Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (32 page)

Now, it’s interesting: I didn’t see the Barbara Walters program you mentioned, but I’ve read the State Department reports on which she probably based her stuff—and they’re very selective in their coverage. They say, “Oh, it’s all nonsense and lies, and it was all started by the Communists,” and they trace it back to sort of Communist sources—which doubtless picked it up, but
they are
not the sources. The State Department carefully excluded all the other sources, like the church sources, the government sources, the mainstream legal investigators, the human rights groups—they didn’t mention them, they just said, “Yeah, the stories were picked up by the Russian propaganda apparatus back in the bad old days.” But that’s not where it comes from. Like I say, the Russians couldn’t start these stories in the Boston suburbs—and there’s a reason why they couldn’t start them in the Boston suburbs and somebody
could
start them in Guatemala. And the reason is, there’s a background in Guatemala against which these things are not implausible—which is not to say these women are being correctly charged; undoubtedly they’re not, these women are just women who happened to be in Guatemala. But the point is, that background makes it easy for people there to be frightened, and in that sort of context it’s quite understandable how these attacks can have happened.

The Real Crime of Cuba

W
OMAN
: Mr. Chomsky, I’m wondering, how do you explain our embargo on Cuba—why is it still going on, and can you talk a bit about the policies that have been behind it over the years?

Well, Cuba is a country the United States has considered that it
owns
ever since the 1820s. In fact, one of the earliest parts of U.S. foreign relations history was the decision by Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and others to try to annex Cuba. At the time the British navy was in the way, and they were a real deterrent, so the plan, in Adams’s words, was to wait until Cuba falls into our hands like a ripe fruit, by the laws of political gravitation.
  ²⁸
Well, finally it did, and the U.S. ran it—with the usual effects—all the way up until 1959.

In January 1959, Cuba had a popular nationalist revolution. We now know from declassified U.S. government documents that the formal decision to overthrow Castro was made by the American government in March 1960—that’s very important, because at that point there were no Russians around, and Castro was in fact considered anti-Communist by the U.S. [Castro did not align with the Soviet Union until May 1961, after the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January and had sponsored an invasion attempt in April.]
  ²⁹
So the reason for deciding to overthrow the Castro government can’t have had anything to do with Cuba being a Russian outpost in the Cold War—Cuba was just taking an independent path, which has always been unacceptable to powerful interests in the United States.

Strafing and sabotage operations began as early as October 1959. Then, soon after his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy launched a terrorist campaign against them which is without even remote comparison in the history of international terrorism [Operation MONGOOSE].
  ³⁰
And in February 1962, we instituted the embargo—which has had absolutely
devastating
effects on the Cuban population.

Remember, Cuba’s a tiny country right in the U.S. sphere of influence—it’s not going to be able to survive on its own for very long against a monster. But over the years, it was able to survive—barely—thanks to Soviet support: the Soviet Union was the one place Cuba could turn to to try to resist the United States, and the Soviets did provide them with sort of a margin for survival. And we should be realistic about what happened there: many important and impressive things have been achieved, but it’s also been pretty tyrannical, so there’s been an upside and a downside. However, the country certainly was succeeding in terms that are meaningful to other populations in the region—I mean, just compare Cuba with Haiti or the Dominican Republic right next door, or with any other place in Latin America which the United States has controlled: the difference is obvious, and that’s exactly what the United States has always been concerned about.

Look, the real crime of Cuba was never the repression, which, whatever you think about it, doesn’t even come
close
to the kind of repression we have traditionally supported, and in fact implemented, in nearby countries: not even close. The real crime of Cuba was the
successes
, in terms of things like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a “demonstration effect” that follows from that—that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That’s what they call a rotten apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region—and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart. I mean, for thirty years, Cuba has been doing things which are simply intolerable—such as sending tens of thousands of doctors to support suffering people around the Third World, or developing biotechnology in a poor country with no options, or having health services roughly at the level of the advanced countries and way out of line with the rest of Latin America.
  ³¹
These things are not tolerable to American power—they’d be intolerable anywhere in the Third World, and they’re multiply intolerable in a country which is expected to be a U.S. colony. That’s Cuba’s real crime.
  ³²

In fact, when the Soviet Empire was disintegrating and the supposed Soviet threat in Cuba had evaporated beyond the point that anyone could possibly take it seriously, an interesting event took place, though nobody in the U.S. media seemed to notice it. For the last thirty years the story had always been, “We have to defend ourselves against Cuba because it’s an outpost of the Russians.” Okay, all of a sudden the Russians weren’t there anymore—so what happens? All of a sudden it turned out that we really had Cuba under an embargo because of our love for democracy and human rights, not because they’re an outpost of Communism about to destroy us—now it turns out
that’s
why we have to keep torturing them—and nobody in the American press even questions this development. The propaganda system didn’t skip a beat: check back and try to find anybody who even noticed this little curiosity.

Then in 1992, a liberal Democrat, Robert Torricelli, pushed a bill through Congress called the Cuban Democracy Act, which made the embargo still
tighter
—it forbids foreign-based U.S. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba, it allows seizure of cargo from foreign ships that trade with Cuba if they enter U.S. waters, and so on, In fact, this proposal by the liberal Democrat Torricelli was so obviously in conflict with international law that George Bush himself even vetoed it—until he was out-flanked from the right during the Presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, and finally agreed to accept it. Well, the so-called “Cuban Democracy Act” was immediately denounced by I think every major U.S. ally. At the U.N., the entire world condemned it, with the exception of two countries—the United States and Israel; the
New York Times
apparently never discovered that fact. The preceding year, there had been a U.N. vote on the embargo in which the United States managed to get three votes for its side—itself, Israel, and Romania. But Romania apparently dropped off this year.

But the U.S. makes its own rules—we don’t care what happens at the U.N., or what international law requires. As our U.N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, put it in a debate: “if possible we will act multilaterally, if necessary we will act unilaterally”—violently, she meant.
  ³³
And that’s the way it goes when you’re the chief Mafia Don: if you can get support from others, fine, otherwise you just do it yourself—because you don’t follow any rules. Well, that’s us, and the Cuba case illustrates it about as well as you could.

The enhanced embargo has been quite effective: about 90 percent of the aid and trade it’s cut off has been food and medicine—and that’s had the predictable consequences. In fact, there have been several articles in leading medical journals recently which describe some of the effects: the health system, which was extremely good, is collapsing; there’s a tremendous shortage of medicines; malnutrition is increasing; rare diseases that haven’t been seen since Japanese prison camps in the Second World War are reappearing; infant mortality is going up; general health conditions are going down.
  ³⁴
In other words, it’s working fine—we’re “enhancing democracy.” Maybe we’ll ultimately make them as well off as Haiti or Nicaragua, or one of these other countries we’ve been taking care of all these years.

I mean, putting sanctions on a country in general is a very questionable operation—particularly when those sanctions are not being supported by the population that’s supposedly being helped. But this embargo is a particularly brutal one, a really major crime in my opinion. And there’s a lot that can be done to stop it, if enough people in the United States actually get together and start doing something about it. In fact, by now even sectors of the U.S. business community are beginning to have second thoughts about the embargo—they’re getting a little concerned that they might be cut out of potentially lucrative business operations if the other rich countries of the world stop obeying our rules and just begin violating it.
  ³⁵
So there’s a lot of room for change on this issue—it’s certainly something that ought to be pressed very strongly right now.

Panama and Popular Invasions

W
OMAN
: Noam, I’m wondering bow you explain the very high popular approval ratings in the United States for the government’s attacks on Grenada, Libya, Panama and so on. You often talk about the population becoming more dissident—but in the polls after the Panama invasion, about 80 percent of the American people said that they supported it. My Congressman told us the results of a poll he sent out—81 percent of 23,000 respondents to the question “Do you support the Panama invasion?” said yes, they did support it
.

Well, I think there’s been approval mostly because the interventions you mentioned were all quick and successful. I mean, if you can do something where you have an overwhelming advantage, the other side can’t fight back, you can’t lose, you’ll win in a couple days and then people can just forget about it, sure, you’ll get a high approval rating. That’s just standard jingoism—but I do not think that kind of support can be sustained for very long the way it could a couple decades ago.

The approval ratings are also high because people don’t get any information about what really
happens
in these operations. For instance, I don’t think anybody here actually knows what happened in Panama. After the first couple days of the invasion, the news coverage in the U.S. just stopped. So there were big round-ups of union leaders, the political opposition was all rounded up and jailed, and so on and so forth—but none of that stuff was even reported in the United States.
  ³⁶
Or for example, when Quayle [American Vice-President] went down to Panama in December 1989, if you watched the news coverage on television all you saw was everybody cheering—but if you looked carefully, you’d have noticed that everybody in the crowd was white. In fact, the
New York Times
claimed that Quayle had not even gone to the black neighborhood in Panama City, El Chorrillo, at all on his trip—but that was a flat-out lie.
  ³⁷
He did go, the motorcade went through there, and there was an accurate Associated Press report about it by a good journalist, Rita Beamish. She said that in the church Quayle went to where all the television crews were, everybody was cheering, but they were all rich white folk. She said that as the motorcade went by in the black neighborhood, people were silent, stolid, looking out the windows of what was left of their homes, no clapping, no nothing.
  ³⁸
Okay, so that story didn’t appear in the
New York Times
, what appeared was “We’re heroes in Panama.”

Or another thing nobody here knows is that every year since the U.S. invasion—as the Panamanians themselves call it—Panama commemorates it with a national day of mourning. Nobody here knows that, obviously, because the press doesn’t report it.
  ³⁹
I mean, the government George Bush installed in Panama
itself
described the country as “a country under military occupation.”
  ⁴⁰
There’s a group of eight Latin American democracies called the “Group of Eight,” and Panama was expelled from it in March 1990, because, as they pointed out, a country under military occupation cannot possibly be considered “democratic.”
  ⁴¹
Well, none of this has appeared in the American press either.

And if you just look at how the U.S. media presented the
reasons
for the invasion at the time, it becomes even more obvious why people in the United States generally supported it. What were supposed to be the reasons for invading Panama and getting rid of Noriega?

M
AN
: Drug trafficking
.

Drug trafficking? Noriega was much more of a drug trafficker in 1985 than in 1989—why didn’t we have to go and invade Panama and get rid of him in 1985? I mean, if we actually had newspapers in the United States, which we don’t, the first thing they would have asked is, “Why did we have to get rid of Noriega in 1989, but not in 1985?” Well, take a look: what was the difference between 1989 and 1985?