Yesterday, Cuban President Raul Castro announced that Cuba is ready to name an ambassador to the United States, signifying that the United States and Cuba continue on the road toward reestablishing formal diplomatic ties.
As the governments of the two nations move further toward renewing formal relations, it should become increasingly clear what a horrible fraud the U.S. national-security branch of the federal government perpetrated on the American people after Fidel Castro took power in 1959.
Soon after Castro took power after ousting the U.S.-supported Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, it became clear that Castro was taking Cuba in a communist direction, especially with his nationalization of businesses and industries, including those belonging to influential U.S. corporations.
The CIA and the Pentagon told President Eisenhower, and later President Kennedy, that the “national security” of the United States “threatened” by a communist regime 90 miles away from American shores.
Both Ike and JFK bought into the fear-mongering. While Ike was in office, the CIA developed its plan for having Cuban exiles invade Cuba to oust Castro from power and install another U.S.-approved dictator in his stead. That was the plan that JFK ultimately approved, much to his regret, and that became known as the Bay of Pigs disaster.
Later, under JFK the CIA, in partnership with the Mafia (yes, that Mafia), came up with multiple assassination plots against Castro, none of which succeeded.
The CIA instigated terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage within Cuba.
The U.S. government imposed a brutal economic embargo with the intent of squeezing the lifeblood out of the Cuban people in the hopes that they would oust Castro in a violent revolution.
And throughout Kennedy’s term in office, the Pentagon and the CIA were exhorting him to order a U.S. invasion of Cuba for the purpose of effecting regime change on the island.
None of these acts of aggression was necessary. Cuba and the United States could have peacefully and harmoniously co-existed notwithstanding the fact that Cuba was now ruled by a communist regime.
How do we know that? Because that’s precisely what is happening today. Don’t forget, after all: Nothing fundamental has changed in Cuba. It’s still headed by a communist regime. Those nationalized industries and businesses are still owned by the government. There are still severe violations of civil liberties. There are still drug laws, gun control, and immigration controls. There is still a socialist economic system, including such programs as Social Security, national health care, public (i.e., government) schooling, and fiat (i.e., paper) money.
Yet, despite all that, the governments of the United States and Cuba are on the road to establishing formal relations.
Indeed, not to digress but, notice that Vietnam, where the Pentagon and the CIA suffered a disastrous military defeat, is also still ruled by a communist regime. Yet, the United States and Vietnam today have a relationship of peace coexistence. In fact, so friendly and peaceful that the Pentagon is seeking to re-establish a military base in Vietnam, with the approval and support of the communists of course.
Peaceful coexistence with Cuba could have been the case in 1959 and afterward, but for the Pentagon and the CIA, both of which made the Cold War into a gigantic fear-mongering racket that would sustain their national-security apparatus. Cuba is a communist dagger pointing at the United States, they cried. Cuba is the point of a worldwide communist conspiracy directed by Moscow, they lamented. The communists are coming to get us, they warned.
What a crock. During the entire time that Cuba has been headed by a communist regime, it has never engaged in one single act of aggression against the United States. The aggression has always, without exception, been in the other direction — by the CIA and the Pentagon against Cuba.
Even the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the edge of all-out nuclear war, was a direct consequence of the anti-Cuban policies and anti-communist obsession of U.S. national-security state officials. The only reason that Castro and the Soviet Union installed those nuclear missiles in Cuba was to deter a U.S. invasion of the island or to defend against such an invasion—an invasion that the Pentagon and the CIA were exhorting Kennedy to order. Once Kennedy promised the Soviets that the U.S. government would never invade Cuba, the missiles were removed.
It was the Cuban Missile Crisis that caused President Kennedy to realize the evil and destructiveness of the entire Cold War. That’s why he became determined to bring it to an end. You can see that clearly in his famous Peace Speech at American University as well as in the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he negotiated with the Soviets, over the objections of the Pentagon and the CIA. He also ordered a partial withdrawal of military advisors from Vietnam and told close aides that he planned to bring all the troops home after the 1964 election. Most important though was Kennedy’s secret negotiations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro to bring an end to the Cold War, negotiations that JFK was conducting without the involvement of the national-security establishment.
Kennedy was leading America in a new direction, one that contradicted the Cold War, anti-communist crusade direction favored by the U.S. national-security establishment.
In fact, at the very moment JFK was assassinated, an emissary of his was secretly meeting with Castro in Cuba about reestablishing relations between the two countries. Ironically, at that very moment as well, the national-security establishment was orchestrating another assassination attempt on Castro.
Too bad that Kennedy was assassinated. His successor Lyndon Johnson put the quietus on any further negotiations with Castro to end the Cold War. In fact, when Castro wrote LBJ in an attempt to continue what JFK had started, Johnson ignored him. While LBJ declined to give the Pentagon and the CIA the invasion of Cuba for which they longed, he did give them their war in Vietnam — a war that they were convinced was necessary to prevent the dominoes from falling to the communists, with the final big domino being the United States — a war that brought an early death to more than 58,000 American men and millions of Vietnamese—a war that tore our nation apart.
The fact is that the Cold War never had to be. But of course, that would have meant no massive standing army, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, military-industrial complex, empire of domestic and foreign military bases, ever-increasing largess for the national-security branch of the government and its army of “defense” contractors and subcontractors — and no torture, assassination, rendition, indefinite incarceration, secret surveillance, Gitmo, NATO, and a never-ending “war on terrorism.”
Without the Cold War, Americans would have been living in a peaceful, harmonious, and prosperous society, one in which people did not live in constant fear of the communists, the terrorists, the Muslims, and other boogeymen. Indeed, we’d be living without a national-security apparatus still attached to our founding governmental structure.