Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wants President Donald Trump to “free” Cuba after he finishes “freeing” Iran.
“Cuba has never been free,” said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy.
In 1511, Diego Velazquez de Cuéllar conquered the Pearl of the Antilles for Spain as a followup to Columbus’s initial 1492 claim. Brutal rule from Madrid lasted until 1898, when Spain lost the Spanish-American War. Cuba was a U.S. puppet from then until 1959 when Fidel Castro made it a Soviet puppet.
Almost certainly, Trump will install another Gringo-friendly, rightwing dictator in the mold of Fulgencio Batista, the guy Castro dumped. “Who benefitted from Batista?” Clardy asked. “American companies that made millions exploiting the natural resources on the island. Before Castro, Cuba was the playground of the rich and was dominated by U.S. business interests.”
Historically, great powers lord it over small countries. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” said Thucydides, the famous general-turned-historian of Athens, a powerhouse of ancient Greece.
Most big countries just take what they want and skip the window dressing. Uncle Sam calls it “spreading democracy.”
The U.S. stepping “forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs,” historian Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States. He offered examples, including Cuba: “It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention.”
The U.S. wouldn’t agree to remove its occupying troops from “free” Cuba until the Cubans agreed to let us intervene in their internal affairs and establish the Guantanamo navy base. The U.S. sent troops in 1906-1909, 1912 and 1917-1922.
No sooner did Castro cozy with Moscow, than the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency tried to topple him by secretly arming and equipping an ill-fated invasion by anti-communist Cubans, including Batista fans. In the years that followed, the CIA tried several times to assassinate Castro.
Nearly a century before Castro, Narcisco Lopez, a Venezuelan adventurer, and Thomas Logan Crittenden, a member of one of Kentucky’s oldest and prestigious families, led a private army to Cuba to overthrow Spanish rule as a first step toward turning the Caribbean island into one or more U.S. slave states. Clardy also pointed out that slavery was already legal in Cuba, where sugar and tobacco production had been enriching the Spanish treasury for years.
Soon after the “liberators” landed in 1851, Spanish troops overpowered and captured them. Most were executed, including Lopez and Crittenden.
White folks from the slave states still coveted Cuba, and they had important friends in Washington. In 1854, three U.S. diplomats, including future president James Buchanan, met in Ostend, Belgium, and drafted the Ostend Manifesto, which called on Uncle Sam to buy Cuba or take it by force if Spain wouldn’t sell. The proposal was abandoned after it brewed a storm of controversy in the North and in Europe.
Historically, much, if not most, U.S. foreign policy reflects the American sense of “exceptionalism.” In a 2005 speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Zinn said exceptionalism “suggests superiority. It suggests something that all of us living in the United States have encountered a lot. And that is, self-congratulation.
“...We are fond, in the United States, of congratulating ourselves for how wonderful we are and how we are the best — we are the greatest — we are the strongest — we are the most prosperous — we are the freest — we are the most democratic. And, yes, we are number one. And we are, in fact, number one in many things. And we are very good, really very good in many things.”
He concluded, “So I leave you with the idea that we’re not alone, and that there are people all over the world and people in this country who do not accept the idea of a special dispensation to do whatever we want in the world. And they will insist on human equality of people everywhere. And I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. I think of what was on the masthead of his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. On his masthead were the words: “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.” A good thing to remember. Thank you.”
A footnote: One could argue convincingly that, often as not, what is moral is also practical. What if we really had spread democracy to Cuba and helped its people become free and prosperous?
It’s hard to imagine the rise of Castro without Batista. Or, for that matter, Lenin without the czar, or the Ayatollahs without the Shah. (You can bet Trump is shopping for a Shah II.)
History instructs that a people’s best inoculation against authoritarianism — rightwing, leftwing, sectarian, or secular — is democracy. Purveyors of fascism, communism and all other forms of authoritarianism generally find themselves without customers in democratic societies that are content and flourishing.
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