The Ghost of Empire: Cuba and the Return of American Interventionism |
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Strip away the legal language around the Raúl Castro indictment, the ‘humanitarian’ packaging of Marco Rubio’s speeches, and the procedural formality of US sanctions policy, and what remains could be a simple proposition – a nation of 330 million, with the world’s largest military and a century of interventions behind it, has decided that a bankrupt island of ten million does not have the right to govern itself without US approval. Trump expressed this as personal destiny – he might be the president who finally ‘acts.’ The casualness of that design is beyond any formal doctrine.
The immediate cause for this latest flareup could be the decision by US federal prosecutors to file criminal charges against Raúl Castro, Cuba’s 94-year-old former president, over the 1996 shooting down of aircraft belonging to the Miami exile group ‘Brothers to the Rescue.’ Four people were killed. But tragedy requires honest context, and honest context is precisely what Washington’s narrative chooses to leave out.
‘Brothers to the Rescue’ was not simply a humanitarian organisation. It was founded by José Basulto, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion who openly admitted to being trained by the United States for violent operations against Cuba. The group began by rescuing Cuban migrants at sea, but it gradually transformed into a vehicle of direct political provocation. Its aircraft repeatedly violated Cuban airspace. In 1995, it dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana. Basulto himself reportedly declared that “we want confrontation.”
The Cuban government repeatedly and formally warned Washington that these flights could lead to catastrophe. Even officials inside the United States reportedly understood the danger. A Federal Aviation Administration official warned in January 1996 that Cuba would eventually shoot one of these planes down. Washington did nothing. The flights continued. On 24 February 1996, the confrontation that everyone had been warned about finally happened.
Nearly thirty years later, this same event has been taken out of its storage in Cold War archives and handed to prosecutors primarily as a political and legal tool. The timing gives it away. Cuba today is more vulnerable than it has been in decades – battered by US sanctions, crippled by fuel shortages, losing its population to mass emigration, and facing the collapse of basic services........