Vijay Prashad
After twenty years, the United States government has decided to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Close observers of US warfare since 1945 say that this has been the longest war that the United States has prosecuted. The previous long war – against Vietnam – ran from 1961 to 1975, a mere fourteen years. The United States’ participation in World War II lasted only less than four years. The war against Afghanistan began as a way to disrupt the base of al-Qaeda but it also began to destroy the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda and its leader Osama Bin Laden refuge in the country. As the US withdraws, its war aims have not been met: al-Qaeda remains in parts of the Afghan-Pakistan border, but it has since dispersed to other parts of the world, and the Taliban is poised to once more return to power. Just as with Vietnam, the US leaves this country in defeat.
But the US war against Afghanistan is not the longest war in recent history. The longest war in US modern history is the hybrid war that the United States government has prosecuted against Cuba since 1959. A hybrid war is a war that does not necessarily require the full arsenal of the US military to come into force; it is a war fought through the control of information, through the control of financial flows, through the use of economic sanctions, and by illicit means such as sabotage. When the CIA’s Brigade 2506 landed at the Bay of Pigs on 17 April 1961, the US demonstrated its malicious intent toward the Cuban Revolution: from then onward, it was clear to the world that the United States would do whatever it took to overthrow the revolution and to reinstate the old Cuban oligarchy that had taken refuge in Miami. Acts of terror, including the shooting down of Cuban civilian aircraft, came alongside acts of economic war, including a blockade of the island from normal trade with other countries. The point was to suffocate Cuba.
The US government punctually planned more than the blockade. In October 1962, during the crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba, the General Maxwell Taylor, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned for a full-scale invasion. He noted, “we must accept the possibility that the enemy may use nuclear weapons to repel invasion. However, if the Cuban leaders took this foolhardy step, we would respond at once in overwhelming nuclear force against military targets”. The idea of nuclear force against military targets is comical, since on the small island any nuclear strike would devastate the entire population. Furthermore, General Taylor clinically noted that if “atomic weapons are not used, our medical plans are drawn to accommodate up to 18,500 casualties in the first ten days of operation”. This was US losses. There was no care for Cuban loss of life. This kind of language did not disappear after the missile crisis. When the Cuban government sent troops to assist in the national liberation struggle in Angola in 1975, the US government contemplated a full-scale military attack on Cuba. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told General George Brown of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on 24 March 1976, “If we decide to use military power, it must succeed. There should be no halfway measures”. The US planned to use airstrikes and to mine Cuba’s harbours. “I think we are going to have to smash Castro”, Kissinger told US President Gerald Ford, who replied, “I agree”.
Why did the US government want to crush the communist government in such a small country in the Caribbean? Because Cuba’s social structure – its commitment to people rather than profits – is a standing rebuke to the hypocrisies of the US, now totally clear during the pandemic as the US, despite its wealth, finds it hard to control the virus while Cuba’s public health system allowed it to control the virus and send its doctors out to heal others. It is this example of socialism that the US elites find to be objectionable.
Even without direct military assaults, the blockade itself is warfare. It has cost the Cuban economy the equivalent of $144 billion over the past decades, and it has meant that Cuba has had to spend precious resources to battle the blockade and to circumvent it. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Cuba was able to find a lifeline through Soviet intervention, with Soviet trade enabling Cuba to ameliorate the worst of the impact. With the fall of the USSR, the blockade tightened, with the US government passing a series of laws to punish anyone who would dare to trade with Cuba. These laws included the Cuban Democracy Act (1992) and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (1996), also known as the Helms-Burton Act. Against this tightening of the embargo, the United Nations General Assembly has every year since 1992 passed a resolution (in 2020, Cuba postponed the resolution till 2021 because of the pandemic). This resolution is opposed each year by the United States and a few of its allies.
Cuba’s government releases a report annually on the resolution, with a factual update on the social impact of the US hybrid war. In 2020, the report said that Cuba had lost $5 billion in trade, a considerable sum for an island of 11 million people. The report notes that in 2019-2020, the US government put in place 90 coercive economic measures and actions, with half of them being sanctions against US or third country entities that trade with Cuban companies. There is a new raft of measures to impose sanctions on shipping firms that transport fuel to Cuba; these measures were used against 27 companies, 54 vessels and 3 individuals to dissuade anyone else from bringing fuel to Cuba. This took place, it should be underlined, during the pandemic. A group of UN Special Rapporteurs wrote a joint statement in April 2020 urging the US government to withdraw its measures to block essential items for medical care and relief. The statement’s core paragraph is the following:
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of the comprehensive embargo has imposed additional financial burden, increased cargo travel time due to an inability to procure supplies, reagents, medical equipment and medicines necessary for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 directly from the United States and therefore constrains the effectiveness of the response. It also delays the development of e-health and telemedicine due to difficulties in accessing affordable technology. We are particularly concerned about the risks to the right to life, health and other critical rights of the most vulnerable sections of the Cuban population, including people with disabilities and older persons, who are at much higher risk of/when contracting the virus.
The US government disregarded this plea.
The Enduring Agenda of Trump
Before he left office, US President Donald Trump placed Cuba on the US government’s list of state-sponsors of terrorism. His successor – President Joe Biden – has been vague on Cuba. ‘A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities’, said his press secretary Jen Psaki recently. There is no one in the US State Department or in the National Security Agency who is overseeing Cuba policy; the only appointment Biden has made in this direction is for an official of the State Department to lead an investigation into the farcical ‘Havana syndrome’ attacks in 2017, when US and Canadian officials say they suffered from microwave attacks.
Meanwhile, in the US Senate, three Republicans (Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and Ted Cruz) as well as one Democrat (Robert Menendez) continue to press for a tough position against Cuba. The loss of some Democratic seats in Florida has furthered the Biden administration’s vagueness. They believe that any softening on the Trump position on Cuba will lose them Cuban and Venezuelan exile votes, a view that is debated amongst Democratic pollsters who believe that the Cuban vote in Florida is more polarised. On 16 April 2021, Admiral Craig Fuller, who heads the US Southern Command, called Cuba a ‘regional corrosive influence’. There is no softening of tone here.
However, popular opinion in the US is far more divided on Cuba. The most recent Gallap poll shows that 45% of those asked have a favourable view of Cuba, while 54% have a negative opinion of the island. This is nowhere near a consensus. To build a political constituency that incorporates these 45% into a bloc would substantially put pressure on the US Congress. Little wonder that a group of 75 members of Congress signed a letter calling upon Biden to return to the Obama ‘policy of engagement and normalisation of relations’. This bloc comprises just over 17% of the legislators. It will take a lot to move the imperialist consensus within the US.
In 2021, the UN General Assembly will once again call upon the US to dismantle its illegal blockade of Cuba. The world stands with Cuba. It is a small section of the world’s population, a group of anti-communist politicians in the United States and those that back them that continue to want to bomb the island, send the children of Batista back to the Bay of Pigs, and turn Cuba back into a gangster’s paradise. Cuba’s fortitude gives the world courage. Our world opens from Havana outwards.
Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. This article was first published in Juventud Rebelde, the magazine of the Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas (Union of Young Communists), on 5 May 2021.
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