With the oil blockades on Cuba since January, Cuba has become part of the administration’s long-running plans to deal with its “enemies” abroad. The targeting of Cuba has been a career-long goal of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Controlling Latin America and the Caribbean, viewing the Western Hemisphere as “Our Hemisphere” through the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, and manufacturing consent for an invasion of Cuba are key to this, as shown in his “Cuba Report.”
“Our Hemisphere”: the word “our” carries a great amount of weight here. This report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, isn’t history written through the viewpoint of the Cuban people. Instead, it is history written from the viewpoint of states, from the interests of the wealthy and political elite of Washington, with Cuba as the enemy, not of the American people, but of American state interests.
Since 1960, the American government has put Cuba under one of the strictest trade embargoes in the world. Cuba has simultaneously been working against strict U.S. economic sanctions, which have blocked it from key resources like vaccines and modern technology, while also, in the words of the report, supposedly being responsible for this: “Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history – from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses – can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.” This paradox the report works under shows the huge disconnect between the reality of Cuba and the supervillain framing of it.
The Black Power movement is viewed as a child of outside Cuban influence, not something that was domestically created. Its development is not explained through the poor racial relations at the time, police brutality, lack of resources in Black communities, poor education, being treated as second-class citizens, or not having voting rights. No, no, Cuba is supposedly the source of these “radical ideas.”
The report speaks of Angela Davis and the support she received through the Free Angela Davis movement during her imprisonment, both in America and in Cuba. The report paints her and other Black radical intellectuals as outsiders and “fugitives” who were ideologically aligned with Cuba. Cuba itself is treated as a huge cultural and ideological center that has been planning for the downfall of America.
Havana is described more as a supervillain against the always-righteous U.S. government, even during the civil rights movement, when the government was actively targeting and monitoring Black leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were wiretapped, while leaders of the Black Panther Party had their organization monitored by the FBI and their letters forged to create distrust and division within the party itself.
The report also frames Black radicals and every other left-leaning group or idea as being against “America” and American ideals, as if there is one set of interests for this country. The rewriting of history to frame everything against the status quo, from the 1960s up to today, as “anti-American” tells history from the viewpoint of the rich upper class. It frames Black radicals as overly controlled or influenced by the Cuban government and tells history through the lens of states, not people of similar backgrounds working toward similar goals.
It doesn’t tell the history of Cuba as a country working to give better rights and quality of life to its population, one that shares a similar background with parts of the American population: a former colony that gained independence, with a large Black and African-descended population, working within the framework of anti-colonial and Pan-African movements.
Accepting its framing of history as true means accepting the interests of the American state as the interests of the whole of America: Black Americans, white Americans, poor Americans, and rich Americans, instead of the interests of a select few who use their overwhelming influence to present their goals as “everyone’s goals” in America.