As of the year 2006, Fidel Castro, Cuba's revolutionary
leader, who has died aged 90, had reportedly been the subject of no fewer than 638 assassination
plots by the CIA.
The Guardian newspaper notes that these had ranged from mundane bombing and
shoot-'em-up schemes to more ludicrous proposals, such as one involving "a
diving-suit to be prepared for him that would be infected with a fungus that
would cause a chronic and debilitating skin disease".
At first glance, of course, it may seem odd and overreactive
that a global superpower would engage in neurotic efforts for over half of a
century to take out the leadership of an island nation smaller than the US state of Pennsylvania.
But, has it really just been a simple case of
neurosis-for-the-sake-of-neurosis?
Following the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, the
US political establishment laboured to portray the country as not merely an
ideological disaster, but also a bastion of malevolence and a downright
existential threat.
In 1960, then-senator John F Kennedy spoke of
Cuba as a "Communist menace" imperilling "the security of the
whole Western Hemisphere" and raising the question of "how the Iron
Curtain could have advanced almost to our front yard".
As late as 2002, more than a decade after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the US selected Cuba as one of three new additions to the
"axis of evil" based on its alleged (read: US-hallucinated)
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
The campaign to demonise Castro by associating him with
apocalyptic scenarios, however, fails to account for the fact that the US
undoubtedly takes the cake when it comes to existential threats - i.e. threats
to existence as we know it.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, is recorded in
official US propaganda as the time the Soviets brought the world to the brink
of nuclear war by installing ballistic missiles in Cuba.
In reality, the installation of said missiles postdated the
installation in Turkey of US nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles pointed at the
Soviet Union, and amid a US terror offensive courtesy of President Kennedy in
Cuba, where Soviet missiles constituted the only deterrent against an invasion
to topple Castro.
Furthermore, as Noam Chomsky has detailed, the US rejected fair and reasonable offers from
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, to defuse the missile crisis, apparently
preferring to gamble with the fate of humanity.
Regarding the double standard by which the US judged its own
missiles against everyone else's missiles, Chomsky comments
sarcastically: "A vastly more powerful US missile force trained on
the much weaker and more vulnerable Soviet enemy cannot possibly be regarded as
a threat to peace, because we are Good, as a great many people in the western
hemisphere and beyond could testify - among numerous others, the victims of the
ongoing terrorist war that the US was then waging against Cuba".
Freedom for capital
In his 1960 speech, Kennedy complained that Castro had
"confiscated over a billion dollars' worth of American property" - a
nod to the financial motives behind the vilification of the man who had
overthrown the oppressive, corporate-friendly dictatorship of US pal, Fulgencio
Batista.
Of course, it wouldn't look so good were the US government
to acknowledge that its preponderant concern in Cuba is freedom for US capital.
So a deceitful euphemism is deployed: What the US cares about in Cuba, we are
told time and again, is "freedom for the Cuban people".
US-generated ruckus about Cuban political prisoners and the dearth of freedom of the
press and of expression necessarily becomes less convincing in light of the
US' own history of assassinating anti-establishment characters and its
efforts to institutionalise censorship, as in the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
The sheer disingenuousness of the Cuban-freedom alibi is
further underscored by the fact that the US happens to occupy a portion of
Cuban territory on which it presides over an illegal prison dedicated to indefinitely detaining, torturing, force-feeding, and otherwise annihilating the freedoms of
various non-Cubans.
To be sure, Castro's Cuba was never a paragon of freedom of
speech or related rights. When I visited for a month in 2006, some of the
government detractors with whom I spoke would only pronounce Castro's name in a
whisper.
Others had no qualms airing their complaints at high
volumes, such as my father's relatives in the eastern province of Granma, who
claimed that Castro was personally to blame for their inability to remodel the
bathroom since 1962.
Although Cuba does not qualify as an objectively free
society, it's important to recall that curtailments to Cuban freedom do not
occur in a vacuum. Instead, they occur on an exposed island that has, for the
duration of its contemporary history, resided in imperial crosshairs.
Given the sustained US effort to overthrow the Castro
regime, and the system itself, with the help of fanatical Cuban exiles prone to terrorism and sabotage, state paranoia has perhaps not been
unfounded. Repressive security measures stemming therefrom qualify as reactive
in nature, and a result of vindictive US policy.
The real danger
There are, meanwhile, numerous freedoms Castro's Cuba hasn't
skimped on. There's much to be said, for example, for the freedom to exist
without having to worry about access to food, shelter, healthcare, and
education - all of which the Cuban state provides its residents.
In a 2010 article about Cuba's health-care system for the
Independent, Nina Lakhani outlined how a "prevention-focused holistic
model ... has helped Cuba to achieve some of the world's most enviable health
improvements".
Despite spending a fraction of what the US was then spending
per capita, Cuba enjoyed a lower infant mortality rate than its neighbour to
the north - not to mention one of the highest ratios of doctors per capita in
the world.
In addition to popularising the fundamentally anti-human
view of healthcare as a for-profit commodity, the US is also known for such
things as rampant homelessness, a wildly disproportionate detention and incarceration
rate for black people, a higher education system that harnesses learners with
debilitating debt, and elementary schools that confiscate and throw out children's lunches when their
parents are behind on meal payments.
That Cuba is able to provide basic necessities of life free
of charge is to some extent proof that useful programmes are possible when a
nation does not spend trillions of dollars on devastating wars.
Instead of exporting catastrophe, Castro's Cuba has focused
on exporting doctors. The New York Times reported in 2009 that, "[i]n the
50 years since the revolution, Cuba has sent more than 185,000 health
professionals on medical missions to at least 103 countries".
A Cuban doctor employed at a free health clinic in Venezuela
once aptly remarked to me on the discrepancy between US and Cuban foreign
policy: "We also fight in war zones, but to save lives".
Such achievements are all the more notable given that they
have occurred within a context characterised by imperial predations, a
punishing economic embargo, and politically influential, belligerent
hysterics from the Cuban exile crowd headquartered in Florida, a mere 160 km
from the Cuban coast.
It is within this context that Fidel's legacy must be
analysed. And it is this context that grants him legitimacy as a symbol of
resistance against hegemony.
Despite sensational braying over the decades about the Cuban
menace, Castro never posed a physical threat to the US. Rather, the danger
always lay in the example he set, which exposed the possibility of challenging
the pernicious self-declared US monopoly over human existence - and for which
he merits remembrance as a hero.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial
Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a
contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
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De AL JAZEERA
NEWS
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