Last week, the pollster Bendixen and Amandi published, in the Miami Herald, a sample in which 79% of Cubans in Florida agreed with a military intervention on the island. The high figure – perhaps the highest since the 60s and 70s – is consistent with a similar percentage that opposes a negotiation between the United States and Cuba, such as the one that, despite so little transparency on both sides, has been taking place for months.
Since January 3 of this year, when the United States military action took place in Caracas, not a week goes by without there being rumors or claims of intervention in Cuba. On social networks, aircraft carriers or drones are reported surrounding the island and an imminent military escalation is announced that would produce the overthrow of Miguel Díaz-Canel’s government, the capture of some historical leaders and the long-awaited regime change.
The imminence of an invasion is not only something that a good part of that emigrated community takes for granted, but also the Cuban government itself and its allies in Latin America. In Cuba, for months, a permanent mobilization has been taking place in anticipation of the invasion, and in Mexico and other Latin American countries, solidarity campaigns are intensifying, with aid shipments and even offering volunteers to go fight imperialism on the island.
We have argued here that a military intervention in Cuba would be humanly costly and historically irresponsible. Cubans and Americans would die in the confrontation and a new military enclave of the great power in Cuba would return the history of the island to 1898 or 1906, traumatic years of the national past, when Washington’s hegemony in Cuban territory and, in general, in the Greater Caribbean, was affirmed by force.
In addition to enormous global opposition, an armed action by the United States in Cuba would have very little chance of functioning as a consensus premise for political reconstruction in the country. The new regime would be born with an original deficit of sovereignty, very similar to the one that undermined the legitimacy of the first Cuban Republic (1902-1934), at the time of the Platt Amendment.
The survey by Bendixen and Amandi makes it clear that the vast majority of the Cuban diaspora supports the intervention because they do not find any other alternative for change and hate that it is the product of a negotiation. But this last route, negotiation, is curiously also rejected by the most immobile and arrogant current of the Cuban regime, and the enthusiasts of solidarity with the Revolution and the resistance of the “heroic Cuban people” in Mexico and Latin America.
So, in the desire for debacle, those who promote intervention and those who bet, not on the necessary reform and the indispensable understanding with the United States, but on the Numantine sacrifice of Cubans for the sake of an anti-imperialism that no one practices anymore in Latin America, converge, involuntarily.
*This article was originally published in The reasonfrom Mexico.
