Cuba’s human rights

‘Human rights abuses.’ The Carter administration raised this phrase from a vague, demagogic political generality to a battle cry against any government that didn’t knuckle under to the demands of the world’s greatest violator of human rights: U.S. finance capital and its military might.

Every administration in Washington since then has used the phrase to take aim at the Cuban Revolution—which, by the way, is still standing tall decades later against imperial determination to recolonize the island nation.

But now a tough task has gotten a whole lot tougher for the Bush administration. Washington double-speak about the Cuban workers’ state and “human rights abuses” invites an analysis of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.

U.S. imperialism has waged an unceasing, covert and illegal war against the Cuban people since they overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1959.

The economic blockade, which Washington tries to justify by blaming Cuba for “human rights abuses,” is itself an act of undeclared economic warfare that violates even bourgeois international law.

Five Cuban prisoners of that war are locked behind bars in jails in the U.S. for the “crime” of trying to monitor right-wing Cuban exiles who have launched terrorist attacks on the island from Miami.

The Bay of Pigs invasion, political infiltration, economic sabotage, assassination attempts against Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro, terror bombings—it is warlords in Washington who must stand in the dock for these crimes.

But this year, as U.S. diplomats roam the halls of the United Nations trying to round up a few nations’ votes—those who are weak enough, beholden enough or complicit enough to have been roped into lining up against Cuba in past years —they are finding it ever more difficult.

The brutal military occupation of Iraq, the blank check for the Israeli military settler occupation of historic Palestine, attempts to overturn the elected government and revolutionary process in Venezuela, support for the fascistic regime in Colombia, saber rattling against the people of Syria, Iran and North Korea—these are the elephants sitting in the middle of the UN General Assembly.

And it’s not just Abu Ghraib that’s become a symbol of Washington’s ruthlessness when it meets opposition to its wars of plunder and profit.

Guantanamo—that little sliver of Cuba that the Pentagon militarily occupies in defiance of the will of the Cuban people—is now known around the world as a CIA torture chamber, where the screams of its prisoners cannot be heard.

Even under a narrow definition of “human rights abuses,” it is Washington that should be in the dock, not Cuba.

But what about broader human rights? Cuba, despite its constant struggle to survive Washington’s subversion, has been building an economic system in which people are guaranteed a job, inexpensive rent, free health care, free education and the opportunity to participate in organizing their neighborhoods, their jobs and their country’s future.

The Emperor in the Oval Office must be praying that none of his subjects will notice he isn’t wearing clothing.