Early in the year 2000, in a conversation with former UNESCO director Federico Mayor Zaragoza, Castro said:
As a general principle, nothing will be privatized in Cuba that is suitable for, and can therefore be kept under, ownership by the nation or a workers’ collective. Our ideology and our preference is that socialism should bear no resemblance to the egoism, the privileges and the inequalities of capitalist society. In our country, nothing ends up as the property of a high-ranking official, and nothing is given away to accomplices or friends. Nothing that can be used efficiently, and with greater profit for our society, will end up in the hands of private individuals, either Cubans or foreigners.37
The evident hardening of Castro’s ideological positions had a lot to do with the fact that for ten years he had been able to watch the fate of his former friends in the Eastern bloc. Closer to home, in Latin America, where democratization and neoliberalism also seemed to have brought nothing to the mass of the population, he saw grim prospects in store that he did not wish Cuba to endure. He told Zaragoza:
In many of these countries a third of the population can neither read nor write; millions of Latin Americans have no roof over their head… . The debt burden in Latin American countries is so high that many of them – regardless of the size of their gross national product – cannot provide most of their citizens with a dignified quality of life… . The weak Latin American currencies are unable to defend themselves from speculators… . Revenue from acts of privatization that have damaged the national heritage are … swallowed up. Latin America, like the rest of the Third World, is the victim of a world economic order imposed on it from outside… . Divided and balkanized, seduced by illusory visions of progress and development, … the Latin American countries run the risk of losing their independence for ever and being annexed by the United States.38
Cuba and the global policeman
On January 9 and 13, 1996, militant Cuban exiles from the Hermanos al Rescate (“Brothers to the Rescue”) organization flew out from Florida in small civilian aircraft, entered Cuban air space and dropped thousands of anti-Castro leaflets on the streets of Havana. Nothing of the kind had happened since 1960. The defensive behavior of the Cuban air force encouraged the group to continue with its propaganda flights.
Originally, in 1991, the “Brothers to the Rescue” had been set up only to keep an aerial watch for refugees in the sea between Cuba and Florida, so that it could get the US coastguard to rescue them. Increasingly, however, it came to reinterpret its humanitarian goals as a political mission to arouse international attention by deliberately violating Cuban air space.
On February 24, 1996, three more sports planes belonging to this organization approached the Cuban coast, and at least one probably entered Cuban air space. But this time they did not get much further. Evidently on orders from above, the Cuban air force intercepted the three aircraft and shot two of them down.
As if to set an example, to deliver a clear lesson, the Cuban fighters opened fire without warning and without any attempt to force the intruders to land. The four people inside the two planes, all of them Cuban exiles (three with US citizenship), lost their lives. Two days later, at the request of the United States, the UN Security Council considered the incident and ruled that Havana had violated the principle according to which states should refrain from the use of weapons against civilian aircraft flying inside their air space.39
The provocative strategy of the anti-Castro forces in Miami had a macabre if dubious success, when overreaction by Havana’s security apparatus triggered an immediate overreaction by Washington’s political apparatus. On March 12, 1996, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed a law on “Cuban liberty and democratic solidarity” which, though passed by the Senate in October 1995, had been put on ice because of its explosive foreign-policy implications. Bearing the name of its two sponsors, Senator Jesse Helms and his fellow-Republican Dan Burton from the House of Representatives, the Helms-Burton Act soon entered the political vocabulary. It involved a dramatic sharpening of the 35-year-old Cuban economic embargo, at least as disproportionate as the shooting down of the exiles’ aircraft and stretching well beyond other trade restrictions recently introduced by the United States. In the view of experts and politicians critical of Cuba, as well as of moderate Cuban exile circles, it was a bundle of political stupidity and short-sightedness.
The Helms-Burton Act was in some ways reminiscent of the Platt Amendment of 1901, whereby the United States had subjugated the Caribbean island after its long and bloody war of independence and forced it into a semi-colonial dependence. But, in extending sanctions to firms from third countries that had economic dealings with Cuba, the act represented a new claim to omnipotence that infringed the sovereignty of other states. The role once played by Platt’s big stick of military intervention was now taken up by the cudgel of financial and economic sanctions, which were designed to hit not only the insubordinate Cubans but any firm or country that did not fall in with Washington’s drive to isolate Cuba. Experts in all branches of politics and the law showed a rare unanimity in arguing that the Helms-Burton Act was an elementary violation of international law, because it placed US national law above all else and even encroached upon the democratic constitutions of friendly and allied states. It is true that similar sanctions had been imposed on other countries with which Washington had hostile relations at that time – in particular, Iran, Iraq, and Libya – but in those cases none of the legal provisions had been as draconian as the measures against Castro’s Cuba.
Cuban exiles saw the new Act as a further step toward “ending the Castro tyranny.” But, in Castro’s eyes, it was much more than a blockade: “It’s war, it’s persecution, it’s harassment,” he declared.40
The four main clauses of the Helms-Burton Act left all earlier sanctions in the shade – even the list drawn up by Democratic congressman Robert Torricelli in October 1992 and signed by then-president George Bush. The provisions of previous embargoes, against both Cuba and other countries, had been a matter for executive orders rather than measures with the force of law; they had therefore left scope for foreign-policy considerations in the way in which they were handled. The Helms-Burton Act was a legislative measure that tied the hands of the executive; it could be amended or repealed only by Congress. The President himself therefore had very little leeway, even in areas where the Act conflicted with reasons of state and breached international law.
Title I of the Act – over and above the longstanding ban on direct or indirect dealings by US firms with Cuba – obliged the US government, in all international financial organizations such as the World Bank or the IMF, to block any loan or financial assistance to Cuba, or even its acceptance into the organization in question. In the event that a democratic majority in one of these institutions making up the international community should set aside the Helms-Burton Act as contrary to the law, Washington would be compelled by national legislation to violate its contractual obligations to that organization and the international community joined together within it, and to reduce its annual contribution by the amount of the sum granted to Cuba. At the same time, US firms were forbidden to import from third countries any products that contained material extracted and processed in Cuba, such as nickel, sugar, or citrus fruit. If the successor states to the Soviet Union continued to support Cuba by offering it more favorable conditions than those obtaining on the world market, an equivalent reduction of US financial assistance to those countries would be threatened. Title II (“Assistance to a Free and Independent Cuba”) stipulated that there could be a question of lifting the embargo only when a “transition government” was in power in Cuba which corresponded to the values of the majority in the US Congress. One of its “requirements for determining a transition government” would be “that it is substantially moving toward a market-oriented economic system based on the right to own and enjoy property” and “has made demonstrable progress in returning to United States citizens (and entities whi
ch are 50 percent or more beneficially owned by United States citizens) property taken by the Cuban Government.” Section 205A, paragraph 7 further specified that “a transition government is a government that … does not include Fidel Castro or Raul Castro.”41
Even with Castro gone, however, the Helms-Burton Act explicitly ruled out that a democratic government in Cuba could ever endorse by parliamentary means the expropriations of the 1960s – as the Alteigentümerverordnung had done in reunified Germany, by ratifying all expropriation of landed estates over 100 hectares that the Soviet occupation authorities carried out after the war in Eastern Germany. For Cuba’s future development, a return to the old property relations would be as catastrophic as an obligation to pay compensation at today’s values.
Cuba expert Bert Hoffmann writes in his comprehensive analysis:
This second chapter of the act is fraught with political consequences. Should the kind of political change envisaged by the [US] hardliners actually come about in Cuba, the Helms-Burton Act already exists today as the undemocratic congenital defect of the new relations, much as the sinister “Platt Amendment” did in the case of Cuba’s First Republic. Above all else, the Helms-Burton Act strengthens the rigidities of the Cuban system. All those among Cuba’s leaders and officials who have limited enthusiasm for a political opening are shown only a deep precipice but no space in which to carry out a reform in dignity.42
The Helms-Burton Act is a blunt law for custodianship over a future Cuba: its aim is not democratization of the political system and its institutions, but reappropriation of the island by its neighbor to the north. A return of large chunks of the Cuban economy to private US corporations would not only mean restoring the (scarcely desirable) conditions existing before the revolution. The people of the island would still bear the burden of interest, and interest on interest, for generations to come, while the real beneficiaries would include the offspring of those Mafiosi who came into their possessions through violence and repression, corruption, theft, tax evasion, and the filing of dubious ownership claims. Nor does the Helms-Burton Act set any requirement for the return of at least the half a billion dollars plus interest that were stolen from the Cuban state coffers in the closing days of the Batista regime.
“The Helms-Burton Act,” noted Bert Hoffmann, “therefore dictates the basic long-term political conditions in Cuba, far beyond the end of the Castro era… . Even many Cubans who resolutely oppose Castro find this too much to swallow.”43 For former US President Jimmy Carter, the Act was “one of the worst mistakes my country has ever made,” because it severely hindered efforts to achieve democratization in Cuba.44
Furthermore, the Act infringes the sovereignty of all countries that have economic relations with the Caribbean island, especially the member-states of the European Union, Canada, and Mexico. Title III gives to US citizens and corporations which lost their property through the Cuban Revolution an explicit right to sue in US courts not only the Cuban state but also foreign companies doing business or operating joint ventures in any way connected with such former property. Title IV prohibits entry into the United States to directors, proprietors, or majority shareholders of any foreign company that is in breach of the Act and has had transactions with any former US possessions expropriated by the Cuban state. This provision applies even to members of such persons’ families.
The right to seek redress before US courts for any property confiscated in Cuba was specifically extended to all Cuban exiles who had subsequently acquired US citizenship. In the view of legal experts, this violated the principle of international law whereby such suits could be filed only before a court in the plaintiff’s country of origin. It also contradicted the ruling three decades before by the US Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, which held that, according to international law, claims for compensation required American citizenship to have been present at the time of the loss.45 The effect was dramatically to increase the potential number of lawsuits for the return of confiscated property. Instead of the 300 or so previously thought likely, the US State Department estimated in the late nineties that the figure would be between 75,000 and 200,000;46 while other experts considered this too low and spoke of as many as 400,000 claims.47
The list of those entitled to file a lawsuit therefore included not only owners of US firms such as General Electric, American Sugar, or Standard Oil, but also, for example, US-domiciled inheritors of Cuban firms such as the Bacardi rum company, formerly based in Havana, who now had the right to take action against French or Spanish drinks corporations, insofar as these had business relations with Cuban state enterprises that had taken over former Bacardi property. In fact, Bacardi did manage to get a New York court to ban the registration of a Cuban rum brand “Havana Club,” which was being produced in a joint venture with the French company Pernod Ricard. And relatives of the gangsters Santos Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, being US citizens, might well file collection claims in US courts against tourist companies in Germany, Spain, or Italy, on the grounds that they accommodate package tourists in the Mafia’s old “Capri” and “Riviera” hotels.
At the beginning of the millennium, the American justice system was handling just 5,900 such cases; claims totalled $6 billion (including interest), going back to the early sixties, not only for property-related matters but also for allegedly unexplained deaths. But the number of suits is growing. In 1999, a US court awarded the astronomical sum of $186.7 million in compensation to relatives of the three “Brothers to the Rescue” members shot down in February 1996 – more than $60 million for each family member. (Relatives of the fourth man went short only because they did not have US citizenship.) So that the money could be collected without delay, a confiscation order was made – against the will of the US State Department – for $19 million due to the Cuban telephone company ETECSA for communications between the two countries. Cuba reacted to this by closing down 85 percent of the telephone lines to the United States.
Meanwhile, Havana had replied to Washington’s demands with its own set of figures. In a “Report to the Secretary-General of the United Nations” in 1999, the Castro government stated that “scientific estimates” had put at $67 billion the total damages caused to Cuba by the US blockade up to 1998. To this was to be added for each subsequent year roughly 1.5 percent of Cuba’s GNP. The government in Washington seemed quite unperturbed by the condemnations of the US blockade that the UN General Assembly had for years been passing with an overwhelming majority. In the year 2000, for example, 166 of the 189 member-states voted with Cuba against the embargo; only Israel and the Marshall Islands actually cast a positive vote alongside the United States.
The rival estimates of damages entered a new round in May 1999, when the People of Cuba filed a suit with a Havana court for compensation against the Government of the United States of America. It made detailed claims that, over the previous 40 years, US secret agents had been responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the disabling of 2,099 more Cuban citizens.48 The list of US-based actions stretched from Eisenhower’s presidential order of March 17, 1960, for a “program of covert operations against the Castro regime,” through the Bay of Pigs invasion, “Operation Mongoose” (begun in 1961) and the release of pests to destroy the sugar harvest, to the operations of the Cuban terrorist organizations “Alpha 66” and “Omega 7,” such as the bomb attack that killed 73 people on a Cuban DC-8 from Barbados to Havana on October 6, 1976. The statement submitted to the court also accused the US government of biological warfare against Cuba: that is, US agents were alleged to have released in May 1981 a type of dengue fever virus, which led to an almost simultaneous epidemic affecting some 350,000 people in various regions between Havana and the east of the island. It was only thanks to prompt and comprehensive vaccinations and other countermeasures that no more than 158 people, including 101 children, died as a result.
Interesting in this connection is an extract from the minutes of talks between Castro and GDR leader Erich Honecker, during t
he latter’s visit to Cuba in late May 1980. Castro complained behind closed doors:
We have had some very strange plagues appearing here recently. It is our view that the three major plagues have been acts of sabotage. One of these was a fungus on the tobacco plantations, which destroyed 90 percent of this year’s tobacco production and forced us to import tobacco.… It involved blue mold. We also had a very serious plague on the sugar plantations… . It caused a loss of roughly a million tonnes of sugar… . Then we had the African swine fever… . We now have this swine fever virtually under control.
Less than two weeks before, an aircraft had flown over the island “dropping a gelatine-like substance with a highly refined fungus in microscopically small capsules,” over an area 15 miles wide. “It is all very disturbing,” Castro thought, “because these can be signs of bacteriological warfare.” Investigations had shown that the substances in question did not come “from one small group of counter-revolutionaries” but were part of “a highly developed industry.”49
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