Cuba Confidential: How Wild Were the Secret Negotiations That Led to a Revolution in Our Relationship with Cuba?"

Arts & Activism                                                                                                          17/Oct/17

Response to Article: "Cuba Confidential: How Wild Were the Secret Negotiations That Led to a Revolution in Our Relationship with Cuba?"

Sabina Arias

The most important lesson that I take away from this article is that this issue is multi-layered and cannot be looked at without considering the tumultuous political history of Colonialism. US-Cuban political tension has been high for the past 50 plus years and both Coutries seem to put the defense of their ideals before the defense of humanitarian values. Both Countries accuse each other for invasiveness, yet the terminology that they use is respectively entwined to the communist and capitalist ideals that have marked their history.

One of the main points in this discussion and one that prevails in our Post Cold War society is the US’ demand for Cuba to shift into a Democratic State. The Embargo is used as a way to pressure Cuba into this transition, yet the United States was outvoted in the United Nations General Assembly in 2013; 188 countries voted to condemn the Embargo (only Isreal sided with the US for obvious economic ties), and they still kept it.¹ So that’s not very democratic. And it’s also not Democratic to support brutal dictatorships in countries just because they favor American interests, “such as Hosni Mubarakin Egypt and Augusto Pinochet in Chile”, or Cuban dictator Batista who was known to have killed tortured and imprisioned political dissenters in the name of American interest. ² During the Revolution those who were considered traitors were executed, so it seems like the US and Cuban governments are both guilty of the same acts they call each other on. Then, this ties into the Human Rights problem.

 The US has also kept the embargo in place in order to “pressure the Cuban government to improve human rights.”³ The problem with this argument (and the irony of it) is that the US military has been violating the human rights of Guantanamo Bay prisioners for 15 years, many of whom are not even proven guilty, given a trial or allowed communication with their families to let them know they are even alive. Using methods such as waterboarding for interrogation has been repeatedly condemned as torture by the US government, yet there has been evidence of ex-president George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA director George Tennet of authorizing these torture on prisoners without any prosecutions against them.⁴

Here is where the terminology gets tricky, because from a US government perspective, Guantanamo prisoners are terrorists and America must do anything in its power to protect its citizens and dismantle terrorism. But Cuba has been in the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list from 1982 till recently, so it brings into question, what is a terrorist and who gets to make that call?

The problem is that when you have a mass shooting like the recent one in Las Vegas by a white civilian, American media doesn’t call it an act of terrorism. Terrorism is used only to describe those entities that harbor anti-American sentiment, without looking deeper at how American Imperialism has unequivocally destabilized dozens of countries, putting people in destitute positions where American ideals unavoidably bear a symbol of oppression more than democracy, free trade or freedom of speech.

I know for me growing up in Mexico in a state of “War” that is not officially a war, American ideals carry a different connotation back home than here, but sometimes it’s hard to explain this. Mexico has lost more than 200,000 lives and 30,000 have disappeared, due to a drug war that is subsidized and impelled by America’s illegal drug demands.⁵ These numbers ironically kneel the civilian death tolls in Afghanistan and Iraq over that period. It has put millions of people in a situation where they have no choice but to emigrate in order to preserve their lives or those of their families. This conflict has destroyed the lives of millions of people and created a state of terror and violence. So, after presencing multiple neighbors and family friends get kidnapped by drug cartels throughout my adolescence, American ideals may have a ring of Imperial Terrorism aswell.

This is such a complicated topic to talk about because it is so multilayered, yet I would like to end with a quote by Obama during the Seventh Summit of the Americas, that really resonated with me, because its hard to find one’s center in such a polarizing subject, we may not change the actions of the past, but we have future to look forward to:

“America never makes a claim about
being perfect. We do make a claim about
being open to change…The United States
will not be imprisoned by the past. We’re
looking to the future.”

Works Cited:

1,2. “Cuba Embargo – ProCon.Org.” ProConorg Headlines, cuba-embargo.procon.org/.

3. “Getting Away with Torture.” Human Rights Watch, 12 July 2011,

www.hrw.org/report/2011/07/12/getting-away-torture/bush-administration-and-mistreatment-detainees#page * I think they didn’t include the author(s) of this essay for security purposes of Human Rights Watch.

4. Greenberg, Karen J . “Qué impide realmente el cierre de la prisión en Guantanamo?Cubadebate, 9 May 2016, www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2016/05/09/que-impide-realmente-el-cierre-de-la-prision-en-guantanamo/#.WdQ3ONSnHdQ

5. Mexico, El Pais. “Especial: Año 11 de la Guerra contra el narco.” EL PAIS, Ediciones EL PAIS, 3, Dec. 2016, elpais.com/especiales/2016/guerra-narcotrafico-mexico/.