The context of Cuba's crisis

By Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdés

On December 18, 2010, Cuban President Raúl Castro warned Cubans: the nation faced a crisis. The disastrous condition of Cuba's economy no longer allowed the state any maneuvering room to walk the dangerous “precipice” of inefficiency, low productivity and corruption. Without reforms, Cuba would sink -- and with it the effort of every generation seeking a free Cuba since the first native revolt against Spanish colonial rule.

Cubans understood that since 1959 the Revolution, with all its faults, had safeguarded the nation's independence – national sovereignty. From 1492 (Columbus' landing) through December 1958, foreign powers had decided the fate of Cubans.

By the early 19 th century a " Cuban " had emerged -- not a Spaniard on a faraway island or an enslaved African, but a hybrid product of three centuries of colonialism who sought self-determination -- like the American colonial population in 1776.

When Batista and his generals fled, a U.S.-backed coup effort among Colonels failed to materialize despite all the plots behind the scenes led by the U.S. government. The rebels then established the modern Cuban nation, which quickly became a real and until then almost unimaginable challenge to U.S. domination.

This unstated truth, understood in Havana and Washington, put the countries on a collision course. Washington refused to cede control; the Revolution rejected U.S. authority. Since 1898, the U.S. had treated Cuba as an appendage of its economy. U.S. companies owned Cuba's largest sugar mills, its best land, the phone and utility companies, the mines and much else. The Cuban government, like those of its neighbors in the “U.S. backyard,” had automatically obeyed Washington's policy dictates.

Revolutionary defiance, reducing rent by 50 percent and passing an agrarian reform law, without asking permission, got attention in Washington. The words “dictatorship” and “communist” began appearing routinely in government-spun news reports.

The island of 6 million people with sugar as its cash crop lacked both material and human resources needed to secure real independence. Washington understood this. Some U.S. officials, wrote E. W. Kenworthy, “believe the Castro Government must go ‘through the wringer' before it will see the need for United States aid and agree to the stabilization measures which will make it possible to get aid.” (“Cuba's Problems Pose Tests for U.S. Policy,” NY Times , April 26, 1959)

When Cuban leaders either ignored or ridiculed Washington ' s warnings, President Eisenhower, in March 1960, authorized a CIA covert operation to overthrow the Cuban government -- ending in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs “fiasco.” In October 1960, however, in response to Cuba's nationalization of U.S. property -- an escalating confrontation of Cuba acting and Washington punishing – Ike imposed an embargo on Cuba.

But even in April 1960, the State Department had issued its punishment guideline: “[E]very possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. ... a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government.” (Office of the Historian, Bureau Of Public Affairs, U.S. Department Of State; John P. Glennon, et al., eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba -Washington D.C.: GPO, 1991, 885.)

Havana responded by doing the unthinkable: In 1961, Cuba allied itself with the Soviet bloc. To secure independence, Cuban leaders became reliant on Soviet assistance.

In 1991, the Soviet demise left Cubans – finally -- with total political “independence” and no outside material support with which to maintain their nation. The embargo took on heightened dimensions.

In 1959, revolutionaries in their 20s and 30s did not predict the ferocity of U.S. punishment, nor grasp that their sin of disobedience reached beyond the dictates of U.S. power, and to the core of a global system. Washington was the informal world capital.

In that role, Washington relentlessly attacked Cuba -- even after it ceased to exercise Hemispheric hegemony. The control mantra still seeps through the walls of national security offices and by osmosis enters the bureaucrats' brains: “We permit no insubordination.” Cubans had to pay for the resistance of their leaders. Washington's lesson: Resistance is futile.

Last month Raúl Castro informed Cubans of the need for drastic reforms. The revolution had trained, educated and made healthy the Cuban population. But, Raúl admitted, the state no longer can meet some basic needs Cubans had assumed as human rights (entitlements). One million people, he announced, would lose jobs; social programs reduced or eliminated.

Cubans' non-productivity -- lax work ethics, bureaucratic inefficiency, and absence of initiative – had become compounded by corruption. The U.S. embargo leads to shortages and encourages bureaucratic misdeeds. A bureaucrat enhances his income by “solving ” the very “obstacles” the same bureaucrat helped create.

After 51-plus years, Washington's punishment appeared to force Cuba into accepting a shock doctrine, but without all the regressive social costs most Third World countries have paid. In 1980, a Jamaican remarked after Prime Minister Manley submitted to the

International Monetary Fund's punishing austerity measures: “We've been IMF'd. ”

The Cuban revolution again enters unscripted territory. Reformers, however, count on deep resources -- a public with social consciousness absorbed through decades of education and experience.

World geo-political changes, however, offer Cuban leaders some advantages: China, Brazil and some European Union states have become potential counters to U.S. hardliners. With breathing space Cubans might still avoid the worst consequences of Washington's obsolete 50 year old shock doctrine.

----------------

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow whose film WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP premiered at the Havana Film Festival. Nelson Valdés is Professor Emeritus, University of New Mexico.

-30-

Reflections of routine air travel

17 March 2010
By Saul Landau

I waited in line at the Phoenix airport thinking how a Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, evaded security. Meanwhile, an informed TSA woman wanded me with a small stick designed to detect explosives -- if I had had any around my armpits, butt and other body parts.

After Umar made headlines, who would enter an airport with “boomzy woomzy” in his knickers, as a British wit described the outré plot to blow up the airplane carrying him to the United States? After the young Nigerian failed to ignite himself, thanks to a fellow airplane passenger’s intervention, President Obama threatened to retaliate anywhere -- meaning Yemen? Surely such a threat would stop a future terrorist attack!

We already have several hundred thousand troops and more mercen… – oops! contractors – scouring several countries hunting potentially violent anti-western Muslims. Unfortunately, this violent process has made even more enemies for us.

But not me! The woman with the detecting wand waved me through “security.” I re-looped my belt, put on my shoes and thought how 19 suicidal, mostly Saudi, box-cutter-carrying hijackers had changed my and everyone else’s life. After their ghastly deed a Jamaican schlemiel tried to light his explosive-laden shoes on a London-U.S. flight. Again, quick work by a flight attendant stopped the impending tragedy.

Has Al Qaeda hired unemployed New York designers to make hot shoes and undies as part of their larger scheme to disrupt airline schedules? U.S. reaction to Bin Laden’s escapades have taken an apple pie experience, air travel -- see George Clooney in Up In The Air – and made it repulsive.

OK, Umar didn’t light the fuse in his skivvies. His nether parts and the plane remained intact. But because of his well-publicized failure, the Administration spent more money fighting airport wars supposedly against people like him. Al-Qaeda has provoked the government to institute permanent non-productive entities – like TSA, Thousands Standing Around or Taking Shampoo Away. They bleed the budget and help start each trip with a frown. Who benefits? Detection technology companies boom. Do their wands distinguish C4 from talcum powder? How many creeps would sacrifice themselves for a cause that few Americans can grasp? Hundreds? Thousands? Hmmn!

A guy with a grudge against paying taxes piloted his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. That’s the American way, not having some bozo hide explosives in his dentures. Will the next Al Qaeda come from Uruguay via the Emirates? Will U.S. troops invade yet another country – like Yemen -- should a future Suicide Sam attempts an attack? That would force Al Qaeda trainers to move to another country. Umar trained in Yemen, the media reported, that mysterious Red Sea land on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

Wait. For almost two decades, U.S., British, German and Spanish and African Muslims have responded to Al Qaeda’s call to do violence – mini 9/11s – at U.S. Embassies and other spots. Umar, the Nigerian whose parents warned authorities, learned from the same texts that attracted members of the Muslim Brotherhood and now Al Qaeda.

How come we don’t study those texts? The export of U.S. culture, Sayyid Qutb an Egyptian scholar believed, could bring death to the human spirit. If U.S. culture prevailed, he imagined a world whose spiritual values would become shopping, lawn-mowing and car-washing – along with inter-sexual hand holding, dancing and hootchie kootchie.

Qutb became the ideological father of the Muslim Brotherhood, embraced Sharia Law and a religious state, and repudiated the West’s “elections,” those processes that follow the imposition of corrupt, pro-Western dictators on the tribal societies. After spending time in Colorado, he observed: "Nobody goes to church as often as Americans do, yet no one is as distant as they are from the spiritual aspect of religion." http://dscriber.com/denver/402.html

Qutb saw “a moment of unbearable crisis,” where people had lost touch with their own nature. Inspiration, intelligence and morality had degenerated along with sexual relations ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' He felt horrified over the level of anxiety, crime, addiction and existentialism in U.S. life. He also saw the richest countries as “the unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness – “this wretched split between man's truest nature and modern life?” (Paul Berman NYT Magazine March 23, 2003)

Western Europe “civilized” (colonized?) what is now the Third World. This process involved capturing African slaves and looting the territories they were civilizing. Then they “granted” the modern Muslim world “independence,” which meant societies characterized by grinding poverty and institutionalized political corruption.

Few commentators dare link poverty and corruption to extremism in Muslim countries. Instead, Washington and London react like Pavlov’s dog to the stimulus of violence against them. A military response vitiates discussion of pro Israel policies and support for oppressive, ass-kissing Arab regimes. Like millions of passengers, I feel the trickle down effect of this strange development. Well, on to the connecting flight!

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow and filmmaker. Go toroundworldproductions.com for his movies.

-30-

Covert Memories from Miami

23 September 2009

By Saul Landau

In Miami, several retired U.S. officials remembered the early 1960s, when the CIA sent hundreds of employees to join other government bureaucrats to process and recruit thousands of Cuban exiles to destroy the Cuban revolution. Assassination plans abounded, from poisoned cigars and wetsuits for Fidel Castro, to a sniper rifle smuggled in by his comrade to a sophisticated poison pill. The capsule’s designer imagined the pills dissolving in Fidel’s chocolate milkshake, which he drank regularly at the former Havana Hilton Hotel’s ice cream bar. These Hollywoodesque creations came from the CIA laboratory of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency’s ghoulish technology maven. Most of the plotters and erstwhile assassins of that era, like Gottlieb, have died.

One long-retired Air Force officer told me of his plan to undermine Fidel among Cuba’s guajiros (peasants). Given the shortages of consumer goods, it made sense to clandestinely drop tens of thousands of rolls of toilet paper on the island. On each leaf the guajiro would see a photo of Castro and Khrushchev together. “That would have given the guajiros a good laugh,” the perpetrator told me. “But the White House nixed it.” Perhaps Kennedy might have thought that if he approved such a prank, some joker in the U.S. could put the President’s and Bobby’s faces on toilet paper and sell the product throughout the United States; legal under the First Amendment.

Most Cubans who arrived in the days preceding what became the April 1961 Bay of Pigs “fiasco” assumed the U.S. government would deal with Fidel and his communists. Washington had never allowed such flagrant disobedience to go unpunished. By the summer of 1960, the Cuban revolution had the gall to seize property belonging to the mighty oil companies (the Cuban government nationalized Texaco and Esso after they refused to refine Soviet crude oil on orders from Washington). Such defiant behavior challenged the essence of the Monroe Doctrine: “Latin America is ours.”

Few inside the hub of operations questioned the premises. “It was the height of the Cold War, after all,” several retired officials explained as if this statement summarized the justification for everything. The West faced a relentless enemy of great power and U.S. agencies had to stop its expansion. Indeed, most of the world would have agreed, at least, that Cuba informally belonged to the United States, no matter what most Cubans thought of that assessment.

The secret plots to overthrow the revolutionary government had become the world’s most open secret. Miami became Planning and Operations Center for the CIA’s largest station (JMWAVE). One man, now in his late 50s, told me how a CIA official -- a Mr. Bishop -- had recruited his father in 1959. Their family moved to Miami along with hundreds of thousands of Cuba’s rich, professional and propertied middle classes. His father worked from a two story building in Miami Beach, one of hundreds of CIA properties in the area. Nearby, ships from the CIA’s navy would dock, load up with provisions (arms and bombs) and set off to the Cuban coast to wreak havoc or just drop or pick-up agents whose job was to subvert the new government. “It was routine, every day and sometimes twice a day.”

“I thought the invasion would come in October of 1960,” he told me, “or at least that would be the start of some intense guerrilla war. Everyone speculated if a full-scale invasion would occur or if men would be sent to the Cuban mountains to do what Fidel did to Batista.”

Eisenhower had obvious misgivings about the plan and passed the ball to Kennedy, who then suffered the ignominious defeat. Publicly, he accepted responsibility (“Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.”). Privately, however, he sought revenge: the overthrow of the Castro government. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, directed a war of terror against Cuba; assassination attempts and sabotage, propaganda and economic war against an island of 6 million people.

In December 1960, I was on a tour with a group of students going to Cuba. Arriving at the Miami airport, we learned the pilots of our Cubana plane (each hour Pan Am and Cubana flew to Havana) had defected. While waiting for a new crew to fly over from Havana, a “spontaneous demonstration” erupted. Angry Cuban exiles screamed at the college students; some protestors threw punches and began to spit at the students. One asked a demonstrator: If Cuba is so terrible, you should want us to go. Then we’ll return and tell lots of people how awful things are.” The protestor looked puzzled. He turned to the team leader and asked for instructions. “Don’t talk, just spit,” he sneered. It appropriately summed up U.S. policy for fifty years.

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow and filmmaker (DVDs available through roundworldproductions.com)

-30-