^^The U.S. made a huge mistake in 1959–60 by not taking a more moderate, wait-and-see attitude with Castro and instead chased him right into the arms of the Soviet Union. His first choice of sponsorship was us, but we kicked him away thinking he would never last. He wanted a larger share of the profits from his national resources (rightfully so, IMO) and when we refused him, he nationalized trillions of dollars in infrastructure from AT&T, hotel chains and tourist industry profits, the Daquiri mines, the sugar industry, etc., etc. and pissed off our corporatacracy—which is where America’s vaunted democracy ends.
Under Soviet sponsorship, he accepted, for a very short time, nuclear missiles from the USSR and turned any sympathizers he had in the US against him. For ten days, he and Khrushchev scared the living shit out of us. That reads in our history as the closest we have ever come to a homeland nuclear exchange.
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He became a tyrant to his own people as a leader in a state of war under constant attack by a super power. As a pawn of the USSR, he supported every Soviet international policy, including backing Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam war. He was a constant thorn in our sides and only 90 miles off our shore. We, in turn, sponsored invasions to his shores, the most famous was our defeat at the Bay of Pigs. Our CIA and mafia tried to assassinate him many times. We prosecuted an unheard of 57-year economic embargo and tried to starve him out. The guy just wouldn’t go away and the hatred was indescribable. Those too young to have lived through all of this have no idea how fucking deep the enmity was between Cuba and the US.
The U.S., through it’s own enslavement to our corrupt lobbying system and corporate influence, made huge mistakes with Castro. Our trans-generational embargo and sabotage against Cuba, increasingly inexplicable to most American citizens born after 1959, was promoted and prolonged by a few, very powerful Cuban ex-patriot families, like the Batista family—once the largest private real estate cartel on our east coast—and the families who lost their vast international sugar, cigar, rum, mining and and communications holdings in Cuba when they were all nationalized. These same families have become incredibly wealthy and international in their influence and can be a great danger to an open Cuba.
The danger now is that these very same families and their related corporations think that this may be an opportunity to get these holdings back and once again re-capture the national resources of Cuba. They have vowed to do this for the past 60 years as soon as Castro was eliminated. These resources rightfully belong to the Cuban people. The most moderate government view is that these entities can contract their services, but they can no longer bleed the country dry of it’s wealth like in the old days under the American sponsored regimes.
My hope is for Cuba to move toward a more liberal Social Democracy with intelligent protections of their own national resources and that my country will support them in this effort with a eye toward stability and wealth of a trading partner. If the US were truly interested in freedom and democracy, our government would stop allowing these families to influence our policy toward Cuba and become a partner in a new, liberal Cuba government. But Cuba would have to continue to establish more major economic reforms and we would have to exercise more patience. We both need to let bygones be bygones.
In politics these days, I rarely get what I hope for. I guess in this day and age, I’ve become an anachronism. We’ll see how it goes.
