Note to reader: This post and the last one on racism in the states of the Confederacy have been published without having been edited by my distinquished colleague and life-long friend Fitz McAden. Fitz and his wife Jill are away on a month long luxury Grand Tour of Europe.  So any misspellings, poor punctuation, errors in syntax, of just plain poor writing are my fault!

 

 

Over 50 years ago, while a college student at Tulane, I was required to write a seminar paper for the Latin American Studies degree that I hoped to earn. While I don’t remember what the exact title of the paper was, it might as well have been Kill Cuba With Kindness. My thesis was simple. I advocated abandoning our Cold War influenced policy of antagonism toward Cuba and declaring friendship with the island nation. I argued that prolonged friendly contact with our country and its people would do more to undermine the communist ideology of Cuba than all the sabre rattling in the world would do. Further, I argued that providing the Cuban people with a devil to hate 90 miles north did more to galvanize the Cuban people against us than Russia’s propaganda ever could. 

 

However, as you will note, no US administration from Nixon to Trump 2 has taken my advice. Yes, Obama tried to take a step in that direction. However with the advent of Trump, any progress in that direction was reversed in the first days of Trump 1. Indeed we are now even more adversarial than at any point since the overthrow of the Batista regime back in 1959.

 

I will resist the temptation to dwell on the idiocy of our Cuba policy since the early 60’s. It has been cruel and stupid. No other nation sees fit to join us in our demonization of socialist Cuba. Our decades-long hostility has made it harder and harder for the Cuban people to survive. And why? To fight communism? For the votes of the Cuban population of south Florida? Because we have always done so? Pick your answer. But our policy has done nothing to benefit anyone in this country and has done much to immiserate innocent Cubans. 

 

And now, drunk on the heady stuff of the takeover of Venezuela, the Trump regime has its sights on Cuba and is not shy about saying so. Venezuela was Cuba’s only real ally and our invasion shut down the supply of oil to Cuba. Now they have run out. Power to the island has been shut down due to lack of fuel to power electrical plants. Through strict rationing, the lights are on for 4 or 5 hours per day, often in the middle of the night. No air conditioning. No refrigeration. No TV. No radio. Just a daily struggle to get by. All this courtesy of the Great Satan to the north. 

 

In addition to the blockade of Cuba, which is not-so-slowly strangling the country, the Trump regime is laying the groundwork for military action against Cuba. We have now charged Raul Castro with murder and sworn to bring him to justice. By the logic of our indictment of Raul, Trump would be facing 1000’s of murder indictments from citizens in, for example, Iran or Venezuela. The indictment is a fig leaf behind which to cloak our real intention – taking over a sovereign nation just because we can. 

 

Not to be outdone in the Cuba sweepstakes, the Supreme Court has decided that companies (which, remember, are people since Citizens United)  whose properties were expropriated in the early 60’s could sue other companies who subsequently used those properties. The case pitted several cruise ship companies who docked in Havana during the brief period of thawed relations initiated by Obama against a company who had owned a concession to operate those docks prior to the revolution. It could be seen as a punishment for having done business in Cuba for a brief time. 

 

And then yesterday, I saw a headline about the danger to our country of Cuban drones! We now have invented several reasons to overthrow the Cuban government and install a brand new capitalist regime. Such a regime will surely facilitate the creation of an oligarchy resembling our own. A few capitalist heroes will get immensely wealthy and the common citizen of Cuba will be left behind. Free medical care, a hallmark of the Cuban revolution, will give way to for profit healthcare with predictable results. 

 

This is all going to happen right before our eyes. The telltale signs are everywhere. Yet there is no outrage in the halls of congress or the streets of the nation. Many more people are concerned about the price of gasoline, than are worried about the naked, cruel aggression being planned by our government against a small country 90 miles south of Key West. Make no mistake, such a move would be illegal by pre Trump standards. Cuba poses no threat to us. Our blockade of Cuba is already an act of war but no one seems to care. 

 

What is driving this push against Cuba?  Most obviously, the Republicans want to reward their faithful Cuban-American voters. Less obviously, this is a pet project of Marco Rubio, our super anti-communist Secretary of State who is stuck in the mindset of the Cold War. But I think that the biggest reason this aggression will happen is that it will provide Trump and his crony capitalist sycophants many money making opportunities. Trump is nothing but a real estate developer and he salivates about carving up Cuba into glitzy hotel properties and luxury homes. I would guess he could imagine adding billions in Cuba profits to his growing stockpile of loot stolen from the US taxpayer. 

 

Though we haven’t attacked Cuba yet, we have been waging war against them via the blockade for a long time. I don’t want to be right about the imminence of a military strike. But I don’t see a way to stop it unless the Congress suddenly exhibits some concern about the use of our military might in ways that are illegal and immoral. Or………….. perhaps my long desired dream of millions of citizens taking to the streets to demand Trump’s resignation might give him pause. But who am I kidding? We, as a nation, have become inured to violence perpetrated in our name by the orange abomination we call Mr. President.

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