Remarks at the Sixth International Conference for World Balance in Havana, Cuba, Jan. 30, 2025
Before I start I want to express sympathy for the people who have died in a plane crash in Washington, and I want to condemn Trump's disgusting proposal to kidnap people and lock them up in Guantanamo.
I'm very happy to be in Cuba. I feel closer to Cuba than I do to people in the United States with red hats reading MAGA. Cuba is, in fact, closer to the continental United States than is Hawaii or Alaska or any of the U.S. colonies in the Pacific or about 916 of the United States' 917 foreign military bases. The people of the U.S. and Cuba have managed, against the odds, to share a great deal of culture and good will, poetry, music, food, and drink. But we sure are divided by governments.
I just searched the internet in the United States for the words "free Cuba" and discovered that it means the overthrow of the Cuban government. I tried searching for "Cuba libre" and learned that it means a drink. But what if I want to search for "a Cuba free of hostile actions by the U.S. government"? The internet is of no help.
The U.S. government has just put Cuba back on a list of governments sponsoring terrorism. As the leading supplier of weapons to wars, genocides, and brutal dictatorships around the world, the U.S. government does have the expertise to form such a list. But it doesn't put itself on the list, it has no legal authority to act on such a list, and it doesn't offer evidence of Cuba sponsoring terrorism. At most it has two arguments that fall apart at the slightest examination.
One is that Cuba provides sanctuary to people the U.S. wants to prosecute. But they are U.S. people accused of U.S. crimes, not international terrorists. Cuba has similarly not extradited Colombians to Colombia, but they are not international terrorists, and Colombia has asked the U.S. to take Cuba off the list. And Cuba, unlike the United States, has attempted to help make peace in Colombia. The U.S. list of terrorism sponsors is a political act, with nations put on and off it at the whims of U.S. presidents with no evidence or even argument required.
The other argument one sometimes hears is that U.S. personnel here in Havana have been so frightened that they have apparently developed psychosomatic symptoms they call the Havana Syndrome. So far I seem to be fine. It seems like a gross insult to combine this beautiful city's name with a syndrome. But, remember, that in the United States, the very best things can be called syndromes. The public desire for peace, for example: the Vietnam Syndrome and the Iraq Syndrome were the names for public resistance to more wars following those wars. The very worst thing about the Havana Syndrome, whether real or not, makes clear the dishonesty in the U.S. denunciation of it. That worst thing is this: the U.S. military says it is working to develop the type of weapon that it claims has been used in Havana. With the U.S. government, an accusation is usually an excuse and a confession.
Of course, the purpose of the list of supposed sponsors of terrorism is to justify illegal, immoral, unilateral sanctions against Cuba and against others who violate the blockading of Cuba. The stated purpose of this cruel violation of the Geneva Conventions is to overthrow the Cuban government. I'm sure, as with every government I've ever heard of, there are a lot of problems with the Cuban government. But those are for the Cuban people to figure out. In the U.S. we have more than enough work trying to improve the U.S. government.
The U.S. government isn't even smart enough to figure out that, after decades of sanctioning dozens of nations, doing so has never resulted in the overthrow of a government. On the contrary, sanctions have tended to increase popular support for governments. Look at Venezuela, which is constantly sanctioned and threatened, but the government is not overthrown. The United States has been sanctioning Russia for years, but has a new president now whose brilliant new idea is to sanction Russia. I have a suspicion, and it's more than a suspicion if you listen to how some people talk in Washington: sanctions are not the ridiculous failures they appear; the imposition of suffering on masses of ordinary people is not a tragic side-effect; the actual purpose of sanctions is to impose that suffering, knowing full well it will not result in the overthrow of governments.
The U.S. government does something else to Cuba. It maintains an illegal occupation of Cuban territory for its military base, experimental torture center, and extra-judicial death camp in Guantanamo.
It also has now made its Secretary of State a man named Marco Rubio who became a U.S. citizen by being born in the United States to parents who had left Cuba in 1956 -- but Rubio lies that it was in 1959. Rubio claims to consider Cuba a serious threat to the safety of the United States.
Of course, Cuba is not threatening the United States. Is the threat, perhaps, that Cuba models certain approaches to government, such as in healthcare, that people in the United States want and the U.S. government does not? Maybe, but most people in the United States know nothing about that. And Scandinavian nations that have modeled social programs that the people of the United States would love to have are not being blockaded. Instead they are being filled with U.S. military bases and pressured to move their money into weapons purchases.
I think the main cause of the U.S. hostility toward Cuba is imaginary resentment and trauma. Not imaginary in the same sense as the apparent cause of the Havana Syndrome, but imaginary in the sense that U.S. Congress Members and presidents imagine the United States as a person with feelings and with a long memory. This person -- Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, whoever it is -- wanted Cuba from childhood and was scorned. It wanted Cuba to stay with Spain or to join the United States. It wanted Cuba to welcome its advances. It wanted Cuba to welcome its expansion of slavery. It wanted to take over Cuba and be thanked and loved for it. Cuba wasn't interested. Cuba just wanted to be friends. The U.S. government doesn't have friends. And then Cuba started a relationship with the U.S. rival. And Cuba put Soviet missiles on Cuban soil -- soil that the U.S. government believed should belong to it. And the U.S. government screamed. It screamed and screamed and howled and cried, and remains traumatized to this day. The imaginary patria-as-person is suffering PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). And so it repeats the cycle. It recreates the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse in Eastern Europe without an apparent care in the world. It has no idea whatsoever that putting missile bases next to Russia might scare anyone in Russia. It's too busy still being scared of Cuba. Some U.S. politicians may realize what Russians think of bases next to Russia, but they can still imagine the personification of the U.S. nation not realizing it.
When President Kennedy made a secret deal with the Soviet Union to remove missiles from Cuba, it was a deal to also remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy. But Kennedy did not tell the U.S. public that. Instead he claimed that he had thumped his chest and talked tough, and that the weak Soviets had backed down. And so that is what people in the United States believe happened. That is probably what Trump and Rubio believe happened. That is probably what they believe happened last week when Trump was threatening Colombia with tariffs in Elon Musk's personal public square. But the real world doesn't work like that, and someday thinking that it does may get us all killed.
The sensitive and traumatized personification of the U.S. government hangs onto one piece of evidence of how things should be with Cuba -- and with the rest of the world: its oldest military base outside of lands that have been made into the United States, namely the base at Guantanamo. That base is now one of some 917 the U.S. military maintains outside its borders. And it is adding more fast. Other countries are following suit: Turkey, the UK, India, Russia, France. None has anything resembling the U.S. empire of bases, but they are building them in smaller numbers. For U.S. base profiteers, the war in Ukraine has been a great boon, and bases are growing across Europe like mushrooms. A so-called think tank in Washington called the Hudson Institute this month noted how much money is to be made just in constructing bases and in constructing them to withstand attack since they are of course likely targets.
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