The
US does not celebrate or even welcome the independence of other nations; it
only countenances servitude. Indeed, the nation that wins its sovereignty—only
to prostitute its resources for the sake of American empire—is the nation that gets
the green light from Washington. Yet, if America does not receive a warm,
economic, post-independence welcome, its war hawks invariably circle. Sometimes
they circle anyway! Then bombs drop. Or, embargos facilitate economic terrorism.
Pick a country, any country. This blueprint gets redrawn everywhere, and this is
precisely the protocol, the behavioral norm, for maintaining global hegemony 90
miles off the coast of Florida.
Despite
the perpetual propagation of its oppressive, hegemonic antagonism around the
globe, even a looming specter as carcinogenic as American empire cannot
shore-up every possibility of a long-lived rogue power it might enterprise to relegate
to the margins of global economy. Cuba, for centuries, has been quite the fly
in America’s imperial ointment, and thus, a champion to oppressed peoples
everywhere. This has especially been true in the last half-century. Cuba shamed
Washington with its revolution some fifty years ago, warring against US-sponsored
terrorism and oppression. But the saga is not over; because Cuba threw off the
yoke of subjugation in 1959, US aggression continues to seek retribution for
its inability to indenture Cuba to this day.
Almost
two centuries ago, the architects of US statecraft envisaged a sphere of
influence whereby the entire American hemisphere submitted to total US
domination. They named it the “American System.” John Quincy Adams, for one,
specifically asserted Cuba’s preordained indenture to the US. He claimed there
were “laws of political as well as of physical gravitation” that affected Cuba
the same way that gravity pulls on an “apple severed from a tree.” Adams
further predicted Cuba would be “incapable of self-support,” thus justifying US
interest and its savage agenda there. The US then conquered half of Mexico in
1848, acquiring Cuba roughly fifty years later. It is perhaps no coincidence
that these annexations took place within but a generation of Adam’s presidency.
As further evidence of imperialist tendencies, the seizures of Mexican and
Cuban property rested largely on the unbending belief that the US had not only
the ability and the authority, but also the burden of determining economic and
political order in ‘its’ hemisphere.
In
one of his most famous chapters, entitled “A Revolution Begins,” Ernesto “Che”
Guevara, a most integral spoke in the Cuban revolutionary wheel, cited Adams in
his own apologies for the historic events that took place in Cuba in the mid-to-late
1950s. Che noted how the reasons for Cuba’s revolution extend much further back
in history, before Sumner Welles in 1933, before the 1901 Platt Amendment—all
the way back to Narciso López, direct envoy of the US annexationists. Writes
Che, “These are all links in a long chain of continental aggression that has
not been aimed solely at Cuba.” Many years before the probability of Che’s
leadership in Cuba’s 1959 Revolution would become a certainty, Simón Bolívar
echoed similar sentiments gathered through his experience as a liberator in his
own right. He noted how the United States appeared “to be determined by
Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” No doubt he
spoke of the US species of “liberty” sardonically. It would appear there was
nothing new under the imperial sun for Cuba in the 50s.
Che’s
acumen regarding the historic nature of Cuba’s oppression likewise proves
poignant. To think that Cuba’s history invariably begins with all Cuban denizens
baptized into colonization by the imperialistic Spanish crown, and then by the US
is nightmarish. To think: Thousands of Cuban people were preordained to suffer
the avarice of predatory and parasitic capitalism, a system with an enormous
propensity towards the unfettered abuse near-invaluable Cuban resources. Even after
throwing off Spanish fetters, the independent, fledgling Cuba faced pure
adversity from its boorish neighbor. US-Cuban relations were henceforth founded
under the aegis of sheer paternalism. Cuba’s state and military then became a
Yankee Frankenstein; any social structures had already been neutered by
Imperial Spain throughout the preceding centuries.
For
the sake of ensuring success in the revolution 1959 revolution, Che, Castro and
the other guerrillas would need to concern themselves with creating absolute
change. They knew this, and that is precisely why they were so widely accepted
and supported by so many rural peasants. This kind of change would be entirely
antithetical to the system originally espoused by the Spanish, and then prolonged
by the numerous forms US occupation and oppression of especially the poorest
Cubans. Indeed, to be truly effective, the revolutionary response would need to
address nothing short of every oppressive facet, every preexisting despotic
structure, and it would need to cleanse Cuba of imperialism. The revolution would have to do
this both with, and for, the benefit of the people whom two foreign governments
had systematically oppressed for centuries.
Cuba
fought for, and won, its independence. By loosing and losing many of its oppressive
fetters, in 1959, Cuba neither submitted to the caprice of US imperium after
the fact, nor did it sell its soul to capitalism. Yet, for its sins of
non-alignment, and for its stark opposition to oppressive entanglement with the
US, the Cuban people have endured more than fifty years of an ill-conceived
embargo, and more! Incredibly, mainstream media in the US continues to this day to treat the 1959 Cuban
Revolution as little more than a misguided, adolescent anomaly in the history
of non-aligned rebellion. The result for Cuba, however, has not been rosy
whatsoever; every time some Yankee mouthpiece for moneyed interest perverts
what the Cuban Revolution stood for, and what it achieved for all of Western Civilization, the US and
its people inch a little further from
the possibility of taking an earnest interest in their oppressed Caribbean—American—neighbors.
And although this contrived distancing of the American people from the Cuban
pueblo has become part of the hackneyed, widely disseminated paradigm in
America, it nonetheless warrants a revolution all its own.
© Copyright 2014 by AxisofLogic.com
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