Havana.
For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible; nothing is secret except to come to light.
(Mark 4:22)
Tom Crumpacker, a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, is not exaggerating a bit when he compares the annexationist Bush Plan to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Both are in fact, the only available examples of publicly announced plans to subjugate a Nation.
They also both coincide in their spirit of genocide and racism. In my previous article on the subject I mentioned that should the Bush Plan be put into action, it would not only eliminate Cuba as a nation, it would also enslave all Cubans to the point of extermination. That was the experience suffered by millions of peoples throughout the European Nations occupied by Hitler’s hordes.
The blockade against Cuba is without a doubt, a crime of genocide. It has been such since the first day and it is so today. That definition corresponds exactly to a policy which proposes to “cause hunger and desperation” as mentioned in official documents from 1959 and 1960 which have finally been declassified. The Bush Plan of 2004 and the additional measures approved by Bush last Monday try to increase the suffering of all Cubans. But Bush aspires to go beyond that. Hitler’s disciple, like his teacher, knows no borders.
The blockade, whose primary purpose is to try and starve the Cuban people into submission, now threatens to lash out like a whip against other nations and peoples on the third world.
KATRINA FOR ALL
Among Bush’s new proposals are those that seek to harm Cuba’s collaboration in the field of medicine with other nations. The new Cuba policy specifically targets the services offered on the island to thousands of patients that have been cured of cataracts or other eye illnesses and that have recovered their sight, or even those that would receive these benefits from Cuban physicians in their own nations. The Bush Administration is trying to thwart the training in Cuba of thousands of young people in the field of medicine and other careers; and it insists also in sabotaging the missions of our doctors, technicians and nurses abroad. Bush envisions himself capable of stamping out Operation Miracle, the Henry Reeve Internationalist Brigade, and the Latin American School of Medicine.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Irrespective of whether Bush may reach his goals, these are some of the things that he has just approved, among the garbage that he has just announced.
That is what he proclaims in pages 31 and 32 of the document that he approved on July 10th: “prohibit all exports” related to medical equipment that may be used in “large scale medical programs for foreign patients” or in “foreign care institutions”.
Such intentions imply, ironically, the acknowledgment of a reality that is becoming harder to deny: the beautiful display of internationalism and human solidarity of which millions and millions of people have been witness to, from Pakistan and Indonesia all the way across Africa and the Caribbean extending to the Andes and Central America.
Neither an arrogant Empire, nor any of its acolytes in other capitalist nations can show of anything that even remotely compares to this genuine example of international cooperation, of a true struggle for life and the most elementary rights of millions of human beings. Not one of them is capable of doing what this small island, assailed and harassed, has done.
It is outrageous that there are still thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that are demanding help. Not few were left displaced and homeless or live as refugees in their own country, many who died without the protection or the assistance that Bush barred them from receiving through the same “Henry Reeve” Brigade that today he wants to destroy; thousands of missing children and thousands of parents who are still searching. New Orleans and “Katrina” will forever be symbols of the intrinsic inhumanity of Capitalism. Bush’s “pray and leave”, is the summation of the clumsy insensitivity, that will follow him to Hell.
That Bush, as did Hitler, despises the poor and the African-Americans in his own country, that he couldn’t care less if they die abandoned, is well known to all. But we now also know, because he has just recognized it publicly, that his hatred reaches beyond to all the poor, all the indigenous, all the people of color in the world. It is imperative that he be stopped and defeated.
Crumpacker recounts that when Mein Kampf was published in 1924 many Europeans simply ignored it. Fifteen years later their worst tragedy befell them.
History should not repeat itself.
The situation now is worse. Bush has weapons that his teacher never even heard of. When he elaborated his infamous pamphlet, Hitler was in prison. His disciple is at large. There is no time to waste.
Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada is Cuba’s Vice President and President of its National Assembly.
(*) Planning for the Re-Colonization of Cuba. Tom Crumpacker lives in Austin, Texas, he is a member of the Miami Coalition to put an end to the United Status embargo against Cuba.