4-08-09, 9:58 am

Original source: CubaNews

In recent days the big corporate news media have resorted to flights of fancy to explain the strangely inevitable presence of the Cuban question in the discussions expected at the Summit that begins on April 17 in Trinidad and Tobago, without pointing out who is responsible for the absurd situation.

How can you explain the “Cuba problem,” and try to resolve it, without delving into the real origin of the “isolation” of a member of the Latin American community of nations, a country that has been establishing normal diplomatic relations with all the members of the organization hosting the Summit, as their governments have regained their respective nations’ sovereignty?

In the “big media” the news reports and op-ed pieces have jumped through ingenious hoops in referring to the events that led to Cuba’s absence from regional forums.

With hardly an exception the corporate media all state that “Cuba was expelled from the organization in 1962 when the member states said that its Communist system was contrary to Inter-American principles,” without pointing out that with the honorable exception of Mexico, all of them reluctantly obeyed an order from Washington.

As the years unfolded, the policy became ever more intolerable, especially for the new governments that came to power in the hemisphere’s countries as the military dictatorships supported by the United States were toppled. In one country after another the exercise of sovereignty regarding their foreign relations led to reestablishing ties with Cuba as the growing tendency toward independence spread throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Washington’s domineering abuses in Latin America led to a situation where the new leaders in the region were increasingly politicians who had more points of contact with Havana than with the White House, despite the enormous influence that the economic, technological, and military power of the United States bestows on its rulers.

Furthermore, the discredited argument about violations of human rights in Cuba no longer serves to bolster the case for the attempt to internationally isolate Cuba. The economic and commercial blockade that the United States hoped would strangle the Cuban Revolution has been explicitly and unanimously rejected by the world community of nations. In the United Nations General Assembly it led to U.S. diplomacy’s most humiliating defeats in the entire postwar period.

Amnesty International, in a definitive public document released by its London-based International Secretariat, notes that the United States is now the only country in the Americas without diplomatic relations with Cuba and it dismisses the argument that the attempted isolation of Cuba might in any way have served the cause of defending human rights in the world.

Cuba’s exclusion from the Fifth Summit of the Americas, which will take place in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, highlights the irrationality of a policy of Washington’s that has already lasted more than half a century and that everyone knows will have to end sooner or later, without having achieved even one of its real or supposed objectives.

When the American superpower finally acknowledges and respects the Caribbean island’s national sovereignty and its right to pursue the social order and political system that its people have chosen, the Cuban people will have gained a victory of historic proportions.

Undoubtedly, when that moment arrives, it will need to come up with diplomatic formulas and media spin to cover up or tone down the spectacular defeat of this imperial policy, but the indisputable fact, which will serve as an example for all peoples, is that when a nation, however small and poor it might be, unites as strongly in defense of its rights and with such a readiness to sacrifice as the Cuban people have done since 1959, there is no empire or power capable of holding it back.

All indications are that the new U.S. President has the choice to accept or postpone this culminating moment. Ten of his predecessors chose the second alternative. Barack Obama is, undoubtedly, a leader who is different from the previous ones, but it remains to be seen if the empire itself, its banks and its military industry, have learned the lesson and accept the change.

It seems inevitable that there will be “an elephant in the room” in Port of Spain.

--A CubaNews translation by Will Reissner. Edited by Walter Lippmann.