Cuba as an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde – Oct 28, 2021
The piggy bank rang again. Less than a month ago, in September 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded 6 million 669 thousand dollars in grants for projects aimed at “regime change” in Cuba, a euphemism to avoid saying “direct intervention by a foreign power”.
The current Democratic administration has especially favored the International Republican Institute (IRI) with a bipartisan generosity that Donald Trump never had. Other groups in Florida, Washington and Madrid that have called for an invasion of the island and painted an apocalyptic picture of Havana have also received lavish allocations, thus assuring more money next year.
The USpublic coffers seem inexhaustible for the anti-Castro industry. In the last year, at least 54 organizations have benefited from the Cuba programs of the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In the last 20 years, this agency has granted Creative Associates International, a CIA front, more than 1.8 billion dollars for espionage, propaganda and the recruitment of agents of “change” on the island. One of its best known projects, the so-called “Cuban Twitter” or ZunZuneo, turned out to be a superb failure that uncovered a web of corruption and flagrant violations of U.S. law. ZunZuneo cost the USAID director his job, but Creative Associates International’s operations are still going strong, now undercover.
US researcher Tracey Eaton, who for years has followed the path of these funds, commented in a recent interview that many of the financing programs for “regime change” in Cuba are so furtive that we will probably never know who all the recipients are or the total amount, and judging by the millions known, the subsidy must have reached a pharaoh like figure. Democracy-building strategies are considered “trade secrets” and are exempt from disclosure under the US Freedom of Information Act, according to letters Eaton has received from the State Department and USAID.
The US freaks out at the supposed hint of Russian, Chinese or Islamic intrusion into local politics and online platforms. Yet it does not hesitate for a minute to rudely intervene in Cuba, as exposed by the digital newspaper MintPress News, which documented how private Facebook groups instigated the July 11 riots in several Cuban cities. “The involvement of foreign citizens in Cuba’s internal affairs is at a level that is hardly conceivable in the United States,” the publication says, adding, “The people who provoked the July 11 protests in Cuba are still planning similar actions for October and November.”
The military superpower’s plans for political subversion are an embarrassment and a scandal, but nothing indicates that Washington will now achieve what it could not in 60 years. In fact, this obsession of the US government is two centuries old, as Louis A. Perez, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, has shown in a brilliant essay entitled Cuba as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
“The Cuba issue has rarely been a subject of reasoned disquisition. It defies easy explanation, and it certainly cannot be understood solely – or even primarily – within the logic of the policy calculus that fleshes out US foreign relations, mainly because there is no logic,” the historian writes.
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What is logical is the permanence of Cuban “intransigence” over time. Ernesto Che Guevara used to repeat in his speeches in the early years of the 1959 revolution that “Cuba will not be another Guatemala”. That is to say, its independence from the US empire would not be boycotted with media bombings first, induced mobilizations and military attacks later.
The habit of overthrowing pro-independence alternatives is so long and the arrogance of overwhelming military and media force so blind, that the US government has not been able to foresee its continuous defeats nor has it overcome the trauma of having a Levantine island “almost within sight of our shores”, as John Quincy Adams said, and to top it all, without the slightest interest in being “the missing state between the entrance to the Gulf and the exit of the vast Mississippi Valley”.
The great truth of all this, comments Louis A. Perez wisely, is that Cubans have learned from history, but Washington has not.
Featured image: File photo
