As a country that had the terrible misfortune of being ruled for several decades by dictators of varied shapes and colors who shamelessly allowed the United States to swallow, manipulate and ruin the country’s resources, Cuba was on its knees completely before Fidel Castro and the bearded revolutionaries came knocking at the seat of power in 1959.
By Igbotako Nowinta
On January 8 1959, Fidel Castro, Raul Castro (his junior brother), Ernesto Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and other Cuban revolutionary fighters entered Havana to put a sensational end to the cruel dictatorship of one of Latin America’s veteran coup plotter, Colonel Fulguencio Batista.
Batista led a military coup d’état in 1952 after he had served as President between 1940 and 1944, and went on to emerge a notorious ally of the United States, who saw the Cuban nation as a colony that must continuously prostrate before the Yankees.
No wonder the capital city of Cuba derived its name from ‘Haven’ (Havana), a place of endless leisure for American super rich for countless decades before the spectacular events of January.
Indeed according to available historical records, Cuba, a small beautiful island, just at the back yard of the United States was used by American drug barons, renowned criminals and some political bandits as a past time where they recklessly enjoyed their loot, to escape justice.
As a country that had the terrible misfortune of being ruled for several decades by dictators of varied shapes and colors who shamelessly allowed the United States to swallow, manipulate and ruin the country’s resources, Cuba was on its knees completely before Fidel Castro and the bearded revolutionaries came knocking at the seat of power in 1959.
Fidel Castro, the Argentine-born international guerilla fighter (Ernesto Guevara) and others had converged on a mountainous suburb of Cuba, called Sierra Maestra for some years, where they painfully, at the greatest ordeal of their lives and the time of their choosing organized and plotted the down fall of the government of General Fulgencio Batista.
The sacking of Batista in 1959 came as a rude shock to the government of United States and thus began the bitter straining of relations between the two countries.
Cuba was never going to be the same again!
And with the cold war politics hanging menacingly from the air in the 1960s between the capitalist United States and communist Soviet Union, Cuba and its strange, courageous, cerebral, pragmatist and flamboyant leader-Fidel Castro, were caught in between the ideological cross fires that constantly became tragic headlines then.
With Batista out of the way Fidel Castro gradually consolidated his hold on power in the country and ensured that his extreme loyalists like Che Guevara, Rauf Castro and the rest were planted in strategic and sensitive positions before he established the first communist state on the western hemisphere and went on to confront the imperialist United States.
Starting with agrarian revolution which snatched the country’s economic main stay, sugar from the control of the United States, Fidel Castro in a series of dramatic revolutionary initiatives and programs, nationalized the economy, clashed endlessly with policy makers in Washington who saw his regime as an affront to the free world.
With the realization that his country could not survive the certain daily threats, confrontation and military take-over by the United States, Castro increasingly moved closer towards the then Soviet Union for protection and survival.
Expectedly, the Soviets became magnificent and magnanimous ally to Cuba, not after the ‘bay of pigs’ attack sponsored by the United States in 1961, which almost truncated the then emerging Cuban government.
As the relationship between Cuba and Soviet Union grew in leaps and bounds, the ideological struggle between United States and the Soviets became dagger-drawn.
Matters got to worrisome note in 1962 when the United States discovered that Soviet Union was helping the Cubans to install nuclear missile war heads in Cuba right at the Florida border between the two countries.
That would become the much publicized and dreaded Cuba missile crisis that John F. Kennedy’s administration had to deal with.
It was divine political intervention that prevented the world from graduating into the theatre of ‘third world war.’
Then Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev saved the human race from unprecedented horror when he consented under force of terror to stop further shipment of arms and materials to Cuba leading eventually an end of the missile project.
The point must be made clearly that the struggle of the Cuban people under Fidel Castro, who was in power effectively for five decades, to overcome United States imperialism was similar to the struggle of African nations against
British, Belgian, Portuguese, French etc. colonialism.
United States saw Cuba as a baby that must be spoon-fed and nurtured according to its whims and caprices, but Castro’s revolution changed all that.
That was why Fidel Castro having studied the dynamics of international racial politics and global petty imperialism noted in 1973 that: ‘The United States will come to talk to us when they have a black president and the world has a Latin American Pope.’
What a perfect prophecy; now we have a Latin American Pope today in Pope Benedict! Therefore, by his recent successful historic visit to Cuba, President Barrack Obama has melted a gigantic bitter ice of unnecessary acrimony between Cuba and the United States, more so when the cold war between the capitalist US and the then communist Soviet Union has been overtaken by many earth shaking global events, such as the collapse of the Berlin wall in German and the dismantling or balkanization of the Soviet Union into several independent states etc.
Credit must be attributed to President Obama for his startling statesmanship in this regard, calling for an end to economic embargo imposed on Cuba by the United States and normalization of relationship between the two neighbors.
Quite remarkably, Obama has never hidden his desire for the prison/fortress being maintained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to be closed; and he is still fighting in that direction before the expiration of his tenure.
Obama has said that he would never be blinded or imprisoned by historical circumstances that necessitated the US economic blockade of Cuba.
His sheer courage and clear headedness in this regard is highly commendable, knowing fully well that Cuba is a disciplined, focused, responsible and progressive country, well nurtured by Fidel Castro before acute health challenges forced him to hand over full presidential power to his junior brother (Raul Castro) in February 2008.
Since international politics is about permanent interest but not permanent quarrel and enemies, the United States Congress should hurriedly consider the merits in the call by President Obama for the lifting of economic sanctions against the Cuban nation.
It is understood that Cuba has for decades been labelled or accused as a repressive regime, with records of human rights violations.
And yet the U.S. has continued to maintain diplomatic relations with China, Vietnam, Russia and some Arab nations with worst human rights records.
Fidel Castro is no longer in the saddle and a new generation of Cuban citizens has sprouted out, with new challenges and interest.
Therefore, normalization of full relationship between the United States is not only feasible, realistic but achievable now and in the best interest of the two nations.
This will be an excellent parting gift for the first black President of the United States of America.
Nowinta wrote: Where We Are – A Call for Democratic Revolution in Nigeria
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