Rapprochement or Intended Regime Change? America’s Kiss of Death
August 19, 2015
Rapprochement or Intended Regime Change? America’s Kiss of Death
by Norman Pollack
Opening the US embassy in Havana is a transparent effort at stifling/arresting the Cuban revolution as it consolidates its domestic achievements and transitions to a more stable Latin American setting, one no longer tyrannized over by American financial-commercial-military dominance. This is not the 1960s. Cuba is not alone in the region. US intervention has to be less blunt, more crafty, though still insidious in its hatred of a free people creating their own society. (What I saw a decade ago has not changed, a world-class medical system, people whether in the cities or in the mountains with dignity and strength written on their faces, children at the center of the social system.)
Considering US efforts to isolate and punish Cuba over the last half-century-plus and the tendency of any revolution to stabilize often at the expense of its inner vision, I think that Cuba in world historical terms has done well for itself, much to a gnashing of teeth in Washington unused to resistance of this quality and kind. Why couldn’t the little varmints behave, so we could have Batista-like fleshpots, agribusiness and mining investment, and supply an abundance of arms to put down labor agitators, opposition political figures, and incipient revolutionists? The demonization of Fidel, worthy of the present demonization of Putin, confirmed in 1959—not that by then a confirmation was needed—America’s global counterrevolutionary role. Cuba must not be allowed to happen. Yet it did, proximity to the US all the more intolerable.
From those early days we see already the interior mental workings of the proto-fascistic mind, a built-in domino theory and effect in which failure to stop Cuba in its tracks will have Cuban hordes invading Miami (ironically, the ultra-Right rather than the Left, and less an invasion than seeking protection and companionship of Americans having the same ideological persuasion), so that a toughened-out posture was absolutely necessary if the US was to save face in the remainder of its world military/business adventurism. If Fidel were to be allowed to succeed, America would suffer irremediable damage both as a unilateral power source and in the eyes of its imperialist colleagues. Hence, under Kennedy, the Cuban missile crisis shortly thereafter—yes, saying goodnight to our young son and the babysitter as we went off to a concert in New Haven, not knowing whether we would see them alive again.
US presidents play for keeps, all the more testimony to the tenacity of the Cuban people to have survived (and continue to) in the face of pressures few others, notably Vietnam, have been able to withstand. The Yankee Colossus shaped the future of Latin America for quite some time—e.g., dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, along with Central American death squads, CIA and other covert activities rife throughout—yet Cuba remained free and comparatively unbloodied. Why expect any change now, precisely when the US is on another international rampage, prepared, in the same suicidal mindset exhibited by Kennedy, to see to completion the staring down, isolation, and dismemberment of China and Russia? Obama and, regrettably, Kerry, who carries water for him, have emerged, even more than their predecessors, as world-class spoilers, spoilers of a democratized global structure in which the impoverished and disadvantaged masses, brought to that plight largely through US actions, provide illustration and warning of what to expect following today’s ceremony in Havana. With regime change the dominating political instinct and policy framework of the Obama administration, one sympathetic to the Cuban revolution and the Cuban people can only urge caution—and a thorough awareness of America’s past conduct and future direction.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/19/rapprochement-or-intended-regime-change-americas-kiss-of-death/
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