FAIR

‘We Have Never Ignored Cuba’

CounterSpin interview with Aviva Chomsky on Obama in Cuba

By Janine Jackson

Janine Jackson interviewed Aviva Chomsky about Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba for the March 25, 2016, CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: FAIR contributor Adam Johnson noted recently how in this country discussion of US history, and that of its allies, is permitted a certain moral nuance, while official enemies are presented as essentially, unrelievedly evil. So it is with Cuba, where Barack Obama just paid the first visit by a sitting US President in 88 years. Any mention of, say, Cuba sending doctors overseas to help in crisis zones is nullified in elite US debate by the fact that—it’s Cuba! Where Castro lives! Few countries are drawn as cartoonishly, making a clear view of Cuba’s strengths and struggles, along with the meaning of any supposed thaw with the US, harder to come by.

Here to help us put recent events in some context is historian and activist Aviva Chomsky. She’s professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts, and author of The Cuba Readerand A History of the Cuban Revolution, among other titles. She joins us now by phone from Massachusetts. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Aviva Chomsky.

Aviva Chomsky: Thanks, Janine. It’s great to be here again.

Fox News on Obama’s Cuba visit

JJ: Well, let me ask you first to translate, if you will, the statement of White House press secretary Josh Earnest, meant to define the purpose of Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba:

For more than 50 years, we tried a strategy of saying, well, why don’t we just try to ignore the Cubans and see if they change their mind on their own? Not surprisingly, that strategy didn’t really work very well, so we’re trying a new approach.

How do you begin to parse that statement from the White House?

AC: Well, wow! Because, like you said, sometimes we’re allowed a degree of nuance when we’re discussing the history of our own country. But that statement is just such a blatant lie, it’s hard to believe that he could get away with it.

That is, we have never ignored Cuba. Cuba has always been a policy priority for the United States, since the mid-1800s. We have invaded Cuba about a dozen times, starting for the first time in 1898 and then multiple times after that, with the most recent actual military invasion being in 1961. But even with no actual invasions of Cuba since 1961, the United States has pursued, by every means possible, the goal of overthrowing Cuba’s government—legal and illegal, covert and overt, violent and nonviolent. We have never paused in that.

To the extent that when—President Obama, in his speech at the press conference on Tuesday, made a really startling statement. He said, we acknowledge the right of the Cubans to choose their own form of government and to choose their own future. Now, to people in the United States,they might have assumed that that is typical US policy or that that has been US policy all along, so the statement might not have sounded so startling. But because that is so distant from what US policy has been all along, to a Cuban audience that was a welcome and shocking statement. Because the United States has never before acknowledged the right of Cubans to determine their own future.

JJ: In terms of US activity, we also hear about invasions and we also hear, more recently, about sort of bungled attempts, even if there were numerous of them, bungled attempts to kill Fidel Castro. But the US involvement in Cuba was much more than kind of inept CIA assassination efforts. I mean, there really was what you might call a terrorist war.

AC: By about a year into the revolution, the United States, after some frantic scrabbling around during 1959 and the beginning of 1960, as to are we going to be able to control Fidel Castro or not, came to the conclusion that, no, we’re not going to be able to control him. There was then a debate—and this is quoting directly from US government correspondence—if we allow Castro’s revolution to succeed, we will be encouraging other Latin American countries to follow the same path of trying to prioritize the needs of their own citizens over the needs of our corporations, and we need to decide whether we wish to let this revolution succeed. And the decision was made, very quickly, that they did not choose to let this revolution succeed, and that they were going to do everything possible to overthrow it.

Now, during the Obama administration, the policy has primarily been through covert action; that is, USAID, the US Agency for International Development, has continued to fund projects aimed at overthrowing Cuba’s government, and imposing a new form of political and economic organization in Cuba. Over the 1990s and 2000s, there’s been a strong decrease in actual military attempts. However, the economic embargo, which was strengthened greatly in the 1990s, is also overtly an attempt to force a change of government onto Cuba.

JJ: The embargo is now discussed as something that “didn’t work,” you know — “not surprisingly,” as Josh Earnest tells us. And I think, particularly for younger people, the Cuba embargo sounds like something that meant that Americans couldn’t get cigars. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the real impact, and also the international understanding of that embargo?

AC: If the goal of the embargo was explicitly to overturn the revolutionary government, then we can say that it failed. If the goal of the embargo was to—as Nixon said in the case of Chile in 1970, we want to “make the economy scream” in order to undermine the legitimacy of the Allende government in Chile—if we think of the goal of the Cuban embargo as being to make the economy scream, then it was successful. That is, it has over the course of 50 years, more than 50 years, severely affected Cuba’s ability to develop a viable economy. And the reason the Cubans call it a blockade instead of an embargo is that the United States attempted to enforce it extraterritorially. That is, not only do we say that we don’t want to trade with Cuba, but we try to prevent others from trading with Cuba.

Now, internationally, the embargo has been universally and repeatedly condemned. Every single year, it comes up before the United Nations General Assembly, a resolution to condemn the US embargo, and it always passes overwhelmingly, with only the United States and Israel reliably voting against this resolution to condemn the embargo. So every other country in the world recognizes Cuba, trades with Cuba, maintains good relations with Cuba, and condemns this US policy aimed at punishing Cuba for trying to choose a different path to economic and political development.

JJ: The press secretary, Josh Earnest, said in the same speech that the new approach, the United States’ putative new approach, is reflected in the fact that Obama was “going to give a speech to the Cuban population…where the president will advocate for better respect for human rights…the kinds of universal human rights that we deeply cherish in this country,” he said. Now, this of course is the same president who maintains a “kill list,” as listeners know. Setting aside US hypocrisy, heavy a boulder as that is to roll, but setting it aside, what can we say about human rights and civil liberties in Cuba today, as compared to other countries in the hemisphere and in the world?

AC: Well, it’s interesting that Raul Castro was asked a question by US journalists at the end of the press conference about political prisoners in Cuba. And he answered, very defensively, by saying, we don’t have political prisoners in Cuba; give me a list. If you have the names of any political prisoners, just give me the names, and they’ll be released by tonight. So, of course, opposition organizations provided, online, after the press conference, lists of political prisoners in Cuba, and there’s approximately 50 of them.

But what Raul could have said is that by far the largest number of political prisoners in Cuba, far more than 50, are on the US naval base of Guantanamo, in the military prison there. That is, the United States can’t get really much traction by talking about political prisoners and human rights in Cuba when the United States is probably the largest violator of political and civil liberties in Cuba, by maintaining a prison where prisoners are not just political prisoners, but do not have the right to trial, do not have the right to representation, are maintained in solitary confinement for years on end.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Aviva Chomsky, author of The Cuba Readeramong other titles. Thank you, Aviva Chomsky, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AC: Oh, you’re very welcome.