Cuba and the United States: The Fight Continues

As part of his legacy, Barack Obama wants to put an end to 56 years of hostility between his nation and the island, but he is discovering that it will not be easy. Why? The two countries are moving in opposite directions; each one is driven by its unique insights and its particular mission in history.

The United States’ foreign policy was designed to protect its values and modus operandi. Cuba´s policy was devised to do exactly the same, but for different values. They are destined to collide.

The political and diplomatic inertia of the United States has led Washington to attempt to change the hostile, adversarial regimes it faces. That mission has generated lists of terrorist nations, accusations of human rights violations, endorsements of dissidents and short-wave radio transmissions of information concealed by enemy dictators.

The Cuban Perspective

From the other corner, Cuba´s beliefs and convictions, along with Fidel´s imperial emergencies, pressure its leaders to destroy its adversary. That is the vision of the Sao Paulo Forum. The five countries of socialism of the 21st century, the creation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, the acceptance of Iran — which backs Hezbollah and fabricates clandestine nuclear weapons — and the support of all anti-Western groups, including narco-guerrillas, are essential parts of this vision.

Fidel, who suffers from fixed ideas, expressed his vision with complete clarity to his confidante and lover, Celia Sanchez, in a letter from the Sierra Maestra mountain range in June 1958 when he was fighting Batista: ¨Once this war is over I will start what for me is a much longer and bigger war, the war I am going to wage against the Americans. I realize this will be my true destiny.¨

Cuba views the U.S. government as the administrator of a genocidal system that feeds off of the Third World and does not hesitate to kill entire populations for its own benefit. For this reason, Cuba argues that the United States must be destroyed at all costs.

Cuba’s leaders continue to believe in the discredited “Dependence Theory” and insist on highlighting the conceptual errors of the book ¨Open Veins of Latin America¨ despite the fact that its author distanced himself from his own hypothesis, just as Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the theory’s creator, and the Chilean Enzo Faletto did long ago.

Consequently, the Castros view themselves as heroic crusaders in a fight to the death against the murderous empire of the United States. In the heat of battle, the Castros embrace Mugabe, Gadhafi, the sinister family of Kim Il-Sung and anyone else that hates the gringos, even if that person is a monster — because the Castros do not mind being monstrous at times, like when they execute their own generals or knowingly kill innocent people. Those are just hazards of the fight for universal justice, as Lenin would say.

The only condition is that an ally be anti-Yankee. The Castros are not passive theoreticians dedicated to judging the iniquities of the United States from university classrooms; they are active, militant enemies that risk their lives in the trenches.

Any action against the United States is valid. They love the metaphor of David and Goliath, and they maintain that their military dictatorship is the most democratic system in the world. In order to avoid painful discord, I fear that they have wound up believing it.

The American Perspective

The North American leadership, however, views the United States as the most powerful country on the planet, chosen by the Creator to positively influence humankind by spreading its virtues, equipped with a successful economic system that has created an enormous middle class, and producer of the greatest technological and scientific developments in history — all for the glory and benefit of the entire species.

This is a nation whose size and sense of responsibility compel it to defend freedom with its enormous, efficient military apparatus. It possesses the machines and the principles, so it claims, that enabled it to save the world from the Nazis and Fascists and to defeat the Communists in the long, persistent battle of the Cold War.

In this narrative scheme, the U.S. government, as the “leader of the free world,” has taken on the duty of propagating and defending democracy, market economy and property throughout the world.

Why does it do it? The United States assumes that humanity´s future depends on it, and even more so, the United States believes that it is incapable of surviving on a planet dominated by a different system than the one created by the Founding Fathers in 1776. Until now, the United States’ mission of defending democracy has been successful, not just for itself but also the 20 nations that have closely followed its model of government.

After all, the 20th century was Washington´s time, and in order to continue as the dominant nation, the country counts on absolute technological leadership, the Pentagon, CIA, Drug Enforcement Administration, Voice of America, National Endowment for Democracy, Association for International Development, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, close ties to the European Union, economic resources that have created an incredibly productive society, the State Department, the best 100 universities on the planet and a legal, military and propaganda strategy that reflects its global power.

Cuba and the United States

And Cuba? Obama sees Cuba — and he is only partly mistaken — as a small, impoverished, unproductive Caribbean island, governed by colorful old men, who are stubborn survivors of the collapse of communism, dragged into a confrontation with Washington as a result of the Cold War, and capable of very little harm to the United States because they are an entirely inoffensive entity.

Therefore, Obama, as a counterpoint to the previous 10 presidents, who does not understand the Castros, and who ignores the fact that the ability to choose your enemies is not among the White House’s powers — because hatred is not controlled by the hated but rather by the hater — decreed the unilateral end to the hostilities and began, so he thought, the process of reconciliation. He did not advertise that the collision between the two countries is not the product of a comedy of historic errors, but rather the inevitable meeting of two adversarial visions and missions.

In order for true reconciliation to occur, one of the two must leave the field and renounce the battle to impose its political model. Neither one is ready to do that. And so the fight continues.