Are you for Cuba?
Why Gitmo is like evangelical attitudes to sex and why Cuba needs our support.
I have always found, in my silly little life, that it is best not to criticise someone else’s aggression when I also regularly torture people in their basement. It’s just basic etiquette. “No righteous admonitions while putting men in stress positions,” as my mother used to say. It even rhymes. So American criticism of Cuba’s handling of protests a few weeks ago are not just a perfect example of a delusional empire’s hypocrisy, it is impolite.
The United States runs a torture camp at Guantanamo Bay. There, it houses people who have never been convicted of a crime and it tortures them. The USA tortured people without trial under Bush. It tortured them under Obama (but pretended to feel really bad about it) and it tortured them with glee under Trump.
SIDE NOTE: If you’re not sure sleep deprivation, ‘stress positions’ (causing physical agony), sexual and religious based threat, simulated drowning and the threatening of your family (among other things) count as torture, you are cordially invited to my basement where we can test your presumption. I am up for it if you are. And if you say that these people are terrorists and therefore deserve it, I say that:
You are thinking like a psychopath, devoid of empathy, who would be among those cheering the crucifixion. Torturing the guilty is not a morally defensible position, no matter how much I sometimes want to see torturers tortured. And:
We don’t know they are guilty. This is the point. Innocent people have been tortured at Guantanamo. The reason we have courts and laws is so that lynchings don’t happen and we don’t immediately get barbecued when someone calls us ‘witch’.
Guantanamo Bay detention centre is many things. It was acquired by force while Cuba was a colony and the US pays a pitiful sum every year (that the Cuban government refuses to accept) as a kind of lease to have a military base there. In addition there is a detention centre that, because it is not on American soil, is seen as a place where Americans (and their collaborating allies) can do things to prisoners and kidnap victims that would be illegal on US soil. It’s a bizarre little line to draw. It reminds me of a few things:
It’s like the Israel knowing that it’s bad to put children who throw stones at heavily armed soldiers in criminal prisons – and so putting them in military prisons with adults. Shooting for logical decency and missing spectacularly.
It’s like wearing a mask in the shops but not covering your nose. (You think it’s better than doing noting right, but you are incorrect.)
It’s like young evangelicals who refuse to have premarital sex and so will do literally everything except peen in vajayjay. (Technically following the rules but absolutely meaningless and devoid of righteousness. Not to mention messy, undignified and very embarrassing when you look at it closely.)
What Gitmo is not is an unfortunate necessity America would rather hide. Like going to war without UN backing or refusing to allow American soldiers to be tried by international courts for war crimes, it is a statement to the world that the rules do not apply to America, and America will do what it wants. It is intimidation by threat and the holding of innocent people is not a mistake, it is a technique. It says to the world: “Nobody is safe if they oppose us. Your guilt or innocence matters less than your vocal and total submission to our sense of entitlement. This could be you.” It is bullying on a global scale. It is intimidation. It is terrorism.
Around the time that anti-government protests happened in Cuba (smaller than those against the right wing, US-backed government in Colombia – which western media largely ignored because it does not fit our foreign policy narrative), the USA released a prisoner from Guantanamo Bay.
Abdul Latif Nasser was released on 19 July after spending 19 years in detention without ever facing trial. He was cleared for release FIVE YEARS AGO and was released this month. Let that sink in.
You can read more about him in stories about Abdul Latif Nasser collected by Reprieve, an incredible charity that works within the legal system to free political prisoners and other victims of injustice.
Obviously American foreign policy expresses this in more than ‘extraordinary rendition’ (the official term with attendant ‘legal’ nuances used by the US to describe what is the kind of kidnapping and torture your average drug cartel engages in). And obviously it is not limited to America. Drone strikes in civilian areas, invasions, funding of militias and policies of regime change are all part of the arsenal. As well as the weapon of sanctions and isolation.
And sanctions, specifically those against Cuba, are what we need to consider when thinking about the protests there this month.
According to Comunistas, a Cuban leftist blog whose editor was arrested during the protests, those taking to the streets were a mixture of right-wing agitators (of the kind the US has regularly supported in countries whose governments they want to undermine), art intellectuals wanting more freedom to create and people tired of the economic difficulties within the country. What I find interesting about that piece is how it doesn’t try to pretend the protests were all artificial American interference or the rantings of an elite that is annoyed at loss of privilege (as one has seen in Bolivia and Venezuela where the middle class can get quite violent if indigenous or poor people are given a leg up).
Comunistas actually paints a scary picture of state paranoia and civilian powerlessness, which is something we can’t glamourise or underplay when talking about Cuba – human rights need to be improved there. But when picking sides on this issue (and people of good conscience must pick sides), we need to look at the reason for the protests. People are angry and frustrated with economic hardship. That hardship is not ‘bEcAUsE sOCiaLiSm’, as right wing commentators suggest. It’s because of the blockade.
Cuba is not allowed to trade with the US. Cuba’s trade with other countries is also limited or made impossible by US punitive policies towards those who would help Cuba. Here’s a little explainer video that is both amusing and helpful to understanding the sanctions and blockade against Cuba.
And what you need to understand is why there is a blockade. It’s not because of human rights abuses or lack of democracy. The United States has actively supported brutal, violent dictatorships more times than one could relate in a single newsletter. No. The reason is because Cuba is Communist. The revolution that overthrew the much more brutal regime that made Cuba a brothel-cum-casino for America was socialist and did not doff its cap to western money interests (in the way that the ANC in SA did, for instance), and so it had to be punished. It has to be isolated. A socialist state cannot be successful or the bogeyman that billionaires use to dissuade people in western democracies from enacting more socialism will be neutered.
So, even though Cuba has some of the best medical care in the world and a higher life expectancy than the United States, we must all believe that Communism or Socialism cannot work. Which is why the US will always take a hard line on countries like Cuba. It’s not because they care about human rights. Saudi Arabia’s bromance with America is as long as it is disgusting. It’s about making sure a system that is a viable alternative to the capitalist semi-democracy you see in most two-party free markets is shown to fail.
That is why there is a blockade. That is why countless bots take to twitter when protests happen, denouncing the Cuban government while at the same time insisting the internet has been taken down in the country. That is why respected mainstream media outlets will post pictures of pro-government rallies (which spontaneously dwarfed the initial protests) and caption them inaccurately to make it look like they were anti government. That is why pictures of protests in Miami (by definition made up of people who fled the revolution because their families were part of the oppression of Cuba pre revolution) are similarly captioned as if they were taking place in Cuba. They weren’t. But this is how hard oligarchy will work to make sure a socialist state fails. All the while telling use we can’t support a socialist system because it is doomed to failure.
Why all the effort then? Why the blockade?
The blockade against Cuba is the number one cause of the economic hardship there. Blockades on countries like Venezuela who were key trading allies have also hurt the country. As has Covid and the decimation of the tourist industry. Is some reform needed to Cuba’s economic system? It’s hard to say. What I know for sure is that a country that is about to see mass evictions and where dying of treatable illness because of poverty is the norm (despite the country’s overall wealth) is in no place to lecture.
Neither is a country where people are regularly killed for being black in a position to comment on civil liberties and democracy. Not one with the largest prison (and slave) population on the planet and whose media loudly denounce the one death in Cuban anti-govt protests while ignoring the 75 deaths of protestors against Colombia’s US backed govt. Not one that is about to make whistleblowing of its military’s war crimes punishable by 15 years in prison.
Can we criticise Cuba? Sure. Cubans of good will who do not want to see their country once again exploited and abused by the rich are critical of some aspects of the way things are run. But we should be very wary of narratives that spin Cuba as the bad guy or even the lesser of two evils in its struggle against the American empire.
Cuba needs and deserves our support, and we need to be willing to shift the narrative ourselves – in our churches, on our feeds and when we talk to the politicians who claim to represent us. Not just in the USA, but all over the world.
Support Reprieve – close Guantanamo
Reprieve is supporting 73-year-old Saifullah Paracha who is still being held against his will by the United States in Guantanamo Bay. You should too. Saifullah has been in Guantanamo since 2004. That’s as long as I’ve been in the UK. It’s a lifetime. And he’s been in a cage for it.
Please visit Reprieve and support them.
If you were thinking of buying me a beer or supporting me in some way this month, could you please rather donate to the work of Reprieve?
*WATCH* The Mauritanian
Based on Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary, this is a film that doesn’t pick sides enough for my tastes, but does give you plenty of insight into what we are allowed to know about what goes on at Gitmo.
The Mauritanian is available on Amazon (I know, but I’d rather you watched it)
Until we fully empathise with people victimised in our names, we will not fully love them and there will be no victory over oppression. So I encourage you to watch the movie. It’s pretty gripping, if enraging in places.
TONE SHIFT
Here’s a music video you should watch! It’s cool!
Speaking of victories for love (see what I did in a really laboured way there?), my good friend Ashton Nyte has just released a glorious version of Alphaville’s classic A Victory for Love.
I love the video and I love the song. In other music news, two things:
I did another music show on Spotify! You should listen to it.
And I made a playlist on Spotify. You should read it.
I mean, my wife is a diamond, this never happens and this is unnecessarily gendered, but read it as any spouse/friend and the joke stands, no?
Want to encourage me?
Because this is how you can encourage the crap out of me.
I do this for free and for the love of getting to talk to you and informing your thinking. That is a massive privilege in itself, NGL. But sometimes people ask how they can help. So if you’d like to do even more than reading, there are two options:
Tell your friends about the newsletter and the podcast, share them on social media, leave reviews, all that kind of stuff. It is so encouraging. And makes it more worthwhile.
Buy me a beer. That is to say, you can make a donation to help support me doing this stuff. You really don’t have to, but it really does really help. And if you’re doing it specifically to support the podcast, I promise to buy drinks for Laura and Malky too if you like! Please leave a message if you do! But also no pressure! Good Lord this is awkward.
Anyway…
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Hi there, full email reader! Does anyone actually make it this far down anymore? How are you doing? Tell me! I’d love to know. I am doing better than I have in ages. Been doing a lot of writing, working on my novel and on some poems. Also wild swimming in last week’s heat and getting WAY too into gay TikTok. Read into that what you will, but if you don’t already know and love Ghost Honey, you should get on that. I even did my own tribute to one of my fave TikTok trends. Laura says my hashtags are shameless. She is not wrong. But I really liked doing that (shirtless noggal) because I have been feeling hideously ugly because of all the weight I’ve put on. And then I’ve been encouraged just by the presence of confident fat men on TikTok being all cool and funny and frankly handsome. So it was a chance for me to give that a shot, you know? Felt good. Anyway, I hope you’re finding something this week to make you feel a little more able to love yourself. Unless you just launched yourself into (almost) space at the expense of your workers. You should go ahead and hate yourself. xoxo J