Far from ushering in a new era of peaceful coexistence, Barack Obama’s opening to Cuba reflects a sharpening
inter-imperialist rivalry. By restoring ties to the Caribbean island, Obama and the U.S. capitalists he serves are seeking to reassert U.S. influence in Latin America at the expense of Russia, China, and Venezuela. While the U.S. bosses’ media focus mainly on economics and politics, the shift also has a significant military dimension. As the Russian and Chinese war machines set their sights on Cuba, it signals a growing probability of global conflict.
The pro-U.S. Jerusalem Post (12/18/14) praises Obama’s move in geo-strategic terms: “Alarmingly, the Russians in recent months have been using Cuba to build up a menacing Cold War-era presence at America’s doorstep.” For U.S. rulers, a rehabilitated Cuba lowers the risk of Russia moving in “just a short boat ride away from the Florida Keys.”
The inside story was revealed by Bill Gertz, a writer for the right-wing Washington Times — owned by the Unification Church, which has close ties to South Korea’s national intelligence agency. According to the New York Times (12/3/2000), Gertz has used his special access to publish “more classified information than anyone else in America.” On December 17, he wrote:
Months before President Obama announced on Wednesday that he is seeking to do away with decades of U.S. economic sanctions against the communist regime in Cuba, Russia concluded a security deal with Havana aimed at bolstering intelligence and military ties to the island dictatorship.
The Russia-Cuba agreement was announced May 16 …. The security agreement comes amid fresh U.S. intelligence agency concerns that Russia is taking steps to follow through on plans to conduct strategic nuclear bomber flights over the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, possibly with the help of Cuba and Venezuela.
Russian officials recently held discussions with both governments about the use of airfields for Russia’s Tu-95 nuclear capable bombers, known as the Bear H. The bombers have been conducting large numbers of threatening flights near U.S. coasts in recent months.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated Nov. 12 that Russia would begin sending long-range bombers to the Gulf. “We have to maintain [Russia’s] military presence in the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific, as well as the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, noting strategic bombers would be dispatched to the region for “drills.”
China, Cuba: Military Allies
Meanwhile, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, reported, “China’s top political advisor Yu Zhengsheng met with Cuban Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Leopoldo Cintra Frias on Thursday. Saying bilateral military ties are part of party-to-party and country-to-country relations between China and Cuba, Yu spoke highly of the progress in high-level exchanges and training between the two militaries” (12/11/14).
Since 1823, U.S. foreign policy has followed the Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe declared that any efforts by outside powers to colonize or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression — and would require U.S. intervention. From that point forward, the Marines invaded any Latin American country where U.S. corporate interests were threatened.
Castro’s Cuba defied this doctrine. In 1960, after it seized a billion dollars worth of U.S. corporate holdings, the U.S. imposed a trade embargo and banned travel to Cuba. (While the travel ban was generally effective, the Progressive Labor Movement—forerunner to Progressive Labor Party—successfully broke it in 1963.) In recent years, as U.S. power has weakened, competing capitalists from China, Japan, Germany, France and Spain have jumped into South America, making deals with Brazil, Chile, Argentina and others. The U.S. has grown marginalized in its own backyard.
Now China is using Cuba to entrench itself in the region. Vladimir Putin is moving to outflank the U.S. by strengthening Russia’s military ties there. In response, U.S. rulers would have to gear up their military machine to recapture their once-dominant position.
War Is the Name of Rulers’ Cuba Game
Bankrolled by oil firms like Exxon and Chevron, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosts a program called Military Forum, where senior Department of Defense officials “present their unique insights and vision on the direction of U.S. national security and defense policy” (CSIS website).
A year ago, these warmongers ran conferences headlined, “The Case to Remove Cuba from the Terrorist List” and “Cuba: Finding its Place in the Global Market?” Now those questions have been settled. On December 2, two weeks before Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced a normalization of relations, the forum topic was “Getting to Normal: A Legal Pathway for U.S.-Cuba Policy Reform.”
The road to Obama’s Cuba gambit was paved by the U.S.-led manipulation to lower oil prices. Even as demand shrinks in a worsening global economy, crude oil production soars in the U.S. and junior partner Saudi Arabia. This has little to do with breakthroughs in U.S. fracking or the Saudis’ desire to retain market share. In reality, U.S. rulers are aiming to punish — if not overthrow — their rivals in Moscow and Caracas. As oil prices have plunged 50 percent since June, economic chaos has ensued in Russia and Venezuela, capitalist petro-states at the top of the U.S. hit list. U.S. rulers pulled the same trick in 1986, when Vice President George H. Bush convinced Saudi King Fahd to depress oil prices. The resulting dislocation helped assure the demise of the Soviet Union.
Even while forced to admit that Cuban health care and education put the U.S. to shame, U.S. politicians are boasting that the move toward normalization proves the “failure of communism” in the island nation. But Cuba never had communism. Its ruling party, following the lead of a decaying Soviet Union, never gave full working-class state power a chance. Misled by the myth of the halfway house of socialism, Cuba maintained lethal aspects of the profit system. Its revolution was doomed from the start.
Cuban Socialism = Capitalism
As Maria Elena Hernández, a senior Communist Party official, told the New York Times (12/20), “We’re going to be like China and Vietnam, a socialist country with capitalism.” By retaining wages, Fidel Castro’s regime locked in wage differentials and a small privileged class, hallmarks of capitalism. In Cuba, as in the USSR and China, socialism led straight back to the capitalist profit system. China is now the world’s second largest capitalist economy. It features mass unemployment and poverty wages for hundreds of millions. A select few have become billionaires on the backs of the working class.
It is socialism — a fig leaf for capitalism — that has failed, not communism. It is the profit system that continues to fail billions of workers worldwide.
A normalized Cuba will spell full-blown capitalism for its working class. It will inevitably lead to heightened exploitation, lower wages, accelerating racism, and growing prostitution to serve foreign-owned hotels and casinos.
For the international working class, the U.S. opening to Cuba can have only one result. Only war can resolve the capitalists’ perpetual fight for markets and cheap labor.
U.S. Police State to Combat Ferguson Rebellions
Obama will use his Cuba scheme and “We are all Americans” rhetoric to recruit more Latin youth into the military, to wage war against our sisters and brothers worldwide on behalf of U.S. imperialism. To pursue these wars, the bosses will intensify fascist measures within the U.S. to stop rebellions by the working class. Exhibit A: The brutal repression of demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri. The rash of racist killings by cops across the U.S., the poverty wages earned by millions, the mass racist unemployment with no end in sight — the time is ripe for rebellions that the bosses can squash only with increased terror.
The one and only answer to this capitalist hell is communist revolution. Communism is the opposite of capitalism and socialism. It eliminates bosses, cops, profits and all of their evils: racism, the special oppression of women, mass unemployment, poverty, and imperialist war.
Communism: Our Class’s Future
Communism means workers’ power, a society led by the workers’ communist party composed of hundreds of millions of workers. Everyone can become a communist leader. Our class will share all the benefits produced by our labor, the source of all value. This is the only decent future for our class, for our youth. This is what the Progressive Labor Party fights for. Join us!