Nikki Haley, UN Ambassador, told the world that North Korea is begging for war. Her statement reminds me of the rape defense that bad men used in decades past at trial before court—she was begging for it, they would always insist.
The victim—always a woman—exercised her constitutional right to dress any way she chose. A prowling lunatic observed her and believed instead that she was advertising a willingness to copulate with a grease-ball, so he attacked.
In today’s United States the grease-ball defense no longer works. Women (and countries) have rights. The courts protect them, most of the time. When they don’t, women have recourse to civil suits.
Nikki Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India. Her mother once owned a clothing company, Exotica International, where Nikki worked as a bookkeeper starting at age 12. She served as governor of South Carolina until she became UN Ambassador in the Trump Administration. Note from the Editorial Board:Haley resigned her UN post on December 31, 2018.
All countries (and women) have the right to defend themselves. No one should have to say it. But the United States has mucked-up the waters of international affairs by waging preemptive wars against communist and socialist countries for the past seventy-five years. It seems like these wars will never end.
The policy of the United States is to undermine any country that espouses communism; it attacks using whatever methods are devised and recommended by the brilliant, depraved minds of our intelligence community. Despite all the evidence, despite all the complaints lodged against the United States before international courts and the United Nations, most Americans refuse to believe it.
The USA birthed its war-policy against collectivism in the early 1900s when the first communist revolutions undermined the noble classes of eastern Europe. The well-connected saw what happened in Russia and Hungary and decided to do something about it. Writers like Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (1984), and Ayn Rand (We the Living) wrote short, easy to read tracts that portrayed life under communism as a personality-destroying nightmare. The public ate it up.
After World War II, the job of suppression was handed over to our newly formed intelligence agencies who gave the fight its name: the Cold War. With the recent CIA assisted transformations of the Soviet Union and Red China into oligarchies (marking a putative end to the biggest conflicts) other terms have emerged from inside the intelligence community to describe how the USA is continuing to war against what few holdouts remain. The current buzz phrase is strategic strangulation.
Billionaires don’t look at the world in the same way as the disenfranchised and exploited. In the neglected and overlooked far reaches of the world where billionaires don’t live, common people sometimes try to organize themselves by producing wealth cooperatively and sharing it as best they can. Once they attract the attention of the powerful, the powerful send in missionaries and agricultural-aid workers to undermine and disenfranchise their leaders.
If God and food don’t work, they send in assassins. It’s true. Since WWII, the United States has gone to war with one out of four countries. It has overthrown (or co-opted) many states including Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens more.
Eventually, the USA sends in Coca-Cola and other first-line-of-attack companies to overwhelm the nascent economies of the sharers and cooperators. The wealthy move in to buy the arable land and lock up the country; billionaire power-brokers make it their business to bury every way of governance that might threaten their right to administer an economic empire built for one purpose only: to empower their own families and the families of their friends to rule unimpeded into perpetuity.
This billboard appears all over the island of Cuba. It says: BLOCKADE: THE LONGEST GENOCIDE IN HISTORY. It shows a Klansman’s noose strangling the island. Inside the USA intelligence community, it’s called strategic strangulation. Our leaders have enforced the embargo of Cuba for 55 years. Odds are it will never end.
The USA is good at undermining socialist countries. It’s why socialism doesn’t do well. When a communist country like Cuba manages to hold on somehow, they are tormented by embargos, infiltration by agents, sabotage, disinformation, slander, assassinations and so on. Radio Free Whatever is beamed into the targeted country to undermine morale and brainwash listeners with the most seductive psychological warfare techniques in our arsenal. It’s why communist countries seal their borders and jam our broadcasters.
The United States makes sure that no administrator can relax; none can kick back without constantly looking over their shoulder and keeping guard. As long as the privately-owned United States exists, countries of the opposite sex — that is, socialist countries — are going to get blamed for however the rich and powerful choose to hurt them. The better these socialist countries do for their people the bigger the target they become. Their success is their mini-skirt; their low-cut blouse. Obviously, they are begging for war as Madame Haley so eloquently put it.
Blaming the victim is as old as Cain and Abel. It’s as old as history. The bullies win. They put on coats and tails, send their kids to exclusive schools, learn to speak with a different accent, and set themselves apart. They tell wonderful stories about themselves on TV, movies, radio, books, magazines, and the internet until people start to actually believe deep in their hearts that wealthy people are more wonderfully made than themselves or their kids.
The poor and disadvantaged admire their employers, because no one is left to help them understand that they are slaves — fools before a noble class that thinks of them as having no more value than farm animals. They live in the cow-pastures outside the gates of the wealthy. A few unlucky cows get a glimpse from time to time of what has been stolen from them; most of the time they are too incredulous before the view to believe their own eyes.
Today, billionaires are planning as they have for the past seventy years to obliterate the North Koreans. Tens of millions of Koreans will die in the first hours. The North Koreans and their Chinese allies were the first countries to challenge America after WWII. Apparently, our arsenal of atomic weapons didn’t intimidate them. The USA has a long memory.
If we use nuclear weapons in a first strike, no one will live on the peninsula again. That this threat has been floated by our new president (fire and fury like the world has never known) makes it easy to understand what the USA is all about.
Despite denials in the press, America may in fact have neutron bombs in its arsenal which kill people but leave infrastructure intact outside the immediate impact zone. Only bunkers constructed from heavy concrete impregnated with barium sulfate can shield against both neutrons and the gamma ray by-products of collisions between neutrons and the proton-rich substrate of heavy concrete.
High level command bunkers are likely to be built with these materials. Otherwise elements like lead and heavy metals are the barriers of choice against most frequencies of nuclear radiation. But heavy metals tend to be transparent and ineffective against neutron bombardment.
Neutron bombs emit little residual radiation so they don’t contaminate the attack zone. An occupying force can be inserted with little risk of radiation poisoning. It’s possible the USA will use neutron bombs against civilians for the first time if the Koreans continue begging our country to kill them. A follow-on insertion of Marine and Airborne divisions would locate and destroy any surviving command bunkers.
The United States always seems to be first to try diabolical things. We used anthrax against Chinese troops during the Korean war back in the 1950s. Everyone knows about it but us of course. We have short memories when it comes to remembering our own sins like the genocidal Vietnam War and other cruelties such as the war against Iraq and the destabilization of the Middle East.
And no one seems to remember that it was a CIA agent (yes, he was disgruntled and no longer employed, the agency insists) who blew up the first commercial airliner and wiped out the Cuban Olympic fencing team. It was an act of terrorism that didn’t happen when you ask most Americans. Lee Harvey Oswald was also disgruntled and no longer employed, come to think of it.
Speaking of begging for war, is anyone out there begging for peace? The USA killed two million North Koreans during aerial bombardments approved by President Truman. What’s stopping us from doing it again?
During the first days of the Korean War, the South rounded up 100,000 of its own citizens and summarily executed them, believing that each of their victims might be a leftist sympathizer of the North. The Korean War was an atrocity — which I won’t devote blog space to explain or explore. Click on links, those who want to know more.
South Korea from North Korea’s point of view. A massive China has their back. South Korea’s capital is close to their border — a tempting target. (Click on map to produce full-size view in a new window.)
The point is, we aren’t listening to the North or South Koreans. Most want the peninsula unified. We don’t. Most folks want to live in a safe and fair place where billionaires don’t reduce the average person to poverty. South Korea doesn’t want us to sacrifice millions of its own citizens in a military strike against the North — possibly triggering a nuclear conflagration — to make a point. It’s simple, really.
The only sensible solution is to leave Korea and to assist reunification as best as we can if the sides invite us. We aren’t leaving obviously, because our policy is to topple socialism wherever it takes root.
In the past the USA demonized so many of its enemies that it has become more confusing for most folks to know who the bad guys are this time around. Immigrants to the Americas once labeled native Americans with the pejorative, savages. We exterminated their food supply (buffalos), then their men, women and children.
Right now, no one knows who to trust. With our new president we will never know what the facts are. We will never know for sure who is begging for war, us or them.
Billy Lee
From the EDITORIAL BOARD:
Billy Lee supports private and public ownership of property (a mixed economy) but advocates for internationally enforced limits on personal incomes and estate sizes to reduce the temptations that drive the wealthy to burn down democracy on altars of greed. Read Billy Lee’s essay Capitalism and Income Inequality.
Billy Lee opposes war on humanitarian grounds. During war people get killed and are maimed in huge numbers. It sometimes takes generations for both winners and losers to emerge from the trauma and horrors.
Billy Lee supports the United States during war but in peacetime reserves his constitutional right to pontificate freely.
Russian hypersonic ship killing missiles fired from submarines and jets pose an existential threat to the US Navy Fleet. From AP Photo.
UPDATE BY THE EDITORS: 5 AUGUST 2021; The Associated Press reported yesterday the following: A prospective Russian hypersonic missile has been successfully test-fired from a nuclear submarine for the first time, the military said Monday. The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Severodvinsk submarine performed two launches of the Zircon cruise missile at mock targets in the Barents Sea.
Editors Note: The January 16, 2018 edition of the New York Times reports that five Naval officers are being charged with negligent homicide related to the incidents described in this essay where seventeen sailors lost their lives, others were injured, and ships were damaged. The decision to take these officers to trial or court-martial is imminent.
The United States Navy insists that it has 277 ships on active-duty. About 132 are combat surface vessels; 75 or so are submarines. About 70 are logistical craft designed to supply the fleet.
Do the math. 132 surface ships patrol the oceans. Yes, the Navy says they have a fleet of 160 or so non-commissioned ships held in reserve, but they are unavailable and ineffective during first strike scenarios.
The New York Times agrees with the Navy. Everyone agrees — we have 277 ships. I hope the Navy and the New York Times are lying, because if they aren’t, we are in big trouble. We don’t have enough boats.
132 surface ships can’t control the Great Lakes, let alone the world’s seven oceans. Submarines, everyone knows, are almost useless except when used for nuclear deterrence.
The Navy’s Seventh Fleet is headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan. The fleet is responsible to cover 48 million square miles — from Japan to South Korea to Singapore, unless the faraway reaches of the South China Sea are included; then the square miles are too confusing for anyone to compute.
China claims the whole of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory, including all reefs, atolls, and islands.
How many ships bear the awesome duty to keep the sea-lanes open and safe from pirates and hostile powers like North Korea? The Navy says, 70. The USA deploys one aircraft carrier and 69 ships.
Some news outlets have reported that an additional carrier group has been sent into the Sea of Japan to augment the current force configuration. A typical carrier strike group consists of eleven vessels, two of which are submarines. So, the total on the date of this essay might be as high as 81.
Sorry, but someone is ordering our sailors to do an impossible job. The job is too big, the resources are too thin, and guess what?
A flotilla of 81 vessels scurrying about the South China Sea to keep a lid on China, which is seizing islands that belong to Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines as they build and fortify new ones wherever they want is more than enough problems to exhaust any navy. People get tired. Accidents happen.
We have 70 ships in theater, the Navy says. We probably have 81. What does the other side have?
Well, we don’t really know. They lie. So do we. But we and they both watch; and we and they both spy and calculate.
Hillary Clinton — once upon a time (anyone remember?) she had the security-clearance to know — during a 2016 presidential debate let slip that Russian drone submarines are patrolling our coasts. These are cheap subs that sail apparently with no crews on board.
She said it once. Her assertion was never repeated in the press or public media. Everyone pretended they didn’t hear, for good reason. The number and types of ships in the Russian and Chinese fleets that are arrayed against our tiny arsenal of boats are state secrets. It’s all classified — out of reach of everyone except those with a clearance and a need to know.
Chinese frigates like this one often stalk US ships in the South China Sea.
It seems clear to more than a few casual observers of Chinese shipping that the Chinese are building the most high-tech navy the world has ever seen. They have been building it for a few decades now.
The Chinese have practiced their sea-going skills in coordination with the Russian navy since 2012. Last year the Russians and Chinese held joint naval exercises in the South China Sea, of all places. Joint land-based military exercises started in 2007.
China is selling its naval technologies and hardware to smaller countries that don’t normally threaten us. Thailand is buying Chinese subs. With military hi-tech weapons spread among a dozen or more countries in secret alliances with China… well… if it’s happening more than we know, does anyone think it’s good for our side?
But really, what would any reasonable person suspect are the forces arrayed against us? Look around. Hundreds-of-thousands of Russians live on the island of Cuba ninety miles from the United States.
Upscale area southwest of the airport in Havana, Cuba. (From Google Earth. Street View not available.)
Go on Google Earth and look at the Cuban neighborhoods. Some nice ones have Russian street names. It’s true. The Russians have a number of wonderfully designed, modern military bases for both subs and ships; and — oh yeah — they have fighter jets and missiles, as well.
Does anyone disagree? Go look.
Am I trying to scare people?
Doesn’t the public have enough to fear? Isn’t terrorism, immigration, climate change, distant war, disease, and precarious health care that could collapse now that the GOP is in charge enough to worry about? Of course it is.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson helped Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin build Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure. It is the world’s best. Note from the Editors:Tillerson resigned his post on March 31, 2018.
Besides, our country has thousands of nuclear weapons buried hundreds of feet below the cornfields and deserts of the heartland to extinguish any threats, should we lose our Navy. Until the missiles rot and their plutonium payloads leech into our soils, why worry?
Everyone should sleep well at night, right? Who wants to alarm anyone? I don’t.
Secretary of State Tillerson said we should sleep well, so why not? He knows all about the Russians, having helped them build their oil industry over many decades.
Depending on when anyone takes its measure, Russia’s energy industry is the world’s largest and most productive — bigger than Saudi Arabia’s. People don’t believe it, but it’s true.
Russia is the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer and exporter. Secretary Tillerson must know what he’s talking about, right?
Well, here is some stuff that is not so comforting. It might scare some people. Between 1975 and 2016 (41 years) our Navy experienced nine accidents, mostly between our own ships. Only two accidents involved the boats of foreign countries. That’s not bad. That’s not the scary part. But hear me out.
The Ehime Maru was on a 74-day voyage to train high school students to become commercial fishermen when it was struck on 9 February 2001 by a US submarine. It sank. Of the 35 on board, nine died, including four teenagers.
In 2001 a Japanese fishing-training boat, the Ehime Maru, with thirty-five Japanese citizens aboard, was obliterated near the Hawaiian island of Oahu when the commanding officer of one of our attack submarines allegedly hot-dogged the craft for civilian joy-riders.
Our new president, George W. Bush, went on national TV to apologize to the Japanese, and the United States paid huge fines and compensation to the Japanese government and the grieving families of the nine who died, which included four high school students.
In 2004, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy ran over an Arab sailboat in the Persian Gulf. 15 people died, but the Navy didn’t identify who they were it seems, and no one was compensated, as far as I know. Two jet fighters parked on deck were damaged. The Navy relieved the commanding officer.
USS Belknap, guided-missile cruiser, destroyed in 1975 near Sicily.
The most serious accident was in 1975 when the same U.S.S. John F. Kennedy hit one of our own guided-missile cruisers, the USSBelknap, off the island of Sicily. The Belknap was completely destroyed; seven sailors died.
A fire burned on the Belknap for twenty hours just a few yards from the magazine where Terrier surface-to-air missiles were stored. The ship was constructed with aluminum, which caught fire. The entire above deck structure melted. It took nearly five years to reconstruct the ruined cruiser. In 1995, the Navy struck it from the Naval Registry and began using it for target practice. They sunk it during a live-fire exercise in 1998.
A year after the Belknap accident, the USS John F. Kennedy collided with another ship, this time the aging USS Bordelon destroyer during a refueling. The Navy struck the ship from its registry and sold it to Iran for parts in 1977. No one died.
So, during the forty-one years between 1975 and 2016, the US Navy had nine peacetime accidents, seven of which were friendly-fire and self-inflicted. 24 foreign nationals died; 7 U.S. sailors; 1 U.S. civilian. Ship losses: one cruiser and one obsolete destroyer. Maybe other losses occurred. I haven’t heard about them, if there were any.
The USS John S. McCain collided with a Liberian oil tanker, the Alnic MC, on August 20, 2017 in an early morning incident that killed ten sailors. The crash took the destroyer out of action for at least one year.
And now comes the scary part; hold onto your pants: In the seven months since the inauguration of our comb-over commander-in-chief (and keeper of nuclear codes), the U.S. Navy has suffered four major accidents, which killed 17 sailors and injured scores more.
It’s lost two of its most powerful missile-guided destroyers — the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and the U.S.S. John S. McCain. It might be years before they are back in service. Readers can read about the fates of the USS Antietam and the USS Lake Chaplain in the links below.
At least two dozen sailors and officers have been disciplined, including a Vice-Admiral, a Commander, and a Lieutenant Commander. Admiral John Richardson, chief of Naval operations, has ordered an “operational pause” to all fleet commanders. He’s ordered a months-long review of protocols, because, he says, “there’s something out there that we’re not getting at.”
All this commotion is happening during a time when we’re planning to conduct war games against North Korea and are daily challenging the Chinese in the South China Sea.
Can I put things into perspective? If the accident rate of the past seven months was applied to the past forty-one years, the U.S. Navy would be short another 85 ships and 800 sailors. Thousands more young men and women would be maimed and wounded, and 250 promising Naval careers would be wrecked.
In peacetime, essentially, the U.S. Navy might have lost one-third of its fleet and some of its best sailors and officers at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The USS Antietam, a guided missile cruiser, grounded itself in Tokyo Bay January 31, 2017. It released over one thousand gallons of toxic hydraulic oil into the bay and damaged both of its propellers and propeller hubs. Repair costs will exceed $4 million.
Here are a few of the headlines from our country’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. All headlines are from articles written in 2017. I’ve read every single one of them. Readers can access their content by clicking on the links. The remainder of my essay is written below these headlines:
*Some readers may have noticed that the last headline seems to have no connection whatsoever to this essay. But they would be wrong.
Recall that the battleship USSIndianapolis was the fiercest war machine we had during World War II in the Pacific. We used that ship to deliver the atomic bomb Little Boy (dropped on Hiroshima) to Tinian Island in the western Pacific Ocean sometime during July, 1945. It would be assembled and delivered to the Japanese people with terrifying effect on August 15.
From Tinian the Navy ordered the Indianapolis to advance to Leyte Island in the Philippines to prepare for an all-out assault and invasion of Japan scheduled to follow the atomic blasts that were soon to occur.
On July 30 the lumbering battleship encountered a Japanese submarine which delivered six torpedoes in the wee hours of the night. The sub commander later said that the clouds parted, which permitted the Indianapolis to be silhouetted by moon-light. It made targeting easy. Two torpedo struck the Indianapolis.
The ammunition on board caught fire and blew-off the front quarter. It took twelve minutes for the battleship to sink below the surface. The ship sucked four hundred men to the bottom and left behind an oil slick that would sicken and blind many of the nearly one-thousand sailors and marines who survived to face death by dehydration, drowning, and sharks.
The USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bomb to the Air Force in the Pacific before being sunk by a Japanese submarine. The ordeal took the lives of nearly a thousand men during five days in the open sea. Read Devil’s Voyage by Jack L Chalker.
The Navy didn’t notice that their prized battleship was missing. After five days of vomiting, diarrhea, hallucinations, and shark attacks, three hundred men were still alive (some in lifeboats, including the Commanding Officer) when an aircraft on an unrelated mission saw something suspicious and flew down to take a closer look.
Twenty-two men who were pulled from the water remain alive today. The Navy court-martialed the commander, Captain McVay, and convicted him for not zig-zagging as he sailed. The Japanese sub-commander testified that zig-zagging would not have mattered. The Indianapolis was going to the floor of the ocean, in any event, he insisted. Nothing could have stopped what happened.
Losing a ship, even in war, is a big deal in the Navy. It’s not something that anyone takes lightly, even when there are extenuating circumstances and good reasons for failure. Captain McVay committed suicide in 1968—clutching a toy sailor in one hand and his service revolver in the other.
The Navy has a history of not being able to keep track of its ships. The earth’s oceans are vast, and we don’t have that many boats on them. Hiding ships from our enemies means we sometimes hide them from ourselves.
Civilian boats are another matter. Merchant fleets deploy 51,405 ships on our oceans. Most of them are bigger and longer and heavier than our 277 Navy ships. Almost all run on auto-pilot most of the time, especially at night when the crews sleep. If the computer directs the tanker to ram a boat like the Fitzgerald, that’s what is going to happen. In collisions, chances are Navy ships will lose.
Collision avoidance should be easy. Crews need only have situational awareness and the ability to steer the boat. The problem is that to perform these tasks crews rely on a complicated matrix of technologies that always seem to fail in critical situations like combat or rule violations by other boats.
These technologies should be used to confirm human observation and decisions; instead sailors confirm what the technology tells them, but only when something goes wrong, which is almost always too late. An alarm sounds and a glance at a computer screen shows that a tanker is 500 meters to starboard, so a crew member looks out a window to see if it’s there. No! That’s bassackwards and will get someone killed.
Officers might better demonstrate proficiency in the absence of high-tech aids for situational awareness and steering, then add high-tech proficiencies one skill-set at a time. Maybe they wear merit badges to enable COs to tell at a glance who can handle hydraulic controls and who is good at computer-aided navigation, for example.
Every officer doesn’t have to master every skill-set, and the least skilled officer should be able to turn off the high-tech systems they haven’t mastered in order to steer the boat and stop it using the skills they do have, when necessary.
Laser distance finders (like those used by golfers) and wide-field-of-view night vision binoculars should be standard issue. A half dozen or more sailors should be stationed around the perimeter of every boat and be required to report what they see or don’t see every five minutes or so. No snoozing!
Mischief Reef is the site of a Chinese airstrip and military installation built on a contested atoll in the Philippines.
Anyway, one thing about the four accidents this year (January 31, the USS Antietam; May 9, the USS Lake Champlain; June 17, the USS Fitzgerald; August 20, the USS John S. McCain) bothers me: the destroyer McCain was nearly sunk just two weeks after it challenged the Chinese at a contested atoll named Mischief Reef, which the Chinese have in recent years built-up into a military base.
I have a problem with coincidences that turn out bad for our side. Malevolent intent by an adversary is always possible. Every bridge officer should understand the protocols to avoid intentional (or unintentional) collisions initiated by rogue (or wayward) boats.
A Philippine-manned cargo ship, the ACX Crystal, rammed the USS Fitzgerald, a guided-missile destroyer, on June 17, 2017. Seven US sailors died. The night was clear; the seas calm. The commanding officer and another crew member were severely injured. Repairs will cost hundreds of millions and take years to complete.
Our Navy is a mess. Everyone knows it. The optics of powerful warships limping into port under the power of a dozen or so tugboats emboldens our enemies and demoralizes our patriotic fighting men and women.
We have the wrong ships, designed the wrong way, for the wrong wars, for the wrong reasons. And our Navy is overworked to the max. We all know it’s true. It doesn’t have to be. It’s good to have high-tech systems, but they are useless during a crisis. Everyone must be proficient at low-tech and know how to enable it. Seriously.
Politics and corruption, profiteering and greed, laziness and lack of zeal are going to kill us all if we don’t wake up. It’s time for civilians to step up and defend our way of life. It’s time for corporations and billionaires to do what’s right — not what makes them wealthy at the expense of our country’s defense and the prosperity of our citizens and the people of the world who are looking to us for leadership.
We are going to regret privatizing our military and using contractors instead of citizens to fight our battles. We are going to lose our freedoms and our country if we don’t fight for both. Everyone must do their part. Corruption can have no role in the process.
We must use our power to make the world safer, freer, and better for everyone, not just ourselves. People are sick and tired of “America first.” We have so much, already.
It’s time to share our advantages, with love. If we do what’s right, if we embrace public service and reach out to the disadvantaged in the world (the military, after all, doesn’t have the room or the money for every citizen), we won’t need to kill everyone who hates us like we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.
A year or two of public service by every American in impoverished neighborhoods and blighted communities might make a big difference in the why, how, and who we fight.
When President Barack Obama visited Cuba in March 2016, the USA-imposed blockade or embargo or quarantine or whatever-else one wants to call it was the elephant on the island. It was the elephant in the room at every meeting between our officials (who numbered close to twelve-hundred) and theirs. We owe Cuba a huge apology. Of course, we didn’t offer one.
This billboard can be found in various places on the island of Cuba. In English it might be interpreted this way: The USA-organized embargo is the longest-lived genocide in world history. They intended to lynch us, but look; the noose is empty; Cuba swims free, beyond the yank of their rope.
Yes, Cubans once-upon-a-time tried to protect themselves from our overwhelming military power; our subversion; our unrelenting sabotage; our many plots to undermine and demoralize the Cuban revolutionary movement, which had overturned the Batista cartel and drove its Mafia friends off the island way back in 1959, a long time ago. We didn’t like it when the Cubans turned to the Soviet Union for help to defend themselves.
Let’s face some facts: It was 6 million of them against 220 million of us. It wasn’t going to be a fair fight. The Cubans were going to lose, and they knew it.
Terrorists fire-bombed El Encanto (a Havana department store) in 1961, just four days before the CIA-organized (and financed) Bay of Pigs invasion. This pic is from 1955.
Fifteen months after the revolution, in March 1960, someone blew-up a French ship in the Havana Harbor, which killed and wounded hundreds of civilians. Cuban police arrested a suspect who, it turned out, was an American with ties to organized-crime and CIA operatives; his team managed to infiltrate harbor-security, police said.
Strange people started flying airplanes over the island on a daily basis to bomb sugar refineries and drop napalm on sugar cane fields. The Cubans managed to shoot down one aircraft and rescue the pilot. He turned out to be an American. Authorities blamed the CIA.
Then, just a few days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, terrorists bombed and burnt to the ground El Encanto, one of Havana’s upscale department stores.
The destruction of El Encanto was part of an extensive campaign to destabilize the island of Cuba. A few days after the terrorist attack, the Bay of Pigs invasion began. The USA public would learn years later that the invasion force had been organized, trained, and paid for by the CIA. The invaders killed and wounded 5,000 Cuban citizens before they exhausted their ammunition and surrendered to Fidel Castro, who led the island’s defenders.
Cubans had no clear idea, even as late as April 1961, that the USA was systematically destabilizing the island and had already finalized plans to invade Cuba and assassinate its leaders.
A few days after the El Encanto firebombing, the invasion-force launched its assault — on Monday, April 17. It included close air-support, a squadron of B-26 bombers, and ships standing off-shore. The assault would come to be called the Bay of Pigs fiasco, mostly because the invaders ran out of ammunition and were forced to surrender.
Fidel himself led the island’s defense; Soviet intelligence informed him a few days in advance of the exact time and place; by some miracle related to our own incompetence, Fidel and his Cuban fighters repulsed the invasion.
Castro’s Cubans managed to capture 1,200 invaders, mostly CIA-trained expatriates, who they later traded for medicine. Afterwards, they begged the Soviet Union to get more involved, because they believed the USA would attack again. Maybe the next time the USA would send more ammo and a bigger air-force, and Cuban defenses wouldn’t hold up.
Our government wasn’t too happy about the deal Cuba made with the USSR. The Soviets took advantage of Cuba’s weakness, Che Guevara would later claim. Che told Fidel and the Soviets that the deal was one-sided and not good for Cuba.
The alliance between Cuba and the Russians almost started a nuclear war, because the Soviets insisted on putting nuclear missiles on the island and basing nuclear-tipped submarines in Cuba’s harbors.
The Russians believed that the island could not be successfully defended against a full-on USA invasion using conventional weapons alone. Had a nuclear-missile exchange occurred, neither Florida nor Cuba would be habitable places even today, fifty-four years later. Millions of Cubans and Americans would have died.
Fortunately, deals were made and tensions de-escalated. The Soviets loaded up their weapons and took them home.
For the United States the fight was just beginning. Although the USA promised the Soviet Union that it would not militarily invade Cuba again (rendering nuclear defense unnecessary), it did not promise anything about an embargo. The United States talked and threatened every country in the Western Hemisphere into imposing one. The only country that refused was Mexico.
The USA-led embargo has turned Cuba into a land frozen in time; a time-capsule from the 1950s, which has transformed the island into one of the world’s most sought after tourist destinations. Travel restrictions by the USA make visits by Americans difficult, but not impossible.
The embargo has never ended. It has lasted fifty-four years and turned Cuba into a time-capsule from the 1950s, which in one of the great ironies of world history has propelled Cuba into an elite group of the most-in-demand tourist attractions of modern times.
The Cubans have complained vociferously about the embargo at the United Nations, but they have never fought back in kind; even after we poisoned their sugar; even after we sunk the ships of their trading partners; even after the Bay of Pigs invasion, when we killed and wounded five-thousand Cuban citizens; all they asked was to be left alone.
Che Guevara resigned his Cuban citizenship in October 1965 and left the island never to return. He hoped to inspire revolutions closer to Argentina, his native country, but he also may have believed that his departure would help to take USA pressure off the Cuban people. It didn’t work.
A fifteen-hundred man force trained by the CIA in Guatemala hunted down the beloved hero of the Cuban revolution, shot him in the legs a few times just to hurt him, then they executed him. They cut off his hands and sent them to Fidel Castro. A CIA agent who witnessed the murder has been quoted as saying that Che never cried out in pain before he died. He died as brave as he lived, without fear, the agent said.
Cuba refused to even consider assassinating our leaders, even as we worked overtime in every depraved way we could think of to assassinate theirs; the assassination plots against Fidel Castro are in the public record and make a wicked read, if anyone wants to look them up.
People who visit Cuba will tell anyone who will listen that the Cubans are a friendly, peace-loving people who were brutalized by a ruthless cartel in alliance with powerful crime syndicates; crime syndicates which would years later come to be called the Mafia.
Everyone on the island (90%, anyway) joined in the effort to get rid of the thugs who were abusing the population on a daily basis. People who fought the Batista family and his cartel and were unlucky enough to be captured were routinely tortured, some to their deaths.
The island of Cuba is a kind of unspoiled paradise. May God bless and protect Cuba as the haters try to keep our fight with them going and going and going.
What kind of country keeps an embargo going for 54 years against another country that is no longer a threat?
The only threat Cuba poses to our billionaires is the example it has set; the lessons it has taught the world that it really is possible to create wealth cooperatively and share it; it really is possible to survive an assault by the most militarized and corrupt nation on planet Earth; it really is possible to choose a different path — a path that doesn’t involve capitulation to cartels and billionaires.
Is Cuba perfect? No; not even close. Of course they aren’t perfect. No nation, no individual, no organization that is shunned and impoverished for fifty-four years by a country as powerful and connected as the United States has any chance at all. How would anyone of us in the USA turn out if the full power the United States turned against us?
I will tell you. If you are lucky enough to survive, as Cuba has, you could turn old and sad. Maybe bitter. We have hurt the Cubans far more than they ever hurt us.
It’s time for this fight to be over. It’s time to make amends. Dispatching on Good Friday four men in their seventies to belch out songs about sex with girls before a modestly attended concert crowd isn’t a good way to start.
It’s time for us to say we are sorry, and mean it. It’s time to be friends. It’s clear to visitors that the Cuban people have in their hearts the desire to forgive us.
I believe that many Cubans want to forge their own path without their vision being twisted by the fear of subversion by U.S. spies and agents. They want to have fun and to be our friends; someday — hopefully sooner rather than later — they will.
