The longest awaited event, almost seen as the most
impossible pipe dream, took place when it was least expected.
On December the 17th, a quite pointed date for the Cuban’s
folklore, Barak Obama, President of the United States of America, and Raul
Castro, president of the Council of State and Ministers, first secretary of the
Communist Party of Cuba, and head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, announced
simultaneously from their respective capitals the resumption of diplomatic
relations between both governments.
Diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba were
interrupted for almost 54 years. On January 3, 1961, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower had decided to close the US embassy in Havana following the signing
of the trade agreement between Fidel Castro and the USSR.
The announcement came as a surprise, as the explosion of the
Maine battleship, the sinking of the Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the
events of the Gulf of Tonkin, or the kamikaze style assault on the Twin Towers.
Anyway, any clever observer could have seen it coming.
During the last year and a half, since June 2013, there have
been intense and not so secret negotiations between Havana and Washington.
Their mediators were the Vatican -under the aegis of a Latin American pope with
great affection for the Theology and Liberation- , and Canada, one of the
eternal economic and political friends of the Castro’s regime.
In the meantime, the US government exempted Cuba from the
list of countries sponsoring terrorism.
Last May the 20th, a letter from the most influential
figures in the US asked President Obama to ease relations with Cuba. David
Rockefeller -one of the most important designers of the political and economic
world map- led the signatories. At his nearly 99 years, he seems to continue
leading the circle of the worlds’ financial and political elite from the
Council Foreign Relations -the world's most influential Think Tank-, the
Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the
Bilderberg group, the Trilateral Commission and others. (In this blog, we have
attempted to investigate the long and close relationship between Fidel Castro
and David Rockefeller.)
Recently, several The New York Times’ editorials on Cuba
predicted that something big was brewing in political backroom.
And suddenly, without Vaseline or saliva, Obama’s and Raul’s
simultaneous announcement took place, with an affectionate and extensive
telephone call between them.
Now, why this announcement of the restoration of diplomatic
relations has been so hasty?
Everything happened as if both presidents hurried up to
prevent anyone to get in the way and unsettle everyone involved historically in
the Cuban question. And also, why exactly now?
From a the most immediate and superficial point of view, one
of the most rational hypothesis on this hasty decision by President Obama would
be, first, that he wished to overtake the first session of the 114th United
States Congress next January 3, 2015, dominated by a Republican majority, which
would have hampered any presidential decision.
Anyone could argue that Obama would have had sufficient time
in order to make such announcement in advance. However, what both sides seem to
have been waiting was the only actual event which gave the green light to the
restoration of diplomatic relations. I mean the death of Fidel Castro, or at
least its final fall into an irreversible coma.
I am absolutely sure that the Commander in Chief’s
metagalactic ego and the hipertrascendental importance that he has always given
to his "prestige", "charisma" and "intransigence"
would never have allowed him to accept alive a reversal of what he have devoted
his whole political career: the
perpetuation of the showdown between the small “David” island and the American
global "Goliath" "Imperialism", the greatest enemy that
anyone has faced ever. However, this doesn’t mean that we believe that Fidel
has actually been an honest, consistent and uncompromising nationalist,
revolutionary, communist and anti-imperialist to the grave, in the manner of an
Amadis of Gaul, the Cid or San Jorge by the feeling of the Hispanic nobility
ideal that had lived deep inside of Cubans’ spirits.
The psychology of the dictator, demonstrated throughout his
long political behavior, marked by an unconscionable egomania, egocentricity
and hipper-self-esteem, would never ever allow him to admit what he always was.
Fidel Castro had always been a mafia thug who found a way to transcend local
and national circles to become an international agent provocateur at the
service of global domination powers. Consequently, Fidel Castro has been the
worst traitor of everything he has pretended to defend throughout all his life.
Fidel betrayed his own political movements of the
Orthodox-Cuban Revolutionary Party and the 26th of July Movement, colluding
with the Popular Socialist Party agents of Moscow. Castro betrayed the Cuban
revolution, aimed at the restoration of democracy and the rule of law in Cuba,
by establishing the worst and longest tyranny throughout Latin America history.
He betrayed his country, handing it to the Soviet Union. In behalf of all this,
he destroyed his country, its nature, its infrastructure, its economy, its
institutions and traditions, plunging his people into the most abject poverty
and the worst state of slavery.
Now, why would Obama wanted to reestablish the relations
with Cuba? What is the urgency? What lies beneath his pressing need?
Cuba is the most impoverished and unproductive country in
the Western Hemisphere.
For the United States and its government, Cuba doesn’t have
any economic or political or military interest. It has been long since it
ceased to be the appearance of a threat to US homeland security. Perhaps now
the only obstacle to a mass exodus of Cubans to the United States is the
impoverished Castro regime, but this has always been so, and it is not
necessary to restore diplomatic relations and lift the embargo to keep it that
way.
It is true that several American presidents before Obama
explored the possibility of restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba and lift
the embargo. It is also true that, every time any US president has made a
gesture in this direction, Fidel Castro has always done some dirty tricks to
confirm the impossibility of any negotiation. Why this would not happen again?
Nothing has changed in Cuba, especially under the
"mandate" of Raul Castro.
The so-called "reforms" of the
"government" of Raul Castro have not gone beyond reviving the old
"openings" from his Big Brother from the eighties and the nineties,
when he allowed a limited self-employment, and the so called "free"
farmers’ and artisans' markets as the one at the Cathedral Square and elsewhere.
The only “extraordinary” thing has been the alleged authorization of sales of
houses and cars. However, this is not a reform itself but another dirty trick
play. In Cuba, only the government has all the resources to legally restore
large mansions and collection cars. Thus, the government itself can sell
expensive buildings and cars through its undercover agents who pretend be
"private owners", giving an appearance of openness.
Although Cuba has been deleted from the list of countries
sponsoring terrorism and diminished its influence in Africa and the Middle
East, the Castro’s’ government continues destabilizing countries in Latin
America. He still influences governments as the ones of Nicaragua, Honduras,
Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, not only against its own people, but
especially against the United States. The Castro regime has not stopped
supporting Colombia's narco-terrorist groups and, no doubt, in other countries,
like when it was the guideline head for Latin America, Africa and the Middle
East terrorist movements.
Moreover, they same people that currently govern Cuba have
always represented a greater threat to America than Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, North
Korea, Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State all together. Cuba was the only
country that actually has threatened the US with a nuclear attack and helped
destabilize Latin America and much of Africa and the Middle East. The Cuban
regime also flooded US of spies at the service of all enemies of this country.
The Cuban regime remains being a strictly designed
government to avoid the establishment of democracy, the rule of law and civil
society, and against the individual, civil and human rights. The only way to do
this was through erasing all the country’s economic, social, democratic and
non-governmental institutions. This has led to the total destruction of the
economy, the natural resources, the technology, the infrastructure, the
national traditions, etc. The centralized economy has led to the disappearance
of all industrial, agricultural and commercial activity of the island,
something that the US embargo hasn’t anything to do with.
Contrary to those who believe that the everlasting economic
crisis of the Island is the largest "failure" of the regime, in fact,
it is his highest achievement.
The Castro government has strictly followed the Stalinist
basic guidelines to keep the population in the most impoverished situation in
order to ensure their full economic, political and ideological dependence from
the state. Thanks to the national economic and social disaster, the Castro’s
regime could impose a state of a perfected widespread slavery in Cuba, in the
same fashion of the Stalin's Soviet Union, the Mao Zedong’s Communist China,
the Kim Il Sun’s North Korea, the Ho Chi Min’s Viet Nam and the Khmer Rouge’s
Cambodia.
The alleged American commercial "embargo" or
"blockade" has not influenced the industrial and infrastructural
collapse of Cuba. Since 1961, when the Soviet Union subsidy to the Castro
government began, until 1991, when the communist bloc disappeared, colossal
amounts of financial and technology aid were sent to the Island in behalf of
its industrial and infrastructural development. Fidel Castro's government
squandered all those resources in terrorist propaganda and adventures worldwide,
leaving huge industrial complexes to disintegrate in wastelands where they were
left to rot when they were not resold to countries led by their accomplices.
Today, since its sugar industry was dismantled, Cuba has
become a country that produces almost nothing. It only produces negligible
amounts of citrus, tobacco and rum that the country exports thanks to its
former prestige but its quality has decayed totally with respect to the times
of his old world glory.
Tourism has depressed significantly since its heyday in the
nineties, when almost two million of low budget tourists visited the island
annually.
Castro’s government survives thanks to the subsidies from
Venezuela -re-selling great deal of the oil that the semi-colonial government
of Maduro sends to Cuba-, Brazil, China, Spain, Russia and the food bought
directly in the US, where agriculture is generally highly subsidized by the
American taxpayer. But this is nothing new, since Castro's government has
survived historically squeezing his cronies as it did with the Soviet Union,
Angola, Chile, Nicaragua, Canada, Venezuela, Spain, every Latin American and
African narco-terrorist group, and the unwary investors who had the brilliant
idea to do business with Castro in the 90s.
The restoration of relationships comes in one of the most
difficult times for the Cuban dictatorship.
The welfare-protector state had already collapsed after the
fall of the USSR. For the last twenty years, the Castro government has been
unable to even offer the usual rationed products and the most basic utilities,
medical attention, education, etc. to the Cuban population.
The fall in oil prices has strained one of his props, the
Maduro's dictatorship in Venezuela, a situation reflected roughly in the Cuban
economy.
The misery and despair of the Cuban people have reached its
limits. Every day, the population has reached the point of not having anything
to lose and shows its open rejection of the Castro government.
The struggle of dissidents has intensified and repression
has worsened significantly.
Illegal migration have increased, compelling the government
to resume the old methods of attacking the fragile rafts at sea at the expense
of the lives of migrants, so that the US government don't get the idea that a
new mass exodus is taking place.
It seems as the Obama administration wanted to give a hand
to the suffocated Castro regime in the very moments of the disappearance of its
fossilized leader, the only actual mainstay of the Cuban regime.
In the end, if the restoration of diplomatic relations
between the US and Cuba has been a hasty and pointless act, the news just makes
me think -rather confirms- that the story of the dispute between the US and
Cuba has been a major political farces in history.
