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The Guardian Unlimited
Comment

Why the US fears Cuba

Hostility to the Castro regime doesn't stem from its failings, but
from its achievements

Seumas Milne
Thursday July 31, 2003
The Guardian

Fifty years after Fidel Castro and his followers launched the Cuban
revolution with an abortive attack on the dictator Batista's Moncada
barracks, Cuba's critics are already writing its obituaries. Echoing
President Bush's dismissal of Cuban-style socialism as a "relic", the
Miami Herald pronounced the revolution "dead in the water" at the
weekend. The Telegraph called the island "the lost cause that is
Cuba", while the Independent on Sunday thought the Cuban dream "as
old and fatigued as Fidel himself" and a BBC reporter claimed that,
by embracing tourism, "the revolution has simply replaced one elite
with another".
Bush is, of course, only the latest of 10 successive US presidents
who have openly sought to overthrow the Cuban government and
Batista's heirs in Florida have long plotted a triumphant return to
reclaim their farms, factories and bordellos - closed or expropriated
by Castro, Che Guevara and their supporters after they came to power
in 1959. But international hostility towards the Cuban regime has
increased sharply since April, when it launched its harshest
crackdown on the US-backed opposition for decades, handing out long
jail sentences to 75 activists for accepting money from a foreign
power and executing three ferry hijackers.

The repression, which followed 18 months of heightened tension
between the US and Cuba, shocked many supporters of Cuba around the
world and left the Castro regime more isolated than it has been since
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Egged on by Britain and the
rightwing governments of Italy and Spain, the EU has now used the
jailings to reverse its policy of constructive engagement and fall in
behind the US neo-conservative line, imposing diplomatic sanctions,
increasing support for the opposition and blocking a new trade
agreement.

But it's not hard to discover the origins of this dangerous standoff,
which follows a period in which Amnesty International had noted
Cuba's "more open and permissive approach" towards dissent. In the
aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration - whose election
depended on the votes of hardline Cuban exiles in Florida - singled
out Cuba for membership of a second-tier axis of evil. The Caribbean
island, US under-secretary of state John Bolton insisted menacingly,
was a safe haven for terrorists, was researching biological weapons
and had dual-use technology it could pass to other "rogue states". He
was backed by Bush, who declared that the 40-year-old US trade
embargo against Cuba would not be lifted until there were both multi-
party elections and free market reforms, while Cuba was branded a
threat to US security, overturning the Clinton administration's
assessment.

Into this growing confrontation stepped James Cason as the new chief
US diplomat in Havana, with a brief to boost support for Cuba's
opposition groups. The US's huge quasi-embassy mainly provided
equipment and facilities, but millions of dollars of US government
aid also appears to have been channelled to the dissidents through
Miami-based exile groups. The final trigger for Castro's clampdown
was a string of US-indulged plane and ferry hijackings in April,
against a background of US warnings about the threat to its security
and Cuban fears of military intervention in the event of a mass
exodus from Cuba - a scenario long favoured by Miami exiles.

Some have concluded that a paranoid Castro walked into a trap laid by
Bush. After 44 years of economic siege, mercenary invasion,
assassination attempts, terrorist attacks and biological warfare from
their northern neighbour, it might be thought the Cuban leadership
had some reason to feel paranoid. But perhaps significantly, the US
has in the past few weeks adopted a more cooperative stance,
returning 15 hijackers to Cuba and warning Cubans that they should
only come to the US through "existing legal channels", which allow
around 20,000 visas a year.

And however grim the Cuban crackdown, it beggars belief that the
denunciations have been led by the US and its closest European allies
in the "war on terror". Not only has the US sentenced five Cubans to
between 15 years and life for trying to track anti-Cuban, Miami-based
terrorist groups and carried out over 70 executions of its own in the
past year, but (along with Britain) supports other states, in the
Middle East and Central Asia for example, which have thousands of
political prisoners and carry out routine torture and executions.
And, of course, the worst human rights abuses on the island of Cuba
are not carried under Castro's aegis at all, but in the Guantanamo
base occupied against Cuba's will, where the US has interned 600
prisoners without charge for 18 months, who it now plans to try in
secret and possibly execute - without even the legal rights afforded
to Cuba's jailed oppositionists.

Which only goes to reinforce what has long been obvious: that US
hostility to Cuba does not stem from the regime's human rights
failings, but its social and political successes and the challenge
its unyielding independence offers to other US and western satellite
states. Saddled with a siege economy and a wartime political culture
for more than 40 years, Cuba has achieved first world health and
education standards in a third world country, its infant mortality
and literacy rates now rivalling or outstripping those of the US, its
class sizes a third smaller than in Britain - while next door, in the
US-backed "democracy" of Haiti, half the population is unable to read
and infant mortality is over 10 times higher. Those, too, are human
rights, recognised by the UN declaration and European convention.
Despite the catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet support more than a
decade ago and the social damage wrought by dollarisation and mass
tourism, Cuba has developed biotechnology and pharmaceutical
industries acknowledged by the US to be the most advanced in Latin
America. Meanwhile, it has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93
third world countries (currently there are 1,000 working in
Venezuela's slums) and given a free university education to 1,000
third world students a year. How much of that would survive a
takeover by the Miami-backed opposition?

The historical importance of Cuba's struggle for social justice and
sovereignty and its creative social mobilisation will continue to
echo beyond its time and place: from the self-sacrificing
internationalism of Che to the crucial role played by Cuban troops in
bringing an end to apartheid through the defeat of South Africa at
Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988. But those relying on the death of
Castro (the "biological solution") to restore Cuba swiftly to its
traditional proprietors may be disappointed, while the Iraq imbroglio
may have checked the US neo-conservatives' enthusiasm for military
intervention against a far more popular regime in Cuba. That suggests
Cuba will have to expect yet more destabilisation, further
complicating the defence of the social and political gains of the
revolution in the years to come. The greatest contribution those
genuinely concerned about human rights and democracy in Cuba can make
is to help get the US and its European friends off the Cubans' backs.

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