Cuba: Standing up against US
Hegemonism
Yohannan Chemarapally
THE
UN General Assembly
once again overwhelmingly voted to condemn the long running
American economic
blockade on Cuba.
In the vote taken in the second week of November, only Israel and Palau
joined the US
in voting against the resolution. Two countries, Micronesia
and the Marshall
Islands,
chose to abstain. The vote once again shows that the US
is truly isolated on “Cuba
issue.”
There
were expectations
that the Obama administration would take a more realistic
approach to relations
with Cuba
and at least modify some of the draconian sanctions imposed
on the country
since the early sixties. In his first term in office,
President Barack Obama
did remove many restrictions on travel and remittances by
Cuban American
citizens to their motherland. The Cuban government has
described the measures
taken by the Obama administration as “positive but
insufficient and extremely
limited.” In fact, however, as President Obama sought a
second term in office,
he kept pandering to the right wing Cuban émigré groups in
his efforts to carry
the key state of Florida
in the 2012 elections.
HUGE DAMAGES
ORDINARY CUBANS
The
economic blockade
started in earnest in 1962 when John F Kennedy was the
president of the US. The
Clinton
and Bush administrations further strengthened the blockade.
The Cuban
government maintains that the blockade can be qualified as
an “act of genocide”
under the 1948 Geneva Convention for the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide. Cuba
has estimated that the economic damage it has sustained in
the last 50 years as
a result of the blockade amounted to a whopping 1,066
trillion dollars. But the
blockade has dismally failed in its primary goal of
dislodging the Revolution
in Cuba
though it has succeeded in inflicting huge collateral damage
to millions of
ordinary Cubans in their daily lives.
Cuba, as
a result of the
blockade, has not been able to achieve its full potential
for development.
Among the sectors most affected are the health and
agricultural sector.
Medicines and laboratory equipment, for instance, have to be
imported from far
away locations at prohibitive prices. Some critical drugs
like the inhalant
agent, Sevoflurane which is used to extend general
anaesthesia to children are
only produced in the US
and
therefore prohibited for sale in Cuba.
Cuban children suffering from
lymphoblastic leukemeia cannot use the life saving medicine
Elspar, since the US
manufacturer, Merck and Co, is banned form selling the
product. The country has
even been denied access to medical literature on US Internet
sites created to
facilitate the free flow of information. In January last
year, Washington
blocked more
than four million dollars allocated by the UN Global Fund to
fight AIDS.
In
the last financial
year, Cuban authorities estimated that they had to spend an
additional 131.573
million dollars as a result of purchasing foodstuff from
distant markets. Cuba has no
access to cheap credit or insurance because of the American
sanctions. The US
does allow Cuba to
import limited amounts of
foodstuff and grain but they are subjected to complex
licensing mechanisms.
The
Bush administration
had given high priority to the ongoing efforts to undermine
the Revolution. The
economic blockade was tightened, more money was earmarked
for “promoting
democracy” and the anti-Cuban exiles in Florida,
were given a free hand to plan and execute their plots
against the Revolution.
Among the Cuban exiles living in the US
were certified terrorists like
Luis Posada Carriles — the man responsible for placing a
bomb on a Cuban
airliner in 1976 which killed all 78 people on board. The US, instead, chose to put Cuba
on the
list of countries sponsoring terrorism 30 years ago. Cuba
at the time was actively involved in supporting liberation
movements like the
ANC in South Africa
and the
MPLA in Angola
while the US
was backing apartheid South Africa
and its proxies in the region.
SCATHING CRITICISM
FROM WORLD LEADERS
The
inflexible positions adopted
by successive US presidents including the current one on
Cuba has come in for
scathing criticism from many world leaders. The president of
Bolivia,
Evo Morales, speaking at the UN General
Assembly in late September, said that the US
had unilaterally put Cuba
on the “terrorist” list as an excuse to maintain the
blockade. Morales said
that the vast majority of nations have rejected the US
position on Cuba.
“The real terrorist is the United States,”
he said. “It is not possible that
the blockade should continue existing in the 21st century.”
The
Bolivian president
also called on the Obama administration to release the
“Cuban Five,” who have
been incarcerated in American jails for the last 14 years.
The five Cubans,
Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando Gonzalez,
Ramon Labanino and Rene
Gonzalez, were jailed on spurious charges. The five Cuban
intelligence agents
had infiltrated a right wing Cuban exile groups in Florida
and had exposed their plans to bomb tourist spots in Cuba.
Hotels in Havana
were targeted in 1997. In one incident,
a foreign tourist was killed.
The
real crime of the
Cuban Five was alerting Havana
about the plans
of the terror outfits in Miami.
Cuban authorities, in turn, used to convey the credible
information in their
possession to their counterparts in Washington.
Many terrorist plans were thus foiled. But the US Federal
Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) never arrested the masterminds behind
the terror plots
against Cuba.
They continue to operate with impunity on American soil.
The
Cuban Five were only
concerned in collecting information regarding Cuba’s
national security matters.
Their case has received support not only from heads of
governments and national
parliaments but also from eminent personalities from around
the world,
including ten Nobel laureates. President Obama, a Nobel
Peace Laureate, has so
far refused to use his executive authority to release the
five Cubans.
However,
there is talk
about the possibility of a swap deal between Havana
and Washington.
An US
citizen, Alan Gross,
working as a subcontractor for the US State Department, was
arrested in Havana
in 2010 after
being caught distributing lap tops and cell phones to
anti-government
activists. He has been given a lengthy sentence but Cuban
officials have
indicated that they would not be averse to a deal that could
see the return of
the five Cuban heroes back to their homeland.
The
Obama administration
is trying to put further pressure on Cuba
as the government there tries
to implement wide ranging reforms to improve the quality of
life of a people
who have been under an unremitting blockade. The Cuban
foreign minister, Bruno
Rodriguez Parrilla, speaking at the recent UN General
Assembly meet, said that
the real purpose of the US
keeping Cuba
on the
“spurious” terrorist list was to “fabricate pretexts to
increase the
persecution of Cuba’s
financial transactions and justify the policy of blockade.”
He said that it was
the US
which was in fact
using terrorism as a tool in its policy of isolating Cuba.
YANKEES: THE
REAL TERRORISTS
Rodriguez
said that US “state
terrorism” was directly responsible for “the deaths of 3,478
persons and the
maiming of 2,099 of our compatriots.” Rodriguez strongly
condemned the US double
standards on terrorism, saying that it was “an outrage
against the Cuban people
and the international community and discredits the cause of
battle against
terrorism.” When the American ambassador was killed in Libya, Cuba
was quick to send in a condolence message and condemn the
terror attack on the
American consulate in Benghazi.
The Cuban government, the foreign minister reminded the
international
community, has time and again voiced its eagerness to
normalise relations with
the US
“through dialogue, on an equal footing and with absolute
respect for our
independence.”
The
Obama administration
has, however, refused to have a rethink on its Cuba
policy, despite being in
splendid isolation internationally on the issue. A recent
opinion poll showed
that 70 per cent in America
are also for normalisation of relations between the two
countries. Since 1992,
the UN General Assembly has been passing resolutions
condemning the US
blockade on Cuba. 186 countries voted
in favour of Cuban
resolution titled “The necessity of ending the economic,
commercial and
financial blockade imposed on Cuba
by the United
States of America.”
The US
is trying to
use issues relating to human rights in a desperate attempt
to garner support
for its policies. The Cuban government insists that “nobody
is repressed by
reason of thinking differently” in his country. Cuban
officials say that it is
one thing “to disagree and another to be funded by an enemy
state to promote
subversion.” The Obama administration continues to allocate
millions of dollars
to finance a very small group of “dissidents” in the ongoing
efforts to destabilise
the revolution.
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