Free Cuba

The U.S. government has just put Cuba back on a list of governments sponsoring terrorism. As the leading supplier of weapons to wars, genocides, and brutal dictatorships around the world, the U.S. government does have the expertise to form such a list.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War

Remarks at the Sixth International Conference for World Balance in Havana, Cuba, Jan. 30, 2025

Video here.

Before I start I want to express sympathy for the people who have died in a plane crash in Washington, and I want to condemn Trump’s disgusting proposal to kidnap people and lock them up in Guantanamo.

I’m very happy to be in Cuba. I feel closer to Cuba than I do to people in the United States with red hats reading MAGA. Cuba is, in fact, closer to the continental United States than is Hawaii or Alaska or any of the U.S. colonies in the Pacific or about 916 of the United States’ 917 foreign military bases. The people of the U.S. and Cuba have managed, against the odds, to share a great deal of culture and good will, poetry, music, food, and drink. But we sure are divided by governments.

I just searched the internet in the United States for the words “free Cuba” and discovered that it means the overthrow of the Cuban government. I tried searching for “Cuba libre” and learned that it means a drink. But what if I want to search for “a Cuba free of hostile actions by the U.S. government”? The internet is of no help.

The U.S. government has just put Cuba back on a list of governments sponsoring terrorism. As the leading supplier of weapons to wars, genocides, and brutal dictatorships around the world, the U.S. government does have the expertise to form such a list. But it doesn’t put itself on the list, it has no legal authority to act on such a list, and it doesn’t offer evidence of Cuba sponsoring terrorism. At most it has two arguments that fall apart at the slightest examination.

One is that Cuba provides sanctuary to people the U.S. wants to prosecute. But they are U.S. people accused of U.S. crimes, not international terrorists. Cuba has similarly not extradited Colombians to Colombia, but they are not international terrorists, and Colombia has asked the U.S. to take Cuba off the list. And Cuba, unlike the United States, has attempted to help make peace in Colombia. The U.S. list of terrorism sponsors is a political act, with nations put on and off it at the whims of U.S. presidents with no evidence or even argument required.

The other argument one sometimes hears is that U.S. personnel here in Havana have been so frightened that they have apparently developed psychosomatic symptoms they call the Havana Syndrome. So far I seem to be fine. It seems like a gross insult to combine this beautiful city’s name with a syndrome. But, remember, that in the United States, the very best things can be called syndromes. The public desire for peace, for example: the Vietnam Syndrome and the Iraq Syndrome were the names for public resistance to more wars following those wars. The very worst thing about the Havana Syndrome, whether real or not, makes clear the dishonesty in the U.S. denunciation of it. That worst thing is this: the U.S. military says it is working to develop the type of weapon that it claims has been used in Havana. With the U.S. government, an accusation is usually an excuse and a confession.

Of course, the purpose of the list of supposed sponsors of terrorism is to justify illegal, immoral, unilateral sanctions against Cuba and against others who violate the blockading of Cuba. The stated purpose of this cruel violation of the Geneva Conventions is to overthrow the Cuban government. I’m sure, as with every government I’ve ever heard of, there are a lot of problems with the Cuban government. But those are for the Cuban people to figure out. In the U.S. we have more than enough work trying to improve the U.S. government.

The U.S. government isn’t even smart enough to figure out that, after decades of sanctioning dozens of nations, doing so has never resulted in the overthrow of a government. On the contrary, sanctions have tended to increase popular support for governments. Look at Venezuela, which is constantly sanctioned and threatened, but the government is not overthrown. The United States has been sanctioning Russia for years, but has a new president now whose brilliant new idea is to sanction Russia. I have a suspicion, and it’s more than a suspicion if you listen to how some people talk in Washington: sanctions are not the ridiculous failures they appear; the imposition of suffering on masses of ordinary people is not a tragic side-effect; the actual purpose of sanctions is to impose that suffering, knowing full well it will not result in the overthrow of governments.

The U.S. government does something else to Cuba. It maintains an illegal occupation of Cuban territory for its military base, experimental torture center, and extra-judicial death camp in Guantanamo.

It also has now made its Secretary of State a man named Marco Rubio who became a U.S. citizen by being born in the United States to parents who had left Cuba in 1956 — but Rubio lies that it was in 1959. Rubio claims to consider Cuba a serious threat to the safety of the United States.

Of course, Cuba is not threatening the United States. Is the threat, perhaps, that Cuba models certain approaches to government, such as in healthcare, that people in the United States want and the U.S. government does not? Maybe, but most people in the United States know nothing about that. And Scandinavian nations that have modeled social programs that the people of the United States would love to have are not being blockaded. Instead they are being filled with U.S. military bases and pressured to move their money into weapons purchases.

I think the main cause of the U.S. hostility toward Cuba is imaginary resentment and trauma. Not imaginary in the same sense as the apparent cause of the Havana Syndrome, but imaginary in the sense that U.S. Congress Members and presidents imagine the United States as a person with feelings and with a long memory. This person — Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, whoever it is — wanted Cuba from childhood and was scorned. It wanted Cuba to stay with Spain or to join the United States. It wanted Cuba to welcome its advances. It wanted Cuba to welcome its expansion of slavery. It wanted to take over Cuba and be thanked and loved for it. Cuba wasn’t interested. Cuba just wanted to be friends. The U.S. government doesn’t have friends. And then Cuba started a relationship with the U.S. rival. And Cuba put Soviet missiles on Cuban soil — soil that the U.S. government believed should belong to it. And the U.S. government screamed. It screamed and screamed and howled and cried, and remains traumatized to this day. The imaginary patria-as-person is suffering PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). And so it repeats the cycle. It recreates the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse in Eastern Europe without an apparent care in the world. It has no idea whatsoever that putting missile bases next to Russia might scare anyone in Russia. It’s too busy still being scared of Cuba. Some U.S. politicians may realize what Russians think of bases next to Russia, but they can still imagine the personification of the U.S. nation not realizing it.

When President Kennedy made a secret deal with the Soviet Union to remove missiles from Cuba, it was a deal to also remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy. But Kennedy did not tell the U.S. public that. Instead he claimed that he had thumped his chest and talked tough, and that the weak Soviets had backed down. And so that is what people in the United States believe happened. That is probably what Trump and Rubio believe happened. That is probably what they believe happened last week when Trump was threatening Colombia with tariffs in Elon Musk’s personal public square. But the real world doesn’t work like that, and someday thinking that it does may get us all killed.

The sensitive and traumatized personification of the U.S. government hangs onto one piece of evidence of how things should be with Cuba — and with the rest of the world: its oldest military base outside of lands that have been made into the United States, namely the base at Guantanamo. That base is now one of some 917 the U.S. military maintains outside its borders. And it is adding more fast. Other countries are following suit: Turkey, the UK, India, Russia, France. None has anything resembling the U.S. empire of bases, but they are building them in smaller numbers. For U.S. base profiteers, the war in Ukraine has been a great boon, and bases are growing across Europe like mushrooms. A so-called think tank in Washington called the Hudson Institute this month noted how much money is to be made just in constructing bases and in constructing them to withstand attack since they are of course likely targets.

The Bahamas and Puerto Rico are packed full of U.S. military bases, but U.S. bases are also in the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. But it’s never enough. The U.S. has no bases in Mexico but wants to name the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America as a first step. It is to the credit of the president of Mexico that she wants to rename the half of her country that was stolen by the United States “America Mexicana.” The U.S. has no bases in Panama but is threatening to take over the canal. The U.S. has no bases in Ecuador, where the former president, Rafael Correa, rightly said that the U.S. could have a base there if Ecuador could have one in Miami, Florida. But a new Ecuadorean president wants to bring U.S. bases back to Ecuador and to the Galapagos Islands.

We should look to the example of the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, who has threatened the U.S. with the closure of its largest base in Latin America and its removal from her country. We should look to the example of Vieques, where bases have been forced out. We should look to the example of Colombia, where a base was prevented on Providencia Island and one is being resisted on Gorgona Island. We should look in Europe to the example of Montenegro, where the people of Sinjajevina have put their bodies in the way of military exercises and prevented the construction of a NATO training ground. Or to the Czech Republic where the people rose up and refused to allow U.S. bases.

A coalition of peace groups is planning something on February 23, inspired by resistance movements in Latin America but organized on every continent of the Earth. We are calling it a Global Day of Action to Close Bases, a day of opposition to all military bases everywhere, foreign and domestic. At the website DayToCloseBases.org you can see all the actions that have been planned and how easy it is to plan one and add it to the map. February 23 is the date on which the United States claimed Guantanamo, and we need to demand that this oldest base be closed as part of a global shutdown of all bases. It was ICAP, the Istituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos that, some years back, proposed actions on February 23.

The Earth is increasingly coated in military bases, spreading like a pandemic: part of a growing and disastrous global increase in spending on wars and preparations for wars that makes wars more, not less, likely. And prime targets in wars are bases and anything near them.

Bases are many of the worst environmental disaster sites, polluting air, soil, and water, and generating horrific noise pollution. This is true for domestic bases as well as foreign, including for U.S. bases within the United States.

Foreign bases are often mini-apartheid states with second-class status for locals and criminal immunity for militaries — a situation that can often be traced back to stolen land and other injustices.

It’s not enough for us to protest each new war once it’s underway. We have to put an end to the preparations for wars, to the imposition of militaries that militarize police and prop up unpopular governments, that create lawless prisons eroding the rule of law, that poison air, soil, and water in secret — unaccountable to those whose land was stolen long ago, and that bring in weaponry and training in terror and torture, and that create conditions from which people try to flee to the heart of the empire which blames the victims and elects leaders who demonize them.

On February 23rd people all over the world will be drawing on the lengthy catalog of anti-base actions that have been used over the years, which include:

• Educational forums have been held at bases, nearby, or in other venues.
• Reports have been published on the roles of bases in particularly unpopular wars, or on the potential for converting bases to useful things.
• Demonstrations have been held in front of bases or in city centers.
• Flyers have been handed out to those going into and out of bases, posters held up, conversations held.
• Giant banners have been dropped on buildings, displayed on boats, etc.
• Gates have been blocked by sit-ins.
• Camps have been started outside bases or on the sites of proposed bases.
• Ploughshares actions and other actions have involved entering bases and symbolically hammering on weapons.
• Bases have been entered by activists looking like inspectors who proceed to inform those at a base what laws they are violating.
• Once in England a truckload of inspectors entered a large base, changed into rabbit costumes, and began running and hopping in all different directions.
• Marches have brought crowds to bases.
• Lobbying visits have urged legislators to shut bases.
• Concerts have raised awareness.
• Celebrations of successes at the sites of former bases or prevented bases have helped build the movement.

Demands people will be making include:

• Shut down an existing base
• Halt plans for a proposed base
• Transparency about whether nuclear weapons are stored on-site. Australia, for example, has been told it’s none of their business whether the U.S. military brings nuclear weapons into Australia
• Environmental remediation for pollution caused by a base
• Justice for those harmed by military personnel stationed at a base
• Conversion of a base site to peaceful uses: green energy, housing, woods, etc.

You may have heard that Trump has demanded Greenland. But the U.S. already has a military base there and may end up getting more very soon from the unprincipled and cowardly government of Denmark. The U.S. base there is also a NATO base, as are many bases across Europe. NATO is working with the United States to keep the war in Ukraine going, and to compel nations to dramatically increase military spending. Instead of Denmark giving the United States advice on successful policies funding human and environmental needs, the U.S. is giving Denmark advice on failed policies of funding wars and war preparations.

NATO has of course made Colombia a partner, and some years back Trump was talking about adding Brazil. NATO is principally a weapons dealer, and it has gone global. NATO members are supposed to be in Europe, plus the United States and Canada. But partners can be anywhere. NATO partnerships come out of the NATO practice, especially in the 1990s, of lying to Russia. NATO promised Russia over and over again not to expand to the East, and refused over and over again to admit Russia as a member (because then what would have been the point of NATO?). But NATO added partners in Eastern Europe, including Russia. Only for Russia, partnership was a road to nowhere, and for everybody else partnership was a path to membership. Russia’s partnership has been suspended. Partnership now is a means of adding members that need not be in Europe, whose wars need not be joined, but who can allow NATO bases and buy NATO weapons and bring in U.S. troops to train people and maintain those weapons.

Every year, NATO has a big annual conference. Last year it was in Washington, D.C. This coming year, the location has been very well chosen. NATO’s top officials will be gathering in The Hague, the location of the International Criminal Court. The indictments of NATO officials should be prepared now, and the guest list should include the Prime Minister of Israel, and his U.S. weapons suppliers. We’ll also have a chance to arrest Netanyahu at the White House on February 4.

While I want to abolish all war and all weapons, the world would benefit just from nations like Israel and the United States becoming a little more like everybody else. Out of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more than 227 of them combined on militarism. Russia and China spend a combined 21 percent of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. In per capita terms, the only higher spender on militarism than the United States is Israel (which includes in its expenditures billions of dollars given it by the U.S. government). As a percentage of government discretionary spending, the U.S. Congress puts 62 percent into militarism.

Since 1945, the U.S. military has acted in a major or minor way in 74 other nations. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. Most places with wars manufacture no weapons. Most wars have U.S. made weapons on at least one side, and often both. Only the U.S. military has devoted various sections, such as Southern Command, to various portions of the Earth (and space), seeking to dominate everyone everywhere.

Weapons dealers and their lackeys do not like to talk about military spending in dollars, or in dollars per capita, or in percentage of government spending. They like to talk about weapons spending as a percentage of an economy measured as gross domestic product, or all the goods and services created in a country. They like this because numbers like 1 percent and 2 percent sound smaller than numbers like 62 percent; because this measurement allows the pretense that military spending is declining even while it is increased; because this measurement allows comparisons between U.S. military spending and other nations’ military spending in which the U.S. isn’t off the charts; and because those comparisons are not neutral but always and necessarily pro-war — ranking nations by how much they spend of their economy on weapons suggests that weapons spending is a public good to be maximized, not a sadistic evil to be abolished, and not even a necessary burden to be adjusted based on supposed threats.

In recent months, Biden was insisting that NATO members spend 2 percent of their GDP on militarism, whereas Trump had upped it to a new demand: 3 percent. Now Trump has announced that it must be 5 percent. It’s a well-kept secret, but Trump’s supposed opposition to NATO last time around amounted to badgering NATO members into buying more (mostly U.S.-made) weapons. In fact, while Biden bragged about the exact same accomplishment, Trump’s badgering produced more military spending increases from NATO members than did Biden’s, even though Biden had the war in Ukraine to work with. And despite complaining that the U.S. was spending more than its “fair share,” Trump also increased U.S. military spending (or commanded Congress to do so) — just as Obama had done and Biden would do — and Trump will do yet again if not stopped. After all, not even the United States meets the new 5 percent standard.

Governments are falling in line. Lithuania and Poland are racing to meeting Trump’s new demand. We need instead to look to the example of nations that are pushing back, and not just pushing back but demonstrating the good that can be done for people and for the planet by not dumping money into organized killing. We need to be advancing the standard of 0 percent of every country’s economy going to war.

Finally, we must affirm our opposition to all wars and militarism, all sactions against populations, all occupations and bases.

Free Palestine.

Free Guantanamo.

Free Cuba.

Long live a world of people at peace, beyond war.