By Juan Antonio Blanco
In the last few days, in relation to the repeated incidents with terrorists, kidnappings of ships with hostages — old people and children among them — heading to Florida, a situation of particular tension between the US and Cuba has been created. The kind of attention these events have been given by the global information industry networks is disturbing because their selective and capricious presentation responds to the customary patterns of the manufacture of public consensus in order to legitimate current policies.
The question which emerges from the manipulation of information about a crisis inside Cuba is unmistakable — Is there a desire to provoke a crisis with Cuba?
In the face of the customary repetitive avalanche of subliminal messages from the international information purveyors' glass cage and its "virtual reality" to which we are accustomed, the alternative press has the duty to communicate the facts in an objective manner and to investigate if there exists the desire to devise a tragedy for the Cuban people.
Let us review some basic history:
The US and Cuba signed an immigration agreement in December of 1984 through which Washington committed itself to accepting a quota of up to 20,000 immigrants annually, as well as to establish an additional priority quota to favour and facilitate the emigration of former political prisoners.
The US never fulfilled this commitment. Between 1984 and 1994, barely 10,000 visas have been granted. In 1990 a committee of former political prisoners made up of more than 70 individuals organised a hunger strike to protest against the fact that the immigration agreement made with them had not been fulfilled. According to a document which these people issued, the US diplomatic authorities in Havana had exhorted them to remain in Cuba to continue the struggle against communism. In other cases, in which individuals who had been sanctioned for having tried to emigrate illegally to the US, these same authorities had responded negatively to the application for a visa, alleging that these people could not be considered "political" prisoners but "common" if that had been the motive for their arrest.
Despite the discriminatory treatment of those people, the US has a special immigration law (the so-called "Cuban Adjustment Act") for those who arrive from the island. According to that law, the people who make use of any air or naval medium, using violence or not to obtain them, and emigrate from Cuba, are automatically granted the status of "political" refugee and in the brief period of one year they are granted the highly sought-after "green card" of permanent legal residence. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, Central Americans, Caribbeans — even Chinese! — who are shot at in the Rio Grande, pursued by the immigration authorities or intercepted by the Coast Guard, lack such a unique privilege.
The difference in the treatment given by the US diplomats in Havana to those who were intercepted by the Cuban Coast Guard in their attempts at illegal exit, and the others who, succeeding in eluding them, were successful in arriving at the North American coasts, together with the extraordinarily low number of immigration visas granted (an average of around 1000 per year), leaves no room for doubt that the US wants to instigate illegal exits — within certain tolerable limits — for reasons of anti-Cuban propaganda.
The US also has an agreement, currently in effect, signed by Cuba, against the hijacking of air and naval ships, according to which the parties commit themselves, except in exceptional circumstances, to return the terrorists to the country of origin to stand trial. Never, since that agreement was signed with President Carter, has the US returned to Cuba even one terrorist, in spite of the fact that a notable number of ships used to emigrate to the US have been hijacked for that purpose, and often carried hostages on board.
Not only was the obligation to deport the terrorists and hijackers to Cuba not fulfilled, but they were extended the same privileged treatment stipulated in the "Cuban adjustment law", while the official media and the press gave those cases the public interpretation of being "political refugees".
In 1992, a few months after the USSR, the island's main commercial partner (until then 80% of the market), disappeared, the US Congress hardened even more the so-called "embargo" against Cuba, extending it to third countries whose business people and ships are subject to reprisals by the US Commerce and Treasury departments if they are caught with investments, freight or commercial or financial transactions with that country. The aim of this new law was openly argued and approved in the process of the congressional deliberations: to contribute to making the daily life of the common Cuban citizen unbearable in order to produce a civil war against the regime. William Safire synthesised it very well in the New York Times: "to make the Cuban people hungry enough to become furious enough and get rid of Castro".
Since that new law was approved (1992) until last year, illegal exits from the country increased from 2554 to 3656. In 1984 only 19 people emigrated illegally to the US from Cuba. In 1993 Cuba granted over 80,000 permanent emigration permits to people who applied for them, while the US in turn granted a little over 1000 immigration visas. If Cuba were to decide tomorrow to do away with the steps to apply to leave the country, that would not change the current terms of the problem.
In the last few months not only did the US deny visas in massive numbers in Havana, receive with green cards those who arrived illegally from Cuba and celebrate the acts of terrorism and hijacking that took place, but it has also instructed the US Coast Guard to approach Cuban waters to pick up even more people, which has given even more encouragement so that type of act will increase.
Also in recent months the radio stations (now 17) which transmit special programs for Cuba from Florida, on which those who have arrived in the US illegally express their joy for the successful escape to the land of "freedom" and "abundance", have intensified their broadcasts (1148 hours a week).
In Cuba — as in other countries — illegal emigration to the US has become a profitable business for criminals on both coasts. The planning of hijackings of airplanes and ships by criminals willing to use violence goes together with the offer to individuals who, without being criminals, have not succeeded in obtaining the visa to emigrate in a safe and normal way to the US. Usually they offer to take them out of Cuba illegally in exchange for thousands of dollars. By accepting this type of offer, because of their desperate eagerness to migrate, not a few incautious people have been made victims of fraud and murder, and others have been made accomplices in terrorist acts. Cases have even been detected of US criminals who systematically kill, transforming their illegal human cargo into clandestine traffic in organs for medical institutions.
As a result of this policy, more and more people die from dehydration, drown, die at the hands of criminals or are bitten by sharks in the Florida Strait. It is calculated that thousands have ended up this way. There are also more terrorist acts and hijackings of ships to leave the country, even with hostages, with accomplices who paid to travel as passengers, or with a mix of both. To date, and during all the years in which this policy has been applied, nobody has reported one ship sunk by the Cuban Coast Guard or an illegal emigrant whom a Cuban Coast Guard member has killed.
Up to this point has been recounted the history to which no international media have alluded or preferred to investigate in the exercise of free journalism.
Now that same press has been pointing out — and distorting — isolated incidents, such as:
- Pointing to the existence in Cuba of legal procedures to obtain an exit permit as the cause of the illegal exits;
- Suggesting that a wooden tugboat manufactured 115 years ago whose operations had been limited for some time to within Havana Bay because of the danger of using it in the open sea — dry-docked awaiting repairs for leaks in its hull — was supposedly sunk by "government" orders and ships while attempting to escape, causing the drowning of dozens of people.
- The hijacking with grenades, pistols and bayonets of three minor ships used for the transport of passengers within Havana Bay, with the terrorists using the passengers (including children and a two-month-old baby) as hostages. The hijackers and their accomplices were picked up by a US Coast Guard ship which refused to take with it the weapons which would have allowed the crime to be proven in a court of law.
- The occurrence of a disturbance in which hundreds of people were involved — they never reached a thousand in any estimate by passers-by, tourists or foreign journalists who were witness — in which they broke store windows, hit police and citizens and damaged some vehicles. This disturbance began the same day on which another attempt to hijack a passenger ship took place, in which one of the terrorists killed at close range a black 19-year-old policeman who was a passenger on the ship. The spontaneous reaction of the population, already indignant over these crimes, which was first a confrontation, which later contributed to the arrest of almost 300 people for these acts, has also been presented to the world as "brutal repression."
This gross manipulation of the facts, added to the "informative forgetting" of the context and the history to which we have already alluded, merits clarification:
1. The exit permit in Cuba is a legal procedure which has been slowly changing since 1988; at present it has become only a formality. For its part, the US government has not suspended the total prohibition of travel to Cuba by its citizens, who must justify their desire to visit the island according to certain exceptional norms, in order to obtain their government's "permission", which exonerates them from prison and fines of over $100,000 upon their return.
2. The tugboat was not pursued by the Cuban military or people who followed their government's instructions, but by a handful of port workers in three other tugboats who wanted to impede the theft of a ship that was the property of their company. Arrested and interrogated together with the hijackers and survivors of the sinking, their statements were corroborated by those in the sense that, trying to impede the hijacking in the middle of the night and with waves three metres high, the sinking was the result of a fatal, and not deliberate, accident between the ship and one of the civilian ships which, driven by port workers and without communication, tried to detain it on its own. Later, more than an hour and a half after the beginning of the events, the Cuban Coast Guard arrived at the location of the sinking and helped in the rescue of survivors, already begun by the port workers in the other ships.
3. To present as heroes the terrorists, hijackers of a ship with women, old people and children, who had additionally killed a policeman who was simply a passenger, does not correspond to the duties of a country which has signed agreements against terrorism and piracy.
4. The international press, which has systematically preferred to ignore the data on the impact which the US economic blockade has had on the Cuban population, now prefers to repeat the fact that hundreds of people produced disturbances "against the regime" in Havana and to silence the fact that there was not one bullet wound, despite the fact that 10 police were wounded among 35 people who were injured more or less seriously. There were no deaths. The Cuban government ordered in no uncertain terms that the authorities not use firearms. The armoured cars which ran through Los Angeles did not appear anywhere in the city of Havana. Neither was tear gas used. The tragic sinking of the tugboat served, however, for the US Senate to ask President Clinton to take the case to the UN Security Council.
The Cuban government has stated that if the US is not willing to control illegal emigration from Cuba toward its coasts, neither will its authorities impede the exit of those ships which have not been stolen or hijacked in an act of terrorism, or access to those who come to seek family members.
To sum up: if the US considers that any Cuban citizen who arrives illegally on its coasts deserves the green card and that the Cuban government is what is impeding, in a totalitarian manner, the free movement of its citizens, the time has come for the world to verify the real origin of the migratory drama between the two countries. The US reaction was not long in coming: if the Cuban government authorises not just the free exit — which in fact it does — but the freedom to sail off to the US in private ships, the US will respond with the Pentagon's contingency plan designed for just that contingency: Operation Distant Shore. The formula being applied to Cuba is one of a program of integral subversion:
Economic strangulation + denial of visas + psychological warfare via radio = social explosion.
A Tienanmen [Square incident] was desired and, if it were possible, a civil war as a result of that. But there were no tanks, no soldiers, no rifles, no steel or rubber bullets. There was a confrontation by one part of the population with some hundreds of individuals: very little to escalate the logic of aggression.
If President Clinton wants his re-election in 1996 — it is said that not changing his policy toward the island is a way to win the votes [in 1996] which he did not win from the Cubans in Florida in 1992 — it is preferable to think about the repercussions that a crisis with Cuba could bring him if he allows himself to be dragged along by those who believe that the US Department of State should act like the Department of State of Dade County. Probably not only would he not win those votes, but he would lose many of those which he obtained in 1992. If to send troops to Somalia was not a good idea, he should think what it would mean to provoke and end up directly involved in a crisis with Cuba.
The policy toward Cuba which President Clinton has inherited was designed by the conservative Republicans when they were betting on generating an incident in Cuba which would legitimate a direct aggression. Those sectors have their permanent presence in the federal bureaucracy and the US Congress and would now like not only to provoke the crisis which they have bet on but also to make the cost of its outcome fall on the Democratic Party.
The sectors of the extreme right in the Cuban-American community, desirous of a future vengeance for which now US soldiers would pay, are also lending themselves to this irresponsible and criminal game. If the president does not want a crisis with Cuba, then he must abandon the idea that the authorities of that country are going to pay the costs to avoid it. The Cuban government does not wish to continue assuming the danger of any incident which could get out of control which impacts on illegal emigration to the US, without any support from that country.
The economic blockade, the non-fulfilment of the immigration and anti-terrorist agreements, the psychological warfare, are all aimed at one form or another of conflict with Cuba which, once begun, will acquire its own logic based on the values and commitments to which each party subscribes. If the Democratic administration feels so vulnerable today in the face of the right-wing sector of the Cuban-American community, to the point that it does not dare to change its policy toward the island before the elections, what could be expected if a real incident were to occur which would serve as the basis for those sectors to demand direct action against Cuba by the US?
Curiously, the White House appears to be convinced of the Cuban government's capacity to maintain the country's stability in spite of its policy toward it. The few hundred who participated in the disturbances on August 5 have been multiplied to the figure of 40,000(!) by the Miami press. CNN, for lack of its own images, did not hesitate to use those of the people who went into the streets to salute the presence of Fidel Castro where the events took place, as if they were the original ones.
And if there had been, which there was not, just one death? How many would the press have proclaimed? What action would have been demanded of President Clinton? To what point would he have allowed himself to be dragged along by pressure? Would achieving the highly anticipated social explosion in Cuba really be a "success" or the beginning of a nightmare for the US government?
The current US policy toward Cuba, inherited from previous administrations, is in conflict with the interests of both the Democratic Party and those of the US as a nation, which would have to pay a considerable price because a handful of wealthy Cubans in Miami aspire one day to return, among foreign bayonets, to misgovern this country. A period of tense waiting is opened. Perhaps calm will prevail and Washington will be capable of seeing in what has happened the need to profoundly reconsider its policy toward Cuba before President Clinton not only loses the votes of Dade County but those of the US as a nation.
Cuba is a small but sovereign country. Since the USSR disappeared, someone would with difficulty put that fact in doubt. Only negotiation, calm and mutual respect can avoid baggage of the past leading to a conflict that no-one on the island wants and that the White House should also avoid.
August 8, 1994.
[Juan Antonio Blanco is a former adviser to the Cuban Foreign Ministry and the United Nations, and a well-known political analyst. This article was translated by Toby Mailman for NY Transfer.]