American interventionists are besides themselves with glee over the deaths of 32 members of Cuba’s national-security establishment who were serving as part of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s security team during the US national-security establishment’s violent abduction of Maduro. Their ecstasy demonstrates that the old Cold War mentality that held interventionists in its grip for some 45 years never went away, not even with the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, at least not insofar as Cuba is concerned.
But the excitement among among these old Cold War dead-enders pails in significance to their ecstasy over the fact that Cuba is now in the throes of a grave economic crisis, one that threatens the Cuban people with death by starvation and illness. That’s because Cuba has long depended on a generous flow of oil from Venezuela, which the US government is now committed to terminating through orders to Venezuelan officials, in the hope of finally bringing down Cuba’s longtime communist regime.
I can just hear it now if the Cuban regime falls: “Our 60-year-long economic embargo against the Cuban people has finally worked! It finally caused enough death and suffering among the Cuban people that the Cuban government fell of its own accord for lack of revenue!”
The excitement and thrill among interventionists for all this death and suffering only goes to show how the national-security state form of governmental structure has served to warp and stultify American values and stultify the consciences of the American people.
After all, how in the world can anyone in good conscience intentionally and knowingly inflict suffering and death on the people of a nation as a way to achieve a political goal — i.e., regime change? Isn’t that why we condemn terrorism? Terrorists attack and kill civilians as a way to induce their government to change its policies. That’s what the Cuban embargo has always done — attack and kill Cuban civilians through impoverishment and illness as a way to induce the Cuban government to renounce power and permit its replacement with a US-approved stooge who will dutifully follow the orders of US officials.
Recall what Cuban official Che Guevara said soon after Fidel Castro’s forces had ousted from power the US-approved stooge Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban brute whose forces would kidnap young Cuban girls and deliver them to high rollers in Havana’s Mafia-controlled casinos as a sexual perk. Guevara was asked what Cuba’s new regime wanted from the United States. His answer: Just to leave us alone.
That was never going to happen. US officials, especially within the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, were never — could never — just leave Cuba alone. The anti-communist obsession was simply too powerful within the minds of the US national-security establishment. US officials were absolutely convinced that the Reds were coming to get us.
The Reds were everyone, US officials maintained. They were in Hollywood, Congress, the executive branch, the public schools, the civil-rights movement, and even the Army. Why, some Cold Warriors were even convinced that President Eisenhower was a Red.
The Reds were in Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and most everyone else.
Of course, since Cuba was only 90 miles away, that meant, US officials said, that a communist dagger was pointed at America’s neck. There was no way that America’s Cold War dead-enders could just leave Cuba alone. The anti-communist obsession dictated a never-ending war against the Cuban people — one that would last until the communist regime finally went away and was replaced with another US puppet regime. Never mind that the last thing that most Cubans wanted was to be re-controlled and re-subjugated by the US Empire.
Through it all, it has never mattered how much economic suffering or how many deaths had to be inflicted on the Cuban people. If millions had to die or be forced to flee the island, that was just the price that had to to be paid to keep America safe from the Reds.
That, of course, has been the same mindset with respect to the Venezuelan people. So what if 8 million Venezuelans had to flee in a desperate attempt to save their lives from death by starvation and illness from the combination of Venezuelan socialism and US sanctions. Who cares? What mattered was getting rid of their ruler Nicolas Maduro. And heaven forbid if any of those 8 million refugees fled to America, where they were considered to be tattooed scum gang members or invaders who needed to be forcibly returned to Venezuela to die or be sent to El Salvador for torture and indefinite detention.
The mindset, of course, was the same with Iraq, where 11 years of brutal and deadly US economic sanctions were intended to bring death and suffering to the Iraqi people, as a way to induce Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to renounce power in favor of another US stooge. When US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright was asked by “Sixty Minutes” whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were worth regime change, Albright’s answer reflected the mindset of American interventionists: Yes, she said, those deaths were, in fact, worth regime change.
Never mind that the sanctions and the deaths never succeeded in securing regime change in Iraq. The 9/11 attacks provided US officials to take a more direct course, much as they have in Venezuela after the brutal and deadly sanctions against the Venezuelan failed to induce Maduro to renounce power in favor of a US stooge. Needless to say, the deaths of even more Iraqis from the US invasion of Iraq were considered “worth it,” just as the deaths of some 75-80 people in the Venezuelan raid are also considered to be “worth it.”
There is something important to keep in mind about this anti-Cuban obsession that has clearly never gone away and that still holds many US officials in its grip. Cuba has never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. It has always been the US government that has been the aggressor against Cuba. The US aggression has included assassinations attempts, state-sponsored terrorism inside Cuba, and, of course, the deadly and destructive economic embargo, which, together with Cuban socialism, has squeezed the life out of the Cuban people.
How much more suffering will US officials inflict on the Cuban people? How many more Cubans will they kill, either directly or indirectly? No one can predict that. All that we know is that there has never been a limit on the suffering and death toll, just as there never was a limit in Iraq or Venezuela. Under the national-security, anti-communist, anti-terrorist, anti-drug-dealer obsessive mindset, no amount of death and privation is too much when it comes to regime change or control.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
