In his recent opinion piece (“Trading barriers for beaches,” ODE, April 14), Alex Conley dredges up a host of old clichés to argue against the normalization of our relations with Cuba. The essence of his claim is to characterize Cuba as dark and repressive and the United States as a beacon of liberty. This sort of attitude keeps him from seeing the hypocrisy of the embargo and realizing the amount of resentment and isolation we cause ourselves by our policies in Latin America.
If we’re going to exhort other countries to embrace “freedom and democracy,” let’s start respecting it. Stop invading Latin American countries (most recently Haiti in 2004) or supporting coups (like the one in Venezuela in 2002) to topple democratically elected leaders we don’t like. Stop sending leading Republican consultants to help the parties of the right to steal elections from the parties of the left (Mexico, 2006). Stop threatening economic retaliation in the event our favored candidate is defeated (El Salvador, 2009). Stop pouring billions of dollars each year into “democracy assistance” programs that principally assist those factions most friendly to American interests. Stop trumpeting the “repressive” character of regimes we find unfriendly, while ignoring the misdeeds of our allies and trading partners. Otherwise, American talk about “democracy” will continue to make Latin Americans cringe.
Since John F. Kennedy invaded Cuba in 1961 at the infamous Bay of Pigs, American presidents, in the thrall of Cold War politics or the power of the Cuban exile lobby, have pledged to topple the Cuban government about as often as Arab leaders promise to annihilate Israel. On top of numerous attempts to assassinate Castro, the United States has long given anti-Cuban terrorist groups aid and shelter and the license to act with impunity. One might expect this to make the Cubans feel embattled and paranoid.
We know that an external menace can lead a government to curtail freedoms; just look at the way the Bush administration gutted the Constitution after 9/11. But far from investing all its scant resources in “repressive machinery,” as Conley claims, the communist government of Cuba has made its priority things like health care and education, food and safe drinking water, with the result that Cuba’s quality of life, according to the U.N.’s Human Development Index, has steadily risen to second in the Caribbean and seventh in the Americas. Meanwhile, the government of the United States devotes its vast resources to maintaining the largest and most expensive military on the planet, waging simultaneous wars for democracy, or “regime change,” or oil, or whatever, and exporting guns and tanks to repressive regimes around the world. By the way, we spend more on our military than the next 45 countries combined. Talk about repressive machinery.
With a Democratic Congress and a forward-thinking president, we have the opportunity to turn the page on a shameful chapter of American foreign policy, and maybe even make friends where we didn’t know we had them. Cuba doesn’t deserve the particular hostility that it receives from the United States alone. Ideally, Cuba’s government would embrace free speech and dissent, and the United States would respect the sovereignty of its neighbors and refrain from interfering in their political affairs. To begin with, let’s dismantle our own repressive machinery: the stupid embargo that isolates us more than it marginalizes them.
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United States needs to create a positive relationship with Latin America
Daily Emerald
April 15, 2009
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