Obama Extorts Concessions From Cuba in Return for a U.S. Embassy in Havana: Give That Man Another Nobel Peace Prize!

Obama cut a deal with Cuban president Raul Castro. It's considered quite a big deal, but it only seems that way because U.S. policy towards Cuba has been locked in ice for over 50 years so any movement seems radical.

There's a lot less here than meets the eye.

Many people have the false impression that the trade embargo on Cuba has been lifted. NOT SO. In the words of the U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR, Obama is “relaxing trade and travel restrictions.” Relaxing them, not removing them. [1]

Obama is allowing some bank connections so Americans going to Cuba can use their credit cards there. And there will be a slight trickle of trade allowed.

It's said that Obama “can't” lift the trade embargo. Congress wrote laws enforcing an embargo, with criminal penalties, and only Congress “can” lift the embargo, through legislation. The president can change the regulations regarding the embargo.

But the reason I put “can't” in quotes is because Bush the Younger, by executive fiat, overrode U.S. anti-torture law and the anti-torture treaty the U.S. signed and ratified and was legally obligated to observe. So how come one president can overrule laws and even treaties by executive fiat, and another one can't? (And treaties have a higher status than laws passed by Congress in the U.S. as they have the status of the U.S. Constitution itself, which is “the supreme law of the land.”

The answer is, Because it Depends. It depends on power. In the U.S., the power structure is overwhelmingly reactionary. So Bush can “authorize” torture.

Obama can assassinate people at will, but can't override an embargo. You see how very little “law” has to do with it, contrary to the elaborate political Kabuki dances that are typically performed with much arguing about what's legal and what isn't. [2]

And there was a prisoner swap. The U.S. is getting back its undercover agent Alan Gross. Gross was sent by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) to smuggle in communications equipment so people in Cuba could covertly communicate outside Cuba via the Internet. Turns out he'd done about a half dozen such missions before getting caught. USAID has been caught running several CIA-type operations in Cuba, including setting up a fraudulent twitter-type service. Gross was sentenced to 15 years but Cuba agreed to release him immediately after he's served a mere five years of his sentence. (The U.S. sentenced one of the Cuban counter-terrorism officers to two life sentences, one not being enough.) 

The U.S. refused to swap the Cuban counter-terrorism officers it has imprisoned in the U.S. (the “Cuban Five,” 3 of whom were still in prison) whom Obama churlishly characterized as enemy spies in his announcement of the Cuba deal, for Gross. It insists Gross was sneaking around doing humanitarian work- covertly. So Cuba had to agree to the fiction that Gross was being released on “humanitarian” grounds. (The same reason the    Sandinista government of Nicaragua used when it freed terror pilot Eugene Hasenfus, who was shot down flying a resupply plane to the contra terrorists. Hasenfus should have been executed. If he'd been committing acts of terror against the U.S., like the Boston Marathon bombers, for example, he'd be executed, maybe after being tortured first.)

The U.S. has stubbornly refused for years to exchange Gross for its anti-terrorist prisoners. To win the release of their counter-terrorism officers who had infiltrated exile fascist terror groups in Miami, the Cubans had to release a “U.S. agent,” whom Obama hailed as a hero, the worst kind of traitor, a Cuban intelligence agent who provided information to the U.S. on the counter-terrorism operation in Miami. This man worked to aid and abet terrorist attacks on his own country. Maybe driving a hard bargain with Cuba over freezing brave counter-terror officers is Obama's way of compensating for trading five top Taliban terrorist leaders to get back a U.S. Army deserter Sergeant, Beau Bergdahl. That was some sweet deal for the Afghan Taliban!

The other Big Deal Breakthrough is the U.S. is going to plant one of its spy and subversion nests right in Havana: The U.S. agreed to open an embassy in Havana. That's a “gift” I sure wouldn't want if I were Cuba.

U.S. embassies are nests of espionage, subversion, coup conspiracies and terrorism. It's hardly a privilege to have one planted in one's midst if the U.S. considers you an enemy state. When the Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, they discovered overwhelming evidence of spying and subversion. They even published the documents- many were painstakingly reconstructed after being shredded- and you can buy them in Tehran. But not in the U.S. Here they're samizdat, subject to seizure.

Millions of lives have been blighted by regimes installed after coups organized from U.S. embassies.

Thus after decades of strangling the Cuban economy, coercing other nations and their businesses to cancel deals with Cuba, blocking loans to Cuba from international financial institutions, sponsoring hundreds if not thousands of acts of terrorism against Cuba (including blowing up a Cuban airliner, the perpetrators of which were treated as heroes in Miami and protected by the Bush family), destroying Cuba's crops and pigs with infectious organisms, and even sponsoring the assassination of a Cuban diplomat in New York, the U.S. got Cuba to agree to open itself to easier U.S. subversion attempts.

Of course, there are no promises to stop the terrorism. No promise to prosecute murderers like Luis Posada Carriles, who actually bragged to a reporter about arranging the bombing of a Havana hotel, killing a young Italian tourist. He also arranged the bombing of a Cubana airliner in 1976, killing everyone on board. Later he turned up running CIA terror ops in Central America. And reparations for all the terrorism, sabotage, and destruction the U.S. has wreaked over the years? That is literally unthinkable. Hell, the U.S. won't even clear out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuban territory it occupies and uses as a military torture and murder center.

Let's see what an expert imperialist has to say about this fabulous “thaw.” P. J. Crowley used to be Obama's State Department spokesman until he was cashiered for calling the treatment of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning “stupid.” He made it very clear in a BBC interview today that what the U.S. is doing is trying another way of pressuring and subverting the Cuban regime. Of the new “opening” he said It's going to put far more pressure on Cuba” than before. FAR MORE. And “it's going to put significant pressure on the Cuban government to deliver in ways it hasn't been able to.” He made the exact same point at least three times. Of course he was approving. He also compared the role of the current Roman Catholic “Pope,” Francis, in brokering the deal to that of “Pope” John Paul in Poland working with Solidarity to subvert and ultimately destroy the Bolshevik socialist regime there. What could be clearer?

Yet leftists are hailing the deal, the same way they were once duped by Obama when he ran for president in 2008. Perhaps they're taking their cues from Raul Castro, who obviously wanted the deal. Or the hopeful Cuban populace who want some economic improvements in their lives.. (Unfortunately they've had no experience with foreign capitalist exploitation. Far better if Raul Castro had loosened the restrictions on small entrepreneurs in Cuba.)

Maybe leftists should strive for at least as much perspicacity as their enemies. (At least, they should regard imperialist apparatchiks as their enemies. Certain that's how the imperialists regard leftists!)

The skunk at the party was Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a rabid reactionary, who denounced the deal in the most hypocritical terms, going on and on about freedom and human rights. (Guess how many fascist dictators this creep ever denounced? Zero, of course. And the Cuban dictatorship has been by far the least awful in Latin America- no death squads, no state terror, no mass murder, no torture. Repression and a one-party dictatorship, yes.) Rubio is getting wall to wall coverage in U.S. media, given numerous platforms to spew his rants against the deal. You'd think he was someone important.

And here's the icing on the cake. Cuba is one of only four nations currently on the ultimate U.S. Shitlist, the State Department's “state sponsors of terrorism” list. (Yeah, I know, the irony is sick. Cuba “sponsors” no “terrorism;” rather it has been the victim of U.S.-sponsored terrorism for decades.) It's still on that list. Reagan put Cuba on the list in 1982. Reagan. The fascist who sponsored terrorism in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and elsewhere.

U.S. elites have no sense of irony.

1] “Morning Edition,” NPR, December 18.

2] And right now the Republicans and their media chorus are screeching that Obama is violating the law by issuing instructions in the form of an executive order to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (commonly referred to by the chillingly-appropriate acronym ICE- like I said, our elites here have no sense of irony) to go easier on deporting harmless “illegal aliens” and concentrate on the “criminal” ones- an instruction he claims to have previously given several years back, to no discernible effect. He's the Deportation King among presidents, holding the record for deportations at over 2 million and counting. He has smashed up countless families this way over the years. Some Republicans even mutter about impeaching him for this.

ICE is an all-too-appropriate name because of the cruelty, callousness, and utter heartlessness of those goons, who raid workplaces, round up non-citizen workers without official permission to be in the U.S., and summarily imprison and deport them. Doesn't matter if they have wives and children here, who are thrown into panic and despair. Standard procedure is to rob the deportees on the way out.