The Unfinished Cold War

Once again, thousands of Cubans are preparing to enter the United States. It is a tired old story: They have been doing it in large numbers since 1959, when the Communist dictatorship of the Castro brothers began. This time, they’re proceeding from Costa Rica. Since 1966, Cubans have gotten preferential treatment from the U.S. immigration authorities. It is called the Cuban Adjustment Act, and it is one of the many exceptions to the complex U.S. legislation on immigration issues.

There are others. For example, temporary protected status, or TPS, has been granted to thousands of undocumented persons living in the United States. A dozen nationalities have benefited from this measure, conceived to protect certain individuals from the horrors of violence, or from natural disasters that were happening in their countries of origin.

But there are essential differences between the TPS and the Adjustment Act. Temporary protection must be renewed periodically, and depends on the will of a fickle Congress. The Adjustment Act that affects the Cubans, in contrast, leads to official residence status after one year and to citizenship after five years.

In reality, it is doubly stupid that TPS doesn’t result in residency and eventual citizenship. The temporary nature and absence of a mechanism for progressive integration into U.S. society heartlessly handicaps immigrants, and converts the “American dream” into an unnecessary nightmare tinged with the ominous potential for persecution by “la Migra,” which was the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and is now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The other side of the stupidity is the damage that the U.S. is inflicting on itself. What is valuable to this country, and to all countries, is to have citizens who are workers who obey the laws, create wealth, pay taxes, and mix into the legendary U.S. “melting pot,” as has happened with the overwhelming majority of Cubans. Cuban exceptionalism began with the laws of the Cold War. The laws were the predictable U.S. response when the Castros and a small group of communists, convinced of the superiority of Marxist-Leninist ideas, of the benefits coming from the USSR, and of the treachery of the U.S. and its market economy, decided to create a Communist dictatorship on the island.

Moscow, a city that knew how to organize satellite states as they had ruthlessly done in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, gave its immediate and unconditional approval. Soviet advisers didn’t lose any time in showing up discreetly on the island, with their first objective being to crush the democratic Cuban opposition and create counterintelligence networks.

The second objective was filling Cuba with nuclear missiles.

Khrushchev said now the U.S. would know what it was like to have a dagger pointing at its throat, only a few kilometers from its coast. It was his retaliation for harassment by NATO.

The U.S. reacted. In the middle of March 1960, President “Ike” Eisenhower signed a secret order authorizing undercover operations to try to eliminate the Russian satellite government installed in Cuba.

It was already too late. A week before, the Spanish-Russian Gen. Francisco Ciutat arrived on the island. Fidel welcomed him, and gave him the name “Angelito,” meaning “little angel.” There would soon be 40,000 Soviet troops and advisers. The Cold War was at its peak in the Caribbean.

Thirty years later, the European satellites broke with the USSR, and the Eastern Bloc, including the Soviet Union itself, disappeared. The U.S. strategy of containment had produced results. The U.S. had won the Cold War.

Not completely. In Cuba and North Korea, they dug in. Fidel Castro, extremely angry with the “traitor” Gorbachev, proclaimed with applause from his brother Raúl that he “would sink the island before abandoning Marxism-Leninism,” guaranteeing that Cuba would be conserved as a bastion of communism to illuminate the day when the planet might recover its revolutionary clarity.

Fidel, a Stalinist as stubborn as a mule, set about with the support of Lula da Silva to gather together the remnants of communism to found the Sao Paulo Forum, a sort of Third International fitting in together all the “anti-imperialist fighters,” from the narco-guerrillas of FARC* to Islamic terrorists.

This was until Hugo Chávez appeared on the horizon with a cloud of ignorance and irresponsibility, and loaded with petrodollars. Fidel recruited him immediately, first to exploit him, and then to fight against economic freedom and against Washington, for the glory of the world’s poor.

Together, “de pipí cogido,” as the Colombians graciously put it, in a relationship of intimacy and trust and in an indomitable Havana-Caracas axis, they would triumph where the USSR had given up. This was a goal and a strategy that no one has ever discarded or denied, as Felipe Pérez Roque, then Cuban minister of foreign affairs, announced in Caracas at the end of 2005.

Out of this Cold War spirit – which may live on in some backward countries – arose the gloomy fantasy of “21st century socialism,” and the anti-U.S. network of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, set against the Free Trade Area of the Americas promoted by the U.S. Thus, it is not true, as Obama supposes, that the Cold War is over. At least in Latin America, it is being kept alive by the Castros, Maduro, Ortega, Evo, and, to a lesser degree, Correa.

It is inconceivable that Washington does not know about this demonstrable reality, or that it thinks this is about a “nuisance rather than a danger.”

*Editor’s note: FARC stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. It is a guerrilla movement originating in 1964, comprising an army of Marxist-Leninists.