The Descent of the US and Rise
of Latin America
by Phillip Agee
www.zmag.org, March 19, 2007
Anyone following the news in recent times cannot be unaware of
the wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the
Caribbean. For many lonely years Cuba held high the torch through
its exemplary programs to provide universal health care and education,
both gratis, along with world class cultural, sports and scientific
achievements. Although you won´t find a Cuban today who
says things are perfect, far from it, probably all would agree
that compared with pre-revolutionary Cuba there is a world of
improvement. All this they did against every effort by the United
States to isolate them as an unacceptable example of independence
and self-determination, using every dirty method including infiltration,
sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and biological warfare
and incessant lies in the cooperating media of many countries.
I know these methods too well, having been a CIA officer in Latin
America in the 1960´s.
Altogether nearly 3500 Cubans have died from terrorist acts, and
more than 2000 are permanently disabled. No country has suffered
terrorism as long and consistently as Cuba.
All through the years, beginning even
before taking power in 1959, the Cuban revolution has needed to
have intelligence collection capabilities in the U.S. for defensive
purposes. Such was the fully justified mission of the Cuban Five,
jailed since 1998 with long sentences after conviction for various
crimes in Miami where they had no chance for a fair trial. Convictions
were for conspiracy to commit espionage to murder. Nevertheless
their sights were exclusively set on criminal terrorist planning
in Miami for operations against Cuba, activities ignored by the
FBI and other law enforcement agencies. They neither sought nor
received any classified U.S. government information. Their cases
are still on appeal, and will be for years to come, but their
completely biased convictions rank with the legal lynching in
the 1920's of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist
immigrants, as among the most shameful injustices in U.S. history.
Freedom for the Cuban Five should be the cause of everyone for
whom fairness, human rights and justice are important, both in
the United States and around the world, joining in the activities
of the 300 Free the Five solidarity committees in 90 countries.
Current U.S. policy with its means and
goals can be found in the nearly 500-page 2004 report of the Commission
for Assistance to a Free Cuba together with an update published
in 2006 that has a secret annex. A fundamental goal, the same
in 2007 as I remember it was in 1959, is isolation of Cuba to
keep this bad example from spreading, and the current policy if
successful, would mean no less than Cuban annexation to the U.S.
and complete dependence, in fact if not in law, as Cubans rightfully
claim. Other fundamental goals from 1959 are still, nearly 50
years later, to foment an internal political opposition and to
cause economic hardship in Cuba leading to desperation, hunger
and despair. It is no exaggeration to call these goals genocidal.
Yet, U.S. economic warfare of nearly 50
years against Cuba hasn't worked even though the Cubans who keep
book estimate its cost at more than $80 billion. After the Cuban
economy's free fall in the early 1990's, with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, it began to recover in 1995. By 2005 growth
was 11.8% and in 2006 it was 12.5%, the highest in Latin America.
Some sectors have surpassed their development levels of the late
80's, before the collapse, and others are nearly back. Cuba's
exports of services, nickel, pharmaceutical and other products
are booming, and try as it may, the U.S. has not been able to
stop this.
In the end U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba
have also totally failed. In September 2006 Cuba was elected,
for the second time, to lead the Non-Aligned Movement of 118 countries,
and two months later, for the 15th consecutive year, the United
Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the U.S. economic embargo
of Cuba, this time 183 to 4. In 2007 Cuba has diplomatic or consular
relations with 182 countries. Havana meanwhile is the site of
seemingly endless international conferences on every imaginable
theme with thousands of people from around the world attending.
And not least, Cuba in recent years has been hosting more than
2 million foreign tourists annually at its world-class resorts.
Far from isolating Cuba, the U.S. has isolated itself.
More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health
workers are saving lives and preventing disease in 69 countries,
many in the most remote and difficult areas where few or no local
doctors will go. Meanwhile 30,000 young foreigners from dozens
of countries are studying medicine in Cuba on full scholarships.
All were selected from areas lacking doctors, and all are committed
to return to these areas in their home countries to practice.
In education the Cuban literacy program
known as "Yes I can" has been adopted in nearly 30 countries
on five continents where thousands more Cuban volunteers are teaching.
Through this program, in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Creole,
Quechua and Aymara, some 2 million people have learned to read
and write, most of whom continue their education afterwards through
a variety of other programs.
Thanks to these international assistance
programs, Cuban prestige and influence, and international solidarity
with Cuba, have never been greater. It was to defend these worthy
programs that the five Cubans, unjustly convicted, went to Miami
in the 1990's.
Then in 1999 came Hugo Chavez, the U.S.'s
latest worst nightmare in the region, admittedly following the
Cuban example in Venezuela, with its enormous income from petroleum,
to establish what he calls a Socialism for the 21st Century with
a foreign policy of regional integration under his innovative
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, ALBA, excluding the United
States altogether. The program is already underway through institutions
such as Mercosur in trade, Petrocaribe, Petroandino and Petrosur
in the energy sector, the Banco del Sur in finance, and Telesur
in electronic media.
Another program under ALBA is /Operación
Milagro /(Operation Miracle) for offering free eye surgery to
people unable to afford it for cataracts, glaucoma, diabetes and
other vision problems. It began in 2004 as a joint Cuban-Venezuelan
effort to bring Venezuelans by air to Cuba cost free for operations.
Within two years 28 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean
were participating, and operations restoring sight numbered 485,000
of whom 290,000 were Venezuelans. Jet liners loaded with patients
come and go from Havana everyday, but by early 2007 thirteen modern
eye clinics were being built in Venezuela, and several had already
performed thousands of operations there. Other clinics were being
established in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti,
all with Cuban planning and staffing. The ten-year goal of /Operación
Milagro/ is to restore sight to 6 million people of Latin America
and the Caribbean, and the program is expanding to Africa.
The Cuban example of so many years, and
now Venezuela, have also recently inspired the peoples of Bolivia,
Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Nicaragua to elect progressive
leaders. Most have rejected the 1990´s "Washington
Consensus" and the neo-liberal model along with determined
U.S. efforts to establish a hemispheric free trade zone. All are
developing grassroots social and economic programs, each in its
own way, aimed at improving the quality of life for all, especially
the long-excluded majorities of their populations where this injustice
prevailed. Although achievements in Cuba continue to shine, the
torch of revolution in the region has effectively passed from
the towering figure of Fidel, ailing at eighty, to Chavez, a military
man and teacher inspired by Simón Bolívar and José
Martí.
Reflecting on these new hopes for hundreds
of millions in such a vast region, one cannot avoid recalling
the old professor, Próspero, addressing his class for the
last time in /Ariel/, the classic essay by José Enrique
Rodó, still read by students in Latin America. In borrowing
from /The Tempest, /and urging his students to follow the soaring
spirit of virtue and good, represented by Ariel, and to reject
the crass materialism of the U.S. personified by Calibán,
Próspero drew a contrast between Latin American idealism
and the United States that is as valid today as in 1900 when the
essay first appeared.
While Latin America is fast moving in
progressive directions, almost unimaginable less than ten years
ago, in contrast the United States, at least since the Reagan
era, has been moving step by step toward a Fascism for the 21st
Century. And the pace has quickened in the last six years of Republican
government under George W. Bush with passage of the Patriot Act
under emergency circumstances just after the attacks on the Twin
Towers in September 2001, and then adoption in 2006 of the Military
Commissions Act, both with substantial support from Congressional
Democrats. Other legislation supports this trend.
The U.S. Federal Government now has legal
powers to secretly monitor one´s communications, whether
by telephone, ordinary mail, e-mail, or fax, plus your bank accounts,
credit cards, the web sites you visit, and the books you buy or
read in libraries. Torture, secret prisons, kidnapping, and jailing
indefinitely without trial or recourse to courts through habeas
corpus---all are now legal. So is "extraordinary rendition"
whereby U.S. captives are delivered to other governments where
they will likely be tortured and possibly assassinated. Investigations
by the European Parliament have identified around 1200 secret
CIA flights carrying these people through European airports to
secret prisons. To qualify for this treatment, anyone in the world,
U.S. citizens and any others, only need be designated by the government
as an "illegal enemy combatant" whose only definition
is someone who has "purposefully and materially supported
hostilities against the United States." Hostilities or a
hostile act can be interpreted as almost anything that opposes
U.S. policies, from a speech expressing solidarity with Cuba to
a picket line protesting the war in Iraq. If an "enemy combatant"
ever gets a trial, it will not be by a jury of peers but by a
U.S. military court that can use hearsay and evidence obtained
under torture.
These powers reminiscent of the Nazi regime
are not just a global U.S Sword of Damocles waiting to fall on
perceived enemies. The full range of repression has been going
on since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 with plenty of evidence
coming from the prisons and concentration camps of Bagram, Abu
Graib and Guantánamo as well as from testimony of various
released innocents swept up in the process. It is an on-going
worldwide application of fascist power in a non-defined, nebulous
"war on terrorism" that has no end or geographical limits.
Since September 2001 the Bush government has given one specious
reason after another for what it believes are the motives of Islamic
terrorism, never admitting that it is a reaction and resistance
to U.S. imperial policies, starting with U.S. support for Israel's
continued occupation and colonization of Arab lands and Israel's
refusal to return to its borders before the Six-Day War in 1967.
By 2006 the U.S. had designated some 17,000
people around the world as "enemy combatants," according
to press reports. Combine this repression with gargantuan contracts
to private U.S. firms, as in Iraqi security and "reconstruction,"
along with forcing the Iraqi government, always with eyes on the
prize, to contract highly prejudicial 30-year "production
sharing agreements" to American and British oil majors, excluded
from Iraq before the invasion, plus historic lows in trade union
power, and you have the marriage of government and corporate power
that Mussolini, who invented the word in 1919, described as the
essence of fascism. The one bright spot are the recent indictments
of 13 CIA people in Germany and 26 others in Italy for kidnapping
and other violations of their laws. They will never be brought
to trial, of course, but the indictments are refreshing developments.
Protection of terrorists who serve U.S.
interests is still another feature of American Fascism of the
21st Century. There are many examples, especially among Cuban
exiles, but two stand out from the others: Orlando Bosch and Luis
Posada Carriles. Both have long, well-documented pedigrees as
international terrorists, but one of their joint crimes was historic:
the first bombing in flight of a civilian airliner in the Western
Hemisphere. It was Cubana flight 455 that on October 6th, 1976
exploded just after takeoff from Barbados killing all 73 people
on board.
Bosch and Carriles, both of whose CIA
careers began around 1960, planned the bombing in Caracas and
provided the explosives to two Venezuelans recruited by Posada.
These two were discovered, convicted, and sentenced to long prison
terms. Not so with Bosch and Posada who were protected by then-Venezuelan
President Carlos Andrés Pérez who has his own history
of working with the CIA. Although they were both arrested and
tried separately in Venezuelan courts as the intellectual authors
of the crime, neither was convicted.
Bosch was found not guilty and released
in 1988, returned to Miami but was arrested for an old parole
violation. The Justice Department then ordered his deportation
as an "undesirable" and as "the most dangerous
terrorist" of the Western Hemisphere. But Jeb Bush, son of
then-President Bush, persuaded his father in 1990 to quash Bosch´s
deportation order. Since then Bosch has lived freely in Miami
where he gives television interviews in which he makes every effort
to justify terrorism against Cuba.
For his part Posada´s trial in Venezuela
never ended because in 1985 he escaped from prison, fled the country,
and soon turned up in El Salvador working in the CIA´s Contra
terrorist operation against Nicaragua. When this ended he stayed
underground in Central America and from the early 1990´s
organized more terrorist operations against Cuba. In 2005 he was
arrested in Miami for illegal entry to the U.S., and although
he admitted to the New York Times to terrorist bombings of hotels
and other tourist facilities in Cuba, in one of which an Italian
tourist died, he has only been indicted for lying to the FBI and
in his request for naturalization. The Bush administration refuses
to certify him as a terrorist so that he can be tried as such,
at the same time ignoring Venezuela's extradition request as a
fugitive from justice, alleging absurdly that he might be tortured
there. His treatment suggests that he will eventually be pardoned
by Bush, perhaps on Christmas Eve of 2008 just before leaving
the White House, just as his father on Christmas Eve of 1992 pardoned
former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and various CIA officers
for crimes in the 1980´s Iran-Contra scandal, thus precluding
their trials scheduled to begin the following month.
One need not dwell on the obvious. The
conviction of the Miami Cuban Five for their anti-terrorist efforts,
in contrast with the official protection of terrorists like Bosch
and Posada, speaks volumes on the U.S. as the pre-eminent state
sponsor of international terrorism.
The major disguise used to cloak this
U.S. program of worldwide aggression from the 1980´s to
the present has been "promotion of democracy," a hypocritical
claim used /ad/ /nauseum/ by Presidents, Secretaries of State
and others that has never fooled anyone. It has always been clear
that the "democracy promotion" programs of the National
Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, the Agency for
International Development and associated foundations and agencies
are nothing more that attempts to foment and strengthen internal
political forces in countries around the world that will be under
U.S. control and will protect and cater to U.S. interests. Their
origins are in the CIA's political operations starting in the
1940´s, and they have included the overthrow of democratically
elected governments and the institution of unspeakable repression
as in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973 to name only two of many
examples.
To be sure there has been, and is, important
and worthy resistance in the U.S. to this developing fascism both
within Congress and among private organizations and individuals.
But it has been mostly isolated attempts of a defensive and rear-guard
nature, with little mention in the corporate media. Bills have
been introduced in Congress to ease or end the economic blockade
of Cuba, to amend the worst of the repressive laws, even to impeach
Bush and Cheney, but they seem unlikely ever to prevail or become
law. The two parties, actually competing branches of a one-party
state, have simply adopted ever more extreme measures to maintain
their monopoly of power.
Even the judicial system, once perhaps
the last hope for enforcing the Constitution, has been riddled
with neo-conservatives who ignore it. Take only the appeal of
the Miami conviction by the Cuban Five. The original three appellate
judges of Atlanta´s 11th Circuit issued a compelling 93-page
unanimous decision upholding the defense position that no fair
trial of self-admitted Cuban agents was possible in Miami´s
prevailing anti-Cuban atmosphere and that the trial venue should
have been moved. Nevertheless the other 10 judges of the Circuit
voted to hear another appeal /en banc/ and then unanimously overturned
the first decision with only two of the original three judges
voting against (the third had retired). That 10 of the 13 Circuit
Court judges would uphold Miami as a place where Cuban agents
could get a fair trial is a good example of how morally and intellectually
corrupt the federal judiciary has become.
So these are grim days indeed for the
United States and by extension for its allies, starting with its
junior partner, the U.K., and extending through NATO. There have
been other periods of shameful repression in the U.S., like the
years following World War I, but never with a global reach like
this.
Predictably U.S. prestige around the world,
what there ever was of it, has disappeared, replaced by contempt
and scorn. Testimony to this is the repudiation of Bush and what
he stands for expressed by so many thousands in the streets protesting
his presence as he traveled around Latin America attempting to
lure five countries away from regional integration. What a contrast
with the enlightened, idealistic, and progressive social and political
movements now flowering in Latin America!
Philip Agee, 72, was a CIA secret operations
officer in Latin American from 1960 to 1969. He is the author
of the best-selling Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Penguin Books,
1975) plus other books and articles. Deported in 1977 by the U.K
and four other NATO countries, he has lived since 1978 with his
wife in Hamburg, Germany. He travels frequently to Cuba and South
America for solidarity and business activities, and in 2000 he
started an online travel service to Cuba: www.cubalinda.com.
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