Your pacifism is our death
As I have written here before, I am a naturalized United States citizen who was born and lived in Cuba during the Cuban revolution. I have shared the revolutionary pangs of the Dominican Republic during the counter-coup that attempted to reinstate Dr. Juan Bosch, the first democratically elected president in that country in decades after the long dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Dr. Bosch was deposed by an illegal coup sponsored and funded in part by the United States and then President John F. Kennedy, because of the fear of “another Cuba.” As a sidebar, that particular coup and the unsuccessful counter-coup led to a bloody civil war that took the lives of thousands of Dominicans, and caused the second invasion by US troops in the 20th Century against the Dominican Republic. I was one of many people evacuated from the D.R. during the counter-coup, aboard the U.S.S. Ruchamkin.
Most of my US readers wonder why I go on and on about “ancient history” and in particular, that of the Caribbean. I do so because when people wonder “why other countries hate us,” it is important to remember our continued and violent intervention in the affairs of other nations, which is against the principles of state sovereignty as enshrined in the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory. We cannot expect that other countries will respect our sovereignty when we routinely disrespect other countries’ rights to govern their own national affairs.
We come then, to pacifism. I have been working as a peace and social justice activist for decades, and by working I mean that there have been times when more than 8 hours per day have been spent solely in this type of enterprise, disregarding physical needs for rest, food, and economic needs such as the need to make an income to pay the rent or the mortgage and put food on the table. I have espoused the principles of pacifism and have taken non-violence training prior to participating in any of the many instances of direct action.
However, as a proud daughter of the Cuban revolution who has always wished for a thousand Cubas in the world, I have issues with pacifism as the only answer to social struggle and inequality. In our completely unjust society, the very rich, that 1% we often talk about, has all the privileges and advantages, the peasants have none. They will be allowed to make just enough money to sustain them in order to work another day for their rich masters. In some ways, the enlightened slave master might have been more careful of his investment than the new corporate masters, who legislate and arbitrate to ensure that the new slaves will have no rights other than those provided by carefully drafted “agreements.” Mind you, an agreement in law requires the voluntary and knowing consent of both contracting parties, which in turn requires an equal bargaining position. These are actually NOT contracts by any definition. They are drafted and signed at symbolic gunpoint, and in my opinion, should not be enforceable at law.
But the law, as popularized in Oliver Twist, is frequently an ass, and that is a truly sad thing for me, who studied law because at the time I thought it was a wonderful use of philosophical principles to help human beings, and by extension, humanity.
Had the Cuban people not risen and resisted, and taken up arms and fought back, we would still be a colony under the boot of the United States Empire, and subject to its many whims. The U.S., after all, invaded us often at the beginning of our Republic, with the excuse that we couldn’t manage our own affairs. Translated, what that meant is that we had to allow United States economic interests to weigh supreme; our land, our skies, our sugar were by extension owned by the United States and needed to be managed by their economic masters. When the Revolution began to “nationalize” those companies, all hell literally broke loose. The people persisted, despite an economic embargo or blockade that has been in place since October 1960, and which is still in place. One of the latest pieces of spurious legislation in the U.S. against Cuba is called, ironically enough, the “Cuban Democracy Act of 1992,” in place because the Cuban government refuses to move toward “democratization and greater respect for human rights.” It was ironic and insulting to have Barack Obama speak about human rights in my native land against the backdrop of the horrors of torture and murder in the prison at Guantanamo maintained by the United States Imperial Government.
I don’t think I need to speak to you about Puerto Rico and the ravages perpetrated by the US against this small Caribbean island and its United States citizens. Their citizenship was a ploy and a sop to a country that has been battered by this country since it was ceded over by Spain as a spoil of war, or those against Haiti, once a fertile land peopled by the first successful slave revolution in the world.
Whenever the United States has made noises against my native land, all the revolutionary fervor of my forebears rises in my chest. I determine to lose weight and to learn the martial arts, that I might help to protect my beautiful island against imperial incursion, or as we say in Spanish, “ingerencia.” As I look at country after country in the south of the American continents, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Colombia, among so many, I hear the words of Simón Bolívar in Venezuela exhorting us to create a Panamerican union of countries, I hear the words of the father of my homeland, José Martí, telling us that after we had won our freedom from Spain, we had to beware of the “monstruo del Norte,” the monster from the North, and I have to repeat the words of Emiliano Zapata, known to and respected by my grandfather Gerardo, “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
Your pacifism, my friends, is our death.