Today, Obama announced a mild normalization of relations with the Cuban state. That means a US embassy may open in Havana and you’ll be able to bring a few more trinkets back from Cuba legally. The travel ban will NOT be loosened for tourism. Caps on remittances by family members will be raised. The US will “review” the presence of Cuba on its list of state terror sponsors.
I’m not going to comment on the Revolution itself. As a Floridian I’m biased for several reasons, and that includes my anarchism. All I’ll say is that while condemning certain tactics, I understand them through the prism of imperialism. Fortunately, this doesn’t matter for what I’m pointing out.
The reality of what happened today, broken into individual facts, is less exciting than the joyful (or angry) explosions we’ve witnessed in the media. The White House released for the world a detailed explanation of its reasons for this diplomatic outreach. If you can see past the think-tanky democratization bullshit you’ll see a vicious plan to complete the domination of Cuba, probably ending in its total recolonization by financial capital.
Among the openly described plans are
1) a ramping up of rhetoric showing the Cuban government as a rights violator
2) making the Cuban government work toward US goals
3) “empowering” the Cuban people, code for continuing to directly undermine the Cuban state
4) injecting more US currency and finance into the Cuban economy
5) opening the Cuban market to more US goods
6) increasing propaganda penetration by allowing private import of telecom materials
This is more like a declaration of war.
But then, that’s what diplomacy is. “Diplomacy” is what Washington calls its imperial scheming and the left falls for it. Diplomacy is cold war, and it often enough leads to hot war. It is not a peace-making endeavor. It is not a good thing to encourage. It is good to disrupt it, as Chelsea Manning — whose birthday is today! — did. Thanks to her, we know so much about the nasty, petty, vindictive, stupid, lying, thieving, murderous shit our hallowed diplomats do every day in subjugated nations around the globe. These are rich, powerful, high-born criminals that have served time in the upper echelons of our own evil government and its largest parastate corporations. They’re scum, and their work is the devil’s. The only real question is, why do these countries allow it?
In the absence of these parasites on the world’s good faith, the US has in Cuba had to resort to bizarre (failed) assassination plots and other idiotic schemes. Key to these schemes is the USAID program, ostensibly an honest organization meant to aid the world’s people, but in truth a subterfuge aimed at kneecapping all attempts at self-determination that do not line up with US foreign policy goals. Cuba, possessing a government ideologically aware of the empire’s goals, has been hip to this bullshit from the beginning. They even imprisoned scamster Alan Gross, released today as part of the deal (which also saw the release of three of the Cuban Five). Gross is a USAID contractor who was cynically using the extant Cuban Jewish community as a shield for his service to US policy. Just look at this spook’s life. As we know, Ukraine wasn’t as savvy.
USAID has also rolled out a fake Cuban Twitter, tried to infiltrate Cuba’s hop hop scene, and perhaps most disgustingly — like Pakistan vaccination scheme-level disgusting — held fake HIV-prevention seminars. That’s just a short list courtesy of the Moon of Alabama blog, which has an amusing warning:
But should indeed a U.S. embassy return to Havana that job will fall again to the CIA. Cuba should be very worried about that. The only reason why the U.S. government has never fallen to a CIA coup is the lack of a U.S. embassy in Washington DC.
It’s well-accepted that US embassies are basically just CIA offices. Nothing good can come of one of these in Havana. We only have to look to Libya to see what can happen when relations are “normalized.”
At this point I can just assume the grizzled Cuban old guard is throwing its hands up at the inevitability of their loss to the juggernaut. I tuned in to see Raúl Castro speak for about 20 seconds and just in that one moment, watched him praise both Obama and the Pope. I don’t know who to roll my leftier-than-thou eyes at — Castro, or emoji-fist-raisers in my Twitter timeline lionizing him in that moment. These liberals dressed as radicals let their masks slip a bit today. Medea Benjamin, CodePink’s milquetoast maven of minivan dissent, has always wanted to love Obama, and now, for just a moment, she can have a day to unabashedly do just that.
It wasn’t just Benjamin praising the drone president and whooping it up for cigars and rum. Look at this fucking dingbat:
But liberals gonna liberal right? Well let’s reach a tiny bit further “left”:
wait there’s more
(hypocrisy!)
(Obama finally wins out!)
The twin whitebros of the libpocalypse are just the ones laughed at in my timeline, I’m sure there are even better out there.
But none of this is as dumb as this, retweeted by Glenn Greenwald, below, which, no.
A few hundred thousand Cuban exiles in a throwaway city, as Miami was in the 1960s, do not directly influence a multigenerational policy. They’re a great public excuse for one, and for political reasons it’s great propaganda. But the empire has its own reasons for making a communist island just 90 miles from its southernmost territories, especially one run by anti-imperialists, appear to be an innate economic basketcase. That’s what a crushingly near-total blockade can do. In exactly the same way, Israel is useful to the empire as a giant spaceship of white capitalism in a typically resistant Middle East. It has very little to do with Jewish power over Washington, oh my god.
The embargo was never total, but even that slack was for propaganda purposes. Connected US agribusinesses, for example, have been privileged enough to make millions trading staple foods to the Cuban government. Thanks to the US, Cubans can eat! Those farmers and possibly many more stand to get even richer in the near term from this thaw. Scahill and Blumenthal probably aren’t wrong to point out that, down the road at least, the hordes are coming.
Imagine, the venerable emoprogs of America praising POTUS for this sham “opening” amid the terrifying threats of that White House statement. All this from the bombingest country on earth. The regime that tortures prisoners (in Cuba!) and spies en masse. An empire that has spent the last century or more systematically binding the peoples of the world to its political and financial will.
Fuck it. Bust out the mint; let’s make mojitos!
————
for lulz
100 Flamingos 
At this point I can just assume the grizzled Cuban old guard is throwing its hands up at the inevitability of their loss to the juggernaut.
I think this probably sums it up. Do either of the Castro brothers have faith that who ever comes next has the fortitude and skill to keep the U.S. at bay? Probably not. My uneducated guess is that this is their attempt to control, as best they can, the inevitable when they both die off.
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That’s an interesting thought. Maybe some combo of this plus the neverending crush of US plots leaves them with little alternative.
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I find myself wondering if Cuba has some severe fresh water availability issues – given its population, size, and reliance on rainfall (versus snowpack and rainfall) – which are at least a part of the putrid mix; which global issue Chillary has become much involved in: coded (and, I’m sure, not so coded) global war speak about.
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Eh, Florida has no snowpack — even less than Cuba, I’d say, since it has zero mountains — and it has no fresh water issues aside from the occasional drought. Seems like an odd thing to consider as a major influence, if true.
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I don’t think the comparison is equal: Florida sits entirely on two huge fresh water aquifer systems, one being one of the largest in the country; Florida is not surrounded entirely by salt water (significant salinization issue possibilities for islands); and Florida is not a self-sustaining country, it can rely on 49 other states in the country for emergency fresh water and the resources – electricity, fuel, server farms, food production, building materials, etcetera – which can significantly contribute to groundwater usage and contamination.
Anyway, I like your post, don’t mean to detract from the subject, was just pondering.
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(Guess I should also have added that Florida also has no – openly hostile to life itself and particularly humanity – land adjoining, ‘Other Nation’ border, such as Guantanamo Bay. The poisoning or restriction of another’s fresh water, is an age old, ultimately lethal, horror; whether deliberate, or not.)
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Nice; the end made me laugh out loud. I have been wondering why the sudden normalization of relations and assumed it was because the US decided that normalization was somehow better suited to its general strategy of global dominance, but this post was mad helpful in laying some of the details out. I saw some advocates of “relation normalization” (next Talking Heads album title?) with Iran also trumpeting this development and calling for that to be Obama’s next big move. I’m more familiar with that history because of my education and professional background and this post has inspired me to search for parallels there.
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Yeah Obama’s thing has been ramped up war through proxies, sanctions, and “deals” which are just as or more powerful than a straight up hot war, depending on the target. “Relations” worked very well to soften up Libya. Cuba may be able to expect the same and act accordingly. I don’t know.
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And it looks like the US is chomping at the bit to take advantage of a golden opportunity to <a href="http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/12/authorities_hope_thaw_in_cuban_relations_will_aid_capture_of_nj_cop_killer_joanne_chesimard.html"re-arrest Assata Shakur.
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I wonder how that would go down. I’d say she’s a “ridiculous” target but then nothing seems to outwardly silly for these people.
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Just when I get excited about trade with commies, SS has to give me a mental anal wax so swift and painful leaving me in the fetal position. Yeah, Medea and Max polyanna enough at times to be Cato interns. They all mean well. Even the Cato interns who aren’t appropriately freaked out by Nazis in Ukraine. [Insert some French saying I can’t spell.]
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