We all hated the images from the Washington Capitol a few days ago, and we heard words like ‘sedition,’ ‘terrorism,’ and ‘coup.’ Democrats were quick to point fingers at Republicans, rightly so. However, like Republicans, Democrats have also supported this kind of unrest, for decades, in foreign countries. It’s overdue for us to reflect on our hypocrisy. If we hate something for ourselves, we shouldn’t like it for others. It’s an easy principle, and as most Americans are Christians, they can read about it in the Bible. If we don’t like what unfolded in our capital, we should not produce these scenes in foreign capitals.

Let’s take John F. Kennedy, one of the Democrats’ most beloved presidents. When in 1959 Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba, there is good evidence that he sought an amenable relationship with the U.S. However, he also pursued economic independence, and Washington saw this as an affront against U.S. businesses in Cuba and across Latin America. Kennedy insisted, “We can’t go on living with this Castro cancer for ten years more.” Clandestine operations were launched to kill Castro. With them failing, Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion, leading to several hundred deaths and imprisonments. Not only was this an absolute moral fiasco, it was also a tremendous strategic failure as Castro was squarely played into Moscow’s orbit.

Let’s take Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the Republicans’ most beloved presidents. A few years before the Bay of Pigs, Eisenhower presided over another coup, this time in Iran. In 1950, Mohammed Mosaddegh became the prime minister of a democratically oriented government. Washington leaders feared that Mossadegh would restrict U.S. and British control of the Middle Eastern oil industry. In early 1953, $1 million was transmitted to the CIA station in Tehran to be used “in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddeq.” American operatives then orchestrated the mob-driven and violent fall of Mossadegh, which led to rule of the Shah who was previously described as “unscrupulous.” Yet, he fell in line with perceived U.S. interests.

Eisenhower wrote later in his diary, “Another recent development that we helped bring about was … the elimination of Mossadegh. The things we did were ‘covert.’… I listened to [our agent’s] detailed report and it seemed more like a dime novel than an historical fact.” Yet, it was an historical fact, and it brought ongoing authoritarian rule over the Iranian people. Again, not only was this an absolute moral failure, but this episode was also the catalyst for the conflictual relations between the U.S. and Iran that remain today.

Unfortunately, these are only two of so many examples. Some years ago, the New York Times acknowledged, “Since the end of World War II, the United States … has installed or toppled leaders on every continent, secretly supported political parties of close allies …, fomented coups, spread false rumors, bribed political figures and spent countless billions of dollars to sway public opinion.” These inclinations continue in America’s interventionist foreign policy establishment. All too often, the consequences are injustice to people in foreign countries and a tarnished image of the U.S. with all the consequences that this brings.

A few days ago, in regards to the assault on the Washington Capitol, the Venezuelan government stated, “With this unfortunate episode, the United States is suffering the same thing that it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression.” There’s some truth to this statement, but the full truth is that the attack on the Capitol is nothing in comparison to what U.S. operations have caused in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Many Americans won’t like to hear this as they prefer a virtuous image of their country in world affairs. Then, however, they have no moral right to complain about the state of our own republic.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

PBS NewsHour: “Insurrection at Capitol draws condemnation across the globe”

Despite the US administration’s renewed interest in Cuba, including new travel restrictions, few have paid attention to a little-known, but telling, historical episode: the island’s 19th-century military “Trocha”. This massive fortified line was a Spanish attempt to contain the Cuban independence rebellion by splitting the island in half – and provides worrying lessons about the potential impact of US President Donald Trump’s “great, great wall” along the US-Mexico border.

The Cuban struggle for independence was a 30-year-long process that started in eastern Cuba in 1868. That year, a handful of white landowners in the east of the island freed their slaves and took up arms against Spanish colonial rule. Until then, and despite the dissatisfaction with high taxation and their limited say in Spanish colonial affairs, Cuban elites had largely remained loyal to Spain.

Eighty years earlier, the 1791 revolution on neighbouring Haiti, and the establishment of the first independent black republic there, had sent huge shock waves across the region. But with Haiti devastated by the war and no longer the world’s largest producer of cane sugar, the Cuban elite saw an opportunity to take Haiti’s economic place.

By the late 1860s, Cuba’s multi-million dollar sugar industry was producing nearly 40% of the world’s sugar cane. This economic miracle brought rapid development and political stability to the island. But there was a serious flaw: it was absolutely dependent on slave labour.

Over several decades of rapid expansion, more than 600,000 enslaved Africans had arrived on the island. And so when the leaders of the 1868 uprising declared independence and promised to liberate Cuba from slavery, the island’s colonial administration, and the majority of its white planters, panicked.

Luckily for the colonial regime, the independence rebellion originated in the east. Unlike western and central Cuba, this region had limited sugar cane and, therefore, a smaller slave population. But things changed a few months later, when the rebellion started to spread towards central Cuba, increasing the prospects of a much-feared slave revolt. At that point, the Spanish military authorities launched the construction of the Trocha.

This 70km-long fortified line linked the southern harbour of Júcaro with the northern town of Morón, running from coast to coast across central Cuba. It was intended to act as a gigantic tourniquet, protecting the vital parts of the island from the rebel “infection”. Initially designed as a series of blockhouses defending a military railway, and a long wooden palisade, the project would end up consuming significant resources over the following decades.

But do walls work?

Strategic defences, such as fortified barriers and border walls, are expensive, quickly perishable, and rarely deliver on the favourite promise of their builders: that they are impregnable.

Nevertheless, physical barriers, such as Trump’s wall, have another purpose. They also send a message, loud and clear: “We don’t want you here, so don’t even try.” They are meant as a symbol of division, a line that splits one people and place from another.

For this reason, a virtual wall will never be as effective as a visible solid structure, concertina wire or burning-hot pointed bollards. But thousands of modern migrants are already risking their lives every year trying to cross through deadly areas such as the Arizona desert to get from Mexico to the US. Chances are pretty low that a border wall is ever going to be dissuasive enough – given the unstoppable power of human determination and ingenuity, especially when combined with desperation and hope.

Unsurprisingly, even with the incorporation of barbed wire, additional fortifications, and more troops, the Spanish Trocha was never fully impenetrable. Small rebel units and groups of civilians were always able to cross it undetected. Finally, in late 1895, a column led by rebel General Antonio Maceo managed to break through, in a bold offensive that would bring the war to the doors of Havana.

Nevertheless, despite this apparent lack of military effectiveness, for many years the Trocha did serve its divisive political purpose perfectly.

Not so useless after all

The Trocha created a tangible frontline, becoming a symbolic demarcation between civilisation and barbarism. In line with Spain’s colonial propaganda, its construction helped to emphasise the alleged differences between the colonial regime and the project of the rebels. On one side, western Cuba: developed, loyal, at peace, productive – and keeping slaves firmly under control. On the other: the eastern provinces, portrayed as underdeveloped, chaotic, unproductive, immoral, and leading Cuba down a path towards another black republic.

By marking this divide, the Trocha played a key part in creating a state of extreme radicalisation in wartime Cuba, literally and socially cutting the island in two. The political middle ground disappeared and the colonial administration was increasingly able to crack down on all those – in both eastern and western Cuba – perceived to be rebel supporters.

Violence against the “untrustworthy” civilian population reached new levels. In some eastern districts, “reconcentration”, a devastating counterinsurgency strategy seen by many as the origin of the modern concept of concentration camp, was widely employed. The Spanish troops burnt farms and crops, with hundreds of countryside families being forcibly relocated into fortified settlements. In 1896, facing now a widespread rebellion, the colonial authorities would resort again to the same principles, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

And so while the Trocha wasn’t physically impregnable, it served its political purpose perfectly. It helped the Spanish authorities redefine the nature of the conflict, imposing a us-versus-them dichotomy on the island that was more favourable to Spain.

The wall helped them to exploit racial stereotypes, spread fear about enemy infiltration, and galvanise white support around hardline positions. This entrenched mentality opened the way to criminalising large parts of the population and characterising political opponents as an internal pathogen that had to be eliminated at all costs. The War of Independence wouldn’t come to an end until 1898, after the US military intervention in Cuba, leaving a divided society and a country in ruins.

So, with what we know about Trump’s vision on immigration, is American society willing to take the same risk? For whether or not Trump’s wall is impenetrable, we know from the history of the Trocha how barriers can split nations in other, even more damaging, ways.

Alberto P. Marti, Honorary Post-doctoral Research Fellow, University of Nottingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Wochit News: “Trump Appeals Judge’s Ruling Blocking Funds To Construct Border Wall”

During a top-level meeting, U.S. officials warned against the possibility of it being traced back to the United States.

The recently published JFK files have shed further light on U.S. plans to use biological weapons as part of its Cuban Project, an agricultural sabotage plot against the socialist country.

During a meeting with top-ranking officials on Sept. 6, 1962, U.S. General and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter said, “biological agents disguised as substances of natural origin” can be employed to destroy crops in Cuba.

Others present at the meeting, which took place only six weeks prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, included National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy; Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; Air Force Gen. Edward Lansdale, who led clandestine operations against Cuba; and Edward R. Murrow, the famous broadcast reporter who was serving at the time as the director of the U.S. Information Agency, according to National Public Radio.

Notes extracted from a document recounting the meeting read, “General Carter pointed out the extreme vulnerability of any such operation and the terrible consequences it could have if something goes wrong, especially if there is any obvious evidence of U.S. involvement.”

Bundy offered counsel on the matter, suggesting that the use of chemical agents were not propitious, especially if their use could be traced back to Washington. A proposal to discuss a plan to “attack Soviet personnel located in the territory of Cuba,” was also revealed in the document but with no further details concerning the matter.

Almost 3,000 previously classified files were released by the U.S. National Archives to the public Friday, but a White House memo penned by U.S. President Donald Trump said he blocked the release of an unknown number of files because he had “no choice” but to accept the concerns of agencies such as the FBI and CIA.

In the days leading up to the deadline, Trump had hyped the documents’ release as a victory for the public that would be “so interesting!” But he later conceded to “national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns,” ordering a 180-day review for the agencies to reconsider their redactions. The result is yet another deadline for documents of April 26, 2018.

The documents also showed that the CIA considered staging several terror events, even bombings, in Miami and other U.S. cities to foster a terror threat which would, in turn, be blamed on the Cuban government. “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” read one of the reports.

The plan also included a possible attack on migrants leaving Cuba to settle in the United States. It went on to read that “we could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.”

Another memo dated to 1959 — the year of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution — read, “Conditions are getting so bad in Cuba a counterrevolution will occur from within Cuba … powerful interests, such as bankers, sugar institute, et cetera, are extremely dissatisfied,” another FBI report suggested that Cuban exiles in the United States are so fed up with Fidel Castro that he “cannot last more than two months.”

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

TYT: “JFK Files: CIA Mulled Bombing Cuban Refugees To Start A War”

I’ll tell you up front that my personal vehicle has crowns of rust on the rear wheel wells and an interior that smells vaguely of dog puke. It’s a 2006 Mazda3 with 150,244 miles on it and it gets me around my modest world well enough, but I sure never considered it the stuff of headlines — until I went to Cuba, an experience that tuned up my feelings about several American phenomena.

I’d booked the trip because I wanted to get out of this American time. Cuba seemed like a prime destination for escape: a nearby yet isolated island where the culture had developed without… well, us. But after United Flight 1502 had touched down in an airfield where lush green hangs over the encircling chain-link, and a rusted sedan dropped my husband Fletcher and me in trash-strewn central Havana, I began to understand that Cuba isn’t so much a great place to get lost in, as a place to get found in.

“Why are rich countries rich?” Alexander asked us, from the front seat of his 1955 Easter-egg-pink Ford Fairlane. He glanced our way in the rearview mirror, beneath which a huge yellow TAXI sign rested on the glossy pink dash.  His tone tipped us off that his query was rhetorical, so we waited patiently for the answer. “They suck something from somewhere else,” he said. “And that’s why Cuba is poor. We never suck nothing from no one.”

What little we knew about Cuban history confirmed this, so Fletcher and I nodded.

Alexander wondered aloud about the U.S. embargo — el bloqueo, as it’s called here. How could Washington still be afraid of Cuba? He gestured at the scenery, mostly vegetation punctuated by the occasional lone roadside vendor selling ropes of garlic or handfuls of potatoes. “We have nothing here,” he said.

“You know what the Cuban dream is?” he continued. “To own a car.”

We hadn’t, in fact, known this. And while Alexander himself was apparently doing well by this metric, most of his country is not. Cuba is famous for its antique American cars, a favorite attraction for tourists. But to Cubans, those ancient vehicles — whose only original parts are their steel bodies, welded together and repainted untold numbers of times — are just evidence of their island’s pervasive scarcity. There certainly aren’t enough cars, or buses, or motorcycles, or motor scooters, for all the people who want them. This was a fact with which I became personally acquainted on my second day in the country when Fletcher and I tried to buy bus tickets out of the capital city.  Everything, we’d discovered, was booked. Everything! And the bus stations were mobbed with people trying to get their hands on tickets.

I was learning that Cuba is a lot more complicated than it appears from the north side of the Straits of Florida. In the U.S., we generally only talk about Cuba since 1959, when Fidel Castro came to power, publicly renounced U.S. imperialism, declared his communist intentions, and cozied up with the Soviet Union. Washington responded first with the embargo, now more than half-a-century old, and later with several attempts to topple or simply assassinate Castro. No dice on unseating or killing el líder (despite the CIA’s poisoned cigars and exploding seashells), but the embargo, which prohibited trade with Cuba and made it illegal for Americans to visit — and which surely hurts innocent Cubans far more than any government official — has stuck. In 2016, President Obama relaxed some of its rules so that Americans can now legally visit, subject to certain limitations; our new president could rescind that freedom on a whim.

But there’s another part of the Cuban story, the part where American corporations expeditiously capitalized on the destruction left behind by Cuba’s long war for independence from Spain, buying up land and taking over much of the island’s lucrative sugar industry at the turn of the twentieth century. The United Fruit Company, more famous for inflicting lasting damage in Central and South America than in the Caribbean, ran a titanic sugar operation in Cuba, and did the same thing there as in other Latin American countries: it extracted wealth and funneled it to American bank accounts. When Castro came on the scene with plans to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, he was successful in part because that grim history of American exploitation helped make his revolution popular. In the U.S., we generally omit this part of the story.

And once you’ve glimpsed that fuller picture, it sure seems like Castro had justice on his side when he emerged victorious on New Year’s Day 1959, although things soon grew complicated for the Cuban people. It’s true that Castro would orchestrate certain genuine social achievements like a national health care system and near universal literacy, but he also set about executing his political opponents and closing down radio and television stations that weren’t controlled by the state. Over the ensuing decades, large numbers of people were imprisoned for political crimes, and others starved for lack of basic foodstuffs under the communist regime. Things got especially tricky when the Soviet Union, a crucial trade partner for the little country (given the U.S. embargo) imploded. Millions of Cubans fled to the U.S. and elsewhere. Like so many other struggles in human history, what had begun as an uprising against an oppressor became a new form of oppression. And despite its embargo and its past acts, the United States, the former oppressor, became, for many Cubans, a sort of savior.

In the backseat of Alexander’s 1955 Ford, we toured the Bay of Pigs, the very spot where thousands of CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed under the cover of darkness in 1961 with doomed hopes of overthrowing Castro, and where American B-26 bombers (slyly repainted to look like Cuban air force planes) flew overhead on orders from officials in Washington who hoped for the installation of a pro-U.S. government. Washington wasn’t motivated by a desire to help the Cuban people, naturally, but rather to refashion this Caribbean island into the American toy that it had for so long been.

Today, around that same bay, there’s a string of quiet beach towns where you can buy fruit from a horse-drawn cart — not because horse-drawn carts are quaint and charming, but because the fruit vendor couldn’t get his hands on a car.

Two Cars in Dallas

Cubans don’t chat about the matter casually, but there were 7,900 reports of arbitrary detention of Cuban citizens by their government in just eight months in 2016, according to Human Rights Watch. Those detained are regularly accused of “counter-revolutionary,” or anti-government, activities. It’s common practice for detainees to be beaten and held for days without access to a phone or other means of communication. At the same time, the government maintains control of all sanctioned media outlets and blocks access to nearly all others, so information is scarce. Independent journalists are routinely jailed.

As it turns out, just a few days before I landed in Cuba a journalist was arrested while en route to Havana, where he planned to cover a ceremony in which political dissidents would present an award to a Uruguayan diplomat who had spoken out against the Cuban government. The journalist, who had previously co-founded a magazine that’s critical of living conditions in Cuba, was charged with “fomenting enemy propaganda.” He never made it to Havana to cover the ceremony, but that didn’t really matter, because the Uruguayan diplomat was denied a visa to enter the country, and the whole thing had to be cancelled.

I was still only becoming acquainted with such facts when I met Cedro, who gave Fletcher and me a brief walking tour of sewage-scented central Havana.  We quickly began to chat and soon our conversation strayed into his personal life, including the fact that both his children had left Cuba in search of opportunity elsewhere. His older son had gone to Costa Rica and then traveled north until finally crossing the U.S. border. Now, the son and his wife live in Dallas, where they own two cars. Cedro emphasized the part about the cars. So they were finally living the Cuban dream — in north Texas.

Cedro was a lot more delicate when it came to discussing Cuban politics. Dancing around my questions about life here, he finally shook his head and said, “One president all these years? One person can’t do it. And here, the president also controls the army.” He pantomimed getting shot.

One afternoon in Havana, while I was walking along a promenade that stretched from the capital to the coast, I passed a group of police with two muzzled German shepherds. Milking my foreign innocence, I went up to them and asked, “What are the dogs for?” I figured they might not be too forthcoming, so I offered a possible answer: “Drugs?”

One of the officers, a woman, nodded. Then an officer by her side made a gesture I’d already seen several times: the right hand closing over the left wrist. I wasn’t sure quite what it meant in this context, but it didn’t seem impossible that it was the fate of nosy foreigners, so I nodded, smiled, and continued on my way.

In Plaza Vieja, in Havana’s most touristy neighborhood, I met a kid named Alex who works as a bow-tied waiter at an open-air cafe. We first spoke in Spanish, but when I faltered he switched to flawless English, explaining that he’d taught himself the language by watching old American movies. A self-starter, you could call him. He told me that he has family in Nevada, but when I asked if he was considering emigrating, he shook his head ruefully. He has to keep working to support his family here, he said. But if he could, he went on, he would head for the U.S. and go to college.

Brief though my trip was, I met many Cubans like Alex. And each of their stories was a reminder of the pull of the superpower to the north, whose economy is still a magnet for the rest of the planet. Despite deplorable American politics, past and present, the U.S. still glowed with the promise of something better.

Hitting the Road in a Mazda3

From the Bay of Pigs we took a shared taxi through Cienfuegos, a city in central Cuba, and then south toward the coast again, speeding through Jurassic Park-like terrain in a 1948 DeSoto as the wind blew my hair. We hiked a damp forest in a mountainous region and spotted a Prairie Warbler, a yellow songbird that migrates thousands of miles to nest in the northeastern U.S., often in trees outside my home.

When only a day remained before our flight back to the States, we climbed into another shared taxi, a 1990 Peugeot, in which Fletcher rode shotgun and I sat in the narrow backseat with a French couple. On our way to Havana, we soon got to chatting with the driver, Jimeno (also not his real name), who looked to be in his early thirties. This was not, he told us, his car. Rather, he works for a company that pays him peanuts to spend 14 hours a day shuttling tourists between the coast and the capital city.

For a while, we drove on in silence. Then he said something I hadn’t heard from anyone else. Perhaps, he commented, sometime after 85-year-old Raúl Castro, the country’s president, passes away, there will be an actual election in Cuba.

“Do you think that will happen in your lifetime?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said.

Since Fidel’s reign began 58 years ago, the Cuban people have not had a meaningful say in their country’s future. Over the same period, the U.S. has elected 12 different presidents.

I had come here because I wanted to escape the newest of those presidents and this fearful time in the United States. In choosing Cuba, I had exercised a small, touristic freedom that we may soon lose, depending on how our new leader uses his considerable, though not limitless, power. But I had escaped nothing, it turned out, in part because in our present world of intricate and intricately connected troubles, a world in which vast population transfers are becoming commonplace and in which literally millions of people are crossing borders in varying states of desperation, it’s an illusion to think that anywhere could be an escape.

Instead of leaving my country behind, I spent two weeks in Cuba rediscovering it. I grew intimately familiar with some of the worst of our history, which so many of us are quick to ignore or elide, but also with some of the best parts of our national identity. For all our screw-ups, and even as we continue to create disasters around the world and deny our responsibility for them, we’re still a place of possibility. It turns out that even my rusty Mazda is evidence of that.

And here was the secret prize in my box of Cuban crackerjacks: our new leader and his benighted crew in Washington suddenly looked so much smaller, shrunk to the size of a half-forgotten island, shrunk to the size of a single episode in an endless history. I had glimpsed some of what’s bad about my own country, but also what remains hopeful, and both are far bigger than Donald Trump and will surely persist long after he’s but an unsavory page in history. More importantly, each of us here in the U.S. has a small yet crucial role to play in what happens next. It’s something I think about every time I put the key in my Mazda3 and hit the road.

Mattea Kramer, a TomDispatch regular, writes cultural commentary. Follow her on Twitter.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Mattea Kramer

Tomdispatch.com

What is Cuba like? Since visiting there recently, I have been asked this question hundreds of times and learned that every third person harbors a desire to visit there.

Yes, there are iconic ‘57 Chevrolets, some in mint condition for taking tourists around Havana. But most 1950s Russian and American cars there would not pass emissions and safety inspections here (although this may change as the Trump administration takes a wrecking ball to the US EPA). There are no traffic jams in this city of 2.2 million people because most Cubans take buses, ride bikes, use pedicabs and walk. Music – especially Afro Cuban and salsa – is everywhere: in hotels, small clubs, plazas, flowing from opened windows. So no need to go in search of it; it finds you.

Cubans love books, we were told. Sure enough, there were many bookstores in Havana. Could their love of books stem from a public education system that is free through university and medical school, the most democratic educational system in the Americas? Within two years after the 1959 revolution, Cuba’s aggressive literacy program, which placed special focus on women, Afro-Cubans and rural people, raised the literacy rate from 60 percent to 96 percent. It now stands at 100 percent. (By contrast, 32 million adults in the U.S. are considered illiterate, reflecting the fact that our country invests much less of our GDP in education than does Cuba). Every morning, just after 7:00 the streets are filled with children in school uniforms walking, being biked and, in the case of the small rural towns like Boca de Camarioca where we stayed, being brought in horse-drawn carriages to their schools.

In Havana we met with two key women’s organizations, the Federation of Cuban Women and the National Union of Cuban Women Lawyers. They described their programs on violence against women in the primary and secondary schools and have a profound understanding of prostitution and the sexual exploitation of women. Their feminist magazines – one for girls and one for women – reach hundreds of thousands of readers.

Cuba is a poor country, with the average monthly salary of teachers being $40, and no evident signs of consumerism – no shopping malls, luxury goods, cheap fast food places or billboard advertising. Despite its poverty, it has the lowest malnutrition rate in the Americas. Nowhere did I see homeless people sleeping in parks, doorways or under bridges nor people begging as I saw daily during the years that I worked in Boston. Boston, with a quarter of Havana’s population, had nearly 8,000 homeless men, women and children in 2016, with a 25 percent increase in homeless families since 2015.

The U.S. embargo of Cuba, more accurately called a bloqueo or blockade by Cubans, began in 1960 with the intent to deny money and supplies to the country; to decrease wages; and “to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the [Castro] government,” according to a State Department memo. And, yes, there is a sense of the country locked in the 1950s, with housing and colonial buildings desperately in need of repair, extremely crowded buses, shortages of consumer goods, and poor air quality in Havana. Years of material deprivation, amazingly, have not dampened the warmth, affection and welcome that everyone who visits Cuba speaks of, a richness in the Cuban spirit sustained, possibly, by their more equal society.

In the past few years, the Cuban government under Raul Castro has allowed small private enterprises to open. Families are renting rooms and offering meals to tourists, in what are called casas particulares. These and other small microenterprises are flourishing and raising incomes and standards of living across the island.

One hallmark of Cuba’s achievements is its free health care system, recognized as one of the best in the world, as well as the primary care it provides in poor communities throughout the world. In meeting with health care providers, we learned of their emphasis on disease prevention and the country’s policy that every community, no matter how remote, has a primary care facility. With its commitment to health care as a human right, Cuba has achieved higher life expectancy and a lower infant mortality rate than the United States, these being key indicators of the overall health of the country’s people.

Like many colonial-era countries, Cuba’s wealth was built on the African slave trade and slave labor. One factor that may contribute to their overall health achievements is that the social and economic integration of black and white Cubans – an intentional goal since their revolution – is more advanced than that of many countries, including (and especially) our own. In 2015 black and Hispanic households in the United States had on average one-tenth the money and property of white households.

Last year President Obama made a trip to Cuba, after much closed door negotiation facilitated at times by the Vatican and consultation with wealthy Miami Cuban-American businessmen. Some of them joined him in Havana, being flown there on the private jet of a Cuban American healthcare billionaire.

Obama’s intentions appear honorable – opening up Cuba’s economy with private enterprise to raise the standard of living, release of political prisoners and free elections. Yet there is a fatal irony in these objectives for Cuba. Our “free” national elections are determined by money – the biggest spenders win; and our Executive Branch is now littered with people in the top 1 percent of income. We have the largest prison system in the world, with a disproportionate number of African Americans unjustly incarcerated, and have never yet, as a society, come to terms with structural racism, our segregated cities and segregated urban schools. Even with the Affordable Care Act, medical expenses are the biggest cause of bankruptcies while executives in the health care industry become multi-millionaires.

Realistically, most U.S. people would not choose to live in Cuba: we have more individual freedoms and no shortages of consumer items, if you can afford them. I do remember, however, a sign scrawled on a wall in the city of Matanzas (the former center of the African slave trade) that speaks to the island country’s social aspirations: la dignidad no se vende, dignity is not for sale.

Pat Hynes, a retired professor of environmental health from Boston University School of Public Health, directs the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

BBC News: “What is life like in Cuba after Fidel Castro? BBC News”