Tag: Soviet Union (USSR)

Another Granma Article Against the U.S. Embargo (Blockade)  

Granma, the official newspaper for Cuba’s Communist Party, already has published an editorial against the U.S. recent extension of its embargo (blockade) against Cuba.[1] Here is the text of another Granma article voicing similar views.[2]

“[It} is not news that the U.S. Government has extended, for one more year, the validity of the law that establishes the basis of the economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba. It would be news if it did not, because that is already on the agenda of the president-elect, regardless of the winning party. There is only one political base against the largest of the Antilles: the imperial one.”

“Last week, Joe Biden played the same role as his predecessors, in a ridiculous and archaic scene, in the middle of the 21st century, by keeping alive the Trading with the Enemy Act, passed by the Federal Congress on October 6, 1917. This gives the head of the White House the power to restrict trade with countries ‘hostile’ to the United States, and the possibility of applying economic sanctions in time of war or any other period of national emergency, and prohibits trade with the enemy or allies of the enemy during armed conflicts.”

“It is under the protection of this legislative text, the oldest of its kind, that the regulations for the Control of Cuban Assets were put into practice in 1963, after the blockade against Cuba was imposed in 1962 by then President John F. Kennedy. He acted under the umbrella of that regulation.

The Trading with the Enemy Act is the cushion of that murderous policy against the people of Cuba, which aims at killing through hunger, unrest and chaos. This regulation is supposed to be applied when Washington considers a nation a national security problem, and so far it has not issued any document against Cuba in this regard, or when there is a war conflict, which does not exist, because the bombs are dropped far away, in the Middle East, but never near its walls.”

“However, the Caribbean island is the only country to which the U.S. government applies the old legislation. Previously, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Vietnam were also subject to it.”

“That text is part of the legal framework of the blockade, which includes others such as the Foreign Assistance Act (1961), the Export Administration Act (1979), the Torricelli Act (1992), the Helms-Burton Act (1996) and the Export Administration Regulations (1979).”

“According to the report presented by the Cuban Foreign Ministry, between March 1, 2023 and February 29, 2024, such a monstrosity caused Cuba damages and material losses estimated in the order of 5,056.8 million dollars, which represents an approximate loss of more than 575,683 dollars for each hour of the blockade.”

“The governments of the United States have filled themselves with laws against a small country that has made it undergo the worldwide embarrassment of not surrendering to its feet. This was stated on the social network X, by the member of the Political Bureau and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who expressed that, ‘despite the serious damage caused, they continue to fail in the objective of destroying the Revolution.’”

Comment

Regardless of your opinion on the Trading with the Enemy Act or on the initial or subsequent U.S. impositions of the embargo, it is utterly stupid now for the U.S. to extend it another year for at least the following reasons:

  • The Cuban economy now is in catastrophic condition and is not posing any threat by itself to the U.S.
  • Ceasing the U.S. embargo now would provide some desperately needed economic and political relief to Cuba.
  • Cuba’s current condition has encouraged it to expand relations with the Soviet Union and China, which are threats to the U.S. in many ways, and ending the embargo now would be one way to counter the threats posed by these two powers and possibly lead to weakening, if not ultimately eliminating, Cuba’s relationships with those powers.
  • Given that the U.N. General Assembly now for many years overwhelmingly has approved resolutions condemning the embargo, ending the embargo now would gain support for the U.S. in the U.N.

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[1] U.S. Extends Cuba Embargo for Another Year, dwkcommentaries.com (Sept. 19, 2024);Comment: Granma Editorial: The blockade is a global embarrassment for the United States (Sept. 23, 2024).

[2] The blockade is a worldwide embarrassment for the United States, Granma (Sep.23, 3034).

The Cuban Missile Crisis: Immediate Postmortems

On the 60th anniversary of the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the National Security Archive has published five previously confidential government documents relating to the immediate postmortems about the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.  Those documents are (1) a Soviet summary of a meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Czechoslovakian Communist Party leader, Antonín Novotný; (2) correspondence from Khrushchev to Fidel Castro; (3) Castro’s own lengthy reflections on the missile crisis; (4) a perceptive aftermath report from the British Ambassador to Cuba; and (5) a lengthy analysis by the U.S. Defense Department on “Some Lessons from Cuba.”[1]

The Archive’s Summary of Those Documents.

Here is the just published Archive’s summary of those documents.

“In the immediate aftermath of the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, [in October   1962], Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev met with the Czechoslovakian Communist Party leader, Antonín Novotný, and told him that ‘this time we really were on the verge of war . . . ‘ Khrushchev repeated [this phrase] later in the meeting, during which he explained how and why the Kremlin ‘had to act very quickly’ to resolve the crisis as the U.S. threatened to invade Cuba. ‘How should one assess the result of these six days that shook the world?’ he pointedly asked, referring to the period between October 22, when President Kennedy announced the discovery of the missiles in Cuba, and October 28, when Khrushchev announced their withdrawal. ‘Who won?’ he wondered.”

“The missile crisis abated on October 28, 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev announced he was ordering a withdrawal of the just-installed nuclear missiles in Cuba in return for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba. His decision came only hours after a secret meeting between Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin during which the two agreed to swap U.S. missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba—a part of the resolution of the crisis that remained secret for almost three decades.”

“But the crisis did not actually conclude. Cut out of the deal to resolve the crisis, a furious Fidel Castro issued his own ‘five point’ demands to end the crisis and refused to allow UN inspectors on the island to monitor the dismantling of the missiles unless the Kennedy administration allowed UN inspectors to monitor dismantling of the violent exile training bases in the United States. In addition to the missiles, the United States demanded that the USSR repatriate the IL-28 bombers it had brought to Cuba, which the Soviets had already promised Castro they would leave behind.”

“The Soviets had also promised to turn over the nearly 100 tactical nuclear weapons they had secretly brought to the island—a commitment that Khrushchev’s special envoy to Havana, Anastas Mikoyan, determined was a dangerous mistake that should be reversed. In November 1962 ‘the Soviets realized that they faced their own ‘Cuban’ missile crisis,’ observed Svetlana Savranskaya, co-author, with Sergo Mikoyan, of The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November. ‘The Soviets sent Anastas Mikoyan to Cuba with an almost impossible mission: persuade Castro to give up the weapons, allow inspections and, above all, keep Cuba as an ally,’ she noted. ‘Nobody knew that Cuba almost became a nuclear power in 1962.’”

“From the Cuban perspective, the outcome of the Crisis de Octubre was the worst of all worlds: a victory for the enemy and a betrayal by the ally that had installed the missiles to defend Cuba. Instead of relief that a massive U.S. invasion had been avoided, along with nuclear war, the Cubans felt ‘a great indignation’ and ‘the humiliation’ of being treated as ‘some type of game token,’ as Castro recounted at a conference in Havana 30 years later. But in his long report to London, drafted only two weeks after the Soviets began dismantling the missiles, British Ambassador Herbert Marchant perceptively noted that it was ‘better to be humiliated than to be wiped out.’”

“At the time, Ambassador Marchant presciently predicted ‘a sequence of events’ from which the Cuban revolution would emerge empowered and stronger from the crisis: ‘A U.S. guarantee not to invade seems certain; a Soviet promise to increase aid seems likely; a Soviet plan to underwrite Cuba economically and build it into a Caribbean show-piece instead of a military base is a possibility,’ he notes. ‘In these circumstances, it is difficult to foresee what forces would unseat the present regime.’ His prediction would soon be validated by Khrushchev’s January 31, 1963, letter inviting Castro to come to the Soviet Union for May Day and to discuss Soviet assistance that would help develop his country into what Khrushchev called ‘a brilliant star’ that ‘attracts the working class, the peasants, the working intellectuals of Latin American, African and Asian countries.’”

“In his conversation with Novotný, the Soviet premier declared victory. ‘I am of the opinion that we won,’ he said. ‘We achieved our objective—we wrenched the promise out of the Americans that they would not attack Cuba’ and showed the U.S. that the Soviets had missiles ‘as strong as theirs.’ The Soviet Union had also learned lessons, he added. ‘Imperialism, as can be seen, is no paper tiger; it is a tiger that can give you a nice bite in the backside.’ Both sides had made concessions, he admitted, in an oblique reference to the missile swap. ‘It was one concession after another … But this mutual concession brought us victory.’”

“In their postmortems on the missile crisis, the U.S. national security agencies arrived at the opposite conclusions: the U.S. had relied on an ‘integrated use of national power’ to force the Soviets to back down. Since knowledge of the missile swap agreement was held to just a few White House aides, the lessons learned from the crisis were evaluated on significantly incomplete information, leading to flawed perceptions of the misjudgments, miscalculations, miscommunications, and mistakes that took world to the brink of Armageddon. The Pentagon’s initial study on ‘Lessons from Cuba’ was based on the premise that the Soviet Union’s intent was first and foremost ‘to display to the world, and especially our allies, that the U.S. is too indecisive or too terrified of war to respond effectively to major Soviet provocation.’ The decisive, forceful, U.S. response threatening ‘serious military action’ against Cuba was responsible for the successful outcome. For the powers that be in the United States, that conclusion became the leading lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“But none of the contemporaneous evaluations of the crisis, whether U.S., Soviet or Cuban, attempted to address what is perhaps the ultimate lesson of the events of 1962—the existential threat of nuclear weapons as a military and political tool. In his famous missile crisis memoir, Thirteen Days, published posthumously after his assassination, Robert Kennedy posed a ‘basic ethical question: What, if any, circumstances or justification gives this government or any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all peoples under the shadow of nuclear destruction?’ Sixty years later, as the world still faces the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, that question remains to be answered.”

Conclusion

This blog has published two posts about the Cuba Missile Crisis.[2]

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[1] The Cuban Missile Crisis @ 60, National Security Archive. The National Security Archive is a nongovernmental organization that was “founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy. [This Archive] combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents . . ., the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, [a] public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, [a] global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets.” (About the National Security Archive.) 

[2] Fidel Castro-Nikita Khrushchev Messages During the Cuba Missile Crisis of 1962, dwkcommentaries.com (Sept. 5, 2016); Conflicting Opinions Regarding the Relative Strength of U.S. and Soviet Missiles, 1960-1962, dwkcommentaries.com (Nov. 2, 2016).