Anybody need any more evidence that the USA is an empire???
Subsection to whole question and answer below:
"Understanding Power" by Noam Chomsky
Subsection to whole question and answer below:
The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a "demonstration effect" that follows from that-that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That's what they call a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region--and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart.
"Understanding Power" by Noam Chomsky
WOMAN: Mr. Chomsky, I'm wondering, how do you explain our embargo on Cuba-why is it still going on, and can you talk a bit about the policies that have been behind it over the years?
Answer: Well, Cuba is a country the United States has considered that it owns ever since the 1820s. In fact, one of the earliest parts of U.S. foreign relations history was the decision by Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and others to try to annex Cuba. At the time the British navy was in the way, and they were a real deterrent, so the plan, in Adams's words, was to wait until Cuba falls into our hands like a ripe fruit, by the laws of political gravitation.28 Well, finally it did, and the U.S. ran it-with the usual effects-all the way up until 1959.
In January 1959, Cuba had a popular nationalist revolution. We now know from declassified U.S. government documents that the formal decision to overthrow Castro was made by the American government in March
1960-that's very important, because at that point there were no Russians around, and Castro was in fact considered anti-Communist by the U.S. [Castro did not align with the Soviet Union until May 1961, after the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January and had sponsored an invasion attempt in April.] 29 So the reason for deciding to overthrow the Castro government can't have had anything to do with Cuba being a Russian outpost in the Cold War-Cuba was just taking an independent path, which has always been unacceptable to powerful interests in the United States.
Strafing and sabotage operations began as early as October 1959. Then, soon after his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy launched a terrorist campaign against them which is without even remote comparison in the history of international terrorism [Operation MONGOOSE].3o And in February 1962, we instituted the embargo-which has had absolutely devastating effects on the Cuban population.
Remember, Cuba's a tiny country right in the U.S. sphere of influence--it's not going to be able to survive on its own for very long against a monster. But over the years, it was able to survive-barely-thanks to Soviet support: the Soviet Union was the one place Cuba could turn to to try to resist the United States, and the Soviets did provide them with sort of a margin for survival. And we should be realistic about what happened there: many important and impressive things have been achieved, but it's also been pretty tyrannical, so there's been an upside and a downside. However, the country certainly was succeeding in terms that are meaningful to other populations in the region-I mean, just compare Cuba with Haiti or the Dominican Republic right next door, or with any other place in Latin America which the United States has controlled: the difference is obvious, and that's exactly what the United States has always been concerned about.
Look, the real crime of Cuba was never the repression, which, whatever you think about it, doesn't even come close to the kind of repression we have traditionally supported, and in fact implemented, in nearby countries: not even close. The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a "demonstration effect" that follows from that-that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That's what they call a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region--and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart. I mean, for thirty years, Cuba has been doing things which are simply intolerable-such as sending tens of thousands of doctors to support suffering people around the Third World, or developing biotechnology in a poor country with no options, or having health services roughly at the level of the advanced countries and way out of line with the rest of Latin America.31 These things are not tolerable to American power-they'd be intolerable anywhere in the Third World, and they're multiply intolerable in a country which is expected to be a U.S. colony. That's Cuba's real crime.32
In fact, when the Soviet Empire was disintegrating and the supposed Soviet threat in Cuba had evaporated beyond the point that anyone could possibly take it seriously, an interesting event took place, though nobody in the u.S. media seemed to notice it. For the last thirty years the story had always been, "We have to defend ourselves against Cuba because it's an outpost of the Russians." Okay, all of a sudden the Russians weren't there anymore-so what happens? All of a sudden it turned out that we really had Cuba under an embargo because of our love for democracy and human rights, not because they're an outpost of Communism about to destroy us-now it turns out that's why we have to keep torturing them-and nobody in the American press even questions this development. The propaganda system didn't skip a beat: check back and try to find anybody who even noticed this little curiosity.
Then in 1992, a liberal Democrat, Robert Torricelli, pushed a bill through Congress called the Cuban Democracy Act, which made the embargo still tighter-it forbids foreign-based US. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba, it allows seizure of cargo from foreign ships that trade with Cuba if they enter u.S. waters, and so on. In fact, this proposal by the liberal Democrat Torricelli was so obviously in conflict with international law that George Bush himself even vetoed it-until he was out-flanked from the right during the Presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, and finally agreed to accept it. Well, the so-called "Cuban Democracy Act" was immediately denounced by I think every major US. ally. At the UN., the entire world condemned it, with the exception of two countries-the United States and Israel; the New York Times apparently never discovered that fact. The preceding year, there had been a U.N. vote on the embargo in which the United States managed to get three votes for its side-itself, Israel, and Romania. But Romania apparently dropped off this year.
But the U.S. makes its own rules-we don't care what happens at the UN., or what international law requires. As our UN. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, put it in a debate: "if possible we will act multilaterally, if necessary we will act unilaterally"-violently, she meant.33 And that's the way it goes when you're the chief Mafia Don: if you can get support from others, fine, otherwise you just do it yourself-because you don't follow any rules. Well, that's us, and the Cuba case illustrates it about as well as you could.
The enhanced embargo has been quite effective: about 90 percent of the aid and trade it's cut off has been food and medicine-and that's had the predictable consequences. In fact, there have been several articles in leading medical journals recently which describe some of the effects: the health system, which was extremely good, is collapsing; there's a tremendous shortage of medicines; malnutrition is increasing; rare diseases that haven't been seen since Japanese prison camps in the Second World War are reappearing; infant mortality is going up; general health conditions are going down.34 In other words, it's working fine-we're "enhancing democracy." Maybe we'll ultimately make them as well off as Haiti or Nicaragua, or one of these other countries we've been taking care of all these years.
I mean, putting sanctions on a country in general is a very questionable operation-particularly when those sanctions are not being supported by the population that's supposedly being helped. But this embargo is a particularly brutal one, a really major crime in my opinion. And there's a lot that can be done to stop it, if enough people in the United States actually get together and start doing something about it. In fact, by now even sectors of the U.S. business community are beginning to have second thoughts about the embargo-they're getting a little concerned that they might be cut out of potentially lucrative business operations if the other rich countries of the world stop obeying our rules and just begin violating it.35 So there's a lot of room for change on this issue-it's certainly something that ought to be pressed very strongly right now.