ZNet | Latin America
U.S., Latin America Trends
by Philip Agee; March 15, 2007
Anyone following the news in recent times cannot be unaware of
the wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean. For
many lonely years Cuba held high the torch through its exemplary programs to
provide universal health care and education, both gratis, along with world
class cultural, sports and scientific achievements. Although you won´t find a
Cuban today who says things are perfect, far from it, probably all would agree
that compared with pre-revolutionary Cuba there is a world of improvement. All
this they did against every effort by the United States to isolate them as an
unacceptable example of independence and self-determination, using every dirty
method including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and
biological warfare and incessant lies in the cooperating media of many
countries. I know these methods too well, having been a CIA officer in Latin
America in the 1960´s. Altogether nearly 3500 Cubans have died from terrorist
acts, and more than 2000 are permanently disabled. No country has suffered
terrorism as long and consistently as Cuba.
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All through the years, beginning even before taking power in
1959, the Cuban revolution has needed to have intelligence collection
capabilities in the U.S. for defensive purposes. Such was the fully justified
mission of the Cuban Five, jailed since 1998 with long sentences after
conviction for various crimes in Miami where they had no chance for a fair
trial. Their sights were exclusively set on criminal terrorist planning in
Miami for operations against Cuba, activities ignored by the FBI and other law
enforcement agencies. They neither sought nor received any classified U.S.
government information. Their cases are still on appeal, and will be for
years to come, but their completely biased convictions rank with the legal
lynching in the 1920’s of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist
immigrants, as among the most shameful injustices in U.S. history. Freedom for
the Cuban Five should be the cause of everyone for whom fairness, human rights
and justice are important, both in the United States and around the world,
joining in the activities of the 300 Free the Five solidarity committees in 90
countries.
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Current U.S. policy with its means and goals can be found in
the nearly 500-page 2004 report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba
together with an update published in 2006 that has a secret annex. A
fundamental goal, the same in 2007 as I remember it was in 1959, is isolation
of Cuba to keep this bad example from spreading, and the current policy if
successful, would mean no less than Cuban annexation to the U.S. and complete
dependence, in fact if not in law, as Cubans rightfully claim. Other
fundamental goals from 1959 are still, nearly 50 years later, to foment an
internal political opposition and to cause economic hardship in Cuba leading to
desperation, hunger and despair. It is no exaggeration to call these goals
genocidal.
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Yet, U.S. economic warfare of nearly 50 years against Cuba
hasn’t worked even though the Cubans who keep book estimate its cost at more
than $80 billion. After the Cuban economy’s free fall in the early 1990’s,
with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it began to recover in 1995. By 2005
growth was 11.8% and in 2006 it was 12.5%, the highest in Latin America. Some
sectors have surpassed their development levels of the late 80’s, before the
collapse, and others are nearly back. Cuba’s exports of services, nickel,
pharmaceutical and other products are booming, and try as it may, the U.S. has
not been able to stop this.
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In the end U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba have also totally
failed. In September 2006 Cuba was elected, for the second time, to lead the
Non-Aligned Movement of 118 countries, and two months later, for the 15th
consecutive year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the U.S.
economic embargo of Cuba, this time 183 to 4. In 2007 Cuba has diplomatic or
consular relations with 182 countries. Havana meanwhile is the site of
seemingly endless international conferences on every imaginable theme with
thousands of people from around the world attending. And not least, Cuba in
recent years has been hosting more than 2 million foreign tourists annually at
its world-class resorts. Far from isolating Cuba, the U.S. has isolated itself.
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More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health workers are saving
lives and preventing disease in 69 countries, many in the most remote and
difficult areas where few or no local doctors will go. Meanwhile 30,000 young
foreigners from dozens of countries are studying medicine in Cuba on full
scholarships. All were selected from areas lacking doctors, and all are
committed to return to these areas in their home countries to practice.
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In education the Cuban literacy program known as “Yes I
can†has been adopted in nearly 30 countries on five continents where
thousands more Cuban volunteers are teaching. Through this program, in Spanish,
Portuguese, English, Creole, Quechua and Aymara, some 2 million people have
learned to read and write, most of whom continue their education afterwards
through a variety of other programs.
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Thanks to these international assistance programs, Cuban
prestige and influence, and international solidarity with Cuba, have never been
greater. It was to defend these worthy programs that the five Cubans, unjustly
convicted, went to Miami in the 1990’s.
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Then in 1999 came Hugo Chavez, the U.S.’s latest worst
nightmare in the region, admittedly following the Cuban example in Venezuela,
with its enormous income from petroleum, to establish what he calls a Socialism
for the 21st Century with a foreign policy of regional integration under his
innovative Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, ALBA, excluding the United
States altogether. The program is already underway through institutions such as
Mercosur in trade, Petrocaribe, Petroandino and Petrosur in the energy sector,
the Banco del Sur in finance, and Telesur in electronic media.
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Another program under ALBA is Operación Milagro (Operation
Miracle) for offering free eye surgery to people unable to afford it for
cataracts, glaucoma, diabetes and other vision problems. It began in 2004 as a
joint Cuban-Venezuelan effort to bring Venezuelans by air to Cuba cost free for
operations. Within two years 28 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean
were participating, and operations restoring sight numbered 485,000 of whom
290,000 were Venezuelans. Jet liners loaded with patients come and go from
Havana everyday, but by early 2007 thirteen modern eye clinics were being built
in Venezuela, and several had already performed thousands of operations there.
Other clinics were being established in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras
and Haiti, all with Cuban planning and staffing. The ten-year goal of
Operación Milagro is to restore sight to 6 million people of Latin America and
the Caribbean, and the program is expanding to Africa. Â Â Â
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The Cuban example of so many years, and now Venezuela, have
also recently inspired the peoples of Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina,
Uruguay and Nicaragua to elect progressive leaders. Most have rejected the
1990´s “Washington Consensus†and the neo-liberal model along with
determined U.S. efforts to establish a hemispheric free trade zone. All are
developing grassroots social and economic programs, each in its own way, aimed
at improving the quality of life for all, especially the long-excluded
majorities of their populations where this injustice prevailed. Although
achievements in Cuba continue to shine, the torch of revolution in the region
has effectively passed from the towering figure of Fidel, ailing at eighty, to
Chavez, a military man and teacher inspired by Simón BolÃvar and José MartÃ.
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Reflecting on these new hopes for hundreds of millions in such
a vast region, one cannot avoid recalling the old professor, Próspero,
addressing his class for the last time in Ariel, the classic essay by José
Enrique Rodó, still read by students in Latin America. In borrowing from The
Tempest, and urging his students to follow the soaring spirit of virtue and
good, represented by Ariel, and to reject the crass materialism of the U.S.
personified by Calibán, Próspero drew a contrast between Latin American
idealism and the United States that is as valid today as in 1900 when the essay
first appeared.
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While Latin America is fast moving in progressive directions,
almost unimaginable less than ten years ago, in contrast the United States, at
least since the Reagan era, has been moving step by step toward a Fascism for
the 21st Century. And the pace has quickened in the last six years of
Republican government under George W. Bush with passage of the Patriot Act
under emergency circumstances just after the attacks on the Twin Towers in
September 2001, and then adoption in 2006 of the Military Commissions Act, both
with substantial support from Congressional Democrats. Other legislation
supports this trend. Â
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The U.S. Federal Government now has legal powers to secretly
monitor one´s communications, whether by telephone, ordinary mail, e-mail, or
fax, plus your bank accounts, credit cards, the web sites you visit, and the
books you buy or read in libraries. Torture, secret prisons, kidnapping, and
jailing indefinitely without trial or recourse to courts through habeas
corpus---all are now legal. So is “extraordinary rendition†whereby U.S.
captives are delivered to other governments where they will likely be tortured
and possibly assassinated. Investigations by the European Parliament have
identified around 1200 secret CIA flights carrying these people through
European airports to secret prisons. To qualify for this treatment, anyone in
the world, U.S. citizens and any others, only need be designated by the
government as an “illegal enemy combatant†whose only definition is someone
who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United
States.†Hostilities or a hostile act can be interpreted as almost anything
that opposes U.S. policies, from a speech expressing solidarity with Cuba to a
picket line protesting the war in Iraq. If an “enemy combatant†ever gets a
trial, it will not be by a jury of peers but by a U.S. military court that can
use hearsay and evidence obtained under torture.
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These powers reminiscent of the Nazi regime are not just a
global U.S Sword of Damocles waiting to fall on perceived enemies. The full
range of repression has been going on since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001
with plenty of evidence coming from the prisons and concentration camps of
Bagram, Abu Graib and Guantánamo as well as from testimony of various released
innocents swept up in the process. It is an on-going worldwide application of
fascist power in a non-defined, nebulous “war on terrorism†that has no end
or geographical limits. Since September 2001 the Bush government has given one
specious reason after another for what it believes are the motives of Islamic
terrorism, never admitting that it is a reaction and resistance to U.S.
imperial policies, starting with U.S. support for Israel’s continued
occupation and colonization of Arab lands and Israel’s refusal to return to
its borders before the Six-Day War in 1967.
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By 2006 the U.S. had designated some 17,000 people around the
world as “enemy combatants,†according to press reports. Combine this
repression with gargantuan contracts to private U.S. firms, as in Iraqi
security and “reconstruction,†along with forcing the Iraqi government,
always with eyes on the prize, to contract highly prejudicial 30-year
“production sharing agreements†to American and British oil majors,
excluded from Iraq before the invasion, plus historic lows in trade union
power, and you have the marriage of government and corporate power that
Mussolini, who invented the word in 1919, described as the essence of fascism.
The one bright spot are the recent indictments of 13 CIA people in Germany and
26 others in Italy for kidnapping and other violations of their laws. They will
never be brought to trial, of course, but the indictments are refreshing
developments.
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Protection of terrorists who serve U.S. interests is still
another feature of American Fascism of the 21st Century. There are many
examples, especially among Cuban exiles, but two stand out from the others:
Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both have long, well-documented
pedigrees as international terrorists, but one of their joint crimes was
historic: the first bombing in flight of a civilian airliner in the Western
Hemisphere. It was Cubana flight 455 that on October 6th, 1976 exploded just
after takeoff from Barbados killing all 73 people on board.
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Bosch and Carriles, both of whose CIA careers began around
1960, planned the bombing in Caracas and provided the explosives to two
Venezuelans recruited by Posada. These two were discovered, convicted, and
sentenced to long prison terms. Not so with Bosch and Posada who were protected
by then-Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez who has his own history of
working with the CIA. Although they were both arrested and tried separately in
Venezuelan courts as the intellectual authors of the crime, neither was
convicted.
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Bosch was found not guilty and released in 1988, returned to
Miami but was arrested for an old parole violation. The Justice Department then
ordered his deportation as an “undesirable†and as “the most dangerous
terrorist†of the Western Hemisphere. But Jeb Bush, son of then-President
Bush, persuaded his father in 1990 to quash Bosch´s deportation order. Since
then Bosch has lived freely in Miami where he gives television interviews in
which he makes every effort to justify terrorism against Cuba.
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For his part Posada´s trial in Venezuela never ended because
in 1985 he escaped from prison, fled the country, and soon turned up in El
Salvador working in the CIA´s Contra terrorist operation against Nicaragua.
When this ended he stayed underground in Central America and from the early
1990´s organized more terrorist operations against Cuba. In 2005 he was
arrested in Miami for illegal entry to the U.S., and although he admitted to
the New York Times to terrorist bombings of hotels and other tourist facilities
in Cuba, in one of which an Italian tourist died, he has only been indicted for
lying to the FBI and in his request for naturalization. The Bush administration
refuses to certify him as a terrorist so that he can be tried as such, at the
same time ignoring Venezuela’s extradition request as a fugitive from
justice, alleging absurdly that he might be tortured there. His treatment
suggests that he will eventually be pardoned by Bush, perhaps on Christmas Eve
of 2008 just before leaving the White House, just as his father on Christmas
Eve of 1992 pardoned former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and various CIA
officers for crimes in the 1980´s Iran-Contra scandal, thus precluding their
trials scheduled to begin the following month.
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One need not dwell on the obvious. The conviction of the Miami
Cuban Five for their anti-terrorist efforts, in contrast with the official
protection of terrorists like Bosch and Posada, speaks volumes on the U.S. as
the pre-eminent state sponsor of international terrorism.
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The major disguise used to cloak this U.S. program of worldwide
aggression from the 1980´s to the present has been “promotion of
democracy,†a hypocritical claim used ad nauseum by Presidents, Secretaries
of State and others that has never fooled anyone. It has always been clear that
the “democracy promotion†programs of the National Endowment for Democracy,
the State Department, the Agency for International Development and associated
foundations and agencies are nothing more that attempts to foment and
strengthen internal political forces in countries around the world that will be
under U.S. control and will protect and cater to U.S. interests. Their origins
are in the CIA’s political operations starting in the 1940´s, and they have
included the overthrow of democratically elected governments and the
institution of unspeakable repression as in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973 to
name only two of many examples. Â
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To be sure there has been, and is, important and worthy
resistance in the U.S. to this developing fascism both within Congress and
among private organizations and individuals. But it has been mostly isolated
attempts of a defensive and rear-guard nature, with little mention in the
corporate media. Bills have been introduced in Congress to ease or end the
economic blockade of Cuba, to amend the worst of the repressive laws, even to
impeach Bush and Cheney, but they seem unlikely ever to prevail or become law.
The two parties, actually competing branches of a one-party state, have simply
adopted ever more extreme measures to maintain their monopoly of power.
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Even the judicial system, once perhaps the last hope for
enforcing the Constitution, has been riddled with neo-conservatives who ignore
it. Take only the appeal of the Miami conviction by the Cuban Five. The
original three appellate judges of Atlanta´s 11th Circuit issued a compelling
93-page unanimous decision upholding the defense position that no fair trial of
self-admitted Cuban agents was possible in Miami´s prevailing anti-Cuban
atmosphere and that the trial venue should have been moved. Nevertheless the
other 10 judges of the Circuit voted to hear another appeal en banc and then
unanimously overturned the first decision with only two of the original three
judges voting against (the third had retired). That 10 of the 13 Circuit Court
judges would uphold Miami as a place where Cuban agents could get a fair trial
is a good example of how morally and intellectually corrupt the federal
judiciary has become.
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So these are grim days indeed for the United States and by
extension for its allies, starting with its junior partner, the U.K., and
extending through NATO. There have been other periods of shameful repression in
the U.S., like the years following World War I, but never with a global reach
like this.
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Predictably U.S. prestige around the world, what there ever was
of it, has disappeared, replaced by contempt and scorn. Testimony to this is
the repudiation of Bush and what he stands for expressed by so many thousands
in the streets protesting his presence as he currently travels around Latin
America attempting to lure five countries away from regional integration. What
a contrast with the enlightened, idealistic, and progressive social and
political movements now flowering in Latin America!
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Havana, March 2007Â Â
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Philip Agee, 72, was a CIA secret operations officer in Latin
American from 1960 to 1969. He is the author of the best-selling Inside the
Company: CIA Diary (Penguin Books, 1975) plus other books and articles.
Deported in 1977 by the U.K and four other NATO countries, he has lived since
1978 with his wife in Hamburg, Germany. He travels frequently to Cuba and South
America for solidarity and business activities, and in 2000 he started an
online travel service to Cuba:Â www.cubalinda.com.
