The indictment of 94-year-old Raúl Castro by the US Justice Department last month is a prelude to “regime change” in Cuba. The US is positioning military assets for a possible attack on the island, following its blockade of oil shipments to the country (itself an act of war)—a move that has led to massive power shortages and suffering on the island. At the time of writing, the power cuts were imperilling the country’s water system, leaving as many as 3 million of the country’s 11 million people without safe drinking water.
As early as February, the United Nations Human Rights Office (UNHRO) warned about the blockade’s effects:
“Intensive care units and emergency rooms are compromised, as are the production, delivery, and storage of vaccines, blood products, and other temperature-sensitive medications. In Cuba, more than 80 percent of water pumping equipment depends on electricity, and power cuts are undermining access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene. The fuel shortage has disrupted the rationing system and the regulated basic food basket, and has affected social protection networks—school feeding, maternity homes, and nursing homes— with the most vulnerable groups being disproportionately impacted.”
Conditions are much worse now than when the UNHRO issued that warning.
The charges against Raúl Castro, who in 2021 retired from public life, stem from an incident in 1996, when the Cuban air force shot down two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an organisation of right-wing Cuban exiles dedicated to overthrowing the Cuban regime. Under the leadership of Jorge Basulto, a Central Intelligence Agency asset who had been part of the agency’s failed invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the “Brothers” staged provocations to increase conflict between the US and Cuba, heading off normalisation between the two countries.
The 1996 incident had the effect of scotching the Clinton administration’s tentative steps toward normalisation with Cuba years after the Cold War against the Soviet Union ended. And it produced a propaganda coup for the Cuban American right, which pushed Congress to pass, and Clinton to sign, the Helms-Burton Act.
Helms-Burton reinforced the decades-old US embargo against Cuba, and even extended its reach to include sovereign countries trading with Cuba, such as Canada and the US’s European allies. A recent US Supreme Court ruling (an 8-1 decision including two of the three Democrat-appointed justices) supported its provision to allow US companies and Cuban exiles to sue the Cuban government for property expropriations that the Cuban revolutionary government conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
If nothing else, the indictment of Castro and the Supreme Court decision show that the US holds a long grudge against Cuba. How did the US government get to the point where, under the pretext of arresting a man who will soon turn 95, it may well unleash the world’s most powerful military against a weak state that is on its way to social collapse?
A long history
In the late 1800s, Cuba was, along with Puerto Rico, the last of Spain’s colonies in the Americas. The US was beginning its ascent in global politics and looking to flex its imperial muscle in the Western hemisphere. Cuba, as one of the last outposts of a decaying empire, was a choice target.
In fact, Cuba was one of the US’s largest trading partners by the end of the nineteenth century. And US businesses had their eye on the island as a possible US state. One US financier said: “It makes the water come to my mouth when I think of the State of Cuba as one in our family”. The US government had even offered to purchase Cuba from Spain. Spain refused to sell.
In 1895, Cuban nationalists launched a military uprising against Spain. Three years later, the US invaded the island under the pretext of avenging the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbour. Initially, the Cuban rebels thought the US would support their demand for independence and allied with the US against Spain. But after the US dispatched Spain, it crushed the independence movement under a military occupation that lasted until 1902.
The US withdrew its forces (while holding on to a military base at Guantánamo Bay) but continued its control of the island under the US Congress’s 1901 Platt Amendment. The amendment, named after the US senator who sponsored it, guaranteed US oversight of Cuban finances and the untrammelled right to intervene politically or militarily in Cuba.
The domination over Cuba lasted officially until 1934, and was an important milestone for a rising US imperialism that was turning the Caribbean into what Eric Williams called “the American Mediterranean”. As Jenny Pearce wrote in Under the Eagle, her classic history of US imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean:
“Cuba emerged as a model for United States imperialism. American economic and political domination had been secured without the seizure of a colony. The United States could continue to boast its anti-colonial traditions and beliefs despite having transformed Cuba into a virtual dependency.”
US agribusiness turned Cuba into a giant industrial sugar plantation over the succeeding decades. At the time of the 1959 revolution, more than 70 percent of Cuba’s arable land belonged to large landowners, and between 25 and 40 percent was in foreign hands. Meanwhile, the US’s foothold in Cuba and Puerto Rico helped it project power throughout the Caribbean, including engineering Panama’s secession from Colombia as a precondition for building the shipping canal through that country.
The Great Depression brought economic collapse and agitation for change, leading to a military coup and US pressure on the dictator Geraldo Machado to resign. In the developments that followed, one of the coup’s organisers, Fulgencio Batista, emerged as the main leader. The US backed Batista, who ruled as a dictator from 1940, dominating the Cuban government until the 1959 revolution overthrew him.
Initial US wariness of the new government led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara gave way to open hostility when it implemented a 1959 agrarian reform that broke up the old sugar plantations. Over the next two years, Castro’s government moved to expropriate foreign-owned businesses on the island. The US then began its decades-long trade and exchange embargo.
By that time, Washington had already given up on trying to influence the Cuban government and had decided to overthrow it instead. The CIA, working with a group of right-wing Cuban exiles, failed in an attempted coup. The April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco was the most spectacular of a number of CIA-led plots (including many harebrained schemes involving exploding cigars and Mafia hitmen) to overthrow the government or to assassinate its leaders.
US belligerence against the Castro government led the latter to engage more fully with the Soviet Union. Indeed, only after the Bay of Pigs did the Cuban government declare its nationalist revolution to be “socialist”—by which it meant a one-party state modelled on the USSR. The USSR had tended to defer to the US’s claimed regional dominance in Latin America. But when Washington deployed nuclear missiles to Italy and Turkey in 1961 and then engaged in an extensive terrorist campaign in Cuba following the Bay of Pigs failure, the USSR dispatched its own missiles and other military hardware to Cuba in 1962. The world was closer to nuclear war than at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Subsequently, the Russians negotiated a climbdown with Washington behind the backs of the Cubans.
So, until 1968, when Castro supported the USSR’s suppression of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the Cuban government’s relationship with Moscow was frosty. But to Washington, Cuba was an outpost of “communism” and a source of chaos and instability in the region, even though the Cold War masked a fundamental continuity in US-Cuba relations.
“The United States acted toward Cuba the same way it had acted toward other Latin American countries long before the Cold War: leaving democratic political rhetoric aside, what really counted for Washington was the defense of US economic, political and military imperial interests in its ‘backyard’”, Cuban-born socialist Sam Farber wrote in his book Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959.
Farber’s point should be more obvious in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc in 1989-91. Moscow withdrew its subsidies to the Cuban economy, leading to a “special period” of economic hardship and contraction in Cuba in the early 1990s. The government’s austerity measures led to the Cuban armed forces being cut by more than 80 percent. In the 1970s, the Cuban military—hundreds of thousands strong—conducted expeditions in Africa that proved decisive in defeating apartheid South Africa’s intervention in Angola’s anti-colonial civil war. Today, Cuba fields a force of fewer than 49,000 active personnel.
The post-Cold War period created opportunities for US normalisation with Cuba, which significant sections of the US capitalist class support. But under the Trump administration (both Trump 1.0 and 2.0), these efforts have been derailed—in part, because the South Florida Cuban right remains a powerful constituency in the Republican Party.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio built his career through the right-wing Cuban American political machine in Florida. Anti-socialism retains significant appeal not only among Cuban exiles. Other significant Florida groups—such as Venezuelans and Nicaraguans who fled “socialism” for Miami—have provided a new source of émigré support for Republican and conservative politics. With Trump effectively outsourcing policy-making to his coterie of aides, Rubio’s obsession with “finishing the job” of rolling back the Cuban revolution may have become US policy.
But under Trump 2.0, something bigger than paying off a political constituency is at work, as the “Trump corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine in last year’s National Security Strategy indicated. The document is a throwback to the days when the US treated the Caribbean as a US lake and the Western hemisphere as its “backyard”.
Whether or not the US will prosecute a full-scale war against Cuba, its show of force in the Caribbean sends a message that Washington is asserting its power in the region in more unilateral and militarist ways. It’s not clear if this amounts to a “pivot” to Latin America away from Asia or the Middle East, but it’s in line with Trumpian bluster about ejecting Chinese corporations from the Panama Canal Zone or taking over Greenland.
The US’s pending defeat in its war against Iran probably won’t dissuade Trump from attacking Cuba or from attempting a “snatch and grab” of Raúl Castro akin to his military-led kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in January. Indeed, it’s quite possible that Trump would consider Cuba “low-hanging fruit” to distract from his fiasco in Iran.
But any sort of military adventure in Cuba would only make the current intolerable situation worse for the Cuban people. If a US assault created mass casualties, how would the injured be treated in hospitals that barely function now? Would a US attack create a refugee crisis as thousands attempt to flee the island to Florida? And how would US naval forces respond, given that preventing “destabilising migration” is one of the National Security Strategy’s aims?
Another unknown is how the Cuban people would respond to US aggression. The Cuban government claims that more than 1 million Cuban citizens are enrolled in paramilitary forces that could be mobilised to defend Cuban sovereignty. The situation may not get to that point, but a researcher at the US Army War College considered the worst-case scenario (from the US perspective) to be “volatile and dangerous”.
With that possibility in mind, the US military, the State Department and the CIA have held a series of meetings with Cuban military and government officials. Given the US record of duplicity in the Middle East, it’s hard to know if these are genuine efforts to avoid military conflict or if they are meant to bamboozle the Cubans before a US attack.
For socialists, neither possibility should determine how we respond. We start with the proposition that we oppose US intervention in whatever form—from sanctions to war. We oppose any US invasion. We call for an end to the current US blockade of oil deliveries. And we call for an end to the US embargo that dates from the early 1960s. Moreover, if Cubans want to emigrate to the US, we welcome them along with all other immigrants who are targets of Trump’s xenophobia.
We don’t take this position because we think that the Cuban government is socialist. Despite its leaders’ sometimes radical rhetoric, it’s based on a state-capitalist economy ruled by a repressive state.
Whatever pretences the US uses to justify intervention in Cuba, it has zero commitment to Cuban self-determination and zero care for the lives and living standards of the Cuban people. The US has no right to determine—or even have a say in—the Cuban people’s future. Only Cubans have that right.
