Editorial

What Kind of Freedom and Democracy?

Following his historic visit to Cuba, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called for the normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States, beginning with the relaxation of travel restrictions prohibiting U.S. citizens from visiting the island. Carter spent several days in Cuba, during which time he addressed the nation and was given unrestricted access to talk to whomever he wished, including Cuban "dissidents".

The Bush administration responded to Carter's visit to Cuba with a statement that President Bush will be announcing the further tightening of the economic embargo against Cuba when he visits Miami today. Pandering to the Cuban-American National Foundation, a Miami-based organization which has a long history of organizing and financing terrorist attacks against Cuba, Bush declared that the embargo will be kept in place until "freedom and democracy" are achieved in Cuba.

What kind of freedom and democracy can the United States possibly offer to Cuba? Despite the repeated claims of American propagandists, the U.S. can hardly be considered a model of freedom and democracy. Quite apart from the fact that Bush himself was elected by the U.S. Supreme Court and not by the American people, huge sections of American society enjoy neither freedom nor democracy. Practically speaking, in the United States only the super-rich or their loyal servants enjoy the right to stand for election. Almost two-thirds of the adult population does not even bother to vote and hundreds of thousands of Black Americans have been officially disenfranchised due to legislation in several states removing for life the right of convicted felons to vote.

In the United States poor Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are denied basic human and civil rights. Despite constituting a minority of the total population, these peoples make up the vast majority of inmates in U.S. prisons. In addition, tens of millions of American citizens are denied adequate levels of health care and education. In fact, tiny Cuba, despite the hardships resulting from the American economic blockade, has better public health standards than the United States, including a lower rate of infant mortality. Last year, Cuba even began training American medical students who have promised to return to practice medicine in poverty-stricken areas of the United States where American doctors refuse to work.

The United States also has the dubious honour of having overthrown more democratically-elected governments than any other state in the history of the world. Just since the Second World War the U.S. has organized coups in virtually every country in the Western Hemisphere, many countries of Africa and the Middle East, and most of the countries of Southeast Asia. American officials have even bragged about how they engineered the 1963 downfall of the Diefenbaker government in Canada. This history of the past half century proves that American imperialism feels mortally threatened by freedom and democracy and the central feature of American foreign policy has been the stamping out of these twin "evils" wherever they have emerged.

This morbid fear of democracy and movements for democracy led in the 1960s and 1970s to a strategic alliance between U.S. imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism. Right up until the mid-1990s the U.S. was the main organizer and financier of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, using it to attack Soviet interests in the region, as well as the various secular democratic movements. It has been revealed that the U.S. and Israeli governments actually helped to create Hamas, the main organization now launching suicide attacks against Israeli citizens, in an attempt to split the Palestinians and undermine the authority of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

In the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. has constructed a terrorist network, headquartered in Miami, Florida and comprised largely of Cuban exiles, which has been implicated in terrorist activities not only against Cuba but also against Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela and other countries. Any government which attempts to institute land reform or to improve the economic well-being of its people has faced the wrath of the United States and its terrorist network, the most recent example being the attempted overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Is this is the nature of the "freedom and democracy" that the Bush administration wishes to bestow on Cuba - freedom for American capitalists to exploit the Cuban people, freedom for rich Americans to use the Cuban people for their own pleasures, freedom for a handful of Cuban-American gangsters to terrorize the Cuban people? Prior to the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959, the Cuban people had a wealth of experience with this kind of American-style "freedom and democracy". It was called the Batista government. Why would they have any wish to experience it again.