By Lil María Pichs Hernández
Since 1959, when Cuba’s foreign policy took a 180-degree turn, like everything else in the country, its foreign relations were consolidated as a clear expression of the Cuban revolutionary paradigm; and no relationship seemed to be more affected than that maintained until then by the successive governments of the Cuban republic, mediated by what for years had been its true capital: Washington.
During the decades following Washington’s initial exchanges with the leadership of the new Republic, born on January 1st, even before the declaration of the socialist character of the Revolution in 1961, Cuba’s relations with the United States were characterized by a sustained deterioration. This deterioration was marked by significant events directly linked to the hostile policies of successive U.S. administrations (both Republican and Democratic) toward the island, based on what the American elites believed Cuba should or should not do with its own country.
The rhetoric of hatred, demonization, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and egocentrism—so characteristic of U.S. imperialist ideology, designed for dispossession and oppression—has always underpinned this policy of aggression against the Cuban people and their institutions. It is no surprise that today this discourse has become one of the mechanisms systematically used to justify all kinds of economic pressure, media campaigns of blackmail and defamation, and, yes, threats of military aggression as well.
However, a US military attack on Cuba would currently be a truly risky and costly gamble for Washington. They have much more to lose. And we have much more to defend and gain.
If they were to actually opt for such measures, whether Washington considers a military blockade, invasion, or a limited coup, and even if they don’t abandon their tradition of subversion, harassment, and systematic attrition, they would be sending a very clear message to the world: “We are desperate because of our failures in all the other conflicts in which we are involved, and because of the terrible image of our current administration, so we are going to take it out on our unfortunate neighbor, who is small and poor, and who has been asking for it for a long time.”
Certainly, the militarists at the Pentagon and their myriad “intelligence” agencies seem to have the most to prove to themselves and to the world. But it would be a most unfortunate course of action.
The United States: a fractured, indebted country, mired in a profound multidimensional crisis, demoralized and infamous in the eyes of the international community due to its sustained policy of policing, bullying, murder, and sponsoring murderers; a country controlled by disgustingly wealthy elites, alienated from all reality and directly linked to scandals of corruption, pedophilia, human trafficking, neo-slavery, and domestic and international terrorism; a country that has lost every war and direct aggression it has ventured into, including the Bay of Pigs invasion: known as the first major defeat of Yankee imperialism in Latin America; that country failed in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iran… and will gain nothing from a military aggression against Cuba but regret, recriminations, and death.
These days, what Martí summarized in the Montecristi Manifesto (1895) is once again at stake: on one side, “the offensive rancor of a minority of masters fallen from their privileges,” and on the other, those of us who fight and are willing to fall “for the greater good of humankind, the confirmation of the moral republic in America, and the creation of a free archipelago where respectful nations may bestow the riches that will inevitably fall upon the crossroads of the world.”
For if that day comes, it will have to be said again that, because it is forced, “Cuba [Socialist and Peaceful] returns to war with a democratic and cultured people, zealously aware of its own rights and those of others.” And the Yankee troops on the ground, the drone pilots in their cubicles, and their generals safely tucked away in their bunkers, will soon realize that since October 10, 1868, and as was written in Guáimaro, we Cubans will not hesitate to declare ourselves once again as citizen soldiers of the Republic of Cuba in Arms.
IMAGE CREDIT: Cartoon: Acelo Ruiz Villanueva/ Threads
[ SOURCE: CUBA DEBATE ]
