The Shame of the Yankee Soldiers

I often wonder how the everyday U.S. citizen must suffer when they hear shouts or see banners that say “Yankees, go home” around the world.

In third-world countries it’s even worse. Just imagine the feelings of the men in uniform that have undergone frequent invasions, occupations, bombardments and subsequent murders of fellow inhabitants or family members in any of those countries where the U.S. can be found. There, the indignation toward the American military often reaches justified extremes and uncontrollable proportions.

When I was a small boy during WWII, I found the American soldiers likeable.

My mother worked as a commissioned salesclerk at a store named Valencia, which was owned by traders of Chinese descent and mainly catered to tourists. My father used to “hunt” American soldiers because at that time in Havana, they were the only foreign visitors susceptible to becoming Valencia clients and they would bring in a healthy commission.

In those days, troops stationed at the North American bases in Cuba usually came from good families with higher incomes than most. Hence, they had enough influence to be posted far from the battlefields and relatively close to home.

That’s why most of the Yankee officers and soldiers who I heard about were almost always generous and pleasant. As a result, their Chinese shop purchases constituted a large portion of our family’s livelihood.

My father spoke English well because he came from a family of tobacco workers who used to travel to the States during “down time” in order to find temporary work in the Cayo Hueso cigarette factories in Tampa, Florida. Fragile skiffs were used to make the trip and his mother (my grandmother) would bring along a sewing machine in order to contribute to the family’s well-being as a seamstress.

When the war ended we all moved over to Tampa — my father, my mother, and two brothers — where we remained for nine months. My parents had intended to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, but they couldn’t obtain the required visa. Plans changed and we went back to Cuba.

For my brother and me, this was a fortunate turn of events because our Ybor City neighborhood was made up of only blacks and Latinos, so we suffered numerous instances of racial discrimination and xenophobia first-hand, as well as the odd run-in with the military and their helmets and machine guns performing maneuvers known as “black-outs,” which we black and Latino kids would often defy.

Toward the end of the 1940s a shameful incident happened in which inebriated American “marines” climbed the José Martí statue in the main park and urinated. The indignation we all felt as Cubans added insult to injury in my case, due to my having at one time harbored affection toward those young soldiers we had known at “Valencia.”

Now, after experiencing the bloody insurrection against Cuba’s U.S.-backed dictatorship, with all their military might in addition to a half a century of hostility and aggression against the revolution by Washington D.C., I believe it’s not the soldiers — mere human beings — that carry the blame for all the crimes against so many places in the world, including North America. It is the oligarchic leadership sitting on Wall Street that should be the target of such widespread international rejection.

Today I understand that it’s not through the burning of American flags nor affronts to military personnel, politicians, diplomats (or any of their representatives), but through the expression of rejection together with the fight against imperialism, both being executed in the form of a demand for action, that will directly affect the interests of the great nation, their corporations, banks, media moguls, commerce, and transnational industry that today rule the world at their whim.