In 1854, U.S. diplomats wrote to Secretary of State William Marcy in the Ostend Manifesto that the U.S. should try to either purchase Cuba from Spain or declare war on Spain and seize Cuba. Beginning with the tenure of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, the U.S. tried to take possession of Cuba to extend economic control over the region and expand U.S. slave territory. As Adams declared, the acquisition of Cuba was “an object of transcendent importance to the commercial and political interests of our Union.”
As American politicians have always been a thoroughly disinterested bunch, the manifesto spurred a controversy, not for concern over the island’s right to sovereignty and self-determination, but rather Northern concern that Cuba would figure as one more Southern (slave) state, thus challenging Northern political and economic hegemony.
Cuba officially obtained independence from Spain in 1898 and from the U.S. in 1902, although it continued to be ruled for the next half century as a neo-colony of the U.S. With the American design for Cuba fulfilled, our country exploited the island’s riches, influencing the political situation through organized crime and coercion while the denizens of the islands lived largely in abject poverty.
The period from 1959 to the present has been radically different from the U.S.’s side, as the scale of our engagement completely diminished following the Cuban Revolution and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. In this period, per misplaced bitterness from both Washington and the Cubans who voluntarily fled after 1959, our policy entailed the implementation of a total embargo. This heinous measure only amounted to the crushing of the Cuban people whilst Castro’s government consolidated its resources, and after some 60-odd years, the embargo has completely failed to shake the Castros from power.
This in turn entails the most offensive aspect of our present dialogue for me: Cuba is not “opening up.” The New York Times ran a piece on Sunday that claimed, “Though Cuban society has been closed off from the world for a half-century, there remains an uncanny openness about the nation’s people.”
The vision of the piece, in all its patronizing and inaccurate glory, is the one into which Americans have sadly been inculcated: American saviors ready to storm into and save this sad Communist land of mojitos, old Chevys and Che posters.
The interesting aspect of the phrase “has been closed off” is that it is in the passive voice and we don’t know who “closed” Cuba. Was it Fidel? The U.S.? Aliens? It is clear nonetheless, within our neo-colonial narratives, that Cuba now figures into the space it always did before the revolution: one open for American political and economic domination.
In the time Cuba has been “closed off,” it has managed to ensure universal healthcare and education, attain a 99.8 percent literacy rate and become the first country to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Cuba presently has around 50,000 health workers volunteering in 66 countries, and Cuban doctors were among the first to arrive in West Africa in the fight against the Ebola outbreak. The list goes on.
Research the history, look up the statistics and you will see that the “normalization” we see on TV is really just the U.S. ceasing its senseless barbarism and overt attacks against a country whose main “crime” was trying to implement its own system.
I fear Cuba is being re-colonized into a new U.S. playground destination, its resources and pristine environment soon to be subjugated to the almighty dollar and the whims of the “free market.”
Thus, I exhort Americans, as we observe and participate in this historic transition, not to accept the ridiculous trope that Cuba is “opening up,” when in fact it is the mindset and actions of the U.S. that have been closed off to reason and decency for the past 60 years. ¡Viva Cuba libre!
Jordan MacKenzie is a second-year UF linguistics masters student. His column appears on Wednesdays.
