Bush announces new anti-Cuba plans
By Gloria La Riva
"Clearly, the Castro regime will not change by
its own choice. But Cuba must change."
With this overt threat to the Cuban Revolution, George W.
Bush on Oct. 10 declared new measures against Cuba and a plan
to increase prosecution of people from the U.S. who visit the
island.
Flanked at the White House by Miami-based anti-Cuba
counter-revolutionaries, Cuban appointees to his
administration, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush
announced "several new initiatives intended to hasten the
arrival of a new, free, democratic Cuba."
For his announcement, Bush picked the date in Cuba's history
when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes declared the young
nation's struggle for independence from Spain in 1868. Yet U.S.
plans for Cuba include neither independence nor sovereignty,
but the same colonial oppression it is imposing today on the
people of Iraq.
Using the menacing rhetoric and sneer that have become his
trademark, Bush said he will re-enforce restrictions on people
who visit Cuba.
He promised to stop "illegal" travel of those who go without
a U.S.-issued license, or who don't qualify for the very
limited exemptions permitted by the government.
Bush failed to mention that in March he shut down virtually
all permitted travel to Cuba. He banned cultural-exchange
licenses that have allowed universities, sports teams and
cultural groups to send thousands of individuals to the
socialist island.
Today he went further, also discrediting the legal means to
travel as "too often used as cover for illegal business travel
and tourism," and implied there would be harassment of this
sector as well. "We're cracking down on this deception," he
said, with future inspections and investigations by the
Department of Homeland Security.
The travel ban--imposed since 1962--clashes sharply with the
reality that growing numbers of U.S. citizens are going to
Cuba. The number reached 180,000 last year, 80 percent of whom
were of Cuban descent. Tourism is now Cuba's leading economic
sector. For the first quarter of 2003, Cuba announced a
19-percent increase over the same period last year--a record
770,000 tourists, many from Europe and Canada.
The intent is to inflict economic damage on Cuba and to
prevent people in the U.S. from seeing the reality of Cuban
socialism. In the name of promoting democracy, Bush is denying
the people of the U.S. the democratic right to see Cuba for
themselves.
Since January 2001, when Bush took office, more than 1,200
U.S. citizens have been threatened with fines for violating the
travel restrictions. This is twice the number of fines imposed
during the Clinton administration.
Bush's second proposal, which he called "improvements" in
processing Cubans who want to leave Cuba, is designed to
promote more illegal and dangerous emigration from Cuba.
The U.S. has only issued a tiny fraction of the 20,000 entry
visas it agreed to grant annually in the 1995 U.S.-Cuba
Migratory Agreement. From October 2002 to February 2003, the
first five months of the treaty's latest calendar year, only
505 visas were given by the U.S.
How can Bush now promise to "improve the method through
which we identify refugees, and redouble our efforts to process
Cubans who seek to leave"?
His rhetoric can best be understood in relation to the Cuban
Adjustment Act of 1966, a U.S. law which accords only to Cuban
immigrants the right to U.S. residency and financial
assistance, no matter how they get here. By granting a minimal
number of legal entry visas while the CAA remains in effect,
the Bush administration opens the door to more illegal entry to
the U.S.--and more potential disasters as people take to small
boats or even hijack vessels and planes.
Recently, the Miami Cuban ultra-right community has
accelerated its demand on Bush that he abrogate the migratory
agreement, setting the stage for a confrontation with Cuba over
this matter.
Subversion and propaganda
Third, Bush announced that he is setting up a commission to
promote a "free" Cuba, headed by Colin Powell and Mel Martinez,
another Cuban with right-wing credentials. This adds a new
operational bureaucracy to U.S. imperialism's efforts at
"regime change"--that is, counter-revolution--in Cuba.
Finally, Bush declared an increase in U.S.-generated radio
and television propaganda broadcasts to jam and interfere with
Cuban broadcasts.
In another significant political attack on Cuba, Roger
Noriega at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on
Oct. 2 renewed the lie that Cuba is engaged in a biological
weapons program.
Noriega is Assistant Secretary of State for Western
Hemisphere Affairs. During Jimmy Carter's visit to Cuba in May
2002, the administration made the same accusation of
"bioterrorism," but the former U.S. president discounted this
false charge against Cuba.
In response to Noriega's charge, Cuba said on Oct. 5 that
"Once more, this individual has shamefully lied in order to try
to link Cuba with bioterrorism. Cuba is calling on the U.S.
administration to demonstrate that it is not shamefully lying,
and to present the minimal amount of proof to back up these
mendacious accusations that our country is developing
biological weapons."
After Bush's speech, the Cuban government denounced the U.S.
schemes as "a vain attempt to neutralize the growing isolation
and international condemnation of U.S. policy on Cuba, and a
broad-based questioning of U.S. governmental hostility towards
our country in the United States itself.
"Cuba is once again exposing to the world these new
provocations and aggressive actions on the part of the
neofascist U.S. government which, as confirmed in Bush's own
words, are part of a plan to defeat the Cuban Revolution.
"The transition dreamed of by Bush and his Miami mafia
acolytes will never occur in Cuba. Our country is in
transition, yes, but in a transition towards more revolution,
towards a more just society, towards a society where men and
women can attain the full development only offered by
socialism."
The International Action Center in the U.S. issued an
unequivocal statement of support for Cuba: "Despite 44 years of
aggres sion by the U.S. government," it said, "Cuba has
survived and achieved remarkable social and economic gains for
its people.
"Now the Bush administration dreams of doing what no other
president who preceded him could do, destroy the Cuban
government and take back a former colony through force of
occupation, as it is trying to do to the Iraqi people and their
country.
"Bush's aims of more economic strangulation run contrary to
the U.S. people's real interests. We demand the unconditional
and immediate lifting of the blockade, an end to the aggression
against Cuba and for the full right to travel there. Of course,
this will require a movement by the people of the U.S. that can
push Bush back."
Some say that Bush's speech was intended mainly to cater to
the Miami Cuban right-wing vote in the 2004 elections. But it
is important not to dismiss the harm and threat that each new
aggression can pose for the people of Cuba.
Reprinted from the Oct. 23, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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