Bush-Trump: Dirty Tricks in Parallel

The decision of the Donald Trump administration to reactivate the Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, of March 1996, has the same despicable purposes of the Bush plan of Assistance to a Free Cuba, of May 2006, in its efforts to return the island to a US colony condition

Thirteen years ago, impacted by the boundless cynicism of the then President George W. Bush when announcing his plan of Assistance to a Free Cuba, I wrote an article entitled “Science fiction of the nonsense”, because I believed that the imagination and overflowing arrogance of Bush and his gang surpassed even that of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

I wondered if there was someone from Mars in that administration, the only way to accept that they were so ignorant and obtuse as to believe that a people who feel free and owner of its nation after a century and a half of struggles could be traced back to the times of slavery, without property and without rights, governed by a Yankee proconsul who, like Paul Bremer in Iraq, imposed the laws dictated by Washington.

I also said that the power of the United States and its jurisdiction did not pass one millimeter further than the dividing line that marks the boundaries between the two countries in the Strait of Florida. In other words: that their dominion ends where Cuba begins, whose people do not believe them enlightened or chosen by anyone —much less by God— to threaten our sovereignty or covet what belongs to us.

Of course Bush and his cohort of extremists, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others, have been replaced after Barack Obama’s two terms, by another team of fascists, like Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Mauricio Claver-Carone and Marco Rubio, among others, in what seems to be an emulation to see who is more repulsively reactionary, aggressive and contumacious.

If I were to make a remark between Bush and Trump’s administrations, one would say that the first was blinded by the rapid victory in the aggression against Iraq after which they thought that, if they succeeded in that war even with the opposition of the United Nations, they could repeat the experience in the Cuba of Martí and Fidel: How wrong they were !

But after Obama’s eight years in power, Trump arrived and, without a fight won anywhere, with the task of doing damage control of the wars lost in Syria and Afghanistan, and the futility of the war in Iraq, where the Baghdad government today has better relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran than with Washington, there is little to be said to feel euphoric and arrogant, as it seems that They feel them.

However, a look at the current situation in this continent allows us to notice a situation that could justify, or at least explain, the aggressive line that Trump and his cohort follow towards the neighboring island, and that in recent times the rightwing situation in the continent has made it possible to intensify the pressure against Venezuela.

Seeing it this way, the predatory team of Donald Trump and his think tanks deduces that, while aggressions are hardened against the Homeland of Bolivar, the same must be done against the Island of the Liberty (Cuba), the one that, if fighting for its own survival, would not be in full condition to help his South American ally, and that once the government of Nicolás Maduro was overthrown, it would be possible to overturn all the enormous economic, political and media pressure to change the governments of Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia, in that order. 

Since the days of his election campaign the abominable Trump had threatened to dismantle, if he arrived at the White House, all the measures adopted by Obama, including the incipient rapprochement with Cuba, which led to the reopening of his embassy in La Havana in July 2016. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that he would intensify his offensive in the moment of the greatest democratic advance of the island, when its popular democracy process has reached the climax with the approval of the most advanced Constitution of the hemisphere.

It’s also difficult to understand that, as part of their crusade of change of regimes that are not faithful to them, Trump and his team have unleashed the destabilizing processes in countries such as Nicaragua and Bolivia, which have two of the healthiest and fastest growing economies in the region.

The Empire tries to impose itself against all odds. In the particular case of Sandino’s homeland, it has the additional purpose of preventing the construction of a new interoceanic canal that would give permanent presence to China in Central America; while in Bolivia, it hopes to seize its immense mineral wealth, starting with silicon. Thus, it is worth remembering that Mr. Bush, whose paternal and maternal grandparents were guilty of trading with the enemy during World War II, left the presidential armchair without being able to crown his dream of seeing Cuba on its knees, something that, paradoxically, one of his most acerbic critics, Donald Trump, tries to achieve in less favorable international circumstances, because two other powers have emerged in the arena: Russia and China, whose interests complement each other.

Despite the eleven administrations that have reached Washington and the huge pressures exerted by them, Cuba has never given up in any of its principles. What makes Trump and his people think that with them the result will be successful?

The answer was already given by Barack Obama in one of his public appearances when, referring to the more than 50 years attacks of the United States against Cuba, he expressed that different results cannot be expected by doing the same thing and in the same way against the island.

Knowing the wood of which Cubans are made of and the influence of Martí and Fidel on us, we don’t need to be Nostradamus to predict that the attempt to fully apply Title III of the Helms-Burton, as proposed by Trump and his followers in order to suffocate the Cubans and change their system, are condemned to the most shameful of failures and will serve, among other things, to mark the limits of the imperial power, because, as the Commander in Chief said, “They shall never have Cuba”.