Cuba and the U.S.: The struggle continues

By Carlos Alberto Montaner*

The third round of negotiations between the United States and Cuba did not go well. Barack Obama wanted to put an end to 56 years of hostility between his nation and the island as part of his “legacy,” but he's discovering that it is not easy. Why?

The two countries march in opposite directions, each moved by its own perceptions and its own sense of its proper mission in history. The foreign policy of the United States was designed to defend and project the nation's values and modus operandi. Cuba's policy is exactly the same but goes in the opposite direction. They're bound to clash.

The United States' political and diplomatic inertia led Washington to try to change adversarial regimes that are manifestly hostile. That was the origin of the lists of terrorists nations, the charges of human rights violations, the support for the dissidents and the shortwave broadcasts of information that has been banned by the hostile dictatorships.

On the other side, Cuba's beliefs and convictions, together with Fidel's imperial commands, encourage its leaders to try to destroy the adversary. That's the vision of the Forum of São Paulo. That's the objective of the five-country circuit of 21st-Century Socialism, the constitution of ALBA, the embrace of Iran, godfather of Hezbollah, manufacturer of nuclear weapons, and supporter of all anti-West sectors, including narcoguerrillas.

Cuba perceives the government of the United States as the administrator of a genocidal system that feeds on the work of the Third World and does not hesitate to kill entire populations for its own benefit. That, it proposes, is why it must be exterminated.

Consequently, the Castro brothers see themselves as the heroic crusaders in a struggle to the death against that murderous empire. They embrace Mugabe, Qaddafi, anyone who hates the gringos, even if he's a monster.

They are not passive theoreticians engaged in judging the iniquities of the United States in a university forum. They are active, militant enemies who risk their lives in any trench. Everything that is done against the U.S.A. is legitimate. They delight in the David-vs.-Goliath metaphor while they maintain that their military dictatorship "is the world's most democratic and just system."

Fidel, who suffers from a fixation of ideas, said so very clearly to his confidante and lover, Celia Sánchez, in a letter written in June 1958 on the Sierra Maestra, while he fought Batista: "When this war ends, a much longer and widespread war will begin for me: the war that I'm going to wage against them. I realize that that is going to be my true destiny."

In contrast, the North American ruling class sees the United States as the world's foremost power, blessed with a successful economic system that has created enormous middle classes and the largest technological and scientific development in history, to the glory and benefit of the whole human species. A nation that, because of its weight and sense of responsibility, must support the freedoms through its huge and efficient military apparatus.

That machinery and those principles, they contend, in the past allowed them to save the world from the Nazis and fascists and later defeat the communists in the long and persistent Cold War.

In addition, the U.S. government, as “the leader of the free world,” for many decades has assumed the obligation to propagate and defend democracy, the market economy and property rights on an international scale.

It assumes that the future of humanity hinges on that, even the nation's survival, incapable of prevailing in a world dominated by a system that's different from and hostile to the model created by the Founding Fathers in 1776.

That argument has served it well. The 20th Century belonged to the United States and, in order to continue to be the hegemonic nation, it relies on the Pentagon, the CIA, the DEA, the VOA, the NED, the AID, NATO, its links with the European Union, the economic resources furnished by an immensely productive society, the Department of State, the world's 100 best universities and an entire legal, military and propagandistic strategy that reflects its vocation as the first world power.

And Cuba? Obama sees it as a small, poor and unproductive Caribbean island governed by some colorful old men, stubborn survivors of the sinking of communism, dragged into a confrontation with Washington as a result of the Cold War, a country that can inflict little damage to the United States.

That is why Obama, who doesn't understand the Castros and is unaware that choosing his enemies is not among his powers, unilaterally decreed -- unlike his 10 predecessors -- an end to the hostilities and began (he thought) a process of reconciliation. He didn't realize that the clash between the two countries is not the product of historic fate but an inevitable head-on crash between two adversarial visions and missions.

To truly reconcile, one of them must leave the field and give up the battle to impose its political model. Neither is willing to do it. Therefore, the struggle continues. 

*CAM is a journalist and writer. His latest book is the novel “A Time for Scoundrels.”