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Culture
A Call to End the Embargo against Cuba
by J.A. Sierra
“We have a good many American farmers who need to find a foreign home for their product. We sell that product to China, a communist government. We sell it to Vietnam, a communist government. But we are told somehow that we ought not to encourage sales of food to Cuba. I don’t think Fidel Castro has ever missed a meal because of our embargo. I don’t believe he missed a meal in 40 years because we couldn’t ship U.S. food to Cuba or they couldn’t purchase food from the United States. But I think poor, sick, and hungry people in Cuba are the victims of these policies, and I personally believe that it is immoral to use food as a weapon.”
– Byron L. Dorgan, U.S. Senator from South Dakota, May 21, 2002
We sit at a sumptuous dinner table for eight that includes almost anything found in an upscale traditional Cuban meal; steamed rice, seasoned black beans, slices of pork and chicken, cooked yucca and malanga (tubers), fried plantains and a salad of tomato, lettuce, cucumber and avocado. Everything is placed on the table, and a generous assortment of Cuban pastries (filled with fruit paste) waits on the kitchen counter for later consumption. To drink we have a choice of water, Coke, Malta (a barley soft drink) and beer.
Somehow the conversation turns to Cuba and the embargo. I’m not surprised to hear Arturo, our host, issue hard-line after hard-line at the “Castro regime,” and for a second, I consider ignoring his remarks to resume enjoying the food. Instead I joke, “How can you support starving Cubans during such a splendid meal?”
“If they’re communists they should starve!” blasts my host between mouthfuls of lightly fried platanitos.
The table goes completely quiet. “They,” Arturo explains, sounding like a Florida politician, “must rise against tyranny and defeat communism before they can share the gifts of democracy,” to which our meal is attributed. The silence multiplies, and if a pin had dropped, you could have heard it bounce on the hardwood floor like a nuclear explosion. In some Cuban American circles, opposing the embargo is worse than supporting Osama bin Laden. Most of Arturo’s guests do not support the embargo, yet we all sit at his table and eat his food. “We must support democracy in Cuba,” says Maria, our host’s wife and, no doubt, the one who prepared our meal.
“Why don’t you return to Cuba and join the dissidents?” I quickly ask our host, who has settled back on his favorite living room chair, twirling a Panamanian cigar in his right hand. Again the house goes quiet, as some misunderstand the fact that Arturo and I have had this conversation thousands of times.
“Because I’d be in jail,” he responds, “or dead.”
“They had about 71 political prisoners [in 2006]!” I say in exaggerated liberal outrage. “No doubt you’d have been one of them.”
This question could easily inspire others, such as, why do Cuban Americans support the idea of starving their Cuban counterparts for a fight they’re not willing to take part in? Sure, many Cuban-Americans that support the embargo want to see a U.S. military victory over Cuba, at almost any cost, evidenced by their unquestioned support for terrorists Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. They’re frustrated with the lack of success the U.S. government has had disrupting the Cuban government with the embargo and numerous assassination and terrorist attempts.
“Cuba has turned us into abusive, angry bullies,” says Rowena, my date. “The United States has always wanted to absorb Cuba,” says Ricardo, a conservative high school teacher who disapproves of the embargo. “They see it as a natural relationship.”
Some of the guests appear uncomfortable with the conversation as Arturo becomes more agitated and prepares to accuse me of being a communist. Almost anywhere else the commie label would be as outdated as 8-Track, yet it remains central to a cultural movement that has made it acceptable for Cubans to kill Cubans with whom they disagree on the Castro issue, and for Cuban Americans to support the starvation of their families on the island.
The embargo against Cuba emerged shortly after the triumph of the Castro brothers and the “bearded ones” in 1959, and has grown steadily in scope and legislation over the past five decades into one of the meanest and longest in history.
Since then, the foreign policy umbrella under which the embargo exists includes sabotage, assassination attempts, direct and indirect support for terrorist activities against the island, and a general lack of concern for the suffering of Cubans. Since 1960, the focus has been completely on Castro, with the Cuban people relegated to war casualties.
To maintain this level of hostility against Cuba, and to gain the support of the American people (who are footing the bill) the orchestrators have carefully removed all perception of the Cuban people from the equation. The embargo and related acts of terrorism are not against the masses, but against Castro the dictator; against the Castro regime; against repressive communism; against the generals of the 26th of July Movement (which was vital in the formation of the Communist Party of Cuba); and during the G.W. Bush administration, against the evil dictator. That most of the efforts have only hurt innocents and have never even come close to eliminating the Cuban government is rarely discussed.
Since the failure at Bay of Pigs in April 1961, U.S. policy toward Cuba has been entrenched in a cold-war ideology that exists to this day. A combined State Department/CIA report released to President Kennedy on May 2, 1961, acknowledged that even if the regime collapsed, Cuba “could operate without him (Castro).”
It seems fitting to remind the Obama administration that 48 years after that memo was delivered to a U.S. President, our policy on Cuba remains a relic of that same Cold War.
After dessert, through sips of hot Café Bustelo, I blurt out, “We should have ended the embargo in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union,” and again I’m interrupted by silence. Arturo asserts that “if we had gone in with force then, this would all be over.”
When the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, and Cubans found themselves without a major trading partner, the embargo got meaner, more entrenched in legalistic procedures and extraterritorial reach, first with the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, and then with the Helms-Burton Law of 1996. With Cuba at her most vulnerable, hardliners claimed that the embargo would “crush Castro.” It was this ideological meanness that propelled Cuba into her so called “special period.”
During the Clinton Administration, while we were passing laws aiming to starve the Cuban people, real Cubans were leading the world in energy savings and developing a garden-farming culture that the whole world can now learn from. As a result of losing their main trading partner, and the embargo’s tightening measures, the average Cuban lost more than 20 pounds of bodyweight.
This sudden “thinning” of the Cuban population led to a number of creative homegrown solutions that can now be looked upon as innovations: sustainable communities, garden farming and the use of bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers in place of petrochemical products. As word of the “green movement” spread slowly across the United States during the Clinton Administration, Cubans implemented its ideology as a survival tactic.
In his State of the Union address to the American people on January 29 2002, President G.W. Bush referred to Cuba as a member of the “axis of evil” which included Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Never mind that there was no evidence whatsoever that Cuba should be on that list.
Within a few months, Bush-appointed Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, said in a series of speeches that Cuba had “biological weapons” capabilities and was sharing them with “rogue nations.” Bolton repeated the charges on 10 different occasions, without once offering any evidence to support his claims. The Bush Administration eventually backed away from the Bolton statements, unable to produce any intelligence that would even come close to validating any possible interpretation of the remarks. It was later revealed that Bolton tried to have two State Department intelligence analysts punished for refusing to support his charges against Cuba.
Even Arturo, a hardened embargo supporter and self-described “lover of my American Empire,” is embarrassed by Bolton’s statements. “He’s an asshole,” Arturo admits, “but that doesn’t mean we should end the embargo.” Perhaps no logic will ever change Arturo’s opinion.
President Obama’s largely symbolic gestures of permitting Cuban-Americans to travel to Cuba and allowing families to send money is not nearly enough to stop a half-century of insanity. Aside from putting an end to the embargo, we need to start thinking about getting our troops out of Guantánamo Bay. And that’s only part of the problem the Obama administration faces with Cuba. You can’t just erase the stain of empire lust that has affected the nearly 200-year relationship between two countries. Whatever single action is taken to move us forward into a peaceful accord will only serve to point out how much is still left to do.
J.A. Sierra has been interested in Cuban history since he came to the United States as an 11-year old boy. He continues to believe that Cubans should have as much access to food and medicine as he does, and he believes that the time for peace with Cuba is now. Learn more about the economic embargo against Cuba in Part Two of this article at historyofcuba.com/embargo.htm.