The culture of hostility against Cuba

On April 30 of this year 2020, with premeditation and under cover of darkness, an individual of Cuban origin fired with an AK-47 rifle at our embassy in Washington, bringing up a history of acts in which Cuban diplomats have lost their lives on the very soil of the United States. There is a culture of hostility against Cuba.

The line of reasoning followed by our Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla in the subsequent press conference to criticize the US Government has a strict, flawless, and relentless logic. And this logic has its basis in the history and nature of US governments’ attitudes and policy in conducting their relations with Cuba.

Already in 1958, President Eisenhower was devising plans to frustrate the triumph of the Cuban revolution. He had infiltrated the revolutionary ranks with several CIA agents, working from the inside, to avoid at all costs that the revolution should seize power. Faced with failure, in 1959, plans to assassinate the leaders of the revolution –Fidel, Raúl and Che Guevara– were being hatched at the White House.

It’s a very long history until this very day when after more than sixty years they haven’t stopped acting with the same intentions. Terrorist acts since the very year 1959 are in the thousands: assassinations, terrorist groups in the Escambray mountains, attacks on coastal villages, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Mongoose Plan, attacks on our diplomatic quarters, attempts to invade Cuba, biological attacks, and others.

All this has been complemented with radio, television, and ideological aggressions in general. Open and undercover actions against Cuba make up a long list which is impossible to fathom. The loss of human lives is in the thousands, and material loss reaches hundreds of billions of dollars. So, how could we not take into account all these actions carried out in compliance with US policy for over 60 years?

It’s not just the aggressions, which are certainly not isolated. It’s that US administrations, by allowing and planning all these actions against Cuba themselves, have contributed to generating a culture, in which attacking Cuba always has the support of the US government. What is the blockade if not an attempt to shut out Cuba from the world, so as to keep our country from taking up its rightful place in international relations?

In the same way that Cuba has always been regarded, in American political culture, as part of the continental territory of the United States, so too everything that’s been done against Cuba is justified by that culture which all US administrations have tried to maintain and fuel with regards to it.

That is, attacking Cuba has become a part of the political culture in some sectors of American society and of practically all US administrations. Of course, there are many people both outside and within the US who do not accept or share that logic of hostility. But for many years, US administrations have taken charge of creating the groups that uphold it, both within the Cuban community in the US and among its international allies, along with some sectors of American society, in particular within the Republican Party and other sectors which identify with the interests of a hostile policy against Cuba.

When Trump won the presidency, he found that the hostile logic for dealing with Cuba was quite deteriorated. The Obama administration had contributed to a certain disassembling and managed to move forward with positive relations. Therefore, he has tried to reconstruct it, starting with his inauguration speech in Miami, with the support of the most aggressive and reactionary sectors within the Cuban community in the US.

Since then, Trump has been committed to reversing all the progress made under the Obama administration, bringing back aggressive models that existed before Obama, and even earlier. Therefore, this April’s assault against the Cuban embassy in Washington may be considered a part of that revival of the culture of hostility against Cuba, one that, incidentally, is clearly fuelled by Trump’s aggressive policy against our country

Neither Trump nor Pompeo can answer the questions posed by our Foreign Minister, because then they would have to dare to deny a number of irrefutable historical arguments, which would only make them look ridiculous. And this is so, especially because what the Minister points out has been a part of the most stupidly aggressive speeches given by both.

And the thing is that Donald Trump’s administration is mired in a trap, fuelled by its own aggressive attitude against Cuba, that a number of counterrevolutionary personalities and small groups –such as Marco Rubio, Díaz-Balart and other financed, third-rate politicians– have set, feeling themselves part of a policy which supports them and grants them sotto voce the right to carry out actions against Cuba with the known backing of Trump and his administration.

For that reason, our Foreign Minister deploys that logic, in which it is known that the very environment created by the Trump administration generates and supports actions against Cuba, such as the attack on the embassy.

Therefore, it’s possible to maintain that, while Trump occupies the Presidency, actions of this kind are to be expected, both within and outside the US. And one must also keep in mind the incentive they represent for people who, seeing themselves without employment, might want to use counterrevolutionary activity again as what it’s always been: a way to get rich by hurting Cuba.

Trump is constantly accusing the island. He’s now put it back in the list of countries that do not cooperate in the fight against terrorism. Pompeo, for his part, can hardly do more to try to discredit Cuba’s solidarity and internationalist medical work.

Consequently, our embassies abroad and other international missions, such as our medical brigades, in particular, must exercise great caution, so as to not be the object of these terrorist acts, for which the Trump administration is trying to create the most favorable context it can.

Translated from the original