{"id":190077,"date":"2021-07-26T12:02:13","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T11:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=190077"},"modified":"2021-07-26T09:06:03","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T08:06:03","slug":"the-many-faces-of-regime-change-in-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/the-many-faces-of-regime-change-in-cuba\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Faces of Regime Change in Cuba"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cubans confront a host of problems amid a national health emergency \u2014 and the Biden administrative is only adding to punitive sanctions with the intent to make everything worse.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Fidel Castro holds up a newspaper headlining a plot to kill him in 1959. (Bettmann via Getty)<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Jul 2021 – <\/em>After months of casual indifference to conditions in Cuba, the Biden administration reacted with purposeful swiftness to support street protests on the island. \u201cWe stand with the Cuban people,\u201d President Biden pronounced<\/a>. A talking point was born.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe Biden-Harris administration stands by the Cuban people,\u201d secretary of state Antony Blinken followed. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Men\u00e9ndez also joined to emphasize \u201cthe need for the United States to continue to stand with the Cuban people.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more than a hundred and twenty years, the United States has \u201cstood with the Cuban people\u201d \u2014 or, perhaps more correctly, has stood over the Cuban people. Cuba seems always to be at the receiving end of American history. To stand with the Cuban people has meant armed intervention, military occupation, regime change, and political meddling \u2014 all normal events in US-Cuba relations in the sixty years before <\/i>the triumph of the Cuban revolution. In the sixty years after <\/i>the revolution, standing with the Cuban people has meant diplomatic isolation, armed invasion, covert operations, and economic sanctions.<\/p>\n

It is the policy of economic sanctions \u2014 the embargo \u2014 officially designated as an \u201ceconomic denial program<\/a>,\u201d that gives the lie to US claims of beneficent concern for the Cuban people. Sanctions developed early into a full-blown policy protocol in pursuit of regime change, designed to deprive Cubans of needed goods and services, to induce scarcity and foment shortages, to inflict hardship and deepen adversity.<\/p>\n

Nor should it be supposed that the Cuban people were the unintended \u201ccollateral damage\u201d of the embargo. On the contrary, the Cuban people have been the target. Sanctions were designed from the outset to produce economic havoc as a way to foment popular discontent, to politicize hunger in the hope that, driven by despair and motivated by want, the Cuban people would rise up to topple the government.<\/p>\n