Cuban Regime Can Sleep Peacefully / 14ymedio, Luis Tornes Aguililla

The elected US president, Donald Trump, Raul Castro and Barack Obama. (Social networks montage)
The elected US president, Donald Trump, Raul Castro and Barack Obama. (Social networks montage)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Luis Tornes Aguililla, Bordeaux France, 14 November 2016 – Trump plus Cuba, let us say, will not even be a low intensity conflict. Rather, Cuba is this place where those who manage La Pasta thanks to tourist activity along with other perks must have arrived, at this point, at a de facto commitment to the current system in that part of the world, a commitment that surely includes maintaining the normal activity of a peanut seller with its miserable street-vendor-capitalism until the time comes when death overcomes him in bed without having to render accounts to the Pol Pot Plan or anything like that. This is what happens when the enemy doesn’t have oil, gas or rare metals.

And I am reminded of a story from an old Frenchman who, in 1944, saw an armored division of the US Army pass in front of German soldiers who only wanted to surrender. The old man told me that the Germans were waving wildly to the Americans who continued on their way without acknowledging them. In the end, tired of wanting to surrender, the Germans presented themselves to the mayor of a neighboring village and remained there about a month until the US command did them the favor of going to look for trucks. They were enemies, but conquered and insignificant.

One of the responses to the financial crisis of 1929 envisioned by President Herbert Hoover’s administration was the repatriation to the United States of all the American funds contributed to Germany and indirectly to Europe to help them recover from the ravages of World War One. There was talk of 14 billion dollars repatriated, which led to an unsustainable economic and social reality in a Germany militarily occupied, under the vindictive Treaty of Versailles. Germans reacted to Hoover’s financial operation with xenophobic, racist and exclusionary opposition, a kind of “short circuited” life that progressively plunged them into the abyss of the Second World War. Since then, Americans have learned to control the hornets’ nests, so Trump will be soft on Cuba.

Eighty-seven years later, we are living with the consequences of another global crisis, that of April 2008 which, far from a systemic credit crisis is more akin to a new phase of financial capitalism, something unexpectedly huge that the American electorate base just interpreted in its way by seating Donald Trump as president of the United States, where drugs, the undocumented and widespread insecurity are the visible part of the problem, while the underlying reality is the precariousness in which millions of Americans find themselves in places like West Virginia and in remote places like Orderville (Utah), where I had the opportunity to speak this year with a married couple of unemployed civil engineers selling stones for lack of work.

Today, real or latent peripheral conflicts in Ukraine, Libya, Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan, whose apparent causes are the need for affirmation of a cultural or ethnic identity, have deep causes whose roots lie in the strategic interests of the great powers. The Cuban regime can sleep peacefully.