If it’s presidential election time, then, like clockwork, it’s time for Republicans to continue the US national security establishment’s sixty-year-long attack on Cuba. That’s because Republican presidential candidates feel the need to pander to Cuban American voters in Florida as a way to show how “tough” they are on communism.
Well, not all communism. The US government, especially the Pentagon, loves the communist regime in Vietnam, the one that killed some fifty-eight thousand American men in the Vietnam War. Today, the US and Vietnamese regimes are living in peaceful and friendly coexistence, exactly what the national security establishment said was impossible during the Cold War.
President Trump now continues this electoral tradition by slamming additional sanctions on the Cuban and the American people. He has issued an edict prohibiting American citizens from staying in hotels in Cuba that are owned by the Cuban government. He has also ordered Americans not to bring back to the United States Cuban rum or Cuban cigars.
Those measures are on top of those taken by Trump last year to reduce travel to Cuba, which included bans on cruise ships, yachts, fishing boats, and group educational and cultural trips to Cuba.
Oh, in bringing up the US government’s close and friendly relationship with the communist regime in Vietnam, I forgot to mention that Trump, by his own admission, fell in love with the communist dictator of North Korea. Why, Trump even salutes communist generals in that country.
But not Cuba. US officials, including Trump, hate Cuba. No falling in love with Cuba’s communist rulers. No peaceful and friendly coexistence there. That’s because over the decades, Cuba has indirectly exposed the corrupt sham of the entire Cold War and the corrupt machinery of the US national security establishment.
After all, recall what the Pentagon and the CIA said throughout the Cold War—that Cuba posed a grave threat to US “national security.” They said that the island was a “dagger” pointed at America’s throat. They said America couldn’t stand with a communist regime ninety miles away from American shores.
And yet, despite the continued existence of Cuba’s communist regime, the US government is still standing, more powerful and more omnipotent than ever. And while it certainly has become more socialist (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, public schooling, etc.), no one is claiming that it has been taken over by the Russian or Chinese Reds.
But Americans were told to be afraid of Cuba, very afraid. That’s why there were repeated CIA and Pentagon regime change operations against the Cuban regime, including top-secret assassination plots, in partnership with the Mafia, on the part of the CIA.
In fact, Trump announced his new measures at a White House event honoring Bay of Pigs veterans. But let’s keep something important in mind: this was a CIA operation from the get-go, one designed to use Cuban exiles as the invaders so that Americans wouldn’t know that the US government was behind the operation.
The question naturally arises: Under what legal authority did the US government conspire to invade Cuba or assassinate its rulers? There certainly was no congressional declaration of war against Cuba, which the Constitution requires as a prerequisite to waging war against another country. And one thing is for sure: an invasion is most definitely an act of war and an assassination is an act of murder.
The fact is that there never was a legal justification for the CIA’s invasion of Cuba. But once the US government was converted into a national security state after World War II, the powers of the national security branch of the government—i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA—essentially became omnipotent. The Constitution became irrelevant, at least insofar as the other three branches of the federal government were concerned.
There was also Operation Northwoods, the infamous plan by the Pentagon to conduct deadly and destructive terrorist attacks on American soil and make them look like they were done by Cuban agents. The idea was to provide a false and deceptive pretext for invading Cuba and effecting regime change.
Where was the constitutional authority for Operation Northwoods? There was none, but that was considered irrelevant.
In fact, the reason that the Cuban regime invited the Soviet Union to install nuclear missiles in Cuba was because the Castro regime knew about the Pentagon’s and CIA’s desires to invade Cuba. The Cubans wanted the missiles to deter US officials or, in the worst case, to defend themselves from a Pentagon-CIA attack. Thus, it was the US national security establishment that was indirectly responsible for bringing the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.
Through the entire Cold War and beyond, Cuba never attacked the US or even threatened to do so. It has always been the US government that has been the aggressor against Cuba, including with its embargo, sanctions, assassination plots, and state-sponsored terrorism within Cuba.
The Cuban communist regime has continued standing. What about the much-vaunted threat to “national security” that it supposedly posed to the United States, especially during the Cold War? It was always a crooked and corrupt sham, just like the entire Cold War was. That’s why US officials hate Cuba so much—they know that the continued existence of the Cuban communist regime has shown the utter corruptness of the entire Cold War, something President Kennedy realized prior to his assassination.
After all, the United States is still standing. For that matter, so is the communist regime in Vietnam, which Pentagon and CIA officials said ultimately would cause a domino effect that would end with the Reds in control of the US government. How utterly ludicrous.
Through it all, it has not only been the Cuban people who have suffered from these antics. It has also been the American people, not just economically but especially through the destruction of their own economic liberty and freedom of travel.
After all, don’t forget who Trump’s orders and prohibitions are directed to: the American people. If they violate his edicts, it is they who will go to jail or be fined or both.
So, here you have the supreme irony—to oppose a Cuban regime that controls the economic activity of its citizens through its socialist system, US officials control the economic activity of the American people. It’s called destroying liberty at home to oppose communism and socialism abroad.
Too bad the American people don’t have the gumption to fight for their own fundamental rights here at home, including the fundamental rights of freedom of travel and freedom of trade that US officials have destroyed in their decades-long war against Cuba.
