Washington is using a familiar script: Sanctions, then threats. Next comes force – under a trumped-up false pretext
American imperialism may be absolutely lawless and perfectly immoral but it does have its favorite and predictable routines. One of them is what can be called the Washington Three-Step of ‘blockade, blackmail, invade’.
The Three-Step is by no means foolproof. Witness, for instance, the recent de facto defeat of the US (and its occasional overlord Israel) at the hands of Iran, which even arch neocon warmonger Robert Kagan has as good as admitted in, of all places, The Atlantic. But failure has never deterred America’s best and brightest. Indeed, the combination of slow, sadistic strangulation of whole nations and taking the military baseball bat to them is a virtual fixation, as central to American foreign policy as permanent bad faith.
Don’t believe it? Here’s a preliminary, most likely incomplete list (in alphabetical order) of countries that have two things in common: In the post-World War II period, they have been the victims of both economic warfare – via sanctions, embargoes, and blockades – and direct military attack, including bombing (directly and by proxy), land invasion (also including by proxy), and Venezuela-type terror raids: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Panama, Syria, and Yugoslavia.
It may be counter-intuitive, but if you are realistic about the nature of the Ukraine War and all the things Kiev would not be able to do on its own (from ‘survive’ to ‘target deep strikes into Russia’), then – as insanely risky as this strategy has been – the US has already applied the scheme to Russia as well. Which goes to show that the Washington Three-Step is simply irresistible to American elites. Even the serious risk of escalating to World War III against Moscow, which has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, has deterred them only imperfectly.
Against this backdrop, you really cannot miss the real meaning of Washington’s latest messages regarding Cuba. First, conveniently anonymous ‘intelligence’ sources have told us that Cuba has around 300 drones and plans to use them for attacks on American targets, including the US base (and legal black hole as well as de facto concentration camp) at Guantanamo Bay and even Florida, that is, the American mainland. For good measure, Russia, China, and Iran have also been fingered as accomplices of those dastardly Cubans.
The cut-out for this particularly ridiculous piece of psychological warfare has been Axios, a publication that has recently been at the center of a scandal involving insider trading manipulations around US President Donald Trump and his assault on Iran as well as reporter Barak Ravid and his long background in Israeli intelligence.
It is obvious: The bizarre piece of ‘news’ asking us to believe that Cuba is about to commit suicide by giving the US a perfect pretext to bomb, invade, and regime-change it by direct, military force is, in reality, not about any Cuban plans to go to war, but Washington’s preparations for an attack.
That does not mean that America will necessarily make good on this threat-by-false-accusation. The Cuban authorities have, of course, denied the American smears. They have also accused Washington of building a “fraudulent case” for a military attack. And they have the facts on their side: The US assaults on Iraq (2003) and now Venezuela and Iran have demonstrated that, with Washington, brazen lies (WMDs, a nuclear weapons program, drug trafficking, a swarm of drones ready to pounce on Key West) may very well be the propaganda barrage preceding a full-scale military assault.
Or perhaps another Venezuela-style operation? The propaganda groundwork for that option has been laid with the second American threat regarding Cuba: With the US Justice Department charging former Cuban President Raul Castro over the downing of two small planes more than a quarter of a century ago, Washington has not only – in the words of the New York Times – added yet another “extraordinary escalation.” The Trump regime has also issued a threat to do to Cuba, in essence, what it did to Venezuela (where, incidentally, scores of Cuban security personnel were massacred), where it kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro.
The Caribbean island is, of course, a long-standing victim – even longer than Iran, which is a high bar – of fierce American economic warfare. Initially it came with extraordinarily crass assassination and proxy invasion attempts, too. But America’s main and most devastating weapon against Cuba has been decades of unrelenting economic warfare, recently escalating into a full-blown siege, depleting the country’s fuel and other reserves and subjecting its population to a brutal attack by deprivation and disruption.
You may disagree with the Cuban foreign minister categorizing this US attack-by-blockade a “genocide.” But it is certainly a great crime: The deliberate creation of a deep humanitarian crisis for purposes of regime change. Indeed, the US leadership has been perfectly explicit about this aim: Even its offer of “assistance” – made by no one other than the head of the CIA – is nothing but blackmail. It’s real, transparent meaning is: We are strangling your people and we will keep doing so, and only if you finally submit to us will we stop.
The reason for so much American cruelty and violence is, actually, not complicated: Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the island’s big, overbearing neighbor has never forgiven it for no longer submitting to US control. Forget the silly ideological cant about freedom (which doesn’t exist in the US), democracy (ditto), and human rights (ask ICE). Even the endless, greedy American and Cuban-exile demands for material restitution stemming from long overdue nationalizations after the revolution and the obsessive American animus against socialism (by which Washington means anything to the left of pure Robber Baron/Tech Titan capitalism) are not the key issues.
Instead, the essence of the Cuban-US stand-off is that Cuba has dared try to be sovereign in the vicinity of the US, where the old Monroe Doctrine and its new Donroe iteration will tolerate only clients and vassals. Any country not subordinating its national interest as well as the will and welfare of its population to America, is written off and then targeted as a ‘failed state’ or even, as Trump has now called Cuba, a “failed nation.” And we all know what the US feels it has a right to do to these places.
You may feel, by the way, about the current Cuban government – not “regime” – whatever you wish. Under no conceivable circumstances does the US have the right to inflict so much violence and pain on any country that has not attacked it. Debates about the Cuban economic system are also beside the point: We simply cannot know whether it would work or not or sort-of, since the Cuban economy has always been disrupted by massive US interference. And in any case, the existence of economic problems does not justify being invaded and regime-changed. If it did, the US with its exploding debt, manufacturing-base decline, and cost-of-living crisis would be a legitimate target, too.
Cuba may be able to resist this latest American attack or not. Its president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, has warned Washington that an invasion attempt would encounter massive resistance and produce a “blood bath.” Venezuela has fallen to American lawlessness and violence; Iran has not. Cuba’s fate remains open.
