo’s death quickly became the pretext for an orchestrated and deeply cynical campaign by the US government and its European imperialist allies – echoed in the big-business media – to slander Cuba around human rights, torture, and political prisoners.

On Capitol Hill calls have increased to halt the supposed efforts by the Obama Administration to “improve” relations with the sovereign Cuban state and to instead step up open political hostility and action. Proposed Congressional legislation to end travel restrictions to Cuba for US citizens, never very warm in the first place, are likely to go into deep freeze. On March 11, 2009 the European Union Parliament strongly condemned Cuba over the death of Zapata Tamayo by a vote of 509 to 30 with 14 abstentions. The EU resolution further mandates its “High Representative” and “Commissioner” to “immediately to begin a structured dialogue with Cuban civil society and with those who support a peaceful transition in Cuba,” that is, to openly establish political collaboration with would be clients (many of whom already are on Washington’s payroll) who aim to overturn – “peacefully” of course – the Cuban Revolution and sovereign government. (The Cuban government has begun a vigorous counter campaign. The March 1, 2010 online edition of Granma International answers the factual distortions and false assertions on Zapata Tamayo’s life and death as a “political prisoner” in the article “For Whom is Death a Useful Tool?” by Enrique Ubieta Gomez.¹

Of course, the crocodile tears shed by imperialist governments, institutions, and media over the death of Zapata Tamayo stands in great contrast to the relative silence and lack of action over the numerous (no one knows exactly how many?) detainees – often picked up arbitrarily and not charged, let alone tried, for anything – that have been tortured and beaten to death in the “democratic” custody of US, British, Canadian, and other secret European “facilities” in the so-called “war on terror.

The US government openly spends dozens of millions of dollars in direct financial and other material “aid” to its Cuban clients and agents inside Cuba. Obviously this is a violation of Cuban law. The Cuban government – as the sovereign product of the Cuban Revolution –is under no legal or moral obligation to tolerate such activity from the conduits of a foreign power currently committed to its destruction. In fact it would be the height of naïve irresponsibility to not act rigorously and firmly against such mercenary subversion. Accordingly, there are several dozen individuals in Cuban jails, all of whom have been convicted in Cuban courts with all their legal rights protected, including right to legal council and defense. It should be added that the convictions were based on incontrovertible evidence of acts of receiving material and financial aid and direction, that is, of being mercenary clients and agents, of US government agencies, not “conspiracy” charges as in the gambit used by US prosecutors when they lack evidence of actual deeds, as in the case of the Cuban Five.²

Of course, the death of Zapata Tamayo is not a cause for any happiness or satisfaction for any Cuban revolutionary or defender of the Cuban Revolution. It is particularly a cause for regret and frustration because it is an inevitable byproduct of US policy. The normalization of US-Cuban relations would bring with it the definitive end to the current US policy of “regime change by any means possible.” When that happens opponents of the Revolution like Zapata Tamayo can present and attempt to win support for their views in a legal framework and not as agents of an aggressive foreign power.

In any case Cuban President Raul Castro has repeatedly offered to exchange all the imprisoned agents and clients of Washington in exchange for the Cuba Five.

As I will demonstrate in this essay, many months before Zapata Tamayo’s death it had already become clearer that the Obama Administration had no hidden desire or perspective of normalizing US relations with Cuba or fundamentally alleviating, let alone ending, Washington’s economic and political war against the revolutionary socialist island. In fact the Obama-Hillary Clinton team is – after some peripheral adjustments in the opening months of the new Administration – continuing the firmly bipartisan, half-century long policy of overturning the sovereign Cuban government. This policy, set in place shortly after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, remains the longest unchanged foreign policy position of the US government in the history of US diplomacy.

The expectation that a fundamental change in US Cuba policy was in the works with the new Obama Administration was asserted by many conservatives and ultra-rightists, some of whom fantasized in horror that Obama was a secret supporter of the Cuban Revolution. The illusion, from the other end of the bourgeois political spectrum was shared as well by many liberals and leftists who fantasized in wishful thinking that Obama planned to end US sanctions and hostility. Among the former, it is still seen as useful to present Obama as a barely closeted commie. Among the latter, on this and virtually every other central domestic and foreign policy orientation of the current Administration, a sobering up, at varying pace and degree, is taking place.

McCaffrey’s Signal

On December 22, 2009 retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey wrote a letter to Wayne Smith, a prominent voice in US academic, think-tank, and diplomatic circles who advocates an end to the US embargo of Cuba and the normalization of US-Cuba relations. In the letter McCaffrey withdrew from a scheduled January 2010 delegation of fellow dignitaries to Cuba Smith was organizing. McCaffrey cited comments by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez sharply denouncing the behavior of President Barack Obama following the fiasco of the December 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, as the ostensible reason for his withdrawal from the trip.

McCaffrey has visited Cuba before, met top Cuban leaders including Fidel and Raul Castro, and declared publicly and before a US Congressional panel that Cuba represented no “military threat” to US “national security.” His Congressional testimony brought him harsh criticism from Cuban-American elected officials who defend the heirs and interests of Cuba’s former ruling classes that were ousted in the 1959 Revolution and other policymakers who oppose any “liberalization” of US anti-Cuba policy. McCaffrey had long spoken out formally, and with some force, against the longstanding US policies of overt “regime change,” employing trade and travel sanctions, political hostility, and military intimidation. McCaffrey aligned himself with a significant, growing minority in US ruling circles who have argued for “engagement” as the best way to advance the goal of ending, once and for all, the Cuban Revolution and its political resonance and influence worldwide and, in particular, across the Americas.

McCaffrey is no mushy, naïve bourgeois politician. He has a “distinguished” military career defending the interests of US imperialism in combat action from the 1965 US invasion of the Dominican Republic to multi-medalled “service” in Vietnam to the first Gulf War. In that latter war McCaffrey’s command oversaw one of the most despicable examples of war crimes in recent decades, when US forces bombed and shot to death many thousands of unarmed, fleeing Iraqi troops – abandoned by their officers following military rout by US forces – who had shed their uniforms and were attempting to return to Iraq from Kuwait, along what became known as the “highways of death.” The defenseless, forcibly conscripted, massacred former soldiers were buried in mass graves after the slaughter. Among the soldiers participating was the future Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who no doubt picked up a few pointers on the morality of the merciless targeting of unarmed innocents.

McCaffrey has a direct, intimate connection with US policy in Latin America, going back to his early participation in the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. The liberal Democratic Lyndon Johnson Administration dispatched over 40,000 Marines and 82nd Airborne troops to that impoverished island to abort an increasingly powerful popular uprising that threatened to overturn the military dictatorship that had seized power overthrowing the elected, Constitutional government of Juan Bosch. At least 2000 Dominican civilians were killed in the US invasion, which aimed at averting what Johnson called a “second Cuba.” Under President William Clinton from 1994-96 McCaffrey was Commander-in-Chief for Southern Command of the US Armed Forces with the charge of coordinating “national security operations” in Latin America. Next, still under Clinton, he became the so-called “Drug Czar.” Of course, the pretext of combating drug trafficking has become finely tuned over the decades as an increasingly central rationalization for US intervention in the Americas and political campaigns against governments in conflict with Washington. This has been further deepened under the Obama Administration as it has moved in 2009 to implement the Bush Administration plan to greatly expand direct US military presence on the ground in Colombia with seven military bases there and to reactivate the Fourth Naval Fleet off the waters of Latin America, six decades after being disbanded. Both moves were rationalized in terms of the “war on drugs.”

By itself, McCaffrey’s announcement may seem to have limited significance. But McCaffrey is a savvy bourgeois political operative who never functions as a lone wolf. He is a disciplined figure who can read the tea leaves. So his action should be understand and viewed in its proper context, which is the downward trajectory of US policy toward Cuba under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as 2009 unfolded and ended, following a period of false expectations and widespread illusions that a change was coming. More precisely, after the initial months of his Administration, which found the Obama team on the defensive and isolated, Washington has subsequently pushed back and registered a certain amount of progress in asserting its positions and strengthening its allies in Latin America, while tamping down expectations of significant change in US policies towards Cuba.

The successful – for Washington – outcome of the June 2009 coup in Honduras gave impetus to the US pushback. After its isolation at the San Pedro Sula Summit of the OAS, Washington took advantage of the coup in Honduras to step up its fight to regain political leverage under the Obama Administration. The White House and State Department formally opposed the coup even as political operatives close to the Administration worked on behalf of the coup makers. Once the US government became a central player in diplomatic maneuvers and intrigue after the June 28 coup, it was guaranteed that any process that unfolded would skew in the most demobilizing, conservative manner possible. All of this culminated in the farcical signed agreement on October 30, 2009 which was presented as facilitating the return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya to his presidential post but which actually did no such thing. With the signed document in hand, Washington and what they called the “de facto” regime brusquely shunted Zelaya aside and announced they would support the outcome of the November 29, 2009 elections held under the auspices of the coup regime and significant repression and closing of democratic political space.

Obama Pushes Back

During the period when General McCaffrey canceled his trip to Cuba, a sharp sequence of events unfolded which underlined this shift:

• On November 19, 2009 Obama chose, in a clear provocation, to publicly correspond with Yoani Sanchez, the so-called “dissident blogger,” the latest wholly manufactured, financed, and highly promoted darling and tool of both liberal and conservative anti-Cuba forces in US bourgeois media, academic, and political circles. This was done as an answer to the repeated invitations of Cuban president Raul Castro for direct dialogue between the United States and Cuban governments where every question and political difference would be, as put by Raul Castro, “on the table.”

• On November 30, 2009 a document was issued accusing the Cuban government of persecuting an Afro-Cuban doctor and, in general, practicing institutionalized racism. The initiative was under the direction of Carlos Moore, a longtime and notorious Afro-Cuban counter-revolutionary activist who presents himself as a fighter against “racism” in Cuba. Moore has a long history of working with US-based counter-revolutionaries that are creatures and dependencies of US government and intelligence agencies. The document, “Acting On Our Conscience: A Declaration of African-American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba,” was signed by a number of prominent “progressive” African-American academics and figures such as Prof. Cornell West, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Ruby Dee Davis, Prof. Ron Walters, and Prof. James Turner. In response to this slanderous “Declaration” defenders of revolutionary Cuba’s exemplary role in fighting racism inside Cuba as well as its amazing record in combating colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid in Africa went into action.³

• Washington-Havana talks on legal rules and procedures governing immigration, that had been scheduled for December 2009 following their unilateral termination by the Bush Administration in 2003, were pushed back by the Obama Administration after an initial meeting in July 2009. (The talks resumed on February 19, 2010.) During that period and since Washington has stonewalled Cuba’s offer to expand bilateral negotiations to reach accords on the issues of combating drug trafficking and terrorism as well as collaboration and cooperation towards Hurricane preparedness and relief.

• On December 5, 2009 Havana police arrested one Alan Gross, formally an employee of an outfit calling itself Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI). DAI is a major for-profit mercenary business employing 350 full-time staff in its central office in Washington, DC suburbs and operating in over 60 countries. In line with the contemporary US policy of utilizing so-called “subcontractors,” operating as “private” for-profit corporations, as proxies for promoting and implementing US government policy. (DAI’s website calls the US State Department’s Agency for International Development its “principal client.”) Gross is being held in a Cuban prison accused of spying. This policy of manufacturing “front” organizations with elaborate business structures is nothing new for US and other imperialist intelligence services, although the practice has multiplied considerably in recent decades. This so-called “privatization” of US intelligence and operational tasks has, in fact, become rampant and brazenly open. (There are tens of thousands of employees of such “contractors” working for US military and intelligence agencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other action fronts in the so-called “war on terror.”) It has the advantage of establishing degrees of separation, and what spook jargon calls “plausible deniability,” from the US government source of political direction and financing, although few in the world are taken in by the elaborate charade. Perhaps most important for the individuals heading up these myriad fronts – most of whom are themselves graduates from direct government “service” in military, intelligence, or other such fields – is the lucrative material rewards involved, as these relationships are a “legal” cash cow. Gross and DAI were nabbed handing out highly sophisticated satellite cell phones and computer equipment as part of open US polices to finance individuals and groups that will work hand-in-hand with Washington to subvert and eventually destroy the Cuban Revolution under the guise, of course, of innocently promoting “democracy” and “human rights.” The 2008 Federal US budget openly allocated $45 million for this purpose. (These are separate from covert funding operations.) In that budget DAI received nearly 10% of the mercenary money. In the past much of these funds were handed to rightist Cuban-American outfits based in Florida, who tended to just pocket the money for personal use. The botched DAI operation seems to indicate that the Obama Administration was moving towards new methods to get money and equipment directly to their mercenary clients inside Cuba, without the gusano middlemen and their sticky fingers. So far the Obama Administration has issued perfunctory statements of “concern.” The above-mentioned Wayne Smith, who was the chief of the US Interests Section in Havana when it was established under the Carter Administration in the late 1970s, told the Miami Herald that if Gross distributed satellite phones and other high-tech equipment, it will be hard for Washington to argue his case. “If he was caught with simply a cell phone, even if he didn’t have proper documents, they would have just expelled him… I’m struck by the fact that the United States has not raised hell over this. If I were down there handling the case, and the guy hadn’t done much, I’d be making noise. Maybe he was up to something he shouldn’t have been up to.”

• Following the Christmas Day 2009 attempted terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines plane headed to Detroit in the US from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Washington made all citizens of Cuba, along with a number of other countries, subject to enhanced searches and harassment at US customs checkpoints on the basis of Cuba being on the US State Department list of states that “sponsor” and “support” terrorism. The degree of hypocrisy and mendacity involved here by Washington is breathtaking. Thousands of Cuban citizens have died in terrorist attacks launched from US soil against Cuba since the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution. These attacks have either been directly organized and promoted by US government agencies or winked at and tolerated by US authorities over the years. Perhaps the most notorious incident in a long and sordid history was the October 6, 1976 terrorist destruction of a Cubana Airlines craft and the murder of all 73 passengers aboard, which included the 24 members of Cuba’s juvenile national fencing team, which had just won all the gold medals at Central American and Caribbean athletic games. The two organizers of that crime, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posadas Carriles – both former operatives of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – are currently living freely in the United States. There is not an iota of factual evidence tying Cuba to any act of terrorism in the United States or anywhere else. The fact that the Obama Administration has refused to remove Cuba from this list is a clear indication of its continuation of the essential core of US anti-Cuba policy.

• In the “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community” testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, given on February 2, 2010, US “Director of National Intelligence” Dennis Blair stated, “Cuba has demonstrated few signs of wanting a closer relationship with the United States. Without subsidized Venezuela oil shipments of about 100,000 barrels per day, the severe economic situation would be even worse. President Raul Castro fears that rapid or significant economic change would undermine regime control and weaken the revolution, and his government shows no signs of easing his repression of political dissidents.” Translated from sophistry into English, Blair is lamenting the fact that the Cuban government has refused to surrender to Washington’s demands and do US imperialism the favor of liquidating the Revolution themselves in exchange for all the charms and benefits of US domination.

“We Send Doctors, Not Soldiers”

It should be noted that the social catastrophe in Haiti has complicated Obama’s anti-Cuba push back in the Hemisphere. Inside the United States, there has been a near-total blackout of Cuba’s medical solidarity with Haiti – a truly inspiring history – where the Cuban medical personnel and brigades, who were already on the ground before the earthquake providing, free of charge, much of the medical care existing in Haiti, were the first responders in the disaster. The Cuban teams, reinforced with doctors from Cuba, Haitians and other from the Hemisphere trained in Cuba, set up the first open-tent clinics and operating facilities that have already served tens of thousands. This is widely known and acknowledged in the Caribbean, Latin America, and worldwide. Cuba, by far, has the most, and the most effective, personnel and programs actually providing medical aid to the Haitian people. As Fidel Castro wrote, “We send Doctors, not soldiers.”

The Obama Administration, on the other hand, has rapidly poured in troops and essentially seized the Haitian Airport at Port au Prince, while slowly getting medical equipment, supplies, and food, not to speak of on the ground functioning medical facilities, to the people and operational. In the initial days and weeks, US and “Western” resources went primarily to rescue UN personnel, foreign diplomats, and “western” tourists and citizens, criminally failing to provide minimal assistance to devastated working-class Haitian neighborhoods. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was forced on the defensive as outrage mounted internationally over the heavy-handed US military role which prioritizes the landing of troops at the airport and seaports while forcing some aid shipments to travel overland via the Dominican Republic. According to the Associated Press, for every dollar in US “aid,” 33 cents goes to the US military while 9 cents is for food, 9 cents is to transport the food, 5 cents to pay Haitians working on recovery, 1 cent goes to the Haitian government, and ½ cent to the government of the Dominican Republic. We should all be very grateful, however, that the Western imperialist hyenas, who have looted Haiti for centuries, and, with Washington in the lead, imposed the blood-soaked tyranny of the Duvalier family protecting a system where 1% of the Haitian population controls 50% of its wealth, has magnanimously agreed to cancel $290 million of Haiti’s $890 million international debt!

(Towards the end of February 2010 the US government announced the withdrawal of those doctors under its direction, the closing of its last field hospital inside Haiti, and the departure of the highly publicized US Navy Medical Ship Comfort from its Haitian dock. Of course the medical needs of the earthquake survivors are multiplying rapidly as the legions of homeless living in “tent communities” in horrid conditions including massive rain are facing diarrhea, malaria, and all the disease produced by such conditions on top of constant undernourishment and hunger. In addition it is estimated that up to 30 percent of those who received emergency surgery in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake will need follow up operations. While Washington withdraws its minimal direct medical assistance the Cuban medical mission in Haiti is expanding.)

From Trinidad to Turtle Bay

The first months of the Obama Administration found Washington playing defense on the “Cuba Question” at a series of hemispheric meetings under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS), a body traditionally dominated by the US government. Obama came face to face with the political ground lost by Washington in the Bush years that needed to be made up under his Administration.

In two successive OAS “Summits” held in April 2009 in Trinidad and June 2009 in Honduras, the Obama Administration was embarrassingly isolated. Washington came under remarkably open pressure over its anti-Cuba policy which formally united every other government in the OAS, and dominated the agenda, much to Obama and Clinton’s chagrin. Nevertheless at the June Summit, hosted by the soon-to-be-ousted Honduran President Zelaya, the Obama-Clinton diplomatic team was able to prevent a formal vote openly condemning US policy although it was forced to retreat and acquiesce to the abrogation of the 1962 OAS resolution expelling Cuba.⁴

Washington’s isolation and near-humiliation over Cuba at the OAS Summits was squared a few months later on October 28, 2009 when, for the 18th consecutive year, and with the most lopsided vote yet (187 for the Cuban resolution and 3 siding with Washington with 2 abstentions) the UN General Assembly voted on, as the resolution put it, the “necessity of ending the economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” Washington was only able to get 2 other votes this year – Israel and Palau, while losing El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan from the 2008 vote. It is surely a delicious irony – and a powerful symbol of how utterly isolated US anti-Cuba policy is (and how embarrassing for Washington’s diplomacy and political authority) that even the US-created, sustained, and dependent governments of Afghanistan and Iraq felt compelled to vote for Cuba!

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriquez’s UN presentation was a factual, devastating indictment of the grotesque reality of US sanctions, which extend to life-saving medicines and technologies that are even partially manufactured or developed in the United States:

Alexis García Iribar was born in Cuba, in the province of Guantánamo. He suffered from a congenital cardiopathy known as persistent arterial duct. At the age of 6 and after successive deferrals and hemodynamic complications, he had to be submitted to an open-heart surgery on March 9, 2009, because the government of the United States prevents the US companies NUMED, AGA and Boston Scientific from selling to Cuba the ‘amplatzer’ and ‘embolization coil’ devices required to perform a catheterization that will spare children from this type of surgery. I could mention another 12 cases of children between the ages of 5 months and 13 years who have had to undergo a similar procedure in the course of the last one and a half years – two of them underwent surgery after last January 20.

Cuban children suffering from lymphoblastic leukemia whose bodies reject traditional medicines can not be treated with the American product “Elspar” (Erwinia L-asparaginase), created specially to treat intolerance. Consequently, the life expectancy of these children is reduced and their suffering increases. The U.S. government forbids Merck & Co. to supply this medication to Cuba.

Cuba has not been able to acquire Gene Analyzer Equipment – indispensable to study the origin of breast, colon, and prostate cancer – which is manufactured by the company Applied Biosystem (ABI). Lactalis USA, a supplier of dairy products, was fined $20,000 by the US government.

Since the election of President Obama, there has been no change whatsoever in the implementation of the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba. The blockade remains intact.

US ambassador Susan Rice found herself tangled up in Turtle Bay (the Manhattan neighborhood where the UN is located) where she defended, in a lonely place, US policy with childishly knee-jerk rhetoric: “Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard. The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress. We will not respond in kind to painfully familiar rhetoric that we have heard in years past.”

What a stupid joke! Of course it is Washington that is continuing its “Cold War” against revolutionary Cuba. It is Washington that refuses to accept – 50 years later! – the actuality of the Cuban Revolution and Cuba’s right to self-determination. It is Washington not Cuba that claims a right to subvert, intervene, and harbor and protect terrorists so as to bring about a return to US domination. The surreal remarks of Rice register how tied up in knots Washington finds itself politically as it flails about furiously from its isolated diplomatic corner. But embarrassment and diplomatic isolation are far from sufficient to bring about a change in US policy. Washington under Obama is determined to change the unfavorable political relationship of forces that accumulated over its Cuba policy across the Americas under the years of George W. Bush’s Administration.

Obama Advances Bipartisan US Policy Aims in Latin America

Under Obama’s leadership Washington has made some progress toward its bipartisan political goals in Latin America. Obama was aided by the initially widespread hopes and illusions in him in Latin America and worldwide as well as in the United States by many self-described “progressives.” While, after one year, these are being increasingly discarded, the initial illusions were a useful cover for the Obama Administration as it pushed forward an agenda in essential continuity with its predecessor in Latin America and internationally.

Under the Bush Administration there were concerted, failed efforts to subvert and overturn the government and proletarian state in Cuba and the left-wing, anti-imperialist governments in Venezuela and later Bolivia that came to power amid massive popular struggles. None of this worked out very well for Washington. All of its targets were politically strengthened and the policy had virtually no support in Latin America. The governments of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, in close alliance with revolutionary Cuba which provided tremendous solidarity in the form of large-scale medical and educational assistance, successfully resisted US-backed military coups and counter-revolutionary plots and subversion and carried out significant policies in favor of working people.

Under the new Obama Administration there was a tactical diplomatic shift — a necessary retreat in form, more of a regrouping. The bellicose rhetoric and in-your-face confrontationism of the Bush years were ratcheted down somewhat. Ambassadors were again exchanged with Venezuela and Bolivia. At the OAS Summit in Trinidad, Obama was photographed shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. Nevertheless, the aims of US policy were unchanged. (And, in recent months, alongside the shift to direct contention again with Cuba, there has been a ramping up of political hostility, demonization, and destabilization against the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela. Corporate media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and the increasingly bellicose and conservative editorial page of the Washington Post have echoed, albeit more harshly, the US State Department government line painting a picture of Venezuela in utter economic and social chaos with a repressive government lashing out at dissent and “dropping the mask of democracy.”)

On Cuba Obama quickly adjusted US policy on some secondary questions – in the face of the mounting Hemispheric and near-unanimous international opposition to the US economic, financial, and commercial embargo – in order to more credibly defend and promote the core policy aim which remains the overturning of the revolutionary government, the destruction of the social relations and conquests of the Revolution, and the restoration of capitalism and US domination.

Obama fulfilled his campaign promise to end existing travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans; has eased somewhat the ability of some Cuban academics, musicians, artists, and scientists to visit the US and some similar US categories and individuals to legally travel to Cuba at the invitation of Cuban society. Also, there has been a slight US liberalization in granting so-called “people to people” licenses. Nevertheless, so far, the Obama moves still are far from taking us to where the policy on exchanges and licenses was under Clinton and the first several years of the George W. Bush Administration.

These anorexic measures, doled out with an eyedropper, are presented by Obama and Clinton as bold moves begging for a Cuban response. They are saying in essence: “We’ve done our bit, now you must basically commit suicide and end the Revolution in exchange.”

Colombia

Over the course of the first decade of the new millennium the political and moral deterioration of the armed guerrilla movement of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) became more pronounced and apparent, to the great advantage of the Colombian officer corps and capitalist political parties. Their political consolidation took place under the leadership of Alvaro Uribe. (This entire development was candidly analyzed by Fidel Castro in a remarkable small book, Peace in Colombia, which is a treasure trove of the Marxist method and principles.)

In this framework, on October 30, 2009 the US and Colombian governments signed an agreement to significantly expand the US military presence there in seven military bases. This puts potentially large-scale US military forces directly on the ground for future political contingencies in the heart of the South American continent. Colombia territory has become the wedge by which Washington hopes to regain on-the-ground military striking power, under the cover of fighting “drug trafficking,” on the South American continent. This military presence will aim to threaten and intimidate governments in conflict with Washington and to counter the inevitable explosions in popular struggles and revolutionary bids for power that are built into the contemporary reality of economic crisis and class and social polarization throughout the Americas.

Endgame

There is no question that if Cuba were to drop its revolutionary political orientation and become more responsible to the interests and dominance of world capitalism and imperialism, then Washington would change course and establish full diplomatic relations and end all sanctions in a New York minute. But short of Cuban political capitulation, what will end the US economic and political war against Cuba? There are three factors which can be looked at separately, but which are totally intertwined, playing upon and off each other.

First and foremost is independent mass pressure inside the US, that is, independent of the maneuverings, machinations, and intrigues of the bait and switch game on Capitol Hill. This first factor is weak today, although that can change. And while there is a vibrant, committed core of Cuba solidarity activists in cities across the United States, as a national movement it is decentralized and diffuse. Of course the “Cuba Question” is not at this time a pressing issue in US politics. There is no imminent or clearly building momentum towards direct US aggression. Widespread sentiment against the US embargo in US public opinion exists, and there is even a small but significant layer of US public opinion that is consciously sympathetic to the example, legacy, and historic leadership and of the Cuban Revolution, particularly among Blacks. There is furthermore great, broad interest in Cuba, and the prospects of visiting there, among ordinary US citizens. Preventing people from seeing the actual Cuban reality as opposed to the hell painted by imperialist propaganda is, of course, a major reason US authorities strain to maintain travel restrictions.

Second is Hemispheric and world pressure. In formal diplomatic terms it’s hardly possible for Washington to be more isolated in its Cuba policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, among Washington’s imperialist allies who are also its dog-eat-dog competitors on the world capitalist market, opposition to the US embargo at the UN has more to do with antagonism towards US attempts to impose its economic and financial policies extraterritorially than with any sympathy for revolutionary, socialist Cuba. The above-cited EU Parliament vote strongly condemning Cuba is a truer reflection of the class and political antagonism of European imperialism. In the Americas while popular solidarity with Cuba is very widespread and is a big factor weighing on the postures of even conservative governments, it is certain that as social and political polarization deepens in the wake of growing economic crisis, antagonism towards Cuba – the permanent example and inspiration for all Hemispheric forces fighting for social justice – consciously fostered and demanded by Washington, among certain governments and political tendencies is bound to grow. There are many delicious contradictions within the actuality and dynamics of the Cuban Revolution’s place in Latin American history and contemporary politics.

The third factor is divisions within the US ruling class. This factor totally flows from and is dependent on factors one and two. Short of a victorious social revolution inside the United States bringing working people to political power, it is the political representatives of the US “Establishment” that will make the decision to end the five decades of economic and political war against the Cuban Revolution. So far we have only seen tactical divergences from within an utterly united policy of defeating the Cuban Revolution and destroying Cuban socialism.

If Obama and Clinton had any illusions that the Cuban government under Raul Castro would be less inclined to promote revolutionary internationalism and solidarity with the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity against the policies of world capital, they have had enough time to shed them.

Despite years of stupid speculation and assertions about splits and divisions between Raul and Fidel Castro, it seems fairly clear that Washington no longer views as serious or real that anything fundamental has changed in the Cuban leadership and political orientation, either within Cuba or in its foreign policy, under Raul Castro’s Presidency. Cuba remains revolutionary and Marxist. Revolutionary continuity is the reality in Cuba.

Therefore so does continuity remain the reality of US policy under Barack Obama.

1. See also the March 3, 2010 speech by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
2. For more information on the case of the Cuban Five, in US prisons for over 11 years, framed-up and convicted on trumped up “conspiracy” charges, for their heroic activities infiltrating Miami-based Cuban-American organizations involved in terrorist acts against Cuba, and the international campaign to free them.
3. See the counter-petitions “In Solidarity With the Real Anti-Racist Movement in Cuba,” and “Declaration of African American Activists, Intellectuals and Artists in Continued Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution,” and the article, “Latest Attack on Cuba Falsifies History of Fight Against Racism in Cuba.”
4. See my articles, “Trapped in Trinidad,” and “Slipping and Sliding in San Pedro Sula.”

When we look around the world we see a number of leaders – Chávez is one of them but not the only one – who, over the last eight years, have become more and more negative and oppositional to the United States. The prior administration tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to turn them into international pariahs. It didn’t work.

We are going to see what other approaches might work. We have no guarantees that we can create a better relationship with someone who has a different view of politics, the economy, and so much else. But we think it’s worth trying to just explore this and see what comes of it. I don’t think that in today’s world — a multipolar world where we are competing for attention and relationships with at least the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians — it’s in our interest to turn our backs on countries in our own hemisphere.

So we’re going to try some different approaches. No illusions about who we’re dealing with or what the issues are. But I think it’s worth a try, because what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked very well. In fact, if you look at the gains, particularly in Latin America, that Iran is making and China is making, it’s quite disturbing. They are building very strong economic and political connections with a lot of these leaders. I don’t think that’s in our interest.

I’m certainly open to constructive criticism and ideas, but – we talked about exchanging ambassadors again with Chávez, which I think we will do at some point. We are looking to figure out how to deal with Ortega. The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua, and you can only imagine what it’s for.

We want to try to build better relationships with [Ecuador's Rafael] Correa, and we want to see if we can figure out how to get an ambassador back and work with [Evo] Morales in Bolivia.

We’re facing an almost united front against the United States regarding Cuba. Every country, even those with whom we are closest, is saying ‘you’ve got to change, you can’t keep doing what you’re doing.’ We would like to see some reciprocity from the Castros on political prisoners, human rights, and other matters.

So we’re looking at a number of different relationships and trying to figure out whether we can be more productive. My bottom line is: What’s best for America? How do we try to influence behavior that is more in our interest than not? And that’s how we’re looking at it.

– US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Address to State Department Employees, May 1, 2009

In resisting the aggressions of the most powerful empire ever to have existed, our people fought for the other sister peoples of this continent. The OAS was an accomplice of all the crimes committed against Cuba.

At one moment or another, the totality of the countries of Latin America were victims of interventions and political and economic aggression. There is not one single one that can deny that. It is ingenuous to believe that the good intentions of a president of the United States can justify the existence of that institution that opened the gates to the Trojan horse that backed the Summits of the Americas, neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises. Ignorance, underdevelopment, economic dependence, poverty, the forced return of those who emigrate in search of work, the brain drain, and even the sophisticated weapons of organized crime were the consequences of interventions and plundering proceeding from the North. Cuba, a little country, has demonstrated that it can resist the blockade and advance in many fields, and even cooperate with other countries.

– Fidel Castro, “The Trojan Horse,” June 2, 2009

Washington “pretty much by itself”

On June 3, at the end of a a Ministerial Conference of the Organization of American States (OAS) in San Pedro Sula, Honduras – and while President Barack Obama was the recepient of lavish pomp and circumstance by the absolutist monarchy and semi-feudal dictatorship of the House of Saud in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Washington’s delegation, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, patched together a last-minute, highly-diluted resolution that allowed Washington to save some face and prevent an abject political humiliation over its anti-Cuba policy. Nevertheless the gathering registered a further retreat by a clearly stung Washington in the face of overwhelming Hemispheric (and international) opposition to the decades-long US economic and political war – and permanent military intimidation and threats – against revolutionary and socialist Cuba.

Washington continues to hold onto the core of its bipartisan policy of demanding the overturning of the Cuban government and promoting the consequent return of US economic, financial, and political domination. But, in doing so, Washington, under the Obama Administration, was forced, at San Pedro Sula, to jettison yet another legal prop cushioning and justifying the core policy, in this case a US-promoted 1962 resolution expelling Cuba from the OAS.

According to an article in the May 31, 2009 USA Today the Obama Administration went into the Conference prepared to accept the abrogation of the 1962 resolution and retreat to a position of setting political conditions for Cuba’s “membership” in an Hemispheric body which the Cuban revolutionaries view with contempt as an historic tool of US imperialism against Latin America and the Caribbean. Other national delegations, led by Nicaragua and Venezuela, put forward a position of opposing any conditions on Cuba. This view was apparently supported by at least the two-thirds majority needed to pass if things had moved to an open and public vote. But a push for an up-or-down vote did not happen and apparently an accomodation was made to Washington’s “needs.”

When the US delegation found no support for specific language deliniating its political conditions – the usual demagogic and hypocritical boilerplate about “democracy,” “political prisoners,” “free elections,” and so on – the Clinton-led team was reduced to conjuring up language, mealy-mouthed enough to reach “consensus,” that could be nevertheless be spun into a stick to attack Cuba and maintain Washington’s core, unchanged agenda.

The language within the actual resolution, passed by acclamation, reads “…that Cuba’s participation in the OAS would be the result of a dialogue initiated at the government of Cuba’s request and in conformity with the practices, purposes and principles of the OAS.”

Dan Restrepo, who is a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs on the U.S. National Security Council said, “What we’ve seen today is really a testament to the hard work of multilateral diplomacy…The United States and other countries from various parts in the hemisphere fought, defended and prevailed in saying that this was not an automatic process, that ‘yes, let’s leave an argument of the past in the past, let’s not become prisoners of the past, but let us ensure that we are defending the basic principles of democracy and human rights and nonintervention and noninterference as the path forward to Cuba’s return to the organization.”

In an article in the June 5 Washington Post – based on mostly unattributed interviews with “diplomats” and obviously spun by US officials to present what happened in the most positive light – it was reported that polarization, rupture, and even the possible disintegration of the OAS appeared imminent. At one point, before bolting to the Middle East to join Obama, Clinton had blurted out the reality that Washington was “pretty much by itself” in the discussions over Cuba at the OAS Conference.

The Post piece further asserts that “The United States compromised more than it ever had in the OAS on the Cuba issue, diplomats said, and it mustered its most impressive diplomatic firepower to get a deal – with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton leading the delegation and [President] Obama calling Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.”

On the defensive throughout the San Pedro Sula Conference, Clinton took the line that the new Obama Administration had already done so much to reverse Bush’s “failed” policy on Cuba that they were actually taken aback by how little this had softened the united, clear, and unwavering call by all governments and countries across the Americas for Washington to immediately and unilaterally end all economic and travel sanctions against Cuba.

“I want to emphasize the United States under President Obama is taking a completely new approach to our policy toward Cuba: We have eased restrictions on family travel and remittances,” Clinton said. “As I was getting ready in my hotel room this morning, I had CNN on and I saw just a tearful reunion between a man and his little baby boy who he hadn’t seen in a year and a half because of the prior travel restrictions.” Clinton added that the Obama Administration had also authorized telecommunications links with Cuba supported resuming bilateral talks on immigration and direct mail.

“We are not interested in fighting old battles or living in the past,” she said in the text of a speech prepared for delivery to the group. “At the same time, we will always defend the timeless principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Of course the whole “past” of US interventions and subversion in the Americas shows a vicious disregard for the “timeless principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

The Post article tells us that “Nicaragua and Venezuela were threatening to quit the group unless Cuba was readmitted…And there was a possibility that members could put the issue to a vote, leaving the United States alone on the losing side, which would have caused a backlash in Congress.” Republican and Democratic Congessional Representatives most strongly identified with the counter-revolutionary elements in the Cuban-American community tied to decades of terrorism and sabotage inside Cuba (who are in now in a distinct and shrinking minority) have been threatening to cut off US funds to the OAS which has historically been utterly dominated by Washington’s political and economic interests and priorities – with no higher political priority than eliminating the Cuban revolutionary example.

Recovering from the Bush years

Such a move is viewed as politically disastrous by top US policymakers who are attempting to advance, not further erode, US political authority in the Americas, which is seen as having deteriorated significantly during the years of the George W. Bush Administration. Those years saw the defeat in 2002 of a US-backed military coup in Venezuela and the failure of the White House drive to get rid of the government of Hugo Chavez as well as the election and consolidation of other left-wing governments in Bolivia and Ecuador that are in conflict with Washington and international capital and which quickly developed close relations and deepening economic and political collaboration with Cuba. All of those governments came into power out of the mass popular struggles and class battles against the imperialist-imposed austerity, or “neoliberal,” policies that have increasingly framed and marked politics in Latin America from the mid-1990s under the Democratic William Clinton Adminstration through the years of the second Bush Administration.

Throughout the Americas the traditional political spectrum moved significantly to the left in the Bush years as conservative governments were defeated electorally in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and El Salvador (and narrowly maintained power in Mexico and Peru). All of these new governing parties and coalitions remain firmly within the framework of the prerogatives of the capitalist market and the boundaries of bourgeois electoralism, eschewing the use of governmental power to promote mass mobilizations of workers and peasants. Nevertheless, to one degree or another, these governments present themselves as receptive to the demands and pressures from working people and the class and popular struggles and resistance that break out independently of them, including the increasingly politically conscious and militant struggles of indigenous peoples fighting institutionalized racism. These governments have not generally been marked by harsh repression against workers and peasants and political space has expanded.

All of this can easily bring these “leftist” governments into conflict with the “national” capitalist and landlord classes and consequently the US government which ultimately is the main prop of these ruling classes. At the same time US economic and financial power competes ferociously and unequally with these same ruling classes. One registration of all these economic, social, and political contradictions is that all of these governments (and indeed more conservative governments such as Colombia and Mexico) have pursued normal and friendly relations and collaboration with Cuba. Cuban medical and education missions thrive and do amazing work in many of these countries, where popular solidarity with Cuba is strong whatever the political coloration of the government.

The Obama Adminstration is in the unenviable position of seeing Washington’s anti-Cuba policy become a very public obstacle to the positive (from their point of view) development of US diplomacy and policies throughout the Americas. It is striking that even relatively conservative governments in Latin America and the Caribbean feel unable to identify publicly with Washington in placing conditions and politically attacking a government in Cuba that is led by revolutionary Marxists.

The Obama Administration and the US rulers in general understand fully that the disintegration of the OAS – the historic instrument and cover of US policy and Hemispheric domination – could only strengthen the already clear tendency in Latin America and the Caribbean toward regional and other bodies independent of US (and Canadian) participation which register the growing economic integration and common political orientation that runs counter to the economic, financial, social, and political policies and priorities promoted by Washington. In December 2008 Brazil hosted a Summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders which pointedly excluded the United States and Canada and included Cuba.

The Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas (ALBA), initiated by Venezuela and Cuba and expanded to now include Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Honduras, and Ecuador began and developed out of the struggle against the drive by Washington, under the cover of the OAS, to impose the so-called Free Trade in the Americas (FTAA) treaty on the peoples of the Hemisphere, reinforcing and extending neoliberal imperialist domination and unequal economic and financial exchange and social relations. FTAA is now in, at best, a comatose state to the great dismay of Washington and Wall Street.

Needless to say the current economic and financial crisis and the onset of world depression conditions can only exacerbate class and social polarization and struggle throughout the Americas, adding to the urgency for Washington to reposition itself politically and recover from the derailment of US policy over the past decade.

The Cuban Revolution and the OAS

In 1962 the Democratic Party Administration of John Kennedy was able to push through Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS based on an “adherence…to Marxism-Leninism [which] is incompatible with the inter-American system” by the revolutionary leadership team headed by Fidel Castro which came to power when the Cuban Revolution triumphed on January 1, 1959. The Cuban revolutionaries established a government which was supported enthusiastically by the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people, particularly among industrial workers, peasants, Black Cubans, and youth of all social classes. The Cuban government had solidified that support by carrying out sweeping, revolutionary measures on agrarian reform and land redistribution; workers rights and entitlements such as pensions, maternity leave, trade-union representation, and so on; universal access to free medical care; radical rent and utility cost reductions; massive programs to eliminate illiteracy and establish access to excellent education free of charge for all; the smashing of racist Jim Crow segregation laws and practices; the promotion of laws and policies that greatly elevated the status and emancipation of women; and the eradication of US-based Mafia networks which organized the island’s vast prostitution, gambling, and narcotics rackets.

Naturally these measures did not go down well with the social and class forces in Cuba that had benefited and profited from the social relations of the pre-revolutionary order that was being uprooted nor, of course, with US business and financial interests that utterly dominated every aspect of the Cuban economy. As in every genuine Revolution, Cuban society became highly polarized along social and class lines. Although a distinct, clear minority, there were still hundreds of thousands of Cubans whose “way of life” was disrupted and swept away by the Revolution driven by and in the interests of the overwhelming majority who were oppressed, degraded, and exploited…and who had now risen up in a united, clench fist of revolutionary mobilization and action.

The Cuban landowning class, bourgeoisie, and large layers of the professional and middle classes – most of whom chose to ensconse to Miami and the United States — became the social base for the US-organized attempts to overturn the revolutionary order in Cuba. (Of course, not every landlord, capitalist, or middle-class professional opposed the Cuban Revolution and not every worker, peasant, and Black Cuban supported it. But it is an indisputable fact that this was the general, overwhelming tendency.)

The revoked 1962 OAS resolution also cited Cuba’s alliance with the former Soviet Union and allied Eastern European regimes as the revolutionary Cuban government sought to defend the triumphant Revolution against direct US military aggression after the defeat of the US-organize Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban counter-revolutionary mercenaries. This was a period of intense counter-revolutionary activity organized from the United States and vertically directed by the White House, CIA, and State Department. Every day assassination plots were being organized, terrorist incursions planned and implemented, and plans for economic sabotage carried out. Large bureaucracies employing hundreds of operatives were established just for the purpose of planting false stories in the press, spreading vile rumors and disinformation (so-called psychological operations or “psy-ops”). Miami was the nerve center and after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs it suffered a nervous breakdown.

The 1962 OAS expulsion of Cuba was part of Washington’s attempt to re-establish political cover and credibility for new direct aggression – this time without the leading edge of its mercenary Cuban proxies – by US forces. This period culminated later in 1962 with Cuba acceeding to Soviet pressure to secretly install nuclear weapons on Cuban territory in the hope of deterring the US invasion they knew was in place and impending. Upon discovery, Washington organized a naval quarantine of Cuba and threatened to engage Soviet naval vessels entering Cuban waters, a sequence of events that nearly led to direct military strikes and an invasion of Cuba by the United States, not to speak of devastating nuclear exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union and untold millions of deaths. The crisis was resolved when the Soviet leadership removed the nuclear weapons from Cuba, the Kennedy Administration agreed, in a secret protocol, to remove US nuclear missiles from Turkey that were an equivalent distance from the Soviet Union, and an alleged, informal pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba.

US government documents declassified since the 1962 “Missile Crisis” reveal that Washington policymakers fully understood that a US invasion would meet truly massive popular Cuban resistance – the entire population was armed to the teeth and in a state of full territorial mobilization – that would in the first days and weeks lead to 10,000 or more US casualties. It was this reality – as much as any supposed “statesman-like cool” – that restrained President Kennedy from ordering an invasion and negotiating, without the participation of the Cuban government, a mutually agreeable settlement with an equally anxious and politically-diplomatically outmaneuvered Soviet government which had overplayed its hand.

From then until now Washington has focused on isolating and subverting Cuba through attempts to implement a death-inducing economic and financial blockade, supplemented with terrorist attacks and economic sabotage launched from US soil by CIA-trained Cuban-American cunter-revolutionaries (including as revealed in 1976 US Senate Hearing the introduction of biological agents to destroy Cuban agricultural production).

The resolution passed by acclamation at San Pedro Sula overturned the 1962 expulsion of Cuba from the Washington-dominated body following the 1959 Cuba Revolution. It took Washington three years after the triumph of the Revolution to muster the support among the various capitalist governments of Latin America and the Caribbean to boot out the revolutionary Cuban government. Over the next decade-and-a-half succeeding Administrations – Democratic and Republican – and the Democratic Party-controlled Congress, promoted policies that established vicious right-wing military dictatorships throughout Latin America (Brazil 1964; Dominican Republic 1965 following a US invasion; Uruguay and Chile 1973; Argentina 1976; Bolivia with numerous coups and counter-coups from 1964-82) adding to the already longtime family-military tyrannies backed by Washington (Duvalierist Hait; Somocista Nicaragua; El Salvador; and so on.

This is the “past” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do not want to be “living in.” And who can blame them? But the present-day economic, social, and political realities in the Americas, the legacy of oppression, grinding exploitation, and obscene social inequality, flows precisely from this “past.” Indeed, how could they not be? Among these present-day realities which the Obama team came up against in San Pedro Sula is the clear and united Hemispheric solidarity with Cuba against Washington’s economic and political war.

The overriding aim of Washington’s Cuba policies is to prevent the extension of the Cuban socialist revolution, especially in the Americas, which overturned capitalist property relations on the island and began to forge a new society and new human beings based on human needs over private profit and solidarity with the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity.

This has not changed to this day and has become more compelling and imperative with the ongoing waves of mass popular and anti-imperialist struggle that have shaken Hemispheric politics in the young 21st Century. This is why Washington continues to be willing to put up with Hemispheric and international isolation and embarrassment over its policy toward a small Caribbean island that has had such a huge impact on world politics and whose influence and resonance on the world stage is greater than ever.

Epilogue to San Pedro Sula

A few days after the OAS Ministerial Conference the White House chose, with great fanfare, to announce the arrest of a former State Department employee and his wife on “espionage” charges of giving “classified” US government documents to Cuba. Supposedly the couple had been under “suspicion” for over a decade.

Nine days later the US Supreme Court announced it would not accept an Appeal to review the outrageous injustice of the five Cuban revolutionaries, the Cuban Five – Fernando Gonzalez, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, and Ramon Labanino – who have been incarcerated in US prisons for more than a decade for the “crime” of preventing ongoing terrorist attacks against their country from US soil by infiltrating counter-revolutionary Cuban-American organizations involved in such activities. The case of the Cuban Five is emblematic of the entire history of Washington’s response to the Cuban Revolution and, at the same time, the Five Cuban patriots represent the extraordinary and heroic individuals – out of the ranks of ordinary people – that a genuine Revolution produces. The continued denial of freedom for the Cuban Five and the growing awareness and resonance of their cause has become an important part of the deepening political price Washington is paying, and is prepared to pay, to defeat and destroy the example of the Cuban Revolution. It is teaching a whole new generation worldwide about the Cuban Revolution.

Clearly, Washington’s anti-Cuba policy will not go away gently into the night. But the pressures are mounting to end, once and for all, US economic and travel sanctions and for the normalization of US-Cuban relations. The relationship of forces has changed in the Americas. While US imperialism retains great military power, its economic and financial might is increasingly crisis-wracked and its political authority has never been weaker since the origins of the modern US Hemispheric imperial colossus at the very end of the 19th Century. But today Washington can no longer control events in the Americas.