Por Eve Ottenberg
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Map of Cuba from 1639 – Public Domain |
He has blockaded Cuba, and now he’s expanded the sanctions. Donald “Uber-Capitalist” Trump is relentless in his war on this tiny nation of 11 million people, whose courage, solidarity and grit has inspired all ends of the global political spectrum, from Claudia Scheinbaum’s left-leaning Mexico to Vladimir Putin’s traditional-values-championing Russia. Fortunately, some of these onlookers have even been inspired to act. Moscow already broke the blockade by dispatching one enormous oil tanker to Havana and is sending another, while other nations have donated various necessities. Beijing has been especially generous with everything from rice to thousands of solar panels. It kinda invites the comparison between Trump and Ebeneezer Scrouge. Not a good look for a man obsessed with his appearance.
On May 1, Trump’s new sanctions took aim at “officials, entities…as well as people operating in Cuba’s energy, defense, mining and financial sectors,” reported Democracy Now! “Foreign banks and companies that do business with sanctioned Cuban entities could also be cut off from U.S. markets.” Never has the planet’s need for a new, non-U.S. financial architecture glared more apparently, because Washington wages relentless, endless economic war on any nation anywhere that refuses to bow to it. Though U.S. financial assaults on Cuba are not, unlike those on BRICS countries, liable to catapult the dollar into its grave as the world’s chief reserve currency, you can be sure China and Russia have taken note. It’s one more nail in the coffin of dollar supremacy, one more argument, come the next BRICS summit – and BRICS, by the way, speaks for 45 to 55 percent of the world’s population and holds 40 to 44 percent of the world’s purchasing power parity – for expanding the yuan as a reserve currency and, even, for BRICS creating its OWN currency.
In other words, American sanctions, which have already backfired spectacularly in certain corners of the globe (think Russia), are still used as promiscuously by Mr. Trump as by his predecessors, to the fury of just about everybody, a fury that’s far from impotent. The irony here is that Trump periodically erupts with threats against anyone who harms the almighty dollar; but with his refusal to kick the sanctions habit, he’s got the same self-defeating addiction as all his predecessors. His sanctions temper-tantrums, like those of every other recent president, kill people in the global south. This is a form of warfare, leading everyone who can quite rightly to shun the dollar. So sooner rather than later, the dollar will no longer hold the world reserve currency prize, and we lucky dogs in the heart of the Empire will get smacked with eye-popping inflation.
Also on May Day came the Cuban government’s International Worker’s Day celebration. “With a severe energy crisis that has sent food prices soaring, morale plummeting and transportation halting,” reported the New York Times that day, over half a million Cuban Communist Party supporters attended the celebration. Meanwhile Trump’s executive order, issued that day, claims that Cuba “constitute[s] an unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” As Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canal riposted: “One has to ask: What is the threat? What is extraordinary about that threat? What is unusual about that threat, when Cuba is a country of peace?”
Then, according to an X summary May 2, “at a dinner in West Palm Beach on Friday, Trump joked about using the USS Abraham Lincoln to force Cuba’s quick capitulation.” Two days later X added that Diaz-Canal “called the U.S. a ‘fascist government’…amid the island’s deepening crisis of food shortages, blackouts and inflation.” Again, who is aiding the grotesquely bullied Cubans? Front and center stand the Russians. Moscow’s first tanker arrived in the port of Matanzas March 31, with roughly 730,000 barrels of oil. Meanwhile, by May 5, a second Russian tanker got about 1000 miles from the Cuban coast, with 270,000 barrels of diesel. But according to Bloomberg May 5, that second tanker has stalled.
“For the last two weeks,” wrote the Guardian May 3, “U.S. surveillance aircraft have been circling the island in an echo of what happened in Venezuela before the January 3 abduction of Nicolas Maduro.” Clearly Trump wants to drive Diaz-Canal from office, because just as clearly, the Trump who posed as an anti-interventionist candidate and bragged that as president he had started no new wars, is in fact all-in with the neoconservative putsch fanboy agenda. He failed spectacularly in Iran; assaults on China are on hold; Russia is beating the crap out of the NATO army in Ukraine; so what does the U.S. power elite have left? Not much. Kidnapping socialist presidents and lording it over tiny communist islands 90 miles from Key West. Simultaneously, however, as reporter Richard Medhurst has written copiously on X for weeks and in a stunning substack investigation May 1, under Trump the U.S. has pursued global energy supremacy and largely achieved it. Venezuela – check. Gaza/Syrian gas fields – check. Kettling Arctic transit of oil to China – check. What remains? I’ll tell you: a tiny country called Russia, which Washington had hoped to balkanize but failed, so instead, its Ukrainian puppet flies hundreds of drones at Russian energy installations, rashly risking a nuclear war with NATO.
Which is to say that while the U.S. military can’t beat anyone else’s military, and hasn’t been able to since the Korean War, the U.S. is very good at “stealing the oil.” That’s because here in the USA, we have the smartest, most ruthless, most experienced, most cohesive, most amoral capitalists in the world. They may not be able to defeat Iran in a fair fight, but they can make it darn difficult for Tehran’s oil to get to market. And while Iranian oil is largely blockaded, Washington price-gouges the world for its ridiculously expensive LNG. So the oil companies make bank, the white house plays and rigs the stock market, and Wall Street smiles, while the rest of us go flat broke. As Trump said on television just recently about the barrel price of oil, “even if it’s $200, it’s worth it.” Worth it to whom? I mean, it’s easy for him to say. He’s a billionaire – not a farmer paying $300 to fill the tank of his work vehicle.
So now Trump evidently thinks toppling Diaz-Canal would be a glittering anti-communist feather in his cap. He has all but told the Cuban president to get out or else. Diaz-Canal hasn’t budged. So what next? A repeat of the Venezuelan acrobatics? Or have U.S. spooks not as thoroughly infested the Cuban military as they did the Venezuelan one? That’s probably no concern for the white house, which doubtless has plenty of other dirty tricks up its sleeve and fiendishly commie-hating advisors – the alarming and shadowy Elliott Abrams comes to mind though he is not officially in this iteration of Trump’s rule – quite capable of implementing them.
In short, we have the clever bandits in Washington pillaging the globe and apparently winning at that hands down via market manipulation, other financial skullduggery and, when needed, deploying the military as its paramount “gangster for capitalism.” That gangster is possibly headed for Cuba, though why and why now are the wildly ostentatious questions of the hour. Well, there’s a reality TV star in the white house, and the Trump show must go on.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Old Man Alone. She can be reached at her website.
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