Trump: Cuba in the crosshairs

The U.S. indictment of 94-year-old Raúl Castro in May is a predicate for “regime change” in Cuba. The U.S. is positioning military assets for a possible attack on the island.

This comes on top of the U.S.-led blockade of oil shipments to Cuba (itself an act of war) that has led to massive power shortages and suffering on the island. At the time of writing, the power cuts were imperiling the country’s water system, leaving as many as 3 million of the country’s 11 million people without safe drinking water.

As early as February, the United Nations Human Rights Office (UNHRO) warned about the blockade’s effects:

Intensive care units and emergency rooms are compromised, as are the production, delivery, and storage of vaccines, blood products, and other temperature-sensitive medications. In Cuba, more than 80 percent of water pumping equipment depends on electricity, and power cuts are undermining access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

The fuel shortage has disrupted the rationing system and the regulated basic food basket, and has affected social protection networks— school feeding, maternity homes, and nursing homes— with the most vulnerable groups being disproportionately impacted.

Conditions are much worse now than when the UNHRO issued that warning.

The charges against Raúl Castro, who in 2021 retired from public life, stem from the Cuban air force’s 1996 shootdown of two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an organization of right-wing Cuban exiles dedicated to overthrowing the Cuban regime.

Under the leadership of Jorge Basulto, a CIA asset who had been part of the agency’s failed invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the “Brothers” staged deliberate provocations to increase conflict between the U.S. and Cuba, heading off normalization between the two countries.

The 1996 shootdown had the effect of scotching the Clinton administration’s tentative steps toward normalization with Cuba years after the Cold War against the USSR ended. Instead, the shootdown produced a propaganda coup for the Cuban American right that pushed the Congress to pass, and Clinton to sign, the Helms-Burton Act.

Helms-Burton reinforced the decades’ old U.S. embargo against Cuba, and even extended its reach to include sovereign countries, like Canada and the U.S.’s European allies, trading with Cuba. A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision (an 8-1 decision including two of the three Democrat-appointed justices) supported its provision to allow U.S. companies and Cuban exiles to sue the Cuban government for expropriations of property that the Cuban revolutionary government conducted in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

If nothing else, the indictment of Castro and the Supreme Court decision shows that the U.S. holds a long grudge against Cuba. How did the U.S. get to the point where, under the pretext of arresting a man who will turn 95 in June, its government may unleash the world’s most powerful military against a weak state that is on its way to social collapse?

We can rewind history back to the late 1800s, when Cuba was, along with Puerto Rico, the last of Spain’s colonies in the Americas. The U.S. was beginning its ascent in global politics and looking to flex its imperial muscle in the Western hemisphere. Cuba, as one of the last outposts of a decaying empire, was a choice target.

In fact, Cuba was one of the U. S’s largest trading partners by the end of the 19^th century. And U.S. business had its eye on the island as a possible U.S. state. Said one U.S. financier: “It makes the water come to my mouth when I think of the State of Cuba as one in our family.” The U.S. government had even offered to purchase Cuba from Spain. Spain refused to sell.

In 1895, Cuban independentistas launched a military uprising against Spain. Three years later, the U.S. invaded the island under the pretext of avenging the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor. Initially, the Cuban nationalists thought the U.S. would support their demand for independence and allied with the U.S. against Spain. Instead, the U.S. dispatched Spain and then crushed the independence movement under a military occupation that lasted until 1902.

The U.S. withdrew its forces (while holding on to a military base at Guantánamo Bay) but continued its control of the island under the U.S. Congress’s 1901 “Platt amendment.” The amendment, named for the U.S. senator who sponsored it, guaranteed U.S. oversight of Cuban finances and the untrammeled right to intervene politically or militarily in Cuba for whatever reason the U.S. deemed.

The U.S. domination over Cuba that lasted officially to 1934 was an important milestone for a rising U.S. imperialism that was turning the Caribbean into what Eric Williams called “the American Mediterranean”. As Jenny Pearce wrote in Under the Eagle, her classic history of U.S. imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean:

Cuba emerged as a model for United States imperialism. American economic and political domination had been secured without the seizure of a colony. The United States could continue to boast its anti-colonial traditions and beliefs despite having transformed Cuba into a virtual dependency.

U.S. agribusiness turned Cuba into a giant industrial sugar plantation over the succeeding decades. At the time of the 1959 revolution, more than 70 percent of Cuba’s arable land belonged to large landowners, and between 25 and 40 percent was in foreign hands. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s foothold in Cuba and Puerto Rico helped it to project power throughout the Caribbean, including engineering the secession of Panamá from Colombia as the precondition for building the canal through that country.

The Great Depression brought collapse in the economy and agitation for change, leading to a military coup and U.S. pressure for the dictator Geraldo Machado to resign. In the developments that followed, one of the coup leaders, Fulgencio Batista, emerged as the main leader. The U.S.-backed Batista, who ruled as a dictator from 1940, dominated the Cuban government until the 1959 revolution overthrew him.

Initial U.S. wariness of the new government led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto (Ché) Guevara gave way to open hostility when the Castro government implemented a 1959 agrarian reform that broke up the old sugar plantations. Over the next two years, the Castro government moved to expropriate foreign-owned businesses on the island. The U.S. began its decades’-long trade and exchange embargo.

By that time, the U.S. had already given up on influencing the Cuban government and had decided to overthrow it instead. The CIA, working with a group of right-wing Cuban exiles, attempted, and failed, to overthrow the government in the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Bay of Pigs was the most spectacular of a number of CIA-led plots (including many harebrained schemes involving exploding cigars and Mafia hitmen) to overthrow the government or to assassinate its leaders.

U.S. belligerence against the Castro government led it to engage more fully with the U.S.’s main Cold War rival, the USSR. The USSR tended to defer to the U.S.’s claimed regional dominance in Latin America. But when it dispatched missiles and other military hardware to Cuba in 1962, the U.S. brought the world closest to nuclear war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the event, the Russians negotiated a climbdown with Washington behind the backs of the Cubans.

So, until 1968, when Castro supported the USSR’s suppression of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the Castro government’s relationship with Moscow was frosty. And only in 1961 did the Cuban government even declare its nationalist revolution to be “socialist”—by which it meant a one-party state modeled on the USSR. But to Washington, Cuba was an outpost of “communism” and a source of chaos and instability in the region, even though the Cold War masked a fundamental continuity in U.S.-Cuba relations.

“The United States acted toward Cuba the same way it had acted toward other Latin American countries long before the Cold War: leaving democratic political rhetoric aside, what really counted for Washington was the defense of U.S. economic, political and military imperial interests in its ‘backyard’,” wrote Cuban-born socialist Sam Farber in his book Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959.

Farber’s point should be more obvious in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc in 1989-1991. Moscow withdrew its subsidies to the Cuban economy, leading to the “special period” of economic hardship and contraction in Cuba in the early 1990s.

These austerity measures led to a cut in the Cuban armed forces by more than 80 percent. In the 1970s, the Cuban military—hundreds of thousands strong—conducted expeditions in Africa that proved decisive in defeating apartheid South Africa’s intervention in Angola’s anti-colonial civil war. Today, Cuba fields a force of fewer than 49,000 active personnel.

The post-Cold War period created opportunities for normalization with Cuba that significant sections of U.S. business support. But under the Trump administration (both Trump 1.0 and 2.0), these efforts have been derailed—in part, because the South Florida Cuban right remains a powerful constituency in the Republican Party.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio built his career through the right-wing Cuban American political machine in Florida. Anti-socialism retains significant appeal—not only among Cuban exiles but also among other significant Florida groups like Venezuelans and Nicaraguans who fled “socialism” to Miami and environs and have provided a new source of émigré support for Republican and conservative politics. With Trump effectively outsourcing policy making to his coterie of aides, Rubio’s obsession with “finishing the job” of rolling back the Cuban revolution may have become U.S. policy.

But under Trump 2.0, something bigger than paying off a political constituency is at work, as the “Trump corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine in last year’s National Security Strategy (NSS) indicated.

This document is a throwback to the days when the U.S. treated the Caribbean as a U.S. lake and the Western hemisphere as its “backyard.” Whether or not the U.S. will really prosecute a full-scale war against Cuba, its show of force in the Caribbean sends a message that the U.S. is asserting its power in the region in more unilateralist and militarist ways. It’s not clear if this amounts to a “pivot” to Latin America away from Asia or the Middle East, but it’s in line with Trumpian bluster about ejecting Chinese corporations from the Panamá Canal Zone or taking over Greenland.

The U.S.’s pending defeat in its war against Iran won’t dissuade Trump from attacking Cuba or from attempting a “snatch and grab” of Raúl Castro akin to his military-led kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in January. It’s very possible that Trump would consider Cuba “low hanging fruit” to distract from his fiasco in Iran.

But any sort of military adventure in Cuba will only make the current intolerable situation worse for the Cuban people. If a U.S. assault creates mass casualties, how will the injured be treated in hospitals that barely function now? Will a U.S. attack create a refugee crisis that will cause thousands to attempt to flee the island to Florida? And how would U.S. naval forces respond, given that preventing “destabilizing migration” is one of the NSS’s announced aims?

Another unknown is how the Cuban people will respond to U.S. aggression. The Cuban state claims that more than one million Cuban citizens are enrolled in paramilitary forces that could be mobilized to defend Cuban sovereignty. The situation may not get to that point, but a researcher at the U.S. Army War College considered the worst case (from the U.S. point of view) to be “volatile and dangerous.”

With that possibility in mind, the U.S. military, the State Department and the CIA have held a series of meetings with Cuban military and government officials. Given the U.S. record of duplicity in the Middle East, it’s hard to know if these are genuine efforts to avoid military conflict or if they are meant to bamboozle the Cubans before a U.S. attack.

For socialists, neither possibility should determine how we respond. We start with the proposition that we oppose U.S. intervention in whatever form—from sanctions to war.

We oppose any U.S. invasion. We call for an end to the current U.S. blockade of oil deliveries. And we call for an end to the U.S. embargo that dates from the early 1960s. Moreover, if Cubans want to emigrate to the U.S., we welcome them along with all other immigrants who are targets of Trump’s xenophobia.

We don’t take this position because we think that the Cuban government is socialist. Far from it. Despite its leaders’ sometimes radical rhetoric, it’s based on a state capitalist economy that a repressive state rules over.

Whatever pretenses the U.S. uses to justify intervention in Cuba, you can be sure that nowhere on that list is a genuine commitment to helping Cuba achieve self-determination. The U.S. has no right to determine—or even have a say in—the Cuban people’s future. Only Cubans can do that.