Latin America
Related: About this forumRapprochement or Intended Regime Change? America’s Kiss of Death
August 19, 2015
Rapprochement or Intended Regime Change? Americas 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 couldnt 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 1959not that by then a confirmation was neededAmericas 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 thereafteryes, 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 timee.g., dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, along with Central American death squads, CIA and other covert activities rife throughoutyet 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 todays 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 cautionand a thorough awareness of Americas past conduct and future direction.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/19/rapprochement-or-intended-regime-change-americas-kiss-of-death/
Good reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016130404
emsimon33
(3,128 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)And making friends is just like admitting you lost the first round of fighting. We don't even like our own people, we sure are not going to give a shit about ordinary people anywhere else.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and I'm willing to bet the farm that the intentions for Cuba are NOT good...and that Cuba will easily defeat them.
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)It is inevitable at this point. And hopefully they'll drop the one-party system.