US claims of Cuba’s ‘unique threat’ jar with reality of hunger and blackouts

Uncollected rubbish during a blackout in Havana this month. The country has been under a US oil blockade since January. Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Uncollected rubbish during a blackout in Havana this month. The country has been under a US oil blockade since January. Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images Analysis US claims of Cuba’s ‘unique threat’ jar with reality of hunger and blackouts Ruaridh Nicoll in Havana State department’s 100-page report is latest push in Trump administration campaign to bring down government The US government’s latest allegations that Cuba is behind “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history” and that its leaders pose “a unique threat to American homeland security” have come as startling revelations to those living under the six-month-long US oil blockade in Havana, where desperate people search through piles of uncollected rubbish for food, or else swelter at home in 24-hour-plus blackouts. The unsigned 100-page report Cuba: Capital of 21st-Century Communism, published by the US state department on Monday, blames Havana for everything from “the George Floyd riots to the rise of antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses”. ‘Front groups and fellow travelers’: state department attacks US left over Cuba Read more It is the latest push in a maximum-pressure campaign to bring down the island’s government that began with the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, the president of Cuba’s ally Venezuela, on 3 January. Since then, Cuba has been brought to a standstill by the oil blockade, sanctions on foreign businesses and threats of a military intervention. It also seems to be an attempt to “other” those on the US left before November’s midterm elections. “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory,” the report reads. “It was a revolution against western civilisation itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the west to turn against their own inheritance.” “Fidel would have been quite proud of this,” said one amused Cuban as he read it. The US state department, run by the Cuban-American Marco Rubio , refused to name the author, but it is clearly someone who knows their history. “Almost immediately after taking Havana in January 1959, Castro began plotting armed assaults against neighbouring governments – launching expeditions against Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama in just that year alone,” it reads. What it fails to mention is that Haiti was then run by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who killed an estimated 60,000 of his own people; the Dominican Republic by Rafael Trujillo, who launched the “parsley massacre”, killing between 20,000 to 35,000 Haitians; and Nicaragua by the Somoza family, who are credited with the murder of up to 50,000 Nicaraguans. Although t