A Blockade
Against Humanity
By Atilio
A. Boron
On October 28th, the United
Nations General Assembly will once again bring a resolution to a vote,
requiring the United States to put an end to the blockade against Cuba in effect
since 1961. Just as has occurred each
time since 1991 up until the present day, that resolution will be approved
practically unanimously, ratifying the international community’s condemnation
of the United States and reinforcing Washington’s tremendous isolation in the
debate, due to a policy that has not only brutally chastised the Cuban people
but also constitutes a threat to humanity as a whole.
Conscious that by its nature, it violates
the most basic norms of international law and human rights, the empire’s
publicists and their local spokesmen have unleashed, as on so many other
occasions, a persistent semantic battle aimed at confusing and misleading
worldwide public opinion. To this end
they resort to a euphemism: they refer to the blockade as an “embargo” and
present it as though it were merely a commercial matter. This is how they hide the far reaching U.S.
blockade against Cuba: a blockade that is economic, commercial, financial and
technological, but also international (penalizing as it does, companies in
third countries who trade with Cuba, and hindering Cuba’s diplomatic relations
with the rest of the world); informational (by preventing Cubans from gaining
access to high-speed broadband internet); social (making the re-unification of
Cuban families separated by emigration difficult or impossible); and cultural,
by impeding the free movement of artists, writers, intellectuals and scientists
between Cuba and the United States.[1]
It is a blockade that is not only
illegitimate in light of civilization’s highest values but also a blatant
infringement of international law,
designed to bring Cuba to its knees by causing hunger, illness and
desperation among its people. In short:
it is a repeat of the barbaric policy of laying siege to a defenseless city by
causing all sorts of hardships and misfortunes to its inhabitants, in the hope
of weakening their resistance or bringing about a generalized insurrection
against its legitimate leaders. If
anything, it is a cruel and inhumane policy which the empire applies solely and
exclusively against Cuba, updating its old and unhealthy obsession of wanting
to take over that island, even at the cost of violating international law a
thousand times and trampling on the highest ethical norms that define the civilized
co-existence of people and nations.
There are no precedents in worldwide
history even remotely comparable to the blockade against Cuba, maintained
without interruption by the United States over 49 years. Nothing even remotely similar has been applied
by Washington against many countries which for one reason or another, have (or
used to have) serious conflicts with the United States: it never blockaded the
Soviet Union or China, for obvious reasons, but neither did it blockade
Vietnam, nor Qaddafi’s Libya (not even after blaming Libya for the bombing of
PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, killing 259 passengers in-flight, plus 11 on the
ground) nor North Korea, nor Iran, nor any other country. Only Cuba, a sweet American colonial dream
that became - thanks to the glorious liberating campaign of the July 26th
Movement - a painful nightmare that day and night shakes the minds of the
imperialists.
Blinded by its pathological ambition to
take over the unredeemed island it considers its own, the United States is in
breach of Resolution 63/7, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on October 29,
2008, when 185 member states voted in favor of the immediate lifting of the
blockade.[2] It is not only the George W. Bush
administration which has ignored the U.N. General Assembly’s recommendation,
but its successor as well – the current Nobel Peace Prize winner no less, who
has continued with the same policy of maintaining the laws, regulations and
administrative procedures which serve to support the blockade.
In effect, nothing’s been done, or even
said, relative to the “Trading With the Enemy” or “Foreign Aid” laws which were
the first pieces of legislation with which the blockade of Cuba began. Not to mention the “Export Administration
Law” or since we’re talking about euphemisms, the “Cuban Democracy Act,” better
known as the Torricelli Law. This
infamous piece of legislation was enacted under Bush Sr., in 1992, and it
enabled Washington’s strengthening of its economic measures against the island,
as well as granting normative support to the blockade’s extra-territorial
nature, given that the legislation prohibits foreign-based subsidiaries of U.S.
companies from engaging in transactions with Cuba or Cuban nationals, and
prevents ships from third countries which have docked in Cuba from entering
U.S. territory for 180 days afterwards, among other restrictions.
The euphemistically named “Cuban Liberty
and Solidarity Act,” better known as the Helms-Burton law deserves its own
paragraph. Enacted by the U.S. Congress
and Bill Clinton in March of 1996, it aims to extend the extra-territorial
scope of the blockade and put still more obstacles in the way of foreign
investment in Cuba. The law also limits
the White House’s prerogatives to suspend the policy, while it establishes the
possibility of bringing claims in U.S. courts against the managers of foreign
companies (or their families) who invest in businesses or properties
“confiscated” by the Cuban revolution.
In view of this background, it’s clear that
the innocent “embargo” constitutes a criminal act: based on the provisions of
Article II, paragraph “c” of the Geneva Convention of 1948 on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the blockade qualifies as
genocide. Furthermore, if the
“Declaration Regarding Maritime War” (adopted by the London Naval Conference in
1909) is considered, the U.S. blockade against Cuba is an act of economic
warfare. Consequently, it is not an
“embargo” but a set of rules and policies that international law regards as
genocidal and criminal. This is why the
condemnation of the blockade is not a strictly Cuban concern, but something
that worries the international community – a lot. The attempt to grant extra-territoriality to
U.S. legislation, as arrogant as it is absurd, is a threat to world peace and a
vicious attack on the self-determination and national sovereignty of people and
states. In line with this policy, the
White House has penalized plenty of U.S. and European companies for doing
business with Cuba. Because of this, patients
from Cuba or any other country who are treated in Cuban clinics have no access
to new diagnostic equipment, technology, or medicine, because even if they are
produced (or made available) in third countries, the blockade’s laws prohibit
their sale or transfer to Cuba if their components or programs, even if only in
small part, originate in the United States.
From an economic point of view, the
blockade has caused enormous damage to Cuba.
Extremely conservative estimates (which underestimate the true impact)
show that in current dollar value, the total is something more than $236
billion dollars. It’s an astronomical
sum when the size of the Cuban economy is taken into account. And not only that: it’s also very significant
in itself, given that it is approximately double the expenditure of the
Marshall Plan, spent by the United States in Europe to finance post-war
recovery.[3] This figure does not include the direct
damage caused by sabotage and terrorist acts encouraged, organized and financed
from the United States. Knowing the
great strides made by the Cuban revolution in fields such as health, culture
and education, it’s easy to imagine all that might have been achieved had it
not been forced to deal with the enormous financial and economic hemorrhage
generated by the blockade. But this was
exactly imperialism’s point: this policy has been applied in order to prove the
non-viability of a non-capitalist development path and the incurable
“inefficiency” of socialist planning, thereby provoking all kinds of illness
and suffering among the people. In their
hallucinations, imperialism’s strategists hoped that such deprivations would
trigger the long-awaited “regime change” in Cuba. History refuted their expectations. We saw this same destabilizing and incurably
anti-democratic attempt in the decision taken by President Richard Nixon, the
same night that Salvador Allende won the first plurality in the 1970
presidential elections in Chile: thwarting the Chilean economy so that later,
on the basis of the frustration and resentment that this would produce, the
conditions would be created that would pave the way for the military coup of
1973.
Has anything changed since the arrival of
Obama to the White House? Very
little. The new administration has introduced
a modest easing of the blockade, but these measures simply modify certain
marginal aspects which do not change the substance of the matter. Nevertheless, a heavy propaganda campaign has
been launched, trying to present Obama as the mentor of a new policy that
overcomes the nefarious legacy of the ten U.S. presidents who preceded him.[4] But in fact, the innovations introduced were
limited to the following:
a)
The
elimination of restrictions on family visits for Cubans resident in the United
States with blood relations on the island, up to the third-degree.
b)
The
same for restrictions on remittances by Cuban-Americans to their family members
in Cuba – still limited to third-degree blood relations and excluding members
of the Cuban government and the Cuban communist party.
c)
An
expanded range of items that may be sent as gifts.
d)
The
granting of licenses for U.S. companies to expand certain telecommunication
operations with Cuba.
In short, these are initiatives that, while
partially repairing a serious injustice - returning to Cubans resident in the
United States the right to visit their family members in Cuba; something taken
from them by the government of George W. Bush – are insufficient and of very
limited scope, given that they go no farther than returning to the situation
existent in 2004, when the economic blockade was already being applied with
full force.
Furthermore, and despite the complete
repeal of the limitations on the frequency and duration of the abovementioned
visits and an increase on the limit of daily expenditures allowed the visitors,
Cubans resident in the United States without family in Cuba remain prohibited
from traveling there, and the unusual abuse of the right of U.S. citizens to
travel freely to Cuba remains. It is the
only country in the world they are prevented from visiting by their government.
What can be hoped for from Obama? Regrettably, little or nothing, and not only
on the subject of the blockade but in the most diverse areas of public
policy. The reason, described in detail
in the already cited book, is that the current occupant of the White House only
controls the marginal levers of the U.S. state apparatus while state power
rests firmly in the hands of the “permanent government” of the United States,
that framework that in its incipient form brought about a serious warning from
President Dwight Eisenhower,- when in his farewell speech, he denounced the
ominous role that what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex” was
already beginning to play. In our time, that
complex has grown inordinately, to a degree that was hardly imaginable or
thinkable just half a century ago. It
has not only grown in terms of its quantitative gravitation; its degree of
articulation among the different members of its alliance and his capacity to
determine public policy have also improved qualitatively, and not just in the
United States, but through its allies, across the empire. In any case, the declarations of Obama’s Vice
President, Joe Biden, at the so-called “Progressive Governance Summit” held in
Santiago, Chile, in March of 2009, doesn’t feed very many expectations. On that occasion, Biden assured that “The
United States will maintain the embargo as a tool to apply pressure on
Cuba.” His words were not denied,
neither by the White House nor the State Department.
The Cuban government is absolutely right
when it points out that “The embargo violates International Law. It is contrary to the purposes and principles
of the United Nations Charter. It
constitutes a transgression on the right to peace, development and security of
a sovereign state. In its essence and
its aims, it is an act of unilateral aggression and a permanent threat against
the stability of a country. It
constitutes a flagrant, massive and systematic violation of the rights of an
entire people. It is also in violation
of the constitutional rights of the American people since it denies them the
freedom to travel to Cuba. Moreover, it
violates the sovereign rights of many other states because of its extra-territorial
nature.”[5]
Cuba is not alone in demanding an end to
the blockade. The overwhelming majority
of countries support its petition.
However, despite the announced claims to initiate a “new policy” toward
Cuba and Latin America, the Obama administration has given no indication
whatsoever that it will try to lift the blockade. This brings to mind the question that
President Hugo Chávez formulated in the context of the recent U.N. General
Assembly: Who is the real Obama? The one who says lovely phrases or the one who
validates the coup d’etat in Honduras?
We might add: He who wishes to promote multilateralism and re-establish
U.S. relations with Latin America on new terms, or he who persists in
maintaining the blockade against Cuba?
Until now, history’s verdict says the latter. It cannot be discounted that he may change,
although it seems increasingly unlikely.
The passage of time plays against him.
24/10/09
Atilio A. Boron is Director of PLED, The Latin American Programme
for Distance Education in the Social Sciences in Buenos Aires, Argentina
[1] Concerning the numerous damages brought about by the blockade on the most diverse areas of social, economic and cultural life in Cuba, see the well documented “Report by Cuba on Resolution 63/7 of the United Nations General Assembly,” at http://embacuba.cubaminrex.cu/Default.aspx?tabid=11014
[2] Of course, it’s not the only resolution ignored by Washington. For a detailed examination of this matter, see Atilio A. Boron and Andrea Vlahusic, El lado oscuro del imperio. La violación de los derechos humanos por Estados Unidos [The Dark Side of the Empire. The United States’ Violation of Human Rights] (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Luxemburg, 2009)
[3] This, according to a study done by the Argentinean economist Alex Kicillof, “El Plan Marshall estuvo en la base de la Unión Europea,” [The Marshall Plan Was the Basis for the European Union] Página/12, June 21, 2007
[4] Actually, not all of them had the same attitude. In one of his reflections, Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz maintained that “Of all the presidents of the United States, and those who aspire to that office, I only met one who, for ethical-religious reasons, was not an accomplice to the brutal terrorism against Cuba: James Carter. That assumes, of course, another President who forbade that United States officials should be used to assassinate Cuban leaders. That was Gerald Ford, who replaced Nixon after the Watergate scandal.” In September of 1977, Carter opened the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Cf. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Submission to Imperial Politics,” August 27, 2007. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2007/ing/f270807i.html
[5] See the already cited “Report by Cuba on Resolution 63/7 of the United Nations General Assembly.”