{"id":224234,"date":"2020-07-11T12:03:16","date_gmt":"2020-07-11T16:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=224234"},"modified":"2020-07-11T12:03:16","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T16:03:16","slug":"cuba-u-s-relations-for-beginners-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba-usa\/cuba-u-s-relations-for-beginners-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Cuba-U.S. relations for beginners (II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cCuban blacks look directly into the eyes of whites,\u201d noted an impressed U.S. visitor in 1907: \u201cTo the American at home, the negro as a social, political or even industrial equal is an affront, an offence, nothing less; to the Cuban he is not. It is because in Cuba the negro\u2026is not everywhere confronted and made hard in thought and feeling\u2026. Schools, churches, theatres, hotels, baths, street-cars, steamers, all are the black man\u2019s and white man\u2019s alike.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This is how <\/span>R. L. Bullard<\/span><\/a> described the differences between Cubans and Americans, in <\/span>The North American Review<\/span><\/i>, less than five years before the massacre of the Independent Party of Color. Obviously, this U.S. army lieutenant colonel\u2019s vision of interracial relations in Cuba was not that of a Cuban who lived on the island, and even less that of an anthropologist or sociologist. Usually, those who come to visit look at things with the glasses they bring. However, even if it is an idealization of Cuba as a \u201cracial democracy,\u201d when looking at it with the polarized lenses of the United States, this military officer did not only reflect the remarkable differences between the two sides.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bullard: How Cubans differ from us Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even today some Americans seem puzzled to discover that, compared to the U.S., where a drop of African or \u201cLatino\u201d (Hispanic, in the Census jargon) blood disqualifies them as white, in Cuba, whoever \u201cseems white\u201d automatically is so on paper. In fact, you may not even be black or white, but mulatto, for centuries. That mulatto (formerly \u201cbrown\u201d), however, appear today in official documents as \u201cmestizo,\u201d a census category that does not exist in the U.S., but is present in Latin America and the Caribbean.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naturally, no category or generic term exhausts the representations about skin color and somatic features that really exist in Cuban society, which the anthropologist Jes\u00fas Guanche took the trouble to compile in a list of 20 \u201cpopular phenotypes.\u201d<\/span>1<\/b> Compared to this, the U.S. categories are rather bland.<\/span><\/p>\n

The weight of the American in the construction of Cuban identity, recognized by Fernando Ortiz in his theory of the melting pot, has been thoroughly documented in works such as those of the great historian Louis P\u00e9rez Jr., in the same way as the unusual weight of Cuba in the northern imagination, since the 18th century, as well as in the monumental collection and editions of Emilio Cueto. That Cuban-American space is not only symbolic, but so tangible that it allowed blacks and whites from both sides to play for the first time on the same baseball field, decades before Jackie Robinson did so in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

This meeting between societies, essential to understand Cuba-U.S. relations, has always been made up of multiple layers and nuances, which permeate not only the mutual perceptions below, but also above. Seen with lenses from the North, Cubans have lacked, for example, any appreciation for the rule of law, according to an influential reporter in 1917: \u201cWe have given them the great gift of freedom and constitutional government, but we have never taught them how to use them…. Our responsibilities therefore do not end in giving Cuba the forms and titles of freedom. We have to help keep Cuba <\/span>libre<\/span><\/i>, saving Cubans from themselves.\u201d<\/span>2<\/b><\/p>\n

Why this \u201cheavy burden of the white man\u201d about Cuba\u2015among all the lands in the world\u2015for the United States? How to explain its excessive space in the American mind, before the Soviet threat, the cold war, communist totalitarianism and other abominations emerged? Will it be the quintessential imperialist ideology? The monopoly interests of corporations? Recurring racism? The evil condition of its rulers?<\/span><\/p>\n

The explanation for this comes from a founder: \u201cI candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.\u201d This is how Thomas Jefferson explained that \u201cgood spirit that loved freedom and instilled strength in sleepy people\u201d (according to Mart\u00ed) to President Monroe, anticipating 75 years of military intervention on the island, and what we modernly call geopolitics.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Excerpt about Cuba in letter from Jefferson to Monroe, 10\/24\/1823.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the summer of 1960, American oil companies did not like the idea of \u200b\u200brefining Russian oil. But they were willing to do it. It was the Secretary of the Treasury who let them know that they should not accept it, in the best interest of the United States, as Ambassador Philip Bonsal himself regrets in his memoirs. What followed was the application of Cuban law from before 1959: the companies were nationalized. That fact, naturally, gave a boost to the spiral of U.S. sanctions already underway, and led to the conflict with the massive nationalizations in October of that year.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, it was not those nationalizations that brought bilateral relations into a collision course. The CIA\u2019s 500-man infiltration plan devised in late 1959, which Eisenhower officially stamped in March 1960 (when they already reached 1,400), was under development almost a year earlier, with Operation Pluto, better known later as the Bay of Pigs invasion. So the Treasury Secretary\u2019s orientation was part of a hot war that dragged Esso and Texaco with it, not the other way around.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

La revoluci\u00f3n contra Texaco: 60 a\u00f1os despu\u00e9s<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n