What America’s seizure of websites says about the ‘rules-based’ order   

Rules are by definition things that apply universally, so it’s hard to convince the world to respect them if you consistently violate them.

 

Written by 
Robert Wright and Connor Echols

 

This article first appeared in the Nonzero Newsletter 

 

This week Peter Beinart, writing in the New York Times, took aim at one of the Blob’s favorite terms: the “rules-based order.” The Biden administration often invokes the term, typically in reference to the threat allegedly posed to that order by China. The problem, Beinart notes, is that no one ever bothers to explain what rules constitute the order—what rules America is supposedly abiding by while its adversaries violate them. “Since the ‘rules-based order’ is never adequately defined, America’s claim to uphold it can never be disproved,” Beinart writes.

This sort of skepticism about boilerplate “rules-based order” rhetoric has been growing lately, and that’s a welcome development in foreign policy discourse—maybe even a sign that the Blob’s days of hegemony are numbered. The trend dates back to the Trump administration, when observers noted that some of the Blobsters most loudly complaining about Trump’s failure to uphold the “rules-based order” had championed things like invading and bombing countries in violation of international law. When Biden took office, and staffed his foreign policy team with exactly this kind of rules-based-order scold, it was an open invitation for Beinart and other Blob critics to turn up the heat.

And yet—so much more heat is needed! The average member of the foreign policy establishment, to say nothing of the average American voter, has no idea how hypocritical America’s sermons about following the rules look from abroad. As it happens, an object lesson in this hypocrisy took shape on the same day Beinart’s piece was published, when the US Justice Department announced that it had disabled 36 Iran-linked websites. Let’s take a look at this exercise in American rules enforcement and try to imagine how it might look from perspectives other than America’s. Three kinds of rules, in particular, are implicated in the Justice Department’s website takedown:    

1. Rules against election interference. As Joshua Keating notes in Slate, the legal basis for seizing 30 of those websites was a Trump-era executive order authorizing sanctions against foreign actors that have interfered in American elections. So is one of the rules in the “rules-based order” that influencing a foreign election—with propaganda, misinformation, whatever—is forbidden? If so, America is due for a scolding. The political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke writes in his book Covert Regime Change:“Throughout the Cold War, the United States recurrently sought to influence foreign elections by covertly providing funding, advisory assistance, and propaganda to help its preferred candidates win their elections… All told, US-supported parties won their elections in twelve out of sixteen covert campaigns.”

And of course, if the “wrong” candidate wins an election, the US can always intervene after the fact. Like when it helped depose Iran’s elected leader in 1953, replacing him with a brutal dictator who ruled until the 1979 Iranian revolution, which ushered in an Islamist regime that, not surprisingly, has been able to get political mileage out of anti-American rhetoric ever since! Also not surprisingly, this regime apparently feels justified in using its websites to influence—even “interfere in”—American elections.

During the Obama administration, Biden himself was supportive of something that bore at least some resemblance to a coup against a democratically elected leader. American officials went to Ukraine, egged on protestors who wanted to oust its pro-Russian president, and meanwhile maneuvered behind the scenes to select a new head of government—who took the reins after the country’s elected president, with armed opponents roaming the streets, fled the country to ensure his survival. Apparently the Biden foreign policy team (notably including Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was centrally involved in the Ukraine affair) doesn’t consider deposing elected presidents as serious an assault on democracy as spreading propaganda during an election.

2. Rules against terrorism. Three of the websites were taken down on grounds that they belonged to Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group that in 2009 was deemed a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department.

Why the terrorist designation? Because the Katai’ib Hezbollah militia was part of the Iraqi insurgency and killed US troops. Of course, the troops were there because the US had violated the mother of all rules—the one against attacking countries that haven’t attacked you, the rule that, more than any other single rule, the United Nations was founded on. But let’s leave that fact aside and look at why Iran might consider it ironic that the US would deem lethal insurgents terrorists.

Didn’t the US, during the Obama administration, arm insurgents in Syria who killed lots of people, no doubt including civilians? And quite possibly including Iranian troops (who, unlike American troops in Iraq, were in Syria at the behest of the government—a fact that, however brutal the Syrian regime, still makes a big difference under international law)? 

Also: When Israel arranges to have Iranian nuclear scientists murdered, isn’t that kind of like terrorism? So shouldn’t the US sanction Israel—or, at least, signal that it doesn’t approve of such terrorist acts, just to clarify that its broader collaboration with Israel on anti-Iran measures doesn’t mean it supports rule violation?

Oh, wait! That would be awkward, since its collaboration with Israel on anti-Iran measures does mean it supports rule violation. During the Obama administration, the US and Israel together launched a cyberattack that made Iranian centrifuges spin out of control, which presumably violates some rule or other. (Unless the US wants to declare that it’s OK if Iran launches a cyberattack that makes America’scentrifuges spin out of control.)

And a technical question: When in January of 2020 the US assassinated Iran’s most important military leader, was that terrorism or was it more like an act of war? Either way, since it had no plausible justification under international law, shouldn’t presidential candidate Biden have done more than just fret that the killing would be “escalatory”? Shouldn’t he have said it threatens the “rule-based order”?

3. Suppression of speech. The question of whether free speech is one of the “rules” in the “rules based order” opens up a can of worms—questions about whether by “rules based order” you’re referring to the “liberal international order,” and, if so, which specific meaning of “liberal international order” you have in mind. But for present purposes it’s enough to say that members of the Biden team have been known to complain about censorship in places like Russia and China.

So it’s worth asking: What does it do for the credibility of these sermons when we take down a bunch of websites of foreign origin because of their content? Keating, in Slate, does a good job of assessing this question. After acknowledging that some of these websites conveyed disinformation and did other objectionable things, he concludes, “Disinformation and election interference are serious problems, but a world in which governments all reserve the right to tightly control the information that can reach their citizens from outside their borders is exactly the sort of world that governments like Russia, China, and Iran want to create.”

Note Keating’s hidden assumption: that effectively promulgating international rules means abiding by them. Rules, after all, are by definition things that apply universally, so it’s hard to convince the world to respect them if you violate them. In other words: Keating takes the word “rules” seriously. No senior figure on the Biden foreign policy team—certainly not National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan or Secretary of State Antony Blinken, both of whom love to rhapsodize about the “rules-based order”—has shown any inclination to do that.

 

 Read more:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/06/29/what-americas-seizure-of-websites-says-about-the-rules-based-order/

 

 

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Amid power outages, food shortages, and continued fears over COVID-19, amplified by 60 years of economic strangulation by a US blockade, thousands of protestors in Cuba have taken to the streets to demand answers and action from their government. Mainstream media outlets in the US have jumped at the chance to paint these protests as singularly focused on repudiating the communist revolution, using them as a pretext for greater imperialist intervention, but the reality on the ground is much more complex. Author and historian Andrés Pertierra joins us to examine the deeper historical and political contexts surrounding the protests and to discuss how viewers outside of Cuba can navigate the media frenzy. Pertierra is a historian of Cuba and US-Cuban relations in the 19th and 20th centuries; he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Havana and is currently a PhD student in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

 

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https://therealnews.com/us-media-co-opts-cuba-protests-for-imperialist-ends

 

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Exclusive: Congressional Republicans Seek To Give Biden War Powers For Cuba

 

 

GOP leadership also included Big Tech in meetings in order to explore feasibility of providing internet access on the island.

 

West Virginia GOP Rep. Alex Mooney is planning to introduce a new congressional joint resolution to grant President Joe Biden the ability to use war powers to deliver humanitarian aid to Cuba amid growing unrest in the country.

Images of the resolution reviewed by The American Conservative show that “The Authorization for the Use of Military Forces Against Cuba to Ensure the Delivery of Humanitarian Aid” has three specific goals:

1. “ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid to the people of Cuba, including but not limited to food, water, and medicine;”
2. “create a safe zone in Cuba for the Cuban people to safely receive humanitarian aid;” and
3. “prevent humanitarian aid from being stolen by the Cuban government or its forces.”

Mooney’s office stated, “The Congressman hasn’t introduced any legislation related to Cuba. If he does introduce legislation we’ll be happy to comment at that time. Our office doesn’t comment on hypothetical legislation.”

Congressional Republicans have also held separate, virtual, member-level meetings regarding how to respond to the protests in Cuba and have invited representatives of large corporations to them. Emails also reviewed by The American Conservative show an official from Sen. Rick Scott’s office coordinated a meeting on July 19 with members of Congress and representatives with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Verizon, and the wireless communications trade association CTIA.

Sources detailed that senators spoke to companies from Silicon Valley to see what was technically feasible as far as getting internet access into Cuba. “If the people of Cuba can see the outpouring of support they have from the United States and the world can see the atrocities happening in that country, the further we’ll be toppling that regime,” said a Senate aide.

The American Conservative reached out to Scott’s office for comment, but did not receive a response in time for this report’s publication.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced last week that Mooney would be among those Republicans placed on the “Leader’s Advisory Team on Cuba,” and Mooney’s office has been actively courting other Republicans to support the resolution, including Florida Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Maria Salazar, and Sen. Marco Rubio, according to emails reviewed by The American Conservative. A source told TheAmerican Conservative that Rubio would not support Mooney’s drafted AUMF.

Those emails reveal that Diaz-Balart’s office opposed the measure, with one official writing that the Republican does “not trust the Biden Administration” because they “would only prop up the Cuban regime with this aid.” However, other communications show that Diaz-Balart planned to write the president a letter “urging him to build on [the Trump administration’s] robust policy toward Cuba and to lead a coordinated, global effort of democratic allies and multilateral organizations to stand with the Cuban people.”

Over the last week, massive protests have erupted among Cuba’s citizens over collapsing conditions brought about by the communist-controlled government. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cuba’s economy collapsed by 11 percent last year amid the coronavirus. Money brought into their economy through tourism quickly dried up as countries enacted lockdowns and travel restrictions and remittances plummeted.

Citizens are reportedly forced to wait in line for hours to buy basic commodities, such as bread and chicken, or even use public transportation. Cubans have also seen their electricity and lights shut down for hours at a time. All the while, coronavirus continues to spread.

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that it was placing sanctions on the Cuban Minister of Defense, Alvaro Lopez Miera, and on the Cuban Ministry of the Interior. “The Cuban people are protesting for the fundamental and universal rights they deserve from their government,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a statement. “Treasury will continue to enforce its Cuba-related sanctions, including those imposed today, to support the people of Cuba in their quest for democracy and relief from the Cuban regime.”

The Biden administration said those sanctions were put in place because of the Cuban government’s moves to quash protests. In a separate statement, the president said that those sanctions are only “the beginning” of what the administration plans to do. “The United States will continue to sanction individuals responsible for oppression of the Cuban people,” he said.

The U.S. has a largely dismal record of intervening in Cuba, ranging from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion organized by the CIA to oust Fidel Castro from power, which led to heightened tensions during the Cuban missile crisis, to multiple failed CIA plots to assassinate Castro.

 

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Ryan Girdusky is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, a host of the TAC Right Now podcast, and the author of They’re Not Listening: How The Elites Created the National Populist Revolution.

 

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/exclusive-congressional-republicans-seek-to-give-biden-war-powers-for-cuba/

 

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Listening to the pronouncements on Cuba by our cardboard President I wonder what the hell the United States is trying to do in Latin America? Biden, a lifelong hack of little mind and that going south, runs on, or his ventriloquist does, about his support for the Cuban people. He cares deeply about the Cuban people. Yes he does. So why does this malignant drab want to ruin their lives? He is placing more sanctions against the island. Is he too stupid to realize that sanctions hurt only the people, not the leaders, who can get their prime rib and good bourbon anyway? Or does he simply not care?

If there is any place on this or any other planet that poses less danger to America than Cuba, except Venezuela or maybe some undiscovered tribe in the Brazilian rainforest, I can’t imagine who. There are eleven million Cubans, and all but about five want to work, drink, play with their children, and make phenomenal music that would send the solemn horses’ asses of the thinktanks into therapy. For sixty years the goddam United States has tried to starve them, sanction them, make them as miserable as possible out of a weird sort of Nordic sadism. It is sickening.

Kamala might not stand for it. Of course, standing is not her primary talent.

What does this wind-up political toy know about Cuba? Joe presides, dimly, over a country that for over half a century has done everything it can to ensure the misery of those eleven million innocent people, doing everything it can to make their lives as hard as possible. But Joe, he of the forty-weight sincerity probably learned at Central Casting, feels for the Cuban people. Yes, he does. Where did we get this guy?

Has the sadistic muppet ever even been to Cuba? I have, years ago on a magazine assignment. I had to get permission from Treasury under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Why? The Cubans were not my enemy. They aren’t anybody’s enemy. We found them to be, to our unsurprise, friendly and hospitable people, even though we were from the country that is their chief source of misery. We—my wife and I—spent a fair few nights in a cheap outdoor restaurant on the malecón, watching the waves shatter against the breakwater with a roar and burst of spume and chatting with the clientele. Curiously, neither they nor the other people we met resembled the evil communists imagined by the First Pabulum Dispenser on Pennsylvania Avenue. On other occasions, Violeta being mildly crazy, we spent hours walking the poor sections, streets lined with buildings of an age now past falling apart from the general poverty of the island. All in all, an agreeable Latin American country but ground down by merciless American strangulation.

But, you see, it’s for democracy and human rights. America is all about human rights. Ask the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laos, Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Somalis, Yeminis, Libyans, Iranians, Venezuelans.

Why does America torture Cuba? Because Washington divides countries into two categories, those that submit, and enemies. Which countries don’t lick American boots? Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and…Cuba. America does everything, and will do everything it can to crush the disobedient: embargos, sanctions, invasion, isolation from the world financial system, coups, assassination, tariffs, bombing. When vassals it calls allies, such as Europe, begin to show independence, as by allowing Nordstream II, it sanctions them as readily as it does the enemies. But, see, it isn’t to protect the Empire, to hurt anybody to any extent to remain dominant, to ruin millions upon millions of people who have no interest in politics, in order to maintain hegemony. No. It’s to overthrow dictators. Except those useful to Washington, which it frequently installs.

Is it possible that Biden believes his own twaddle? He is not a pinnacle of neuronal radiance, having finished low in his class in a mediocre law school, after being caught cheating. He appears to have little experience of the world. Yes, as VP he met a hundred world leaders in diplomatic banquets. But has he ever lived in another country? Walked its neighborhoods? Eaten in the side streets? Dated its women? Talked politics with other than the political class? Does he speak another language?

An eerie disconnect lies between America’s rulers and the America they rule, the world they live in. For example, Latin immigration is a crucial issue in America. How much time has Biden spent in, say, Mexico? In the great barrio of East LA? Race relations between black and white are a disaster. When was the last time he dined in Anacostia, Washington’s main black neighborhood? Has he ever been to Anacostia? The police, their behavior, problems, and the world in which they work, rock the country. Has Biden ever been in a police car? Has he any idea of the bad sections at three a.m., of the reality of the streets?

America is constantly at war. Has he been in a war? Seen one? Has he even been in the military?

But he torments the Cubans. For truth, justice, and the American way. Which is the problem. This is the American way.

This is not new. American government has been dropping toward the level of Belize for decades. We had the Clintons selling favors to sordid foreign governments and Bill doing chunky interns in the Offal Office when he wasn’t with Hill in Epstein’s underage ginch island. We had Bush II, who was mostly just dim, a flickering bulb in no danger of kidnapping by Mensa. Trump, a crooked real-estate hustler with the elegance of a truss ad, now under criminal investigation. At the moment we are supernally blessed with Biden with a kid deep in furtive shenanigans involving influence peddling to Ukraine. The morals of the Sinaloa cartel, the intellect of Reader’s Digest, warbling in three-part harmony about transgender rights.

Kamala is not without qualifications but, if Joe made use of them, he would be in divorce court.

The country is in the hands of Thorazine cases. Of pathologically aggressive mongooses, or mongoslings. I wouldn’t trust them to run a lemonade stand, even with supervision by their mothers much less a country bristling with overpriced weaponry that might, unexpectedly, actually work at an awkward moment.

The proportion of draft dodgers among our current martial virgins illuminates their unfamiliarity with America. Bush II, who sheltered in the National Guard. Cheney (I had other priorities). Trump, a golden crested cockatoo speaking English like a brain-damaged twelve-year-old and threatening North Korea with fire and brimstone. Pompeo, who hid in the Navy, a non-combat outfit. Bolton, with his codpiece mustache. Biden, who played football in college but developed asthma whenever in the vicinity of a draft board.

Maybe the warlike posturing of these Beltway isolates is to persuade themselves that they are of one blood with Hells Angels. I imagine all three of Trump’s fern-bar Napoleons, Bannon, Pompeo, and Bolton, sitting in a dark room in the West Wing, masturbating furiously in passionate autolubricity while reading bayonet catalogs, with Trump in the next room tirelessly watching reruns of himself on Fox News. And Biden, sending the Navy to say nya-nya-nay to the Russians in the Black Sea, bowwow, woof, grrr. pondering whether to start World War Three as a publicity stunt in time for the midterms. But none of these was going to risk his sweet ass in a war when he could send some kid from Memphis.

Look at Washington’s, now Biden’s, foreign policy. The Russians and Chinese work on a trade route over the Arctic to have a shorter route than through Suez. Biden hyperventilates, Views With Alarm, and sends warships to Confront Russia. How do you confront a trade route ? No end upset with China; Biden gets a pack of poodle countries to send warships to deter Beijing in the Indian Ocean. Deter it from what? What do they think China is going to do to the Indian Ocean? Poison it? Drain it? Now we have all sorts of poodleties driving warships around the Black Sea, to Send a Message to Russia. Why not Western Union? Gmail? Little boys saying, “Nya nya nya.” Really. They are just like teen-age gangs with their stupid turf wars.

Now we have Biden, a leftover Cold Warrior who performs the three duties essential in a President, obeying Israel, protecting Wall Street, and shoveling money into the arms industry. Joe could be done in software as a senior project at a good high school and no one would know the difference. Think of the savings. Instead of flying expensively to foreign countries, he could be emailed. But he won’t allow remittances to Cubans because he wants to starve them. What did the lady say about the banality of evil? The man, if he quite is one, makes me sick.

 

Write Fred at [email protected] Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid heartless autodeleton. All read, reply not guaranteed due to volume.

 

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President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has scoffed at the notion that Mexico should honor a US-imposed embargo on Cuba, as his country sends aid to the island in defiance of Washington’s suffocating economic restrictions.

 

Defending his decision to fuel shipments and other humanitarian aid to Cuba, Obrador said on Tuesday that US sanctions on the socialist state were “inhumane,” and that “independent” Mexico was well within its rights to defy the unilaterally imposed embargo. 

Earlier this week, a Mexican cargo ship loaded with 100,000 barrels of diesel fuel set sail for Cuba. The Mexican government said the fuel would be used to provide power for Cuban hospitals. 

Two additional vessels loaded with medical supplies and food embarked in the following days. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry described the shipments as humanitarian assistance aimed at helping Cuba overcome the coronavirus pandemic. 

Washington has tried to penalize ships that deliver goods to Cuba by preventing them from docking later at US ports, Obrador noted. The rule is one of the main ways the US enforces its embargo. 

The US government has ratcheted up sanctions aimed at some Cuban officials accused of human rights abuses following anti-government protests in the country earlier this month. 

Mexico isn’t the only country that has openly bypassed Washington’s economic restrictions. On Saturday, Russia sent a large shipment of food and medical supplies to the island. Cuba’s trade minister applauded the move, tweeting: “We are not alone.”

 

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https://www.rt.com/news/530526-mexico-fuel-cuba-us-sanctions-inhumane/

 

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The US Blockade on Cuba Must End

BY
BRANKO MARCETIC

 

For sixty years, the United States has aimed to strangle Cuba’s economy and inflict misery on the Cuban people. Blockades are methods of war — and it’s time for the war on Cuba to end.

 

“They always blame the United States,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on the Senate floor this week. “The embargo, the first thing they blame, it’s the embargo. ‘The embargo is causing all this.’”

Not long after the UN General Assembly voted for the twenty-ninth straight year to condemn the six-decade-long US embargo on Cuba — a 184-2 vote that pitted only the US and Israeli governments against the rest of the entire world — the country has erupted in massive protests over widespread food and medicine shortages. A chorus of voices, ranging from Bernie Sanders and other congressional progressives to former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have blamed the conditions on the long-standing US policy, and called for it to be finally lifted.

Regime-change advocates like Rubio have pushed back against this. For them, the embargo is irrelevant to what’s now happening in the country, which they claim instead is a product of “six decades of suffering under totalitarian socialism and communism.” Predictably, their preferred response to the current protests doesn’t involve ending the policy.

But the reality is that the US “embargo” — or blockade, more accurately — was designed to exacerbate scarcity and encourage social unrest in Cuba. For decades, the blockade has strangled the country’s economy and deprived Cubans of access to essentials like medical supplies, its success at creating misery only intensifying with the fall of the Soviet Union, the coronavirus pandemic, and four years of “maximum pressure” under President Trump.

 

As eighty House Democrats told Joe Biden at the start of this year, “with the stroke of a pen,” he could undo Trump’s actions and “assist struggling Cuban families and promote a more constructive approach by promptly returning to the Obama-Biden administration policy of engagement and normalization of relations.” But this obvious course of action is the very least Washington should do. The US blockade has been a generations-long undeclared economic war on Cuba, one that has consistently failed even on its own terms while inflicting enormous pain on ordinary Cubans.

The Undeclared War

The US blockade on Cuba has been a key part of Washington’s long-standing war on the country, launched shortly after Fidel Castro led a revolution overthrowing the country’s US-backed military dictatorship in 1959.

Things didn’t start out entirely hostile. The Eisenhower administration publicly took a cagey wait-and-see attitude toward the new government. Meeting with Castro for three and a half hours, then–vice president Richard Nixon advised him, according to a post-meeting memo, “that it was the responsibility of a leader not always to follow public opinion but to help to direct it in proper channels, not to give the people what they think they want at a time of emotional stress but to make them want what they ought to have.” With a tinge of regret, Nixon recounted that Castro’s “primary concern was with developing programs for economic progress.”

By September that year, as Castro restricted private ownership of agricultural land and prepared to nationalize foreign-owned industry, the US ambassador to the country expressed “our serious concern at the treatment being given American private interests in Cuba.” The next month, president Dwight Eisenhower approved a program backing anti-Castro elements — including Cuban exiles launching raids on the country and, later, US-supplied sabotage and bombing campaigns — in the hopes that it would topple Castro and make him appear to have caused his own undoing.

 

Read more:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/us-policy-cuba-blockade-embargo-protests-rubio-history-war-covid-food-medicine-shortages

 

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BY Jeremy Kuzmarov

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine.

 

After having lied about WMDs, Russia Gate, chemical weapons in Syria and so many other things, the U.S. intelligence community is now advancing the lie that Cuba is hosting a Chinese spy base that enables China to spy on the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal reported on June 8 that China and Cuba had reached an agreement in principle to build an electronic eavesdropping station on the island and that China planned to pay cash-strapped Cuba billions of dollars as part of the negotiations.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, however, said in an MSNBC interview that The Wall Street Journalreport was “not accurate” and that the U.S. was watching Chinese influence activities around the world very carefully.

An anonymous source familiar with the intelligence says it suggests that a deal has been struck in principle but there has not been any movement on building the spy facility.

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said that the slanderous speculation about a Chinese spy base was causing “harm and alarm without observing minimum patterns of communication and without providing data or evidence to support what they disseminate.”[1]

Mobilizing Support for Regime Change 

The Chinese spy base fabrication is obviously designed to try to mobilize public support for the Biden administration’s regime-change policies.

Biden’s election had raised expectations among many Cubans of a return to the Obama days, when the United States sought to bury the last vestige of the Cold War by restoring diplomatic relations with Havana and calling for an end to the embargo.

However, when protests broke out early in Biden’s presidency, the Biden administration supported the dissidents and doubled down on Donald Trump’s hard-line anti-Cuba policies.

It expanded sanctions and the economic embargo of Cuba, which is opposed by 185 countries and, according to Yuri Gala López, the Ambassador of the Permanent Mission of Cuba to the UN, costs Cubans $455 million per month.

Obama had argued that making it easier for Americans to travel to Cuba and invest in its nascent private sector stood a better chance of promoting economic and political changes on the island than the more directly confrontational regime-change policy Washington has pursued since the 1960s.

Biden went along with Obama’s policy though, in 1996 as a U.S. Senator, he had supported tightening the already devastating U.S. embargo on Cuba through the Helms-Burton Act, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Fidel Castro called Helms-Burton a “shameful” bill, which paved the way for “economic genocide.” In addition to tightening economic sanctions, it increased support for Cuban exile groups and made it official U.S. policy to support regime change in Cuba.

 

In 2008, Biden stated that he was against “lifting the embargo until there is a response to political prisoners—all the things that are wrong with this Castro administration.”

Besides his own pro-imperialist sensibilities, Biden’s policy shift from Obama reflects the influence of Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants and an ardent champion of regime-change policies who criticized Obama’s gambit toward Cuba.

Cruelty of Maximum Pressure Policies

The cruelty of Menendez’s approach was underscored at an International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism focused on Cuba on June 10 and 11. See video here and here.

Organized by an array of peace and social justice organizations, the hearings aimed to spotlight the pernicious impact of U.S. sanctions functioning as a “key tool of U.S. imperialism.”

The first speaker at the hearing, Yuri Gala López, emphasized the Biden administration was continuing to apply a “maximum pressure policy” on Cuba inherited from the Trump administration, whose purpose was to cripple its economy in order to facilitate unrest and the eventual overthrow of Cuba’s communist government.

This strategy has essentially been in place since 1960 following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, which toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and nationalized Cuba’s economy while advancing land reform and instituting free health care and education.

López cited an April 1960 memorandum by Lester D. Mallory, the Deputy Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs at the time of the Cuban Revolution, which emphasized that, since the majority of Cubans supported Fidel Castro and there was no effective political opposition, the U.S. should try to create economic hardship for the population by denying money and supplies and cutting off trade, which would bring about hunger and desperation and the eventual overthrow of Castro’s government.

Mallory’s memo provided the basis for U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba that remains essentially unchanged after six decades.

According to López, the impact of the U.S. blockade has been devastating in human terms, resulting in material shortages and scarcity designed to sow the seeds of popular dissatisfaction with the Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel administrations.

The economic damage from the embargo is at least $154 billion, along with thousands killed in terrorist acts directed largely from U.S. soil.

Other speakers at the hearing emphasized that the U.S. goal was to punish Cuba for its defiance and establishment of a humane governing structure that serves as an alternative to the inhuman capitalist system.

In the agricultural sector, because of the blockade, farmers are deprived of needed technologies and have difficulty exporting their products. Transportation is impeded and certain medicines and medical treatments are difficult to obtain. The U.S. even blocked the delivery of respirators following the outbreak of COVID-19.

Because of a remarkable medical system nevertheless, Cuba has obtained lower infant mortality rates than in the U.S. and parallel life expectancy. This is because of the Cuban government’s investment of its resources in the social and human needs of its people, unlike in the U.S. where neo-liberal austerity is the norm and so much money is invested in the military.

Cuba’s function as a zone of peace was evident in its recent role in helping to broker an important peace agreement in Colombia between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group.

Cuba has generally been labeled by U.S. administrations as a terrorist state and accused of providing a platform for spycraft and subversion into the U.S. when, in reality, it is the U.S. which has terrorized Cuba for six decades and tried to deliberately impoverish and starve its people in the vain hope that they could achieve the long-held goal of regime change and turn the clock back to the 1950s.

 

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https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/06/24/u-s-intelligence-agencies-advance-disinformation-about-chinese-spy-base-in-cuba-to-try-and-gain-support-for-cruel-embargo-that-costs-cubans-455-million-per-month/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4Q-ufV-sM

 

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