Guyana, U.S. and Cuba

Mar 24, 2025 Editorial, News

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Editorial…

Kaieteur News- Secretary of State of the United States of America, Marco Rubio is expected in Guyana this week as part of a Caribbean tour. For Guyana, though the matter of the border controversy with Venezuela will loom large, the issue of the United State’s policy on Cuba and its recent threat of sanctions to nations that continue to engage Cuba’s medical professionals will likely take centre stage. While Grenada, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago’s position on the issue has been unequivocal, Guyana has sought to play it safe, preferring to say that its position would be part of the grand Caricom’s response.

Rubio himself has been quoted on the State Department’s website saying that within the first two weeks of President Trump’s term, the State Department took decisive action to rescind major last-minute policy changes on Cuba announced by the previous administration on January 14. He is quoted as saying: ”The Cuban regime has long supported acts of international terrorism. We call for the regime to end its support for terrorism, and to stop providing food, housing, and medical care to foreign murderers, bombmakers, and hijackers, while Cubans go hungry and lack access to basic medicine.”

Additionally, he said on January 31, 2025, he approved the re-creation of the Cuba Restricted List, which prohibits certain transactions with companies under the control of, or acting for or on behalf of, the repressive Cuban military, intelligence, or security services or personnel. “The State Department is re-issuing the Cuba Restricted List to deny resources to the very branches of the Cuban regime that directly oppress and surveil the Cuban people while controlling large swaths of the country’s economy.  In addition to restoring the entities that were on the list until the final week of the previous administration, we are adding Orbit, S.A., a remittance-processing company operating for or on behalf of the Cuban military,” Rubio said.

Cuba has long loomed inordinately large in the foreign policy calculations of the US – ever since a young radical named Fidel Castro seized power from the dictator Batista in 1959. The latter had opened up the island state, just ninety miles from mainland America, into a playground of the rich and a lucrative market for US corporations. Castro’s rapid alignment with Moscow in the context of the Cold War (which was very “hot” then) was viewed as a veritable act of war that the new liberal US President, John Kennedy felt impelled by domestic politics (“soft on Reds”) to counteract.

The humiliating debacle of the US sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the standoff that almost brought about a nuclear war when the USSR attempted to station missiles in Cuba led to the US defining Cuba as a threat to its national security. As part of its response, the US in 1962 imposed a blockade on trade, investment and travel between it and Cuba that in one form or another has remained in place.

Another response by Kennedy was to vow to “prevent another Cuba” in the Hemisphere and when he assessed the PPP regime in Guyana in power at that time to be “communist leaning,” he engineered the removal of PPP from office through CIA agitation that spilled over into ethnic hostilities. And thus has the history of modern Cuba and Guyana been intertwined. But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since – notably the USSR and its perceived threat to the US collapsing ignominiously by 1990. In Guyana, the PPP was seen as not posing a threat any longer and the US, through the aegis of the Carter Centre and other institutions mid-wifed a return of democratic elections here – and the return of the PPP into office. The US policy towards Cuba however never did evolve to that degree.

There were, however significant differences between the two scenarios that may explain the disparate responses. Cuba, small as it was, continued to thumb its nose at the US and presented its political, economic and social systems as a more viable alternative to those of the US. It even presented the US embargo as the reason why conditions on the island were not better than they were.

There were also significant enclaves of Cuban émigrés in two key states – Florida and New Jersey – that brought pressure on successive US administrations to prevent a return to the status quo ante. From the Presidency of Jimmy Carter in the seventies to that of the last Bush, there have been a back and forth in loosening the restrictions of travel and remittances to Cuba and then tightening them again – with the Democrats generally in favour of loosening. There have been several bills passed by both Congress and the Senate-some went as far as proposing an end to the embargo – but they were all stymied at the White House. During the President Obama administration, he had dubbed President Bush’s policy toward Cuba a “humanitarian and strategic blunder” and Obama had eased travel restrictions for those with relatives in Cuba and an end to limits on remittances. Former President Joe Biden had also softened actions on the Spanish-speaking island, only to see them being restored by the Trump administration.

So as Guyana prepares to sit down for talks with the US top diplomat, this Cuban doctor issue, and the unilateral and heavy-handed manner in which the US has used it to squeeze countries in this region definitely calls for Georgetown to do more than hiding behind Caricom’s frock tail. No doubt, due to the border controversy with Venezuela, there is a heavy dependency on the US to make-up for this country’s limitations. Still, there must be a limit to how much Guyana’s leaders will bow to US dictates.

 

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• CIA agitation, Cold War, Editorial, Guyana, missiles in Cuba, veritable act of war

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