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Weekend Edition Feb 27-Mar 01, 2015<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/27/cuba-the-weight-of-a-long-history/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/27/cuba-the-weight-of-a-long-history/</a><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>200 Years of US
Interventionism</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">Cuba: the Weight of a Long History</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by MANUEL R. GÓMEZ</div>
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<p>The U.S. and Cuba are meeting again this week for their
second round of normalization talks. When asked by the media
what she expected from the first round, Roberta Jacobson, the
senior diplomat leading the U.S. team, said that she was “not
oblivious to the weight of history.” She was right on target:
There is a very long history that begins well before the
Revolution, deserves careful analysis, and will impact the
talks.</p>
<p>As far back as 1809, Jefferson tried to purchase Cuba. In
1820 he went further; he told Secretary of War J.C. Calhoun
that the U.S. “ought, at the first possible opportunity, to
take Cuba.” As President, John Quincy Adams predicted that
Cuba would fall “like a ripening plum into the lap of the
union.” These are but two of many prominent examples of a
widespread ambition to annex Cuba, or at least to control its
destiny, from very early in U.S. history. After “the West,”
Cuba figured as a prominent second place in U.S. expansionist
aims from the beginning of the Republic.</p>
<p>In subsequent decades, support for annexing Cuba shifted
tactically to Southerners who saw Cuba as a potential new
slave state, though “manifest destiny” continued to be the
fundamental driving force. Presidents Polk, in 1848, and
Pierce, in 1854, offered unsuccessfully to buy Cuba. John
Louis O’Sullivan, the newspaper editor who coined the phrase
“Manifest Destiny” in 1845, supported Cuba’s best known
“annexationist,” taking him to Polk’s White House in search of
support for his armed expeditions. And even Walt Whitman—no
advocate of slavery—wrote in 1871 that, “‘manifest destiny’
certainly points to the speedy annexation of Cuba by the
United States.”</p>
<p>President McKinley again unsuccessfully offered to buy Cuba
in 1898, shortly before declaring war on Spain. Only a year
before, his Undersecretary of War, I.C. Breckenridge, had
reflected the annexationist thinking in a memo arguing that:
“We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and its
constant companion, disease, undermine the peaceful population
and decimate the Cuban Army….in order to annex the Pearl of
the Antilles [Cuba].” He meant the Cuban independence army,
who had all but defeated the Spanish well before Roosevelt
with his Rough Riders arrived to clean up. It was advocacy of
a policy to starve the Cuban population and its army, just to
make sure that the U.S. alone could determine the future of
the island. The push for annexation eventually failed, in no
small part because its supporters realized that Cubans would
likely continue their war if the U.S. tried to impose it. Yet
those who favored annexation were able to impose the Platt
Amendment on the new Cuban Constitution in 1904, in effect
granting the US the right to intervene in Cuba for practically
any reason the US saw fit. Cuba’s independence was brutally
truncated, and the U.S. intervened on the island again in
1906, 1912, 1917 and 1920.</p>
<p>During the 1930’s and 40’s, the ambition to control Cuba’s
destiny continued—if somewhat more subtly and without troops.
The U.S. sent Sumner Welles as a special envoy to Cuba in the
1930’s to ensure that the outcome of a populist insurrection
against Gerardo Machado, then Cuba’s dictator, did not steer
the island away from U.S. tutelage. This intervention gave
rise to the U.S. support for Fulgencio Batista, which lasted
until his overthrow in 1959 by the Revolution. As our
ambassador to Cuba at the time, Earl T. Smith, asserted during
a Senate hearing in 1960: “Until Castro, the U.S. was so
overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American
ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even
more important than the Cuban president.”</p>
<p>The ambition to control Cuba, in other words, already had a
long and complex history by the time of the victory of the
Revolution in 1959. The list of U.S. interventions seeking
regime change that followed is too long to detail here. The
Bay of Pigs, assassination efforts, hundreds of acts of
sabotage and terrorism, and, of course, the embargo since
1960. And what did the embargo seek? Well, President
Eisenhower said that “if the [Cuban people] are hungry they
will throw Castro out,” a view that President Kennedy
reiterated when he asserted that the end of the Revolution
would come from “rising discomfort among hungry Cubans.”
Arguably, a policy with the same goal of maintaining Cuba as a
client state as the Breckenridge memo of half a century
before. The embargo was then codified in the so-called
Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws of 1992 and 1996, both
supposedly granting the U.S. the right to decide what kind of
government the island could have, and laws that were passed
well after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Cold War ended,
and Cuba had stopped its revolutionary activities in both
Africa and Latin America. In effect, these laws are modern
versions of the Platt Amendment, no longer “justified” even by
the Cold War fig leaf.</p>
<p>So the history of U.S. policy towards Cuba shows a continuity
that is hard to deny. Even those who might disagree with this
interpretation should not find it hard to imagine how the
Cuban government, and Cubans as a whole, would react with
profound skepticism and distrust of the intentions of the most
powerful country in the world, as reflected by these kinds of
pressures and policies for more than two centuries. Beyond the
immediate issues, such as the irrational listing of Cuba in
the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, Ms. Jacobson
will certainly have a very heavy weight of history to consider
in her discussions with her Cuban counterparts. If the
President directs her, however, she, on behalf of our country,
will have a unique opportunity to break clear from the
interventionist thrust of our past interventionist policies,
and seek agreements that nurture common interests and respect
the obvious differences between the U.S. and the island.</p>
<p><em><strong>Manuel R. Gomez</strong> is a Cuban-American
public health professional who resides in Washington, DC.</em></p>
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