Chomsky on Terrorism and the Cuba 5 Political Pris

Chomsky on Terrorism and the Cuba 5 Political Prisoners

August 28, 2003

[Bernie Dwyer]
The US media has branded several nations as terrorist or as harboring
terrorists or as being perpetrators of terrorist attacks. Cuba has been
pigeonholed as falling into one if not all of these categories when we
know that Cuba has suffered more terrorist attacks against it than any
other country. How serious do you take these accusations against Cuba?
Is the drum beat getting louder?

[Noam Chomsky]
Louder than when? Not louder than when Kennedy invaded Cuba and then
launched Operation Mongoose leading right to the missile crisis which
practically destroyed the world. But, yes, it's picking up. The fact
that the United States can label other countries as terrorist states
itself is quite remarkable because it not a secret that the United
States is incontrovertibly a terrorist state.

The US is the only country in the world that has been condemned by the
World Court for international terrorism. The words they used were:
unlawful use of force in their war against Nicaragua. That's
international terrorism.

There were two Security Council resolutions supporting that judgement.
The US of course vetoed them. And that was no small terrorist war. It
practically destroyed the country. US terrorism against Cuba has been
going on since 1959 and the fact that the US can label Cuba a terrorist
state when it has been carrying out a major terrorist campaign against
Cuba since 1959, picking up heavily in the'60s and peaking in the '70s
in fact, that's pretty astonishing.

But I think if you do a careful study of the American media and
intellectual journals and intellectual opinions and so on, you will find
nothing about this and not a word suggesting that there is anything
strange about it. And if you look at the scholarly literature on
terrorism by people like Walter Lecoeur and other respected scholars,
and take a look at the index, you find Cuba mentioned often and if you
look at the page references, what is mentioned is suspicions that Cuba
may have been involved in some terrorist actions, but what you will not
find is a reference to the very well documented US terrorist operations
against Cuba.

And that is not controversial. We have reams of declassified government
documents on it. There is extensive scholarship on it, but it cannot
enter into public discourse. It's a pretty remarkable achievement, not
just of the media but of the intellectual community altogether. It's not
very different in Europe. If you did an investigation in England you
would probably find pretty much the same.

[Bernie Dwyer]
The US and the people of the US have nothing to fear from Cuba. Cuba is
not a threat. So why is the government doing such a closed job on Cuba?

[Noam Chomsky]
The United States, to its credit, is a very free country, maybe the
freest country in the world in many respects. One result of that is that
we have extremely rich internal documentation. We have a rich record of
high level planning documents which tell us the answer to your question.
And that's an achievement of American democracy. However, almost nobody
knows about it and that is a failure of democracy.

So the information is there. It's in the scholarly literature. It's in
the declassified record and it answers your question very clearly. So
when the Kennedy administration took over, for example, it immediately
organized a Latin American mission. Latin America was going to be the
centre piece of the Kennedy administration policy. It was headed by a
well-known American historian, Arthur Schlesinger, who was adviser to
the president. Schlesinger's report of the Latin American mission has
been declassified for the last number of years and the mission explains
to Kennedy the importance of overthrowing the government of Cuba.

The reason is that they are concerned about, virtually quoting, the
spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands which
will have a lot of appeal to suffering and impoverished people around
the hemisphere who are facing very similar problems. We don't want that
idea to spread. If you go on in the declassified records, you find
descriptions by the CIA and the intelligence agencies of how the problem
with Cuba is what they call its successful defiance of US policies going
back a hundred and fifty years.

That's a reference to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, which
the US was not powerful enough to implement at the time, stated that the
US would become the dominant force in this hemisphere and Cuba is not
submitting to that. That is successful defiance of a policy that goes
back a hundred and fifty years and that can't be tolerated. They make it
very clear. They are not worried about Cuban aggression or even
subversion or anything. They are worried about Cuba's successful
defiance and that's not just Cuba. That's common.

When the US overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954 - again we
have that rich record of declassified documents - what they explain is
that the threat of Guatemala was that it was the first democratic
government that had enormous popular support. It was mobilising the
peasantry, instituting social reforms and this was likely to appeal to
surrounding countries that might want to do the same thing. And that
couldn't be tolerated or else the whole framework of US domination of
the hemisphere would collapse.

And it was the same in South East Asia and the rest of the world. The
threat of independent nationalism has always been a primary threat. And
actually if you go back far enough, remember the American colonies when
they liberated themselves from England, they were regarded by European
statesmen as a tremendous threat. The Czar, Metternich and others were
extremely upset by this threat of republicanism which might appeal to
others and undermine the conservative world order and its moral
foundations. It's the kind of thing that you can't really accept. It's
basically the threat of independence, of taking matters into your own
hands, that can't be accepted. And anyone who wants to know about this
can find it out.

As I say, it's a very free country. We have a rich documentary record of
high level planning going way back and it's constantly the same thing. I
mean why did the United States, Britain and France support Mussolini and
Hitler as they did? Well, because they were afraid of what they called
the masses in Italy and Germany. If the masses, inspired by the Soviet
Union, might try to take matters into their own hands and threaten the
rights of property and power, and the only people who can stop them are
Hitler and Mussolini, then that's why they supported them almost to the
day that the war began. These are old policies and they're
understandable. They're understandable if you want the world to be
subordinated primarily to domestic power interests.

[Bernie Dwyer]
Because of 43 years of non-stop aggression Cuba has obviously had to
take matters into their its own hands even though they did appeal to the
United States to stop some of this terrorism emanating from the
right-wing anti-Cuba groups in Miami. Are you familiar with the case of
the five Cuban political prisoners in the US who were incarcerated for
fighting against terrorism?

[Noam Chomsky]
That's an amazing case! Cuba approached the United States with an offer
to cooperate in combating terrorism and, in fact, the FBI sent people to
Cuba to get information from the Cubans about it. The next thing was
that Cubans who had infiltrated the terrorist groups in the United
States were arrested. That is utterly shocking! Do you think it's
reported? Nobody knows about it. I mean, here are Cubans who are
infiltrating illegal, terrorist organizations in the United States,
which are violating US law and the infiltrators are arrested, not the
terrorists. It's astonishing. The US has refused intelligence
cooperation with Cuba on terrorism because it would lead directly back
to terrorist groups based in the United States.

Actually, since the 1970s, the United States has at least officially
opposed this US based terrorism. But it still tolerates it - it doesn't
close down the terrorist bases or the terrorist funding - but
theoretically it opposes it and in fact has even occasionally prosecuted
people. Up until then (the 1970s) the US wasn't relying on Cuban exiles.
It was itself organising the terrorism. That's right into the 1970s
officially. What is going on now, we don't know. We know the official
record up until 20 or 30 years ago.

[Bernie Dwyer]
How are you following the case of the five Cubans considering the media
silence surrounding the case?

[Noam Chomsky]
There are, fortunately, independent sources although I can't think of an
article in the United States. The British press has covered it. There
are several independent alternative journals in the United States that
have covered it. There was quite a good article on it by William Blum in
Counterpunch. There's a good quarterly journal called Socialism and
Democracy which published the testimonies of the Cuban prisoners. You
can find material on some of the Internet sites like Z-net. So, it is
possible for people to find out about it, but it's a research project.
An ordinary person cannot be expected to do that. It's a major research
project.