The Empire faces defiance as it tries to keep Cuba cornered

Defiance in Latin America and a dynamics of decline within the Empire are now defining the US position in the Western Hemisphere. The reality was beyond imagination only a few years back. And, the reality is beyond imagination of many political leaders in other regions. The realness turned perfect as an effective boycott with the demand to invite Cuba made the several-hour long Summit of the Americas inconclusive, and it concluded without any joint declaration. ‘There is no declaration because there is no consensus’, said Juan Manuel Santos, the Colombian president and the staunchest US ally in the region.

Unprecedented boycott in the presence of a president of the US, an act impossible to many Third World leaders, followed the uncompromising Cuba-demand. These stand as evidence of the Empire’s isolation in a region the Empire considers its backyard. The isolation eyes the Empire relentlessly engaged with acts to isolate Cuba, an island-state, incomparable to the Empire in terms of size and types of power.

Latin America’s opposition to US measures against Cuba and the continent’s support to Argentine claims to the Malvinas Islands dominated the sixth summit of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in the historic Colombian city of Cartagena de Indias on 14-15 April.

Santos in his opening speech criticized the US and OAS’ embargo against Cuba. ‘The isolation, the embargo…have shown their ineffectiveness. In today’s world there is no justification for this’, said Santos. He said the next summit without Cuba ‘would be unthinkable’. Santos visited Havana to discuss Cuba’s possible participation with Raul Castro. The conservative Colombian president turned vocal in support of Cuba.

Others also opposed the US position on Cuba. Rafael Correa, the Ecuadorian president, was the first leader to boycott the summit, saying that he would not attend future summits until Cuba was invited. ‘All the countries here in Latin America and the Caribbean want Cuba to be present. But the United States won’t accept. It’s like a dictatorship’, Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, told reporters. ‘There will be no more summits unless Cuba is admitted’. He referred to many states’ unwillingness to attend future hemispheric summits without Cuba’s participation. Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, suspended his planned trip to the summit, saying that the meeting should be canceled as it would not discuss fundamental issues including Cuba and the Malvinas Islands. The summit is meaningless, said Chavez while addressing a demonstration in Caracas. Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan president, stayed at home. ‘It’s not a favor anyone would be doing to Cuba. It’s a right they’ve had taken away from them. It’s time for the US government to listen to all the Latin American nations’, Ortega said in Managua. Cristina Fernandez, the Argentine president, left the summit before its official closure. Cristina reaffirmed her country’s sovereignty over the Malvinas. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and Santos said there should be no more America’s summits without Cuba.

The foreign ministers of Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela had said their presidents won’t sign any declaration unless the US and Canada withdraw their veto of future Cuban participation. The Latin American countries also opposed the US’ trade embargo on Cuba. Other initiatives included 32 OAS member states’ vote to allow Cuba to be represented on an ‘extraordinary’ basis at the summit. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America Peoples Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) nations said they would not take part in any future summit without Cuba’s involvement, in a statement released by the Venezuelan foreign ministry.

But the US and Canada firmly stood against the demand, and the theme of the summit – ‘Connecting the Americas: Partners for Prosperity’ – got disconnected.

In Havana, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, the Cuban foreign minister said during the inauguration of the Political Council of the ALBA-TCP: ‘We reiterate that Cuba will not return to the OAS, nor is it interested in having any kind of relationship with that organization that has served the United States as a platform of domination, occupation, and aggression, to attack and plunder Latin America and the Caribbean’. However, Parrilla declared, in response to a consultation from the Colombian government, that Cuba ‘if it is invited, it would attend the Summit of the Americas, with respect and remaining true to its traditional attachment to the truth and its foreign policy based on principles’.

He noted that the summit emerged in 1994 in Miami initiated by the US president Clinton ‘as a mechanism for the economic annexation of Latin America, expressed through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a project that was defeated in 2005’.

Under pressure by Washington, as the background tells, Cuba was expelled from the OAS in 1962 as the island-state initiated a socialist model of development. But, under pressure by Latin American aspiration, the expulsion-resolution was annulled in 2009. The Malvinas Islands is an old tale of war and occupation by the UK, a forgone empire.

Support to Cuba is increasing. Felipe Calderon, the Mexican president, criticized the US imposed economic blockade on Cuba describing it as ‘unjustified’. He was on an official visit to Cuba. During the visit, Mexico and Cuba signed legal instruments for cooperation in the trade, health, education, culture, and sports sectors and a letter of intention for possible participation of Mexico in the exploitation of hydrocarbons in Cuba.

‘Nice’ intention was expressed by the US. Barak Obama wished to start a new chapter based on ‘dignity, equality, and respect’. He called for equal partnership. He was unhappy with issues of Cold War-era that still haunt the region. ‘Sometimes I feel…we’re caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy and Yankees and the Cold War’, said Obama.

But intention and wishes don’t build perspective. Rather, perspective determines realizable limit of wishes. Today’s Latin America is different from the Latin America in the grip of Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary.

In 1817, Jefferson said the Latino-Americans were incapable of governing themselves. In 1823, he expressed intention to expand the US to the South. In 1821, John Quincy Adams wrote: ‘It is unavoidable that the rest of the continent will be ours…’ In 1846, Mexico got the experience of its northern neighbor’s intention. Half of Mexico was lost. Before the revolution, Cuba was a de facto US colony, and the Platt law gave US the right to intervene. Centuries bear witness to, as Eduardo Galeano said in his Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, intervention, control, plunder, ravaged soil in Northeast Brazil, “The Devastation of the Caribbean”, “Sugar Castles on Cuba’s Scorched Earth”, “…the Structure of Impotence”, “Sugar Was the Knife, Imperialism the Assassin”.

The region has experienced overthrow of elected governments by military juntas faithful to their external master, blood-thirsty dictators (in)famous for brutality, tyrants’ business of bringing in death in the life of citizens. Fresh is the memory of the generals, Pinochet, Banzer, Videla and many, tormenting people in the region. Their blood soaked hands and their foreign masters are very much known to the region’s people. The people there know the hatred a statesman of an overwhelmingly neighboring country nourished as the statesman said, a record tells, of Salvador Allende, a leader elected by his people: ‘Smash the son of a bitch – that bastard’.

Operation Independence, Operation Phoenix, Operation Colombo, Operation Condor, Operation Gladio, Death Squads, Caravan of Death, Terror Archives, Death Flights, Cocaine Coup, Contra, and similar more joined together to wage a war, Dirty War, against the people in the region. Hiding behind terror the dirty warriors killed, tortured, incarcerated thousands of political activists, trade unionists, and their families. Thousands disappeared during that reign of terror. Only the Southern Cone Operation Condor, as one record says, made the following figures: 50,000 killed, 30,000 missing and 400,000 arrested. Another record cites the following numbers of murdered citizens: 15,000 in Chile, 200,000 in Guatemala. In 1981-1983, more than 100,000 Mayan peasants were executed. They were resisting the big neighbour sponsored changes. The Argentine Dirty War created about 30,000 victims. Many of the perpetrators graduated from the School of Americas.

‘In Argentina, prisoners were taken to…the School of Mechanics of the Army, or to the Isla del Silencio, belonging to the church. Once there, the torture began, with cutting people’s limbs off with the aid of a doctor (to be sure that the victim would not die during interrogation), pulling finger nails, using electrical prods on the sexual organs, and finally disposing them into the Atlantic Ocean or Rio de la Plata…while they were still alive. Some bodies were incinerated. A by-product of the war in Argentina was the abduction of babies’. The people there have not forgotten all of these.

El Salvador has its own ‘stories’. Troops there butchered about 1,000 civilians in 1981 in El Mozote, and the town was ravaged. But the massacre was denied by the El Salvadoran and the US governments. In 1991, a UN team’s excavation found hundreds of skeletons, including those of children along with their parents. Hundreds of bullets manufactured in Lake City, US were also found. Mark Danner’s The Massacre at El Mozote provides the facts. Children were drowned in front of their mothers; infants were bashed against rocks; peasants were burned alive; families were made to drink the blood of their pets; pregnant women had their stomachs cut open and their fetuses pulled out; young boys were kidnapped and made to fight with the government. Raping was there also. The people know these facts.

Child abduction was there. A Latin American general has recently confessed the fact. The world is aware of the poster of disappeared persons compiled by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The mothers claim their children. The murder of Dagmar Ingrid Hagelin, 17-year-old Swedish girl, disappearance of two French nuns, assassination of Carmelo Soria, Spanish diplomat, Carlos Prats, Chilean General, two former Uruguayan MPs, Juan José Torres, former president of Bolivia and Orlando Letelier, former Chilean minister, poisoning of Eduardo Frei Montalva, former president of Chile (1964-’70) were not isolated incidents. These were part of a war against the people of the region. The Terror Files with 60,000 documents weighing 4 tons also provide facts. The Margarita Belén massacre exposes more facts. The dictators operated at least 300 clandestine prisons. These facts are also known.

An internationally known intelligence agency provided torture equipment to the tyrants in the region and offered advice on the degree of shock that the human body can tolerate. ‘Facilitate coordination of internal security forces’, ‘foster inter-service and regional cooperation’, ‘assist organization of integrated command and control’, ‘establish common operating procedures’, ‘conduct combined training exercises’ were the words used by the dictators’ external backers. There was the Conference of American Armies. The big neighbour poured millions of dollars into destabilisation schemes in the region. Iran-Contragate exposed its actors and their motive. Organisational and technical assistance were extended by the neighbour. It was a partner, a sponsor. Mainstream media including BBC, The Guardian carried many reports on Kissinger’s and others’ involvement with these incidents. Scores of books and essays provide much information on the dark episode. The facts have exposed the face of ‘friendship’ and the Caribbean Basin Initiative to the people in the region.

The region has the experience of ‘Shock Therapies’ as Naomi Klein depicts in her Shock Doctrine. The region came across the cruel ‘joke’ of the (in)famous Chicago Boys. The region has seen a corrupt festival of selling out public enterprises. As one of the best laboratories of new-liberalism the region was witness to the selling out of thousands of public properties including national cemeteries. The buyers, the cronies, taking part in these festivities of plunder are known to the people in the region. To ensure profit, collection of rainwater by common citizens was outlawed in a country in the region. Debt and inflation rose to stratospheric heights in the region. And, the region knows the international connections, sponsors and patrons of these gruesome celebrations of loot by a few and deprivations of the majority.

But, now, a significant portion of the region with a population of about one billion is waging a political fight and a meaningful fight against poverty and inequality. An economic boom in a section of the region is increasing employment. With sustained growth, improved income, reduced poverty the region is having possibilities of a better future. In a section of the region people are getting mobilised for practicing democracy of their own, and are not copying Trans-Atlantic alliance designed democracy. People’s increasing awareness and mobilisation, evaporating adventurism and anarchism, maturing of leadership in the region are building up a new type of leadership and political struggle. The Common Market of the South and the ALBA-TCP are now emerging as examples of international fraternity and cooperation. Assertiveness in safeguarding national interests, and upholding dignity and honor are emerging as a new way. China’s increasing investment in and trade with the region compete with US commercial and political influence there as a waning US influence in the region is stark.

These form a background for today’s courage and defiance, sense of honor and steadfastness. Galeano’s words ‘it’s worthwhile to die for things without which it’s not worthwhile to live’ are now the feeling of many in the region.

It’s not a sense owned by only a few persons or a handful of leaders. Broader societies possess these. Equations in political power are changing as political struggle widens and sharpens. This reality with possibilities of setback and possibilities of further victories stands opposed to the US stance on Cuba and the Malvinas, and the US stance on the issues is not in harmony with Obama’s wishes – dignity, equality, respect and equal partnership.

So, boycott is there in the OAS; so, defiance and sense of honour determine the path of political struggle there in Latin America; so, cowing down is not as easy there in the Hemisphere as it is in some other regions.

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* Farooque Chowdhury is the former editor of Paribesh patra, an environmental periodical (in Bangla). He writes on political, socio-economic and environmental issues and is the author of The Age of Crisis.
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