The American handling of Cuba was foolish from the beginning and essentially wrong headed. Yet it was sustained for one excuse after another. The sheer weight of time should have opened other avenues yet it did not. Here we discover that it actually got worse after the demise of the USSR. That was not obvious.
Now we learn that this failed policy in combination with the clearly failed drug war has served to unite the entire hemisphere in opposition to the USA. I do think that the Drug War was the actual key while Cuba provided easy leverage for the opposition. Thus we have the recent Bolt from the Blue of the USA finally acceding to the inevitable and opening up to Cuba.
The unwinding of the Drug war inside the USA continues apace on the marijuana front. Similar rules will need to be applied to all drugs generally with most reserved for medical control including provision to addicts.
Noam Chomsky: Why Obama Suddenly Decided to Cozy up With Cuba—It Wasn't Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Amy Goodman: I wanted to ask you about the passing of
Michael Ratner, Michael Ratner, the former head of the—or the late head
of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the trailblazing human rights
attorney, who died last week at the age of 72. I had interviewed Michael
last year in Washington, D.C., at the reopening of the Cuban Embassy,
after it was closed for more than five decades. And I asked Michael to
talk about the significance of this historic day. This is an excerpt of
what he said.
Michael Ratner: Well, Amy, let’s just say,
other than the birth of my children, this is perhaps one of the most
exciting days of my life. I mean, I’ve been working on Cuba since the
early ’70s, if not before. I worked on the Venceremos Brigade. I went on
brigades. I did construction. And to see that this can actually happen
in a country that decided early on that, unlike most countries in the
world, it was going to level the playing field for everyone—no more
rich, no more poor, everyone the same, education for everyone, schooling
for everyone, housing if they could—and to see the relentless United
States go against it, from the Bay of Pigs to utter subversion on and
on, and to see Cuba emerge victorious—and when I say that, this is not a
defeated country. This is a country—if you heard the foreign minister
today, what he spoke of was the history of U.S. imperialism against
Cuba, from the intervention in the Spanish-American War to the Platt
Amendment, which made U.S. a permanent part of the Cuban government, to
the taking of Guantánamo, to the failure to recognize it in 1959, to the
cutting off of relations in 1961. This is a major, major victory for
the Cuban people, and that should be understood. We are standing at a
moment that I never expected to see in our history.
AG:
That was Michael Ratner. It was July [20th]. It was that historic day in
Washington, D.C., when the Cuban Embassy was opened after almost half a
century. If you could talk both about the significance of Michael
Ratner, from his work around Guantánamo, ultimately challenging the
habeas corpus rights of Guantánamo prisoners, that they should have
their day in court, and winning this case in the Supreme Court, to all
of his work, also talk about Cuba, Noam, something that you certainly
take on in your new book, Who Rules the World?
Noam
Chomsky: Well, Michael Ratner has an absolutely fabulous record. His
achievements have been enormous. A tremendous courage, intelligence,
dedication. A lot of achievement against huge odds. The center, which he
largely—it was a major—he ran and was a major actor in, has done
wonderful work all over the place—Cuba and lots of other things. So I
can’t be excessive in my praise for what he achieved in his life and the
inspiration that it should leave us with.
With regard to
Cuba-U.S. relations, I think what he just said is essentially accurate.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. We tend to forget that after the Bay
of Pigs, the Kennedy administration was practically in a state of
hysteria and seeking to somehow avenge themselves against this upstart
who was carrying out what the government called successful defiance of
U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine. How can we tolerate
that? Kennedy authorized a major terrorist war against Cuba. The goal
was to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba. That’s the phrase of
his associate Arthur Schlesinger, historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his
biography of Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy was given the responsibility
to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba. And it was—he in fact
described it as one of the prime goals of government, is to ensure that
we terrorize Cuba. And it was pretty serious. Thousands of people were
killed, petrochemical plants, other industrial installations blown up.
Russian ships in the Havana Harbor were attacked. You can imagine what
would happen if American ships were attacked. It was probably connected
with poisoning of crops and livestock, can’t be certain. It went on into
the 1990s, though not at that—not at the extreme level of the Kennedy
years, but pretty bad. The late ’70s, there was an upsurge, blowing up
of a Cubana airliner, 73 people killed. The culprits are living happily
in Miami. One of them died. The other, Luis Posada, major terrorist, is
cheerfully living there.
The taking over of southeastern Cuba
back—at the time of the Platt Amendment, the U.S. had absolutely no
claim to this territory, none whatsoever. We’re holding onto it just in
order—it’s a major U.S. military base—it was. But we’re holding onto it
simply to impede the development of Cuba, a major port, and to have a
dumping place where we can send—illegally send Haitian refugees,
claiming that they’re economic refugees, when they’re fleeing from the
terror of the Haitian junta that we supported—Clinton, incidentally, in
this case—or just as a torture chamber. Now, there’s a lot of talk about
human rights violations in Cuba. Yeah, there are human rights
violations in Cuba. By far the worst of them, overwhelmingly, are in the
part of Cuba that we illegally hold—you know, technically, legally. We
took it at the force of a gun, so it’s—point of a gun, so it’s legal. I
mean, in comparison with this, whatever you think of Putin’s annexation
of Crimea is minor in comparison with this.
All of this is
correct, but we have to ask: Why did the U.S. decide to normalize
relations with Cuba? The way it’s presented here, it was a historic act
of magnanimity by the Obama administration. As he, himself, put it, and
commentators echoed, “We have tried for 50 years to bring democracy and
freedom to Cuba. The methods we used didn’t work, so we’ll try another
method.” Reality? No, we tried for 50 years to bring terror, violence
and destruction to Cuba, not just the terrorist war, but the crushing
embargo. When the Russians disappeared from the scene, instead of—you
know, the pretense was, “Well, it’s because of the Russians.” When they
disappeared from the scene, how did we react, under Clinton? By making
the embargo harsher. Clinton outflanked George H.W. Bush from the right,
in harsh—during the electoral campaign, in harshness against Cuba. It
was Torricelli, New Jersey Democrat, who initiated the legislation.
Later became worse with Helms-Burton. All of this has been—that’s how we
tried to bring democracy and freedom to Cuba.
Why the change?
Because the United States was being driven out of the hemisphere. You
take a look at the hemispheric meetings, which are symbol of it. Latin
America used to be just the backyard. They do what you tell them. If
they don’t do it, we throw them out and put in someone else. No more.
Not in the last 10, 20 years. There was a hemispheric meeting in
Cartagena, in Colombia. I think it was—must have been 2012, when the
U.S. was isolated. U.S. and Canada were completely isolated from the
rest of the hemisphere on two issues. One was admission of Cuba into
hemispheric systems. The second was the drug war, which Latin America
are essentially the victims of the drug war. The demand is here.
Actually, even the supply of weapons into Mexico is largely here. But
they’re the ones who suffer from it. They want to change it. They want
to move in various ways towards decriminalization, other measures. U.S.
opposed. Canada opposed. It was pretty clear at that time that at the
next hemispheric meeting, which was going to be in Panama, if the U.S.
still maintained its position on these two issues, the hemisphere would
just go along without the United States. Now, there already are
hemispheric institutions, like CELAC, UNASUR for South America, which
exclude the United States, and it would just move in that direction. So,
Obama bowed to the pressure of reality and agreed to make—to accept the
demand to—the overwhelming demand to move slowly towards normalization
of relations with Cuba. Not a magnanimous gesture of courage to bring
Cuba—to protect Cuba from its isolation, to save them from their
isolation; quite the opposite, to save the United States from its
isolation. Of course, with the rest of the world, there’s not even any
question. Take a look at the annual votes on—the U.N. has annual votes
on the U.S. embargo, and just overwhelming. I think the last one was
something like 180 to two—United States and Israel. It’s been increasing
like that for years. So, that’s the background.
As for Michael, Michael Ratner, his achievements are just really spectacular.
AG:
And finally, Noam, you’ve just written this book, Who Rules the World?
You’ve written more than a hundred other books. And, I mean, you have
been a deep, profound thinker and activist on world issues, for what? I
mean, more than 70 years. You were writing when you were 14 years old,
giving your analysis of what’s been happening. And I’m wondering where
you think we stand today, if you agree with—well, with Dr. Martin Luther
King, that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.
NC:
Actually, it was 10 years old, but not—nothing to rave about. If you
look over the past, say, the roughly 75 years of my, more or less,
consciousness, it’s—in general, I think the arc of history has been
bending towards justice. There have been many improvements, some of them
pretty dramatic—women’s rights, for example, to an extent, civil
rights. It should be remembered that there were literally lynchings in
the South until the early 1950s. It’s not beautiful now, but that’s not
happening. There have been steps forward. Opposition to aggression is
much higher than it was in the past. There’s finally concern for
environmental issues, which are really of desperate necessity. All of
this is slow, halting, significant steps bending the arc of history in
the right way.
There’s been regression, a lot of regression.
Things don’t move smoothly. But there have been bad periods before, and
we’ve pulled out of them. I think there are opportunities—they’re not
huge, but they’re real—to overcome the—and I stress again—to overcome
problems that the human species has never faced in its roughly 200,000
years of existence, problems of, literally, survival. We’ve already
answered these questions for a huge number of species: We’ve killed them
off.
AG: Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political
dissident, linguist and author, institute professor emeritus at MIT. He
taught there for over half a century. His latest book, Who Rules the
World?
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