In the final years of the nineteenth century, US military forces took advantage of the situation of Spain –exhausted by the fighting against the insurgent Cuban fighters and the decline of its global empire– to launch its first imperialist war.

Many history scholars believe that the essential geopolitical objective of the US at that time was to seize the Philippines and the entire Spanish colonial system. Taking Cuba was not so urgent, because, due to its geographical proximity, it could “only gravitate towards the North American Union like an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree”.

But they could manufacture the pretext for war in Cuba more easily by exploding their battleship "Maine" –in port in Havana making a friendly visit with the Spanish colonial authorities– and blaming their hosts for the ruthless act.

Thus, intervening in the island’s conflict by declaring war on Spain, the US thwarted the Cuban rebels’ victory and the proclamation of a free and independent country: the objective for which many thousands of Cubans had been fighting and dying since 1868, driven by the strong wish to have a sovereign nation.

And so Cuba went directly from a colonial status to a neo-colonial situation. Today, when they [in the US] talk to Cubans about the benefits of capitalism and plans are made to help them in the transition to that socio-economic system, they are taking for granted an historIcal amnesia against which Cubans have been vaccinated.

With US consumer society as a paradigm, all consciousness-forming factors –from education to the media—pointed Cuba towards a model of a capitalist nation, deeply divided internally on the basis of race, gender, income, political parties, and many other factors which added up to the domination by their powerful neighbor.

Governments were elected by nomination from the different political parties. Elections were tragic-comic shows that initiated periods of promises, fraud, deception, and embezzlement, occasionally interrupted by cycles of violence that included US interventions, coups, repression, murder, torture ... Until a new cycle –similar to the previous one– began.

Each step in this chain of events had to have approval from the US embassy which sometimes advised the two warring factions.

The corrupt government would head up a superstructure that included a judicial system, a police system, a public administration and the media – all equally corrupt, with very isolated but honorable exceptions

The armed forces, all equipped with American advisers, had the role of keeping order; particularly ensuring the peace and security of the big domestic and foreign capitalists.

These capitalists –the real owners of the country– were not as well known, or as attacked, as the politicians who were always first praised for their promises and then vilified for their corrupt actions and their crimes. Rather they [the capitalists] were placed above politics and the law. They ruled; but they did so anonymously, through politicians and repressors.

They were not even blamed for the hundreds of thousands of child beggars who filled the streets of cities, wandering barefoot and hungry; or for the even greater number of unemployed, underemployed or self-employed. Neither did they take responsibility for the children without schools, the elderly without care, or the tenths of thousands of women forced into prostitution by poverty.

Some politicians remained for long periods in power according to their abilities to deceive. Many managed to move up the ladder and become big capitalists through embezzlement of public funds and other crimes. Then they became socially tolerated.

Although cruelties such as the economic blockade for almost half a century are true vaccines against historical amnesia, the dazzling mirage of an earthly paradise in the "American Way of Life" presented through media propaganda –which makes invisible the 48 million US residents living below the poverty line, growing racial tension, or the plight of the Cubans who emigrated to the United States after 1980– is pervasive and it is almost impossible to escape its harmful effects.

For the new generations of Cubans it is not easy to imagine so much inequality and corruption in a recent past that, to them, may seem very remote.

The migration and neo-annexationist demonstrations are the escape valve of the boiler fire fueled by capitalism in Cuba. The blockade and other forms of aggression have prevented us from putting it out altogether.

December 29, 2015.

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippman

- Manuel E. Yepe - http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/