Cubanow.- In academic seminars, parliamentary debates or simple discussions on the subject of the economic blockade against Cuba, you frequently hear explanations brought from the storehouse of cynicism: call the blockade an embargo and reduced it to a sovereign action by the US government, which does not want to trade with Cuba, and so doesn’t do so.

According to the version US Ambassadors frequently set forth in the United Nations, it is strictly a bilateral measure which does not impede at all Cuba’s economic relations with other countries. Even friends of the Cuban Revolution do not have enough information on the history and the extent of these actions, which the US government started in 1959 to suffocate the Cuban economy and drive the Cuban people into despair.

Some people believe that the "embargo" only affects Cuba, depriving it of US trade and tourism and that Cuba could do business with the rest of the world economy the same as any other country.

For several generations of Cubans, who were born and raised under the blockade, it sometimes seems as if it were only one more element of reality, lacking in importance.

It would be a mistake not make a special effort and give an explanation to our friends abroad or to many people whose attention is focused on these prohibitions, which are now more than 40 years old and also to our younger compatriots.

Part of the history of the Cuban Revolution is the history of intensive and extensive economic warfare, thorough and cruel, implemented against a small and poor country by the most formidable economic and military power that has ever existed.

That history of more than four and a half decades, in which the US government has tried everything, except a military blockade and an invasion of Cuban territory by its Armed Forces, and which has failed in everything, is a multifaceted process.

 Its internal scheming and the cunning of its detailed ignominy are still not completely known. Some colleagues, like Nicanor Leon Cotayo, Olga Miranda, and Alejandro Aguilar, have unveiled aspects of this on-going process. However, they have not exhausted the subject, because probably some very key documents have not yet been declassified.

Furthermore, because the range of actions against Cuba is so extensive and embracing it cannot be completely apprehended in a journalistic, legal, financial or any other field of specialization.

An entire economic war of extermination in its most intensive phase has been deployed against Cuba. The complex US government machinery interacting with Congress has woven a thick and elaborate net of prohibitions, punishments, persecutions forming a complicated plot.

The book Blockade, History’s Longest Economic Siege, written by Andres Zaldivar Dieguez, is a valuable contribution to the essential efforts to explain to Cubans and non-Cubans this four-decade-old infamy to break our people’s resistance. 

The use here of the term State terrorism is not a literary license, but rather a historical truth verifiable and verified by Andres Zaldivar with the effective use of declassified documents from several US government agencies and from the record of actions taken against Cuba.

These actions were sometimes successful for the enemy, sometimes frustrated by our capacity to resist and always unsuccessful in reaching their strategic goal of exterminating the Cuban Revolution.

A meeting of the US National Security Council on March 17, 1960 was very important to characterize the sense of the economic war and its role as part of a group of actions that would lead -scarcely a year later- to the disaster of the Bay of Pigs (Giron) invasion. This failure has been categorized in the works of US authors as "the Bay of Pigs fiasco."

The Program of Covert Actions against Castro, which would lead to the Bay of Pigs disaster, as well as the document titled A Program of Economic Pressures against Castro were approved in the above-mentioned meeting.

The latter Program has not been declassified yet, but we can sense its contents by the meeting’s minutes and by the history of later actions. 

Mixed together as part of one subversive and terrorist package, were the blocking of oil supplies, the termination of trade, the withdrawal of investments, the prohibition of tourism to Cuba, manipulations using the docile OAS, and the suspension of Cuba’s sugar quota.

After the hard failure of Bay of Pigs, the economic war was better planned and organized. A big operation started in which the US used all its power –except direct military action- to subordinate its small neighbor. The plan to terminate the Cuban Revolution in a few months was submitted to the governmental departments and agencies on January 18, 1962. It was code-named Operation Mongoose (Mangosta) and, among its 32 tasks, it contained 13 related to the planning of the economic war in a more structured way and with an important part of its codification still in force today.

The actions to make transportation by sea to Cuba more expensive and difficult, to provoke failures in the harvest of food-crops, to impede the sales of nickel and other products were part of the tasks, as well as sabotage actions against the country and particularly against its economy.

During Operation Mongoose, in a period of 14 months, there were 5,780 terrorist attacks, including 716 sabotages of great importance against economic targets.

Blockade, economic war, State terrorism against the economy are part of a single package, along with the bloodshed and suffering impossible to measure in terms of financial cost of the “light embargo” presented by the anti-Cuban propaganda. 

The financial cost already amounts to at least 72,000 million dollars. Andres Zaldivar explains in his work what we could call a perfectionist process of economic warfare until 1962, when the initial cycle of the systematization of the economic war ended.

Likewise, he shows how -after 1963- the most important decisions continued to add links to that war, including the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts.

Chapters IV and V of this book are of special interest in dealing with espionage and its utilization for planning and implementing sabotage of the Cuban economy. They recount the use of terrorism as a weapon in this war and point out interesting cases which took place in the fields of oil, sugar, agro-industry, and sea transportation.

Forty-four years of State terrorism applied by the Empire has not been able to subordinate our small country, as they likewise cannot subordinate our five compatriots, fighters against terrorism.

Our people and the Cuban Five, who are part of it, have a weapon whose technology is unfathomable to terrorist: the moral values created by the Revolution.

Cuban economist Osvaldo Martinez is Director of Havana’s World Economy Research Center (CIEM).

(Cubanow) November , 2005