HAVANA.- The insistence of many compatriots in talking about annexation to the United States is worrying. It is an unrealistic and antihistorical desire, and what is worse, it only serves to reinforce the old jingoistic discourse of the regime, inherited from Fidel Castropresenting itself as “the safeguard of the homeland.”
I can understand the desire to get out once and for all—“let it end no matter what,” I hear many continually say—from this 67-year dictatorship that has turned the lives of Cubans into an ordeal in every sense. But desperation cannot lead to giving arguments to the bosses of late-Castroism just at the moment when they already have very little at their disposal.
We Cubans seem condemned to always be behind the world. Some stayed in Cuba before 1959. Others, in the 1960s. And not a few, still in the 19th century.
If we except Trump’s controversial claim for Greenland, which seems to have already been resolved with Europe, and the criminal obsession of Putin for recomposing the old Russian empire (first tsarist and then Soviet) with Crimea and the oblasts of eastern Ukraine, it is absurd to talk about annexations in the 21st century.
Today’s geopolitics moves in directions other than territorial ones. Today it is about natural resources, markets, areas of influence… All of this, apart from the problems represented by the Castro regime’s alliance with Russia and China, may interest the United States in Cuba. But do not annex it. Wanting to convert Cuba into another state of the Union, he would have done so in 1898, when he defeated Spain in the Spanish-Cuban-American War, as he did by incorporating Hawaii, the Philippines (until 1946), the Guam and Wake islands and Puerto Rico (became a commonwealth since 1952) into his territory.
The attempt in the United States to annex Cuba ended with the defeat of the slave-owning South in the Civil War (1861-1865). What prevailed then was the interest in the sugar industry, trade, and the search for markets for North American products.
There was independence, but with the Platt Amendment. And this did not end in 1934, when it was abolished. He plattism It continues, both in the minds of those who believe that it is the United States that has to free us from the dictatorship, and in that of the Castro bosses, who with their besieged plaza mentality condition their immobility and their few moves to those of North American politics; They blame the United States for all their failures and express their willingness to talk with the White House, but never with the opposition in Cuba or the exile, which is who they should talk to first.
After the president’s executive order donald trump which declares the Cuban regime “an unusual and exceptional threat to the national security of the United States,” some Cubans are heard talking about annexation to the United States. As if we were in the 19th century and Americans were eager to add another star to their flag and assume, as if it were a Puerto Rico multiplied several times, the multimillion-dollar expenses of rebuilding an infrastructure reduced to ruin and scrap, and assimilating as American citizens—precisely now, in these times of anti-immigrant policies—a population illiterate in matters of civics and democracy, and with socio-anthropological damage caused by the bizarre and failed Castro version of the communism, which will take several decades to repair, perhaps almost as many as it took to damage.
Beware of annexationism! May desperation for change not end up serving the interests of Castroism!
For the dictatorship, which has been accusing anyone who opposes it of being mercenaries, annexationists and anti-Cuban for decades, the argument of annexationism fits perfectly. To show that their conflict is not with this people who long for freedom, but with “the desires of the neighbor to the North, the historical enemy of the Cuban nation.”
Thus, they will try to inflame the patriotism of those who still believe their “patriotic” stories and enlist them to fight, in the name of the country but, in reality, for the perpetuation of the dictatorship, to the sound of their slogans that always speak of death and that, in one way or another, if we do not get rid of these bosses, they will end up leading us to it.
