Tens of thousands of people participate in the parade for International Workers' Day on Monday, May 1, 2017, in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, Cuba. Photo: Alejandro Ernesto/EFE.
By Atilio Borón – Feb 14, 2024
I have just arrived in Cuba, and I feel, once again, the same emotion that entered me the first time I visited it on the occasion of the International Seminar on the External Debt of Latin America and the Caribbean that Fidel convened in the first days of August 1985. Almost 40 years have passed since that premonitory event, and that island, harassed since the first days of its revolution by the annexationist rampage of the United States, continues to resist and survive the longest aggression that any empire has ever perpetrated against a rebellious people.
Does this sound like an exaggeration? Well, take the example of any of the great empires through history, even before the Christian era, e.g., the Persians, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine, the Mongol—with its enormous extension that covered a large part of Eurasia—the Spanish, or the British, and one cannot we find a situation even remotely analogous to the devastating 65-year-long blockade on Cuba, due to its duration, as well as to the diversity of its devices of oppression and punishment.
Despite all this, Cuba continues to be the Free Territory of America, paying an exorbitant price for the unforgivable audacity of not bowing to the pretensions of the White House. In this enclave of dignity, the North American empire cannot impose its laws above the national ones nor, to cite a very current case, send its thugs in suits and ties to steal an airplane from another country, as happened with the Venezuelan cargo ship that Washington ordered to be “seized”, in complicity with the neocolonial government of Argentina. Things like that are unthinkable in Cuba.
The mere fact that the Cuban Revolution has survived the phenomenal excesses of the empire is in itself an absolutely extraordinary success that has, therefore, entered the annals of universal history. Would the United States have survived such aggression by a power—let’s imagine it because it does not exist—hundreds of times larger in economic terms, 30 times larger in population, and infinitely superior in the size and diversity of its armed forces and its military budget? It would surely have exploded into dozens of fragments. Would Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom have resisted? Surely not, but the Cuba of Martí and Fidel did.
However, the empire’s media hitmen scream day and night, denouncing the “failure of the Cuban Revolution.” It is worth asking if a country has really failed if, while subject to such criminal aggression that, for example, blocks access to all types of medical supplies, it demonstrates infant mortality or life expectancy rates as good or better than those of the United States? Or if it develops vaccines and pharmacological products at the “state of the art” level (although their distribution was sabotaged by pressure from Washington on the international organizations that issue the corresponding authorizations for the sale of medicines)? Has Cuba really failed if we do not see, as in the imperial metropolis, entire families sleeping on the streets in the middle of winter or under a scorching sun in the summer, children barefoot and dressed in rags, people rummaging through garbage bins looking for something to eat, or thousands of men and women destroyed by drugs, victims of a society possessed by a cruel individualism which condemns them to wander like zombies through the main cities to feed, with their addictions, the profits of the banking and financial corporations that are the final beneficiaries of drug trafficking, a business of close to a billion dollars annually? Are there thousands of mentally deranged people in Cuba, traumatized by their participation in the wars that the empire wages overseas and who, once they return to their homes, hear voices that tell them that the world must be freed from so many evil and evil people and who, armed with two assault rifles, suddenly enter a shopping arcade, a church, or a school and murder anyone who passes? Is it that deeply sick society that is used as a parameter to judge the rest of the world?
We could continue with this list, including many other items that would show how, despite the brutality of the blockade, Cuban society has demonstrated that it is in possession of moral strength required to prevent the civilizational degradation that eats away the United States from its core and that is manifested in the aberrant realities mentioned above. But let’s go a step further and ask ourselves, if the Cuban Revolution has failed, why not lift the blockade for five or ten years and let the system crumble due to its own inconsistencies and inefficiencies, depriving its rulers of the convenient “pretext” of the blockade to hide what, in reality, are the incorrigible defects of the socialist model?
However, the empire and its administrators know too well that if such a thing were done, there would be an “acid test” that would demonstrate the enormous superiority of socialism over capitalism. This is something the White House and its European bootlickers know very well. This is why they persist in maintaining the blockade, a crime against humanity, although the international community, with the sole exception of the United States itself and its Israeli thug, plus a couple of mini-island states in the Pacific, votes year after year in the General Assembly of the United Nations demanding the blockade to be ended. But Washington is a “failed state” (due to its repeated violation of international legality) that dreams of restoring its already definitively faded global hegemony, which drives it to maintain its criminal blockade against all odds. It would be catastrophic for capitalism as a system if, freed from the suffocation of the blockade, in a few years, Cuba rose like a polar star that illuminated the search for social justice, freedom, national self-determination, and democracy in this world, demonstrating that this progress was only possible because capitalism was abandoned. Washington, as imperial sheriff, cannot allow that to happen and remains undaunted in maintaining the universally condemned blockade.
(Telesur)
SL
Atilio Borón
Atilio A. Borón is a Harvard Graduate professor of political theory at the University of Buenos Aires and was executive secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). He has published widely in several languages a variety of books and articles on political theory and philosophy, social theory, and comparative studies on the capitalist development in the periphery. He is an international analyst, writer and journalist and profoundly Latinoamerican.
