It's Time To End the War Against Cuba:
To Resist The U.S. Empire's Attempts At Regime Change
30 November 2012By Jacob G. Hornberger
When is enough enough? The U.S. military and the
CIA have waged war on Cuba for more than 50 years.
After a half-century of invasions, assassination
attempts, terrorist attacks, and a cruel and inhumane
economic embargo, it's time to bring the entire sordid
policy toward Cuba to an end. Not only has it failed
to accomplish its purported end — the ouster of the
Castro regime and its replacement by a pro-U.S.
dictatorship — it has also played a major role in the
economic misery of the Cuban people. The U.S.
government's war on Cuba has also constituted a grave
infringement on the fundamental rights and freedoms of
the American people.
Keep in mind that neither the Cuban people nor their
government has ever attacked or invaded the United
States or engaged in acts of terrorism against the
United States. It's always been the other way around.
It's been the U.S. government — i.e., the
national-security state, specifically the Pentagon and
the CIA — that has always been the aggressor in the
decades-long conflict with Cuba.
What has been the justification for U.S. aggression
against Cuba? From the beginning, it's been that Cuban
leader Fidel Castro is a communist and a socialist.
And so what? Under what moral or legal authority does
the U.S. government target a foreign leader for
assassination or a foreign country for invasion or
terrorism owing simply to the ideological perspective
of that country's leaders?
The warped values that have come with the U.S.
national-security state's war on Cuba are
well-reflected in the criminal conviction of the Cuban
Five, a group of Cuban agents who came to the United
States to ferret out acts of U.S. terrorism that were
being planned for Cuba. For that, they were convicted
in U.S. federal court of being "spies" and given long
jail sentences.
You see, in the eyes of U.S. officials, a country that
is targeted for regime change by the U.S.
national-security state is supposed to passively
accept its fate at the hands of the U.S. Empire. It's
not supposed to resist a U.S. military invasion of its
land, as Cuban forces did at the Bay of Pigs. It's not
supposed to avoid assassination attempts at the hands
of the CIA-Mafia partnership that was trying to murder
Castro. It's not supposed to try to ferret out
terrorist attacks on Cuban businesses and industries.
To resist the U.S. Empire's attempts at regime change
is considered a criminal act. That's why those five
Cubans were punished even though they were doing
nothing more than trying to defensively protect their
country from U.S. terrorism.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials continue to bray about
Cuba's jailing of American Alan Gross, who was caught
distributing satellite telephones to Cuban citizens in
violation of Cuban law. He's now serving a 15-year
sentence in Cuba. U.S. officials are hopping mad over
that, pointing out that it's legal to distribute
satellite telephones in other countries, an obviously
irrelevant point given that Gross did it in Cuba,
where it's illegal. More important, Gross was being
funded by the U.S. government, whose goal continues to
be regime change in Cuba.
The irony is that when one considers Cuban socialism,
the fundamentals aren't really much different in
principle from those embraced by American statists.
Consider the two socialist programs that Fidel Castro
is most proud of: free public schooling and free
government-provided healthcare in Cuba.
Now, ask yourself: What American liberal opposes free
public schooling and free government-provided
healthcare? Answer: None. Not one single American
statist, liberal or conservative, favors the repeal of
public schooling or the repeal of Medicare and
Medicaid. It's only we libertarians who favor the
immediate repeal of these two major socialist
programs, along with all the others.
Moreover, if you compare the judicial system
established by the Pentagon on its side of Cuba,
you'll immediately notice the remarkable similarities
with Cuba's communist judicial system: military
tribunals, no trial by jury, torture of prisoners,
indefinite incarceration without trial, no right to
speedy trial, no right to confront witnesses,
presumption of guilt, secret proceedings, and abuse of
criminal-defense attorneys.
What Castro did was carry statist economic principles
to their logical conclusion. While President Franklin
Roosevelt, for example, nationalized gold, converting
Americans who were caught owning what had been the
official money of the American people for more than
100 years into felons, Castro nationalized everything.
While American statists favor taxing the rich and
giving the money to the poor, Castro went all the way
and just took all the wealth from the rich, including
their big mansions, and redistributed it to the poor.
While American statists favor the concept of a
government-managed economy, Castro embraced the
principle to the full extent through strict government
control over all economic activity.
That's why Cubans have always been on the verge of
starvation — not just because of the embargo but also
because they were being squeezed at the other end by
all that socialism.
This commonality of beliefs between American and Cuban
statists is best manifested by the mindsets of
Cuban-American members of Congress, who are the most
steadfast opponents of lifting the half-century-old
embargo against Cuba. The truth is that their beef
with Castro is personal, not ideological. Their
commitment to statism is as ardent as Castro's. They
don't want genuine freedom, as libertarians do, they
just want to see Castro replaced by their own statist
dictator — a pro-U.S. statist dictator, like the pro-U.S.
Cuban dictator who preceded Castro, Fulgencio Batista.
After all, those Cuban-American members of Congress
who insist on the continuation of the embargo are
imposing the same type of economic control on us — the
American people — that Castro imposes on his people.
The embargo is an infringement on the economic liberty
of Americans, not Cubans. It's Americans who are
strictly prohibited from traveling to Cuba and
spending money there. If they're caught violating the
law, they are subject to fines and imprisonment — by
the U.S. government, the government that purports to
stand for "free enterprise."
It's time to end this idiocy. It's time to end the
U.S. national-security state's war against Cuba. No
more regime-change operations. No more assassination
attempts. No more invasions. No more terrorist
attacks. No more embargo. Leave Americans free to
travel to Cuba, spend money there, and interact with
the Cuban people. Free the Cuban Five and permit them
to return home. There is no better time than now.
Jacob Hornberger
is founder and president of the Future of Freedom
Foundation.
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