Denounce the US Blockade against Cuba!

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Denounce the US Blockade against Cuba!

The Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial and Financial Blockade Imposed by the United States of America against Cuba

Blockade, Not Embargo

Cuba and the Security Doctrine of the United States

The US blockade is provoking losses of more than $1.8 billion every year, according to Cuba’s report handed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as a basis for the vote at the UN General Assembly scheduled for October 28 under the title “The need to end the economic, trade and financial blockade imposed on Cuba by the United States of America.”

            This report includes information dating back to February 6, 1959 when the United States appropriated the $424 million stolen by Batista’s cronies that was taken to the northern nation, from where it never returned, up to the latest measures adopted by the Bush administration in its eagerness to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

            The document brings together an infinite number of elements corroborating the genocidal nature of the laws that have been applied by the last 10 US administrations and that, today, George W Bush is making even more cruel, with the sole objective of asphyxiating the Cuban revolution and reducing the Cuban people to starvation.

            In a press conference launching the report, Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque cited examples of certain things that Cuba could do if the blockade did not exist.

            He affirmed that with one billion dollars per year 100,000 new houses could be built, 2,000 of them in the capital, and within five years 2.5 million Cubans, including 500,000 capital residents could have moved into new homes.

            $180 million could provide the investment needed to supply 2.4 million family units lacking gas to be able to cook with this fuel.

            Among other examples the foreign minister observed that with $51.8 million the chicken ration distributed among the population could be doubled, and $300 million would allow an investment in the new electricity generation units needed to guarantee a stable supply of energy and undertake the maintenance required without having to impose power cuts.

            Culture Minister Abel Prieto explained that every sphere of culture has been affected by the blockade and gave the examples of artistic teaching, the cinema, the recording industry and others.

            He added that with Bush’s new measures trips by US students for art courses in our country have been cancelled.

            That is a result of the US president’s fear of an interchange of ideas and dialogue, which likewise affects our people-

            The prestigious musician Ibrahim Ferrer told those present that the United States had denied him a visa to travel to that country because it considers him “a danger to US national security”. ”Look at me closely, I don’t look like a terrorist,” the artist who has received various awards and who is well known abroad, ironically exclaimed.

            Eliades Acosta, director of the José Martí National Library; Digna Guerra, director of the National Choir; and filmmaker Rigoberto López gave various examples of arbitrary measures that range from refusing to grant visas to Cuban artists, the cancellation of performances, and the suspension of congresses involving US and Cuban academics and scientists.

            For his part, Dr. Pedro Kouri, director of the Institute of the same name, spoke of the US refusal to sell Cuba retrovirals for AIDS sufferers and other diagnostic means for certain illnesses, which amounts to a form of genocide.

            Cuba has also calculated that it has suffered losses of more than two billion dollar to its aviation industry as a result of extra charges and lost opportunities as a consequence of the US blockade, in a report presented to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

            The text affirms that “the US monopoly over the manufacture of commercial airplanes, their components, spare parts and technology for their production and maintenance, including its factories in Europe, makes it enormously expensive for Cuban airlines to purchase aircraft and forces the airlines to acquire them in more expensive markets.

            The report added that loss of revenue for diverse concepts derived from the US government ban on visits to Cuba should be added to those extra costs. 

            However, the report indicated that “some 60 US charter flights are in contact with Cuba, on a weekly basis,” among them United Airlines, Continental, Delta, Miami Air, American Eagle, Gulf Stream and Falcon Air. The Cuban state “offers all the necessary facilities for the transportation of passengers. Nevertheless, the US government refuses to give authorisation to Cuban airlines to operate on its territory,” the report added.

            WDIE calls on the working class and people to step up their activities and actions in support of Cuba's right to self-determination and against all the hostile US moves against the island.

            We are posting below the introduction to the report by Cuba on Resolution 58/7 of the UN General Assembly, followed by the table of contents.

Havana, September 30, 2004

Introduction

The more than forty long years of suffering by the Cuban people, caused by their sovereign decision to stand up to the blockade imposed on it, to preserve their independence and to not renounce their right to build their own development model, is something that President George W. Bush's administration treats with contempt.

            The UN General Assembly's condemnation over 12 years ago – which today is almost unanimous – of this murderous mechanism that the US authorities euphemistically label "embargo" is continually ignored.

            Neither does President George W. Bush's government pay any attention to the reservations about his Cuba policy that exist in broad sectors of US society, sectors which in an increasingly insistent fashion, demand changes to that policy; a policy that not only seeks to suffocate the Cuban people and affect their relations with third countries but also bans and restricts some of the American people's basic freedoms, including some that are enshrined in the constitution.

            The period analysed by this report (the second half of 2003 and the first half of this year) will go down in history as one of the periods when the colossal crime which goes by the name of "The Blockade" was at its most virulent.

            The new measures the United States government implemented during this period are one more cog in the machinery of laws and regulation that have controlled the blockade against Cuba for over forty years; they are proof of that government's desperation caused by the failure of its attempts to isolate and subjugate the Cuban people through hunger and disease. Their aim is to put into practice the plans to dominate the Cuban nation that have inspired the way some sectors of the US ultra-right have behaved for more than a century.

            The ultimate aim of these measures, moreover, is to satiate the hatred and thirst for vengeance of a Cuban-born extremist minority which has no qualms about resorting to terrorism against the people of our island and to whom President George W. Bush owes a debt of gratitude for the direct role it played in organizing and pulling off the fraud in the year 2000 elections in Florida.

            The most relevant events which characterize the period covered by this report include:

 • 30 September 2003, the US Treasury Department's Office for Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) passed a regulation to ban publication of scientific articles from regimes subject to sanctions by the United States government: Cuba is one of these. The OFAC did this under the pretext that the editing process, that is "revision, changing and publishing" would constitute a "service" which would add value to the articles in question, and would therefore violate the Trading with the Enemy Act. Following intense pressure from the US academic and scientific community, the measure was repealed on 5 April 2004.

 • 10 October 2003, President George W. Bush made an announcement from the White House about the establishment of the so-called "Committee for Assistance to a Free Cuba" and an increase in controls on and greater rigor in applying the ban on travel to Cuba.

 • 9 February 2004, the US secretary of the treasury, John Snow, made an announcement in Miami about a new extraterritorial measure which involved the OFAC immediately freezing the assets in the United States of 10 companies of "Cuban ownership" or controlled by the Cuban government or Cuban nationals, which specialized in promoting travel to Cuba and in sending gifts. This included companies organized and located in Argentina, the Bahamian, Canada, Chile, Holland and the United Kingdom.

            That same day, the aforementioned functionary gave an account of the degree to which the president's decision to tighten controls on travel to Cuba had been applied, listing the number of flights inspected, the fines imposed and the goods seized.

 • 26 February 2004, President George W. Bush signed Presidential Proclamation 7757 which bans vessels intending to enter Cuba from leaving US ports. The regulations for putting this into effect, issued by the Coastguard Service on 8 July 2004, openly declared that the aim of these was to "improve the way the embargo on the Cuban government is applied." The regulation establishes fines of up to $25,000 or five years in prison or both and the confiscation of violators' vessels.

 • In this period, the US government brought fierce pressures to bear on banking institutions in third countries to have them place obstacles in the way of and hinder Cuban financial operations. Cuba uses this income in hard currency for importing medicines, food and other consumer goods and to buy the inputs needed if its economy and essential social services are to function.

            Recently the US government fined the Swiss bank USB $100 million for making financial transactions in dollars with certain countries, including Cuba

 • 6 May 2004, President George W. Bush gave his approval to all of the report from the so-called Committee for Assistance to a Free Cuba. This contains some 450 recommendations and suggestions for new measures to topple the Cuban Revolution and install a puppet regime which would have total control over the Cuban nation and would be under the absolute control of the United States.

 • Finally, on 30 June 2004, the regulations which tighten the measures announced on 6 May became effective. The measures themselves are a violation of Cuban independence and sovereignty and an unprecedented escalation in the mass, flagrant violation of the human rights of the Cuban population, of Cubans living in the United States and even of US citizens themselves.

            The economic, financial and trade blockade which ten US administrations have imposed – and intensified – on Cuba and which is today a complicated apparatus of laws and regulations, is a part of a policy of hostility and aggression towards the very existence of the Cuban nation. By the Cuban nation we mean the undertaking to build a sovereign and independent Cuba for Cubans.

            The United States' voracious appetite for Cuba and its natural and human resources dates back to the very birth of the American Union when efforts to annex Cuba began, using all sorts of different methods ranging from encouragement and support for annexationist forces within the Spanish colony to direct military intervention and occupation.

            No 19th century American government ever recognized the Republic of Cuba in Arms. On the contrary, on several occasions they put obstacle in the way of and interrupted the channels that the American people and Cuban émigrés in that country used to send the aid they had obtained for the Cuban people's cause to win their freedom.

            After the 1898 US military intervention, which robbed Cubans of the right they had won through 30 years of unequal struggle, a "republic" was born in Cuba, a "republic" made dependent by a constitutional amendment, the Platt Amendment, which legalized the island's neo-colonial status. For more than 50 years, US governments subjected the Cuban people to their imperial control and to having their national wealth exploited by US monopolies, thanks to the complicity and spinelessness of successive corrupt puppet governments. They also installed brutal military dictatorships when they found it necessary to shed blood to silence the justified claims of the Cuban people and quash their deep-rooted anti-imperialist sentiments.

            A Cuban-born oligarchy, dependent on and benefiting from the country's neo-colonial control apparatus, showed itself incapable of leading or even of going along with a plan for genuine national development.

            When a profound social revolution was victorious in 1959, the imperialist cliques in the United States who exercised control over the island and who very soon saw the Cuban Revolution's example as an open challenge to its plans for hegemonic domination, decided to use their power, through successive Republican and Democratic administrations to launch, maintain and, as the years went by, step up an undeclared war aimed at re-installing their control over the Cuban nation and, if that was impossible, to simply exterminate it and its rebelliousness.

            The economic, trade and financial war against Cuba began even before the revolutionary government took any measures which affected the US companies controlling the country's economic life.

            A complex, shadowy web of measures, laws and programmes, which is today the US unilateral blockade on Cuba, began to take shape at the same time as they were encouraging, organizing and financing a mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs, countless acts of terrorism – including sabotage on economic and social targets, plans to assassinate the top revolutionary leadership, armed attacks on defenceless settlements and families and even germ warfare – media campaigns filled with rabid lies about the Revolution, encouragement for subversion and funding for the overseas and domestic counterrevolution and cruel incitement to emigrate illegally.

            The Torricelli Act was passed in 1992; this abruptly cut off trade in medical drugs and food between Cuba and subsidiaries of US companies based outside US territory. It also instituted a strict ban on maritime navigation to and from Cuba, thus giving legal status to provisions which were clearly extraterritorial in nature.

            Applying the Torricelli Act delivered a heavy blow to the Cuban people. It was conceived with the criminal and cynical aim of dealing the coup de grace to the Cuban economy, thus destroying it. (The economy was going through serious difficulties following the abrupt cessation of its economic, trade and cooperation relations with the former Soviet Union and the East European former socialist countries.) Since this wager on the collapse of the Cuban Revolution turned into yet another failure of the policy of anti-Cuban hostility followed by successive US governments, it was then decided to escalate the economic, political and diplomatic war against the Cuban nation to levels never before seen in the history of US foreign policy.

            In 1996 the Helms-Burton Act was passed. This, among other things, fine tuned the repressive mechanisms affecting the infinitesimal economic, trade and financial ties between US companies and Cuba, increased the number and scope of the extraterritorial provisions in order to persecute any transaction or business that might benefit the Cuban economy, persecuted and punished foreign investors in Cuba; authorized funding for hostile subversive, aggressive actions against the Cuban people -these included the media disinformation war, improving the broadcasts by the ill-named Radio and Television Martí, drew up a programme aimed at destroying the constitutional system the Cuban people has created for itself and at imposing a "change of regime" which would ensure that the US imperialist cliques´ schemes to take over the Cuban nation are brought to fruition.

            From that time on, a long list of new actions and measures of hostility and aggression were added one after the other, in an attempt to stop any hole or gap detected in the cordon or wall of sanctions set up to blockade Cuba.

            According to figures updated in 2004 by the Cuban National Statistics Office, 69 per cent of the population was born after 1959, which means that approximately seven out of every ten Cubans were born and have lived under this regime of unilateral sanctions that is the American blockade.

            An economic estimate – made by the National Institute for Economic Research with the collaboration of experts from several ministries, companies and other Cuban institutions – of the direct losses suffered by the Cuban people because of the blockade indicates that these amount to over $79.3252 billion.

            It should be pointed out that this estimate takes into consideration only direct damage to our economy and thus does not include the greater part of the indirect economic losses resulting from this. If the country had been able to avail itself of these resources, they would have improved the population's standard of living through the multiplier effect.

            For example, the estimate does not include the value of goods that ceased to be produced because of restrictions and onerous conditions Cuba has to face when applying for investment, trade, banking and international credits. Had it been able to have access, at average rates and under average conditions, to the financing granted to other countries in the region with a similar level of economic development, the country's economy would have reached a much higher level of development.

            It is beyond belief that, at a time when the international community is combining its cooperation efforts to meet essential not-to-be-postponed development goals for all nations, the country with the greatest military and economic power, for petty domestic political reasons and from a desire for world domination, should insist on begrudging the tiny amount of resources that could improve the wellbeing and speed up the progress of a country which has irrefutably demonstrated its willingness to unconditionally share its modest achievements and victories with any other country in the world.

            Cuba represents absolutely no threat or danger to the United States. The world and large sectors of US society are perfectly well aware of this. There are also very few people who are still fooled by the false, pharisaical way they invoke the alleged defence of human rights to justify their ferocious hostility towards the Cuban people.

            How could the government which is responsible for the most atrocious and premeditated attacks on policies and programmes designed to promote economic and social development and the wellbeing, the safety and the right to life of Cuban men and women lay claim to the title of defender of the Cuban people's human rights?

            How could the government which uses lies as a pretext for its "pre-emptive wars" – which are in fact imperialist wars to gain control of resources and geographic regions of great strategic importance – hasten "democracy" anywhere in the world?

            Who could be convinced of its adherence to the "rule of law" by the government that tramples on the basic canons of international law and shows its contempt for agreements reached in multilateral for a of the importance and universality of the United Nations General Assembly and the World Trade Organization. Who could be convinced by the government that claims its exemption from the provisions of the Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment in order to ensure that it will go unpunished for the brutal and inhuman way its authorities treat prisoners in Iraq or those who are still arbitrarily detained in concentration camps built in territory illegally occupied by the Guantánamo Bay US naval base in Cuba?

            How could a government that has made the inequalities and injustices in US society worse and has supported the dismantling of affirmative action programmes that favour underprivileged, forgotten minorities – such as its own Latino and Afro-American citizens – and which, with its social and fiscal policies in favour of the rich, has added million people per year to the number of Americans who have no medical insurance help the advancement and well-being of the Cuban people?

            There is no way the Bush administration can maintain that its policy of hostility, blockade and aggression against Cuba is based on the hypothetical need to promote and protect human rights in the island. The government that has made the largest contribution in the shortest time to the disintegration of and loss of prestige by the international system for promoting and protecting human rights has neither the credibility, moral right or any other right to do so.

            The Cuban people reject the model of political and social organization that the US government is attempting to reinstall in their country with a view to re-imposing its apparatus of control and interference and to following its neo-liberal recipes for reorganizing and managing the Cuban economy. Cuban men and women think that the schema the power circles in the superpower are offering them provide no solution to the problems, needs or historical interests of the Cuban nation nor to its desire to continue building a fairer, more democratic and more equal society.

            As per paragraph (c) of article II of the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of 9 December 1948, the US blockade against Cuba qualifies as an act of genocide and is, therefore, a crime under international law.

            The condemnation of any act of genocide and the need to put a stop to it allow no room for ambiguous positions. The Cuban people cannot condone any attempt whatsoever to influence the degree to which they are opposed to the brutal blockade imposed on them.

            Cuba trusts that an overwhelming majority of governments in the world will continue to recognize – as the peoples and honest, worthy men and women from the four corners of the earth have done – the vital importance of opposing the prolongation of an unlawful policy of hostility and unilateral aggression which is undermining the very foundations of multilateralism.

            Although the Cuban people knows perfectly well that the best guarantee for its existence and development as a sovereign, independent nation lies in its will to unity, its determination to resist and conquer any threat or attack, it is sincerely grateful for the support and solidarity shown by the international community. Such support, as well as serving as moral, ethical and justified encouragement, shows that the battle it is waging today has universal importance and moves us all forward towards that common goal of building a better world, which is not only possible but essential if humanity is to survive.

            This report devotes a long chapter to the new measures announced May 6 and to the regulations for applying these which were released on 16 June. It does this because of the great importance these have in making the blockade worse. Similarly, in six other chapters it provides a set of examples which irrefutably prove that the blockade is a monstrous creation which grievously affects the day-to-day lives of the people of Cuba.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The New Measures Aimed at the Cuban People and Their Economy
            • More restrictions on travel to Cuba
            • More restrictions on family remittances
            • Further extraterritorial harassment • Other necessary notes and assessments

2. The Extraterritorial Nature of the Policy of Blockade

3. Repercussions on Healthcare

4. Harm Caused in the Fields of Education, Culture, Sports, and Academic and Scientific Exchange Between the Cuban and American Peoples

5. Section 211 of the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act 1999

6. Impact on Cuba's Foreign Trade

7. Impact on Other Sectors of the Cuban Economy

Conclusions

Appendix

Radio Havana Cuba, September 29, 2004

To impede free trade in a determined country through use of laws or force, or both; to attempt to strangle the economy of a people to oblige them to accede to foreign decisions; to weaken the structures of a State in order to eliminate a political and social system that sustains it. That is the definition of blockade and it is judicially considered as an act of war under the 1909 London Naval Convention. On the other hand, there is no judicial justification under any circumstances for a "peaceful blockade" of one nation by another. The very United States admitted as much in l916 when it warned that Washington did not recognize the right of any power to limit commercial relations of third parties applying blockade measures in peacetime.

            From that we can deduce that the policy followed by Washington against Cuba since l961, which the entire world, except the United States, qualifies as an economic, commercial and financial blockade, constitutes a hostile act, a war manoeuvre, and a violation of the fundamental rights of an entire people which is coldly calculated to condemn them to all types of suffering with the express aim of violating their sovereignty.

            The United States has refused to accept the term blockade and call their more than 40-year-old sanctions on Cuba an "embargo" and the difference between the two terms is much more than semantic. It is in fact, aimed at obscuring to the world its true objectives. According to the dictionary, "embargo" is the legal term that describes the retention of goods to insure compliance with a legitimately contracted obligation and it can also be a precautionary measure dictated by a judge, court or competent authority directed at a debtor complying with his obligations to his creditors. None of this is expressed in the spirit and the practice of the laws created in the United States to blockade the economy of Cuba; a country which on the one hand, owes the United States nothing and on the other, has violated no obligation.

            If Washington continues using the term "embargo" it is simply to avoid officially admitting that it is employing a war policy against Cuba without the existence of a state of war between the two nations, which also makes the measure arbitrary, unilateral, unjustifiable and illegal. The United Nations itself so recognized in Resolution 2,625 passed October 24, l970, declaring the equal sovereignty of all States, the free determination of peoples and the obligation of all governments to refrain from intervening in affairs that are beyond their domestic jurisdiction. The Resolution also establishes that "no State can apply or foment the use of economic, political or any other measures to coerce another State, aimed at subordinating the exercise of its sovereign rights and obtaining advantage of any other. All States have the inalienable right to choose their political, economic, social and cultural system without any kind of interference on the part of another State".

            We are, therefore, dealing with an illegal blockade and not a simple embargo. But in the matter of words, U.S. governments provide ample examples of the most liberal interpretation. We only have to look at the names they have given the anti-Cuba Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws, which internationalise their war policy against the island. The Torricelli law, which prohibits third countries from trading with Cuba, is called "The Cuban Democracy Act," while the Helms-Burton, which provides for sanctions against countries, companies and people who dare to break the blockade, and which violates their own US Constitution, is named "The Cuban Freedom and Democratic Solidarity Law"! Need we say more?

Cuban President Fidel Castro addressed more than one million Cuban people at the central May Day event in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. Cubans also massed at countless plazas across the nation in defence of the revolution.

Fidel reviewed the results of the US anti-Cuba resolution in the Human Rights Commission in Geneva and how Washington and the European Union committed the error of overlooking the fact that one of the most grotesque cases of human rights violations exists on the Guantánamo Naval Base, where the United States has created that horrific prison camp where it is holding hundreds of people, with no identity, no trial, no guarantee of physical integrity, no procedural or penal law and no time limit. An English translation of his speech is reproduced below.

Also at the tribunal were General of the Army Raúl Castro; ministers; government, state and Party leaders; the families of the five Cuban patriots in US jails; and more than 1,000 guests from 55 countries.

One of the early speakers, Cuban workers´ union (CTC) general secretary Pedro Ross, condemned US President George W Bush’s plan to promote political changes on Cuba, scheduled to be announced by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, and noted that it was response to this threat that brought such record numbers of Cubans to the plazas for May Day.

We don’t know what they are going to invent today, in 45 years they have tried everything said Ross, referring to the many US aggressions against Cuba since 1959, and he continued: "while Cuban workers want to live and work in peace, they are not intimidated by danger and are prepared to resist any preventive war…we will never be slaves again".

Whoever tries to take over Cuba, will confront a fighting people, loyal to Fidel and socialism, the union leader promised, to fervent applause record number of Cubans at the Havana plaza.

Ross also referred to the five Cuban political prisoners held in the United States since 1998, unjustly condemned for trying to prevent acts of terrorism and who are viewed here as supreme examples of firmness and loyalty, "We will not rest until we free them," the CTC leader concluded.

The Havana event was attended by the diplomatic corps accredited in Cuba, notably the ambassadors of the 20 countries that did not back the proposal against Cuba at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

by Miguel Álvarez Sánchez*

September 11, 2001, produced a change on a global scale after which all of us became more insecure.

            Exactly one year later, as part of its exercise of global hegemony, the United States made public its new National Security Directive, later known as the Bush Doctrine, whose essential elements are:

            1. Pre-emptive attack, whereby [the US] attributes to itself the right to intervene rapidly and decisively in any country it considers to be a potential threat to its security.

            2. Regime change, as a practice to overthrow governments [the US] does not like and to impose, in the name of democracy, regimes that guarantee the interests of the occupying power.

            Despite the setbacks in Iraq, the empire has not changed the war-like tone of its discourse and reiterates its adherence to the principles of neo-conservative ideology regarding the imposition of "democracy" and the aggressive use abroad of US military might to achieve those goals. The "propagation of democracy" is an essential mission for this school of thought, and regime change is its true outcome.

            In the case of Cuba, ever since the Bush administration came to power, constituted by the most right-wing sectors of the United States' political oligarchy, with a predominance of neo-conservatives and with the support of the most extremist sectors in Miami, it has been designing the preparation of a "Cuba case" that eventually will serve to justify US military aggression, utilising for that purpose four principal elements. Cuba as: (1) A violator of human rights; (2) A promoter of terrorism; (3) A threat to the national security of the United States; (4) A factor of destabilisation in the region.

            (1) The pressures to place Cuba before the International Community as one of the worst violators of human rights are the principal objective of this effort. Directed at this is the obsessive effort to condemn Cuba in Geneva and [Cuba's] inclusion in every report prepared by the State Department, from a condemnation of the alleged lack of religious freedom to the traffic in humans, with an accusation of being a "major destination for sexual tourism”.

            (2) The yearly inclusion of Cuba on the list made up by the State Department of the countries it designates as terrorist countries. Secretary of State Colin Powell has been most categorical about the meaning of the list: "We have told Cuba, through that report, that those attitudes are not tolerable and that we shall act. We did it in Afghanistan and we did it in Iraq."

            (3) The development of a systematic campaign to present the Island as a threat to the National Security of the United States because of an alleged capability to produce biological weapons. Included in this campaign are, among others, the repeated statements by John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, none of which have been rejected by the principal spokesmen of the Administration, although they lack any basis.

            Bolton, a prominent figure in the neo-conservative movement, states that "Cuba's threat to the security of the United States has been underestimated" and in March 2004, while addressing the Committee on International Relations of the House of Representatives, stressed Cuba's specificity because [the island] is 90 miles from the US mainland and because of "its condition as a violator of human rights, being on the list of terrorist countries, and sheltering terrorists”. He added that "the Administration believes that Cuba remains a terrorist and biological weapons threat to the United States." State Department officials said those statements were endorsed by the Intelligence Community.

            (4) Cuba's ability to destabilise the region, undermine the democratic process and promote anti-Americanism is the most recent accusation that seeks to augment the dossier of "threats" and to attract the support of other governments in the area.

            In January of this year, Under Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Roger Noriega declared that the United States had information about Cuban complicity in the toppling of governments. Secretary of State Powell supported this view a few days later when he opined that "Cuba has tried to do everything possible to destabilise part of the region”. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice joined in to say that the island continued to stir up trouble in other parts of the region.

            Later, in testimony before the House Committee on the Armed Services to evaluate hemispheric security, Gen. James T. Hill of the US Southern Command viewed this as an emerging threat and warned that "some leaders in the region exploit the deep frustrations over the failure of democratic reforms and reinforce their radical positions, fuel anti-American feelings and undermine our interests in the region”.

            A "regime change" always has been the policy of the United States regarding Cuba. The difference after September 11 is that its actions were carried out covertly in the past, while now it is openly proclaimed as the official policy of a government that already has put it into practice in Afghanistan and Iraq.

            In the case of Cuba, the US has gone from the euphemism of supporting a "transition to democracy" to the need to act "in a swift and decisive manner ... to end once and for all vestiges of the regime and prevent the succession”, a process that Washington links directly to the disappearance of Fidel.

            Within that framework and following the same political logic, the US government has produced the plan "to assist a Free Cuba”, which attempts to give international legitimacy to the right of the United States to overthrow the Cuban government and impose a regime that responds to its hegemonic interests.

            The so-called "Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba" prepared a plan aimed at depriving Cuba of its independence and sovereignty through the intensification of economic and political aggression, so as to provoke internal destabilisation and propitiate direct military intervention. Its purpose is to revert the Revolution, restore capitalism in a neo-liberal form and perpetuate imperial domination over the Cuban nation.

            The United States' plots against Cuba have been diverse: economic war, invasion, plots to assassinate Fidel and other leaders, acts of terrorism, constant propaganda aggression, the promulgation of new laws. The current plot attempts to integrate all previous plots and contemplates both the actions to topple the Cuban government and the organisation of Cuban society under US intervention.

            The report defines how [the Bush administration] envisions the functions of the state, its repressive mechanisms, the political system, social organisation, judicial order, the economic structure with its privatisation process and what it considers a "key element" for all this: the process to return all properties. All this is directed, regulated and controlled by the occupying power. It's something like a broadened Helms-Burton Law with a recycled Platt Amendment.

            Some people have limited the significance of the plan to Bush's election interests in Florida, but it would be a grave error not to assess in all its dimensions what constitutes the plan's main objective: to wrest from the Cuban nation its independence, to deprive it of its sovereignty and to proceed to the annexation of the country.

            The President of the United States asked the Commission to identify additional means to put a rapid end to the Cuban regime. When he established the Commission, he said clearly that the US was "not just waiting" for the Cuban government to fall but that it was "already working" toward that end. To do this, the US would, among other actions, set aside $59 million in the next two years. These are the funds assigned openly under Section 109 of the Helms-Burton Law. The funds distributed under Section 115 through the CIA and other agencies are much larger but secret; perhaps we shall learn about them in 20 or more years, when that information is declassified.

            Chapter 1. 'Hastening Cuba's transition'

            This chapter is devoted to the "regime change" with a policy that is "more proactive, integrated and disciplined to undermine the survival strategies of the Castro regime and contribute to conditions that will ... hasten the dictatorship's end”.

            The authors point out that in the past the policies toward Cuba were applied independently from each other. The economic war was waged without simultaneously lending all the support needed by the subversion; this, in turn, was not linked to illegal broadcasts and the international work to bring others aboard that policy. For this reason, the authors undertook to articulate a strategy that would integrate the different instruments at their disposal, structured as a "national commitment”, to put an end to the Revolution.

            This chapter identifies six interrelated tasks whose principal components are the development of subversive activities within the national territory and the strengthening of the "opposition" through its promotion, training and financing, plus a substantial increase in the funds assigned to its agents for those purposes.

            Other tasks are to impede the continuity of Cuban leadership as provided by the Constitution, to intensify the blockade to reduce the ingress of hard currency and to develop new methods to carry out illegal broadcasts, to organise a wide campaign of disinformation abroad and to foment the Revolution's international isolation through multilateral efforts.

            To achieve its purposes, the government of the United States would appoint a Transition Coordinator at the State Department, who would take charge of the planning and coordination of the actions of the various government actions for the execution of this plan.

            The appointment of this proconsul is one of the examples of the expansion of the Helms-Burton Law, which, in Section 203, established the figure of a coordinating official who would be appointed whenever the President of the United States determined that power [in Cuba] was held by a counter-Revolutionary government on a "democratic" stage.

            In Iraq, Paul Bremer was appointed as such an official after the military occupation. Cuba's Bremer would act, starting now, to put and end to the Revolution and to direct the ensuing process.

            The immediate deployment of a military plane to perform illegal broadcasts constitutes one of the most provocative and dangerous actions. A measure like this has previously been taken only during war conditions and represents a clear violation of Cuban sovereignty, of international law and of the rules of the International Telecommunications Union.

            A notable aspect of the presidential plan is the direct attack on the Cuban family through further restrictions on the trips by émigrés to their country of origin and the remittance of economic aid to their relatives. In addition, [the plan] assumes the right to define what constitutes a family and what doesn't, excluding therefore any aunts, uncles, cousins and other "distant" relatives.

            Chapter 2. 'Meeting Basic Human Needs in the Areas of Health, Education, Housing and Human Services'

            Beginning with this chapter, the report devotes itself entirely to outline the measures the US government would take after it begins to administer the colony, under occupation, and implement a capitalist restoration.

            Cuba is living proof of how much can be achieved in health care, education and social welfare, despite the material limitations caused by the United States' criminal blockade. Cubans enjoy access, equally and freely, to assistance in these fields, an assistance that would be a dream to most Third World countries and to tens of millions of people in the United States itself.

            According to the plan designed [by the US], health and education services would be privatised and would stop being universal and free. In the field of health, the plan contemplates the possibility that some private enterprises and charitable institutions help pay part of the expenses for the "basic" care of people who can't afford it. In the case of education, the plan would reopen the old, elitist schools and facilitate the development of private education and its spread to all levels of education. It would also establish that public education must be paid for.

            This chapter proposes the elimination of the Social Security system, because "the Cuban economy and government budget after transition may not be able to sustain the level of unearned benefits and the lax requirements for eligibility that the communist system permitted”.

            The cost of social services would be financed with funds not only from the intervenient government and the contractors who would suck dry the country's resources "but also from ... philanthropic foundations, nonprofit expert organisations and businesses interested in investing in Cuba's future”.

            Chapter 3. 'Establishing Democratic Institutions, Respect for Human Rights, Rule of Law, and National Justice and Reconciliation'

            This is one of the most all-encompassing chapters in the project of domination, involving the police, the army, the government (all the way to the local level), the judicial system, the Parliament, political parties, labour unions, the churches and religious organisations, civic and professional associations. Nothing escapes the empire's foresight.

            Anticipating the repudiation the proposed measures would elicit, the authors assign the organisation of repression prominence above all other matters. Thus, they define as "an immediate priority" the organisation by the US government of "a professional police force”. They consider this to be the "key variable" upon which "will depend, more than any other, the possibility of a regime change”.

            The administrative power of the new colony intends to change laws and regulations, appoint judges, design an electoral system and finally write a new Constitution that will consecrates the rights of the occupier and its puppet government.

            Chapter 4. 'Establishing the Core Institutions of a Free Economy'

            The reestablishment of private property rights is conceived in the report as "one of the biggest challenges of the transition period”, especially the process of property restitution, which [the authors] consider to be "extremely complex”, particularly as it relates to residential property, which they describe as a "Gordian Knot”.

            Among the claimants are included not only US citizens but also the former Cuban exploiters who later acquired US citizenship, even those who remain [in the US] as residents or citizens of other countries.

            The restitution of properties is presented as the "key element" to initiate an economic recovery, because, according to the report, "potential investors will be reluctant to get involved in Cuba as long as questions of ownership, property rights and restitution remain unsettled”. Consequently, "the longer this issue remains open, the longer it will take for Cuba's financial and economic recovery”.

            The report defines the various types of property subject to restitution — commercial, agricultural and residential — and, based on the experience of the former socialist countries, it proposes "solutions”.

            To take away the Cubans' homes and land, [its authors] create a US Government Commission on the Restitution of Property Rights (CRPR) so "an expeditious process may be carried out”. They admit that "the situation involving residential property will be extremely complex" because it "raises the potential for major political dissatisfaction by a large segment of Cubans”, but say the process should be accomplished in less than one year.

            They will form a US Government Standing Committee for Economic Reconstruction (SCER) that will be in charge of returning Cuba to a market economy with the neo-liberal prescriptions that have caused so much misery in Latin America and other regions of the world. This committee, among other tasks, would establish a new fiscal and monetary policy, would free price controls, including the controls on energy prices, would eliminate cooperatives, totally privatise the economy and deliver the country to the international financial institutions.

            The promises of economic recovery through the restoration of a capitalism with an extreme neo-liberal bent cannot avoid admitting that the process will be "slow and uneven" and recall that in other countries the so-called transition to a free-market model has been "slow, painful and politically sensitive”.

            The neo-liberal adjustment includes a "radical overhaul" of the national budget, which implies "determining the economic need and viability of Cuba's numerous social programmes”.

            [The authors] conclude that "the reconstruction effort will be long and costly ... and the burden need not fall completely on the shoulders of the United States”. "It will take time to build national institutions”, so they propose sharing with the international community of donors, the international financial institutions, and the development organisms of the United States the high costs they foresee for their new possession.

            Chapter 5. 'Modernising Infrastructure'

            To carry out the country's conversion, it will become necessary to modify the economic infrastructure. The solution the authors propose is the privatisation of public services, assistance from the World Bank and similar institutions, the sale of US-made equipment and the intervention in every branch of Cuba's economy.

            The imperial greed encompasses everything: aviation, airports, maritime operations, railroads, highways, energy, public transport, mining, telecommunications, hydraulic resources and many other sectors.

            The report foresees the implementation of these measures within the first 90 days of the new regime, legally supported by the drafting of agreements between the intervener and the appointed government to achieve the appropriation of natural resources, guarantee juicy contracts for US companies and thus control the country's economic life in its entirety.

            Chapter 6. 'Addressing Environmental Degradation'

            The report considers that "the poor environmental protection policies that have been in effect are evident in the quality of land, water, air, and natural habitats that exist on the island today”.

            This chapter is an example of the manipulation and absolute ignorance of the United States about Cuba. In this field, as in many other parts of the document, the empire's thinking stopped in 1959, ignoring the institutionalisation in [Cuba] of the protection of the environment through laws, programmes and concrete projects. Besides, Cuba has signed 26 conventions, treaties and protocols related to biological diversity.

            Conclusions

            We are looking at a plan by the government of the United States that shows the lengths to which the empire is willing to go to deprive the Cuban nation of its independence and sovereignty. It is obvious that, toward that end, military intervention is required, as well as the installation of an occupation government that will execute the detailed plans made for what would become — from that moment on — [the empire's] protectorate.

            To fulfil its designs toward Cuba, the US government accompanies its actions with a broad propaganda plan of "public diplomacy”, for which it has budgeted an additional sum of $5 million. This plan portrays Cuba as a country that violates human rights, shelters terrorists and carries out espionage in the United States, promotes instability in Latin America and produces biological weapons for mass extermination, with which it threatens the national security of the United States.

            They try to present an image that delegitimises the Cuban government in the international community and depicts a country that brutalises its citizens and functions on the margins of the international community; thus, they would create the conditions that justify armed aggression.

            The chairman of this Commission, Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently summarised the essence of the policy against Cuba. When asked why the US did not "liberate" Cuba the way it did in Iraq, he answered that "military options are not always used immediately" and said those options were preceded by other instruments: "isolation, sanctions, pressures, economic activity”, although he made it clear that "sometimes there is no appropriate solution other than the use of military force”.

            Some weeks ago, Army Gen. [John] Abizaid, commander in chief of the US Central Command, asked a group of soldiers returning from Iraq not to quit the Army. "We need your experience in the global war against terrorism," he said, and added: "The country is going to face more wars like this in the years to come."

*Miguel Álvarez Sánchez is an adviser to the President of the National Assembly of Cuba.