When President Calvin Coolidge visited Cuba in 1928, he did so on a U.S. battleship, which was, in retrospect, a very accurate message to send. I doubt anyone suspected that it would be eighty-eight years before Cubans got a chance to see firsthand another U.S. president, but that’s how it turned out. President Barack Obama will arrive there on March 21st.
In the interim, the wise men of Washington, Langley, and Moscow almost extinguished all sentient life on our planet over the politics of the Caribbean island. Ordinary citizens had no say in the matter, but they were subjected to relentless propaganda on all sides.
I am sure that the president would not be visiting Havana without having conducted the most careful preparations. He will no doubt be receiving a considerable gift bag of goodies from Raul Castro. I suspect we will see the release of many political prisoners and several other signs of good will and perhaps even commitments for political and economic reform.
The usual suspects will cry foul. Obama will be called a sucker and a fool and a secret communist sympathizer who simply doesn’t get that the Castro Brothers are worse than Saddam Hussein and Mao Zedong combined.
But these same critics will never reflect on the mistakes this country made in Cuba prior to the revolution, or in reaction to the revolution, or after we basically thrust Castro into the arms of the Soviets. They won’t take responsibility for almost blowing up the world. They won’t be honest about how much cost was associated with our fifty-seven year policy, and how little it accomplished. They’ll never ask how we would react domestically if our neighbor’s intelligence agencies had an official policy of assassinating our president and promoting internal dissent, sabotage, murder, and revolution.
This is what happens when the overriding consideration isn’t why our corrupt ally has been overthrown in a popular revolution, but how we can reclaim corporate properties that have been lost as a result. It wasn’t wise to attack Cuba and make them look to the Soviets for protection. It made their internal security situation intolerable that they had to fend off decades of acts of terrorism, sabotage, and assassination attempts.
None of this was necessary. It did not have to happen.
What we did was wrong and ineffectual and in many ways just downright disgraceful. And it almost got all of humanity killed.
I could not be happier to see this country finally comes to its senses under the leadership of this president.
The greatest beneficiaries will be the Cuban people, but we will benefit in many ways as well. For one thing, we can be good neighbors for a change.
I hope a significant number of Americans take this opportunity to reappraise what they’ve been taught about our history with Cuba, because I really want us to learn our lessons.
Big powerful country right next to a weak little country. No immediate neighbors to counterbalance. A tale old as Sargon.
What the Empire will bring?
The same things it always brings.
My post here followa…from Dec., 2010 after a couple of weeks playing NYC-style Afro-Cuban music in Cuba.
Cuba and CommuCaribbeanism-A Sad, Strange, Brave Old New World
Read it and weep.
An excerpt:
i wrote:
“Within less than 5 years the Disneyfication of Havana will begin.”
So I was off by a year or two. Sue me.
Watch.
From The Daily Mail. Two days ago.
Nouveau-riche bling blossoms in emerging Cuba.
Like I said…read it and weep.
Later…
AG
Not really crying tears for the charms of isolated Cuba.
Yeah, some days I miss the old Times Square, too.
I don’t even want to be in the new Times Square.
Doesn’t mean things aren’t considerably better now, at least for most people.
Change brings change.
The future will be better than the past.
Not perfect. Not without loss.
But better.
“But better,” you write.
It all depends on the definition that you bring to that word.
Large parts of New York City have been successively Bloomberged and then Trumped.
Are they “better?”
Not for a huge number of people they are not. Myself included.
I predict the same outcome in Cuba and anywhere else upon which the giant capitalist bubble lands.
At least until…like all bubbles…it bursts.
And then?
And then we start over again.
Watch.
AG
New York was a glorious shithole when I first met it in the 1970’s. I will always be nostalgic for that shithole and bitch about the glitz and sanitation of the new New York.
But it’s much better now than it was.
And that’s true for the vast majority of New Yorkers.
Yes. But…who are these “New Yorkers” now, Booman? Really. The ones that I encounter living in the gentrified areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn? I wish they’d stayed in in Peoria or wherever else their exceptionalist, entitlement-spoiled little asses grew up.
I miss the grit.
The realityu grit.
All covered up and Febrezed out of sight and smell. It’s still here…they shit too. They just don’t want to admit it.
AG
Have some vintage grit, Bowery style.
The conversation flows, real natural like:
“commitments for…economic reform.”
And why the hell should they look at us for that?
We won’t know the answer to that lesson until either the US gets a national health care system or Cuba announces the building of a Sands and a Trump casino for “economic development”. After all, Adelson is buddy-buds with every powerful corrupt cadre in China. And they’re communist like the cadres in Cuba, no?
A bit of blurring of motivations. The politics of Cuba were not the issue. Old timers here know that I am in no way pro-Soviet, but the facts are these: JFK made the very provocative move of stationing IRBM’s (Jupiter? Redstone? Thor? I forget the specific model) in Turkey. In response, Russia put IRBM’s into Cuba (tit for tat). This created a crisis in which JFK is said to have faced down Khrushchev. All we really know is that Russia removed the missiles and so did the USA. Who backed down? Who cares? Was Russia being aggressive? No. I have to admit that it was the USA being aggressive.
I was there and I remember the waves of military transports leaving O’Hare airport flying Southeast for hours. I later was told that the airborne forces were being marshaled in Florida and that B-47’s were dispersed into O’Hare. So who was being reckless and provocative? As an old anti-Communist, I can’t say it was Khrushchev.
I even remember Henry Luce’s Life magazine hyping Castro’s revolution before he took power, nationalized some US companies, and shut down the casinos.
After the declassifications at the end of the Cold War, we found out that US troops were more reckless than we knew and that on at least one occasion a Russian submarine commander’s decision averted a potential escalation to catastrophe.
And that US military and especially CIA were not happy to have settled it without regime change in Cuba a la 1898.
At the time we were just grateful that “Krushchev blinked”.
“Krushchev blinked”.
One of the first really successful results of the CIA Operation Mockingbird project first started in the mid-’50s to essentially transform the media into lockstep, PermaGov puppets. Once it was proven to work they felt free to run the same game on the JFK assassination.
And the rest in
non-history.AG
The US sanctions on Cuba essentially means that once sanctions are lifted in their entirety, it’ll be Canada and European cash that go into Cuba, as they already have connections with Cuba.
So, not only did the embargo fail catastrophically, but it also killed off the Monroe Doctrine.
Good job, hysterical anti-communist cowards.
Don’t forget Chinese money. When I was there…staying in the most expensive hotel in Havana (Hotel Nacional [Not my choice]) , one that actually had 1990’s-level internet connections if you got to the little room on the 12th floor early enough…there were always several Chinese hustlers hogging the bandwidth.
6AM? 11PM?
No matter.
They meant business!!!
Bet on it.
AG
Oh, absolutely.
Had the US not imposed economic sanctions on Cuba, it’d have been South-South Miami by 1967.
That said, I wish I had the time and funds to see Cuba before it becomes a casino.
It’s still inexpensive. Speak Spanish? If not, know anyone who does who would go with you? Stay out of the tourist traps. Rent a car and drive!!! It’s still largely undeveloped. The real deal still lives.
AG
I studied Spanish for 4 years in highschool and 1 in college, and have worked in the back of the house of multiple restaurants, so I am conversationally proficient.
That said, I have zero free time at the moment to go, although, is it easier to go now? When I was younger I remember it taking a flight to another Caribbean island, and then a boat to Cuba, etc.
Spent most of last November in Havana. Loved it. Had help for about a third of the days there from a guide who had been the Russian translator for a tip-top Cuban military leader until the USSR collapsed; we learned about his and the country’s ups and downs, and were introduced personally to a couple of artists, saw some great galleries and shows, and enjoyed a bunch of great people and food. Lucked into an 18th-story apartment in an interesting area of the city as well, right off the corner of Linea and Avenida de los Presidentes.