By Walt Zlotow
One must go back to 1898 for the last time the US was not exploiting Cuba and its people to benefit rapacious US capitalism and organized crime. That year the US cooked up fairy tale about Spain blowing up the US Maine, sent to Havana Harbor to intimidate Cuba’s Spanish ruler. The Maine did blow up but from an accidental internal explosion, not a Spanish mine. Those 261 sailors could not be said to have died in vain so President McKinley and his war party blamed Spain in order to declare war, kick Spain out of the Americas and take over Cuba for US exploitation.
But nothing in the previous 126 years compares to the diabolical cruelty, including death, the US has inflicted upon Cuba by President Trump and his bloodthirsty Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
This is not exaggeration. Need a lifesaving operation in Cuba under the Trump, Rubio oil blockade? Faggedaboudit. Much medical care is unavailable in oil starved Cuba when the lights go dark. Food and life sustaining supplies are becoming scares as farmers and merchants cannot get their wares to the people with a transport system largely shut down. Nearly a fifth of Cubans have fled the Trump, Rubio regime change operation.
Trump glories in their death and destruction he’s unleased. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
Trump is expanding in more grotesque terms US policy to degrade Cuba into submission going back to 1960. A secret State Department memo back then under Eisenhower promoted overthrowing Castro thru:
“… a line of action, while adroit and inconspicuous as possible, denies money and supplies to Cuba to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the Castro government.”
Trump simply dropped the “adroit and inconspicuous” fig leaf.
Ironically, the first US embargo in Cuba was good for the Cuban people. In April, 1958, Eisenhower imposed an arms embargo on the Batista regime. The US had been supporting Batista’s murderous rule for 25 years to insure his support of US economic control, both legal and criminal that enriched US capitalists and Mafia enterprises to the detriment of the Cuban people. Eisenhower didn’t have an epiphany to help the Cuban people. He simply saw the inevitable triumph of Castro’s revolution and sought to curry favor with its eventual rulers.
Twenty months later Castro prevailed, Batista fled and Cuba finally ended 62 years of US cruelty and exploitation. Not quite. Within year the US imposed Cuban embargo 2.0 designed not to facilitate the inevitable revolution but to destroy it. Sixty-six years on, with the entire world community except Israel voting year after year in the UN for the US to stop, America’s endless lust to crush the Cuban revolution continues apace. And under the depraved Trump, Rubio oil embargo, it has become a monumental war crime against the 11 million sorrowful Cuban souls.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL
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Isn’t it interesting that when a pea-brained moron does his best to destroy a non-threatening country, his sycophant – equally moronic – followers and enablers bow down and to kiss his arse and obey his every direction.
He literally wants them crawling on hands and knees towards his throne while begging for his help and forgiveness. “Look at what I done that NO OTHER president has been able, or had the guts, to do.”
President Congealed-Filth is keeping up a dirty old criminal position, dating from the Monroe Doctrine of Dec. 1823. The USA asserts “rights” to coerce, dominate, control, threaten, monitor and bar others in its “zone,” and Cuba is to be eternally punished for defying murderous wilfulness and overbearing oppression by the USA when and if it suits the ruling filth. Two centuries of shameless crime is too much. Cuba has a uniquely good record in health, education, liberation, assistance.