From Vietnam To Iraq To Havana: The United States Has A Long Record Of Confident Intervention In Other Nations’ Politics. The Results Are Rarely What Washington Promises.
This article was compiled and made possible with the help of the following source(s): Letter to POTUS Cuba Indict Raul Castro, CBS News, Axios and Fox News.
The United States Department of Justice plans to indict Cuba’s 94-year-old former president Raúl Castro, a DOJ official confirmed this week.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew personally to Havana to deliver Donald Trump’s message that United States is “prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes,” while also warning that Cuba can “no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere.”
Read that sentence again. A sitting CIA director flew to the capital of a foreign sovereign nation to personally deliver demands from the American president. This is not diplomacy. This is a performance of imperial will. And it fits into a pattern of Trump-era Latin American policy that should make any serious student of twentieth-century history profoundly uneasy.
The planned indictment of Castro comes as the Trump administration is intensely focused on expanding the power of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. On January 3, the US military seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, an ally of Cuba who had been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. That seizure coincidentally fell on the 36th anniversary of the US capture of Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, who had also been indicted by American courts.
The anniversary is not a coincidence. It is a message. Washington is consciously invoking its own history of regime seizure as a statement of continuity and intent. The Monroe Doctrine, which declared the Western Hemisphere America’s exclusive sphere of influence in 1823, has never really been repealed. Under Trump, it has simply been reactivated with considerably less diplomatic packaging.
The problem is what the United States’ record of intervention in the hemisphere actually looks like when you examine it honestly.
Trump has pressed for major reforms in Cuba and has floated a “friendly takeover” of the country. Trump also threatened heavy tariffs on any country that exports oil to Cuba, leading to energy shortages as oil shipments are largely cut off. The strategy is not new. The United States has operated an economic embargo against Cuba since 1960.
Sixty-six years of economic pressure, designed to collapse the Castro government, have produced one of the most durable authoritarian states in the Western Hemisphere. The blockade did not liberate Cuba. It gave the Cuban government a permanent external enemy to blame for every domestic failure, and it hardened the political system rather than softening it.
This is the same logic that was applied to Vietnam and produced 58,000 American dead and a communist government in Hanoi that remains in power today. United States of America entered Vietnam on the confident assertion that a limited show of military and economic force would quickly compel the North Vietnamese government to change course. Sixteen years of escalation later, the US withdrew with nothing achieved and a legacy of chemical contamination, civilian casualties and regional instability that lasted decades.
It is the same logic that was applied to Iraq. The United States went in with legal instruments, a UN resolution, a DOJ-style case about weapons of mass destruction and a plan to install democracy in a region Washington barely understood. What it produced instead was a power vacuum that eventually spawned the Islamic State, regional Iranian expansion and a country that remains politically fractured and economically depleted more than twenty years after the original intervention.
Raúl Castro is 94 years old. He has formally stepped down from the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party. An indictment of him in a US court would be the latest legal pressure tool in a broader campaign targeting the Communist Party leadership, following initiatives involving economic crimes, drugs, violent crimes and immigration-related violations.
But the indictment of a 94-year-old former head of state by the court system of a foreign power has never, in recorded history, produced the political transformation that country sought. Manuel Noriega was captured and jailed. Panama moved toward democracy on its own terms, at its own pace, and the US invasion that removed Noriega killed an estimated 3,000 civilians in the process.
What Trump’s Latin American policy represents, stripped of its legal architecture and its language about democracy and freedom, is a restatement of a very old American assumption: that the United States has the right to determine what kind of governments its neighbours are permitted to have, and the power to enforce that determination unilaterally.
That assumption has been tested repeatedly throughout American history, in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Central America, and across the Caribbean, and it has failed repeatedly for the same structural reasons.
The nations being targeted have populations, histories and political cultures that exist independently of Washington’s preferences. Economic pressure radicalises rather than liberalises when it is experienced as foreign coercion rather than domestic reform. Legal instruments issued by American courts carry no automatic authority inside sovereign states that did not accept that jurisdiction. And the leaders removed or indicted by US action are almost always replaced not by the liberal democrats Washington imagines, but by whoever can most credibly claim to have resisted American pressure.
Trump told a Florida audience that the US would be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately,” adding, “Cuba’s got problems. We’ll finish one first. I like to finish a job.”
That sentence should terrify anyone who has read a history book. America has been saying it will finish the job in Latin America since the Spanish-American War of 1898. A century and a quarter later, Cuba is still communist, Venezuela spent two decades under Chavismo, and the region remains one of the most unequal and politically unstable in the world, not despite United States’ involvement but partly because of it.
The indictment of Raúl Castro may well proceed. The 94-year-old may be charged in a Miami courtroom for a crime committed thirty years ago. And Cuba will almost certainly remain exactly what it is, because the people of Cuba, like the people of Vietnam, like the people of Iraq, will make their own political decisions in their own time, regardless of what Washington demands.
That is the lesson American foreign policy keeps refusing to learn. And the costs of refusing it are always paid by someone else. Like this analysis-driven article. Read our previous article here.
