A List that Does not Match the Truth
By Juana Carrasco Martín on January 22, 2024
protest at the White House calling to take Cuba off the List. photo: Bill Hackwell
The United States is rife with paradoxes and this is one of them. On January 11, 2021, a few days away from ceasing to be president of the powerful nation -reluctantly and not without trying with his fanatics to reverse the electoral process won by Joseph Biden-, Donald Trump took a low blow and put the name of Cuba in a counterfactual list of countries sponsoring terrorism (SSOT). The incongruity lies not only in the fact that it is without a grain of truth, it is that in fact Cuba and the United States have in place a bilateral cooperation agreement on counterterrorism.
But the unprecedented thing was that Biden put the poisoned cherry on the cake when he kept the our island in that register of falsehoods, contributing his own imprint to the unilateral and tendentious register, whose purpose is to cause the greatest possible damage and burden to the daily life of Cubans, with the pretense that the people rebel against the Revolution, an infernal machination that began as early as July 1960 when then President Dwight Eisenhower imposed the first economic measures against Cuba, suspending the sugar quota and thus depriving us of 89 percent of the income from that sector, practically the country’s only industry.
Eisenhower’s decision did not stop there. In October 1960, he prohibited all exports to Cuba, with the exception of raw foodstuffs and medicines, thus closing the doors to the island’s main market.
On April 6, 1960, the Memorandum of Lester Mallory, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, cynically and overbearingly laid out what U.S. policy toward Cuba was all about in a report entitled “The Decline and Fall of Castro”:
“Most Cubans support Castro […]. There is no effective political opposition. […]. The only possible means to alienate this internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. […]. All possible and imaginable means must be used quickly to weaken economic life in Cuba […] denying financing and supplies to Cuba, decreasing real and monetary wages, in order to sow hunger, desperation and to bring about the overthrow of the Government”.
Continue reading Cuba was put on the list of countries sponsoring terrorism “WHY”
