The Many
Faces of Regime Change in Cuba
BY
Cubans confront a host of problems amid a national health
emergency — and the Biden administrative is only adding to punitive sanctions
with the intent to make everything worse.
After months of casual
indifference to conditions in Cuba, the Biden administration reacted with
purposeful swiftness to support street protests on the island. “We stand with
the Cuban people,” President Biden pronounced. A talking point was born.
“The Biden-Harris
administration stands by the Cuban people,” secretary of state Antony Blinken
followed. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menéndez also joined
to emphasize “the need for the United States to continue to stand with the
Cuban people.”
For more than a
hundred and twenty years, the United States has “stood with the Cuban people” —
or, perhaps more correctly, has stood over the Cuban people. Cuba seems always
to be at the receiving end of American history. To stand with the Cuban people
has meant armed intervention, military occupation, regime change, and political
meddling — all normal events in US-Cuba relations in the sixty years before the
triumph of the Cuban revolution. In the sixty years after the
revolution, standing with the Cuban people has meant diplomatic isolation,
armed invasion, covert operations, and economic sanctions.
It is the policy of
economic sanctions — the embargo — officially designated as an “economic denial program,” that gives the lie to
US claims of beneficent concern for the Cuban people. Sanctions developed early
into a full-blown policy protocol in pursuit of regime change, designed to deprive
Cubans of needed goods and services, to induce scarcity and foment shortages,
to inflict hardship and deepen adversity.
Nor should it be
supposed that the Cuban people were the unintended “collateral damage” of the
embargo. On the contrary, the Cuban people have been the target. Sanctions were
designed from the outset to produce economic havoc as a way to foment popular
discontent, to politicize hunger in the hope that, driven by despair and
motivated by want, the Cuban people would rise up to topple the government.
The declassification
of government records provides insight into the calculus of sanctions as a
means of regime change. The “economic denial program” was planned to “weaken
[the Cuban government] economically,” a State Department briefing paper
explained, to “promote internal dissension; erode its internal political
support . . . [and] seek to create conditions conducive to incipient
rebellion.” Sanctions promised to create “the necessary preconditions for
nationalist upheaval inside Cuba,” the Department of State Bureau of
Intelligence and Research predicted, thereupon to produce the downfall of the
Cuban government “as a result of internal stresses and in response to forces
largely, if not wholly, unattributable to the U.S.”
The “only foreseeable
means of alienating internal support,” the Department of State offered, “is
through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and
hardship. . . . Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken
the economic life of Cuba . . . [to deny] money and supplies to Cuba, to
decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and
overthrow of government.”
The embargo has
remained in place for more than sixty years. At times expanded, at other times
contracted. But never lifted.
The degree to which US sanctions are implicated in current protest
demonstrations in Cuba is a matter of debate, of course. But that the embargo
has contributed — to a greater or lesser extent — to hardship in Cuba can
hardly be gainsaid; that has been its intent. And now that hardship has
produced popular protests and demonstrations. That, too, is in the “playbook”
of the embargo.
But the embargo has
had a far more insidious impact on the political culture of Cuba. The Cuban
government is not unaware of the United States’ desired policy outcomes from
the sanctions. They understand well its subversive reach and interventionist
thrust, and have responded accordingly, if not always consistently.
Such a nakedly hostile US policy, which has been ongoing
and periodically reaffirmed over such a lengthy period of time, designed
purposely to sow chaos, has in fact served Cuban authorities well, providing a
readily available target that can be blamed for homegrown economic
mismanagement and resource misallocation. The embargo provides a refuge for
blamelessness and immunity from accountability. The tendency to attribute the consequences of ill-conceived
policies to the embargo has developed into a standing master narrative of Cuban
government.
But it is more
complicated still. Not a few
within the Cuban government view popular protests warily, seeing them as a
function of US policy and its intended outcomes. It is no small irony, in fact,
that the embargo has so often served to compromise the “authenticity” of
popular protest, to ensure that protests are seen as acts in the service of
regime change and depicted as a threat to national security.
The degree to which the political intent of the embargo is
imputed to popular protest often serves to drive the official narrative. That
is, protests are depicted less as an expression of domestic discontent than as
an act of US subversion, instantly discrediting the legitimacy of protest and
the credibility of protesters. The embargo serves to plunge Cuban politics at
all levels into a Kafkaesque netherworld, where the authenticity of domestic
actors is challenged and transformed into the duplicity of foreign agents. In
Cuba, the popular adage warns, nothing appears to be what it seems.
Few dispute the
validity of Cuban grievances. A long-suffering people often subject to
capricious policies and arbitrary practices, an officialdom often appearing
oblivious and unresponsive to the needs of a population confronting deepening
hardship. Shortages of food. Lack of medicines. Scarcity of basic goods.
Soaring prices. Widening social inequalities. Deepening racial disparities.
Difficulties have
mounted, compounding continuously over many years, for which there are few
readily available remedies. An economy that reorganized itself during the late
1990s and early 2000s around tourist receipts has collapsed as a result of the
pandemic. A loss of foreign exchange with ominous implications for a country
that imports 70 percent of its food supplies.
The Trump
administration revived the most punitive elements of US
sanctions, limiting family remittances to $1,000 per quarter per
person, prohibiting remittances to family members of government officials and
members of the Communist Party, and prohibiting remittances in the form of
donations to Cuban nationals. The Trump administration prohibited the
processing of remittances through any entities on a “Cuba restricted list,” an
action that resulted in Western Union ceasing its operations in Cuba
in November 2020.
And as a final
spiteful, gratuitous gesture, the outgoing Trump administration returned Cuba to the list of state sponsors
of terrorism. At the precise moment the Cuban people were reeling from greater
shortages, increased rationing, and declining services, the United States
imposed a new series of sanctions. It is impossible to react in any way other than with blank incredulity to
State Department spokesperson Ned Price’s comment that Cuban humanitarian needs
“are profound because of not anything the United States has done.”
Cubans confront all at
once a collapsing economy, diminished remittances, restricted emigration
opportunities, inflation, shortages of food, scarcity of medicines, all in a
time of a national health emergency — and with the United States applying
punitive sanctions with the intent of making everything worse. Of course, the
Cuban people have the right to peaceful protest. Of course, the Cuban
government must redress Cuban grievances.
Of course, the United
States must end its deadly and destructive policy of subversion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Louis A. Pérez Jr is the
J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History and director of the Institute for the
Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His
most recent book is Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of
Food in Cuba (2019).
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/cuba-embargo-sanctions-biden-crisis
Excellent historical background by Dr. Perez
Cuba as an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
https://cubapeopletopeople.blogspot.com/2019/05/louis-perez-cuba-as-obsessive.html
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