Celebrating Cuban resilience

On January 1, 1959 a man named Richard Bissell became chief of the clandestine service unit in the CIA, that same day; Fidel Castro became President of Cuba. Bissell and his mates took a long hard look at Castro but couldnt quite know what to make of him. In a Havana country club inside Cuba, Jim Noel, the CIA station chief there reported that, “many serious observers feel his regime will collapse within a matter of months.” It never did. At the CIA headquarters, a big debate raged and the majority seemed to suggest that Castro deserved the agency’s ‘guns and money to build a democracy’ a proposition especially championed by Al Cox, the CIA’s chief of paramilitary division. Cox argued that the most secure means of help would be giving money to Castro to buy his own arms…or better still, a combination of arms and money. In May 1959, Castro would visit USA and a CIA officer who handled him would describe him as ‘a new spiritual leader of Latin American democratic and anti-dictator forces.’ But that attitude would soon change as new intelligence suggested otherwise and got President Dwight D. Eisenhower furious at the CIA for having misjudged Castro. In his memoirs, Eisenhower wrote; “though our intelligence experts backed and filled for a number of months, events were driving us to the conclusion that with the coming of Castro, communism had penetrated this hemisphere.” Shortly after, Bissell wrote his bosses an advisory saying that ‘thorough consideration should be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.’ Allen Dulles, then CIA director made a slight amendment to Bissell’s advisory and replaced the word elimination with ‘removal from Cuba’ and then approved the plan. On January 8, 1960, Dulles told Bissell to organize a special taskforce to overthrow Castro. The mission would fail. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be spent on later missions but Castro somehow managed to outmaneuver the Americans. Like a relay race baton the mission to remove or assassinate Castro and prevent the spread of communism would be passed from one American President to another and all would fail disastrously. Castro was not only a strategist but also a smart intelligence gatherer. But most of all, Cubans loved Castro and further American hostility only helped to rally the people behind their leader. From failed assassination missions, the American policy now shifted to economic embargos to destroy the Cuban economy and inspire civil disobedience among Cubans and this has been the policy to date. In February 2008, at the age of 81, Fidel Castro retired from Cuban Presidency after 49 years of harassed leadership and handed responsibility to his younger brother Raul Castro aged 76, then and currently the President of Cuba. On December 17, 2014, President Barrack Obama announced that his administration is to re- establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba after 53 years of hostilities. This will go down as Obama’s grandest foreign policy legacy as the 44th president of USA. Regardless of what you think of Cuban leaders, Cuba never wronged America, their only ‘crime’ was to adopt communism as a form of governance. After the end of the cold war, American foreign policy has been to hunt down communist leaders through facilitating assassinations and coup-de-tats across the world; Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in DRC was a result of that global anti-communism campaign. But today’s world is far different from that of fifty years ago. I was in Cuba and I love Cubans. Globalization has merged world economies and capitalists are now in bed with communists making love through trade, cross-border employment, foreign direct investment and the Internet has broken physical borders that used to separate countries based on their political ideology. Lessons For 53 years, Cuba has endured harsh economic sanctions to protect its choices as a sovereign state. This should be an inspiration to African countries that are often arm-twisted by donor countries with threats of aid suspension or sanctions. Rwanda has had some of these challenges in the recent past and will have more in future but leaders must refuse to trade security of Rwandans and their sovereignty for donor handouts. As a country that’s fast transforming, leaders are going to make some tough decisions that might not please all sundry but these choices must be protected at all costs. While closing this year’s national dialogue President Paul Kagame assured Rwandans that their sovereignty would be defended at all costs. “Those who think they are gods and want us to bow to them, in Rwanda; they are in the wrong place; thinking you can turn Rwandans into nothing is wrong and we cannot accept it.” Attribution: Tim Weiner’s book, Legacy of Ashes.

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Celebrating Cuban resilience