What is happening in Cuba and what are the relations with the American administration. The study by Livio Zanotti, author of ildiavolononmuoremai.it
One death in Cuba is more news than a hundred in Colombia, commented in the aftermath of last Sunday’s major protests General Alvarez Casas, Minister of the Interior. The other day, a few hours after the extraordinary government meeting attended by the ninety-year-old and officially retired Raul Castro, he was seized by sudden illumination and declared that he understood how his health is no longer that of a time: he resigned, irrevocably. Replaced on the fly by a deputy of him. A normal rotation, they say to the Foreign Minister, whose owner, Rodriguez Parrilla, denies that the thousands of people in the square, the intervention of the police and the arrests constitute a social explosion. There would have been – he says – a media conspiracy orchestrated by Miami, where Trump’s Republicans still rule.
But from the CIA (Central Intelligence Service), which in Cuba is perhaps idle but not uninformed, suggest (NYT, 13.07.21) that they do not see Miguel Diaz-Canel as a satrap. If anything – better explained by the State Department – there is a problem of communist inertia in Havana. Not ignoring that although every Cuban doctor around the world is suspected of being a Castro agent (but even Bolsonaro in Brazil could not do without it), in reality it is ex-paramilitaries and ex-Colombian guerrillas who crowd the mercenary market of military contractors from Panama to Haiti. And Joe Biden himself, taken as he is by internal and Atlantic recovery to better face the Chinese challenge,
It was he, moreover, as Barack Obama’s deputy, who gradually mended diplomatic relations with Cuba, which had been interrupted for half a century in 2015, paving the way in the search for normalization. Not imagining that in his unreasonable mess of Donald Trump he would then tear everything up, favoring the Cuban inanita, his status quo. So Biden is fully convinced of the need for a gradual and negotiating process. But also well aware of its international and internal political risks in the United States (for a hostility that is in principle among the Republicans, without leaving even certain democratic fringes of the southern states completely unscathed). He therefore said what he could not fail to say in the face of this new crisis (encouraging the Cuban people to claim freedom).
Head of the State Department.
Despite the system’s inability to shift budget chapters from one item to another to alleviate the crisis made ferocious by Covid (for example: allocating planned expenditures for military investments and service infrastructure to food), Cuban executives are not naïve . On the historical question of the embargo with which the United States has been trying for 60 years to suffocate the island’s economy against international conventions and dozens of votes at the UN general assembly, no miracles are expected. However, they ask for the suspension of the third title of the Helms-Burton law on economic sanctions, so that they can import anti-Covid pharmaceutical-health goods19. The State Department knows very well that it would be a justified derogation, indeed suggested by elementary humanitarian criteria. In fact,
In soliciting it officially, in the name of international law, in Havana, however, they understand that this would imply some kind of reciprocity. And the government emergency meeting in which Raul Castro intervened must have discussed it. To make his unexpected presence necessary, there were three reasonably concerns about many others: how to contain and defuse the protest without degenerating into mass repression; what to grant to the United States to facilitate its availability; and which way to follow to create in the Council of State and at the top of the power the majority destined to support it. As far as is known (not very much), the top military leaders would be more pragmatic than the high party bureaucracy. Since while the former believe they still have an irreplaceable function,
In the revolutionary battles, then during the sixty years of government, Castro’s voluntarism gradually lost its historical protagonists. And although essential to explain the trajectory of great personalities like Fidel and “Che”, Camilo, Raul, Frank Pais, Abel Santamaria, in short the reasons and the spirit of an era, have also lost their theoretical references. Franz Fanon’s concept of the destructive violence of colonialism has long been debated in relation to the evolution of the culture of the modern state even among the original peoples. The legitimate monopoly of force entrusted by Max Weber to the national states, at least in principle today sees limits and counterweights in a much broader and more articulated civil society. The militarism that impregnated the history of Cuba before and after Castro,
