Cuba: Trump's forgotten front?

The not-so-great dictator's strangling this Caribbean marvel, and the effects are spreading. PLUS, further down, my millennial memories about visiting the Cuban 'land of miracles'

The way they were: Cuban family and/or friends on the beach captured in my 1998 photo

Imagine Sir Keir Starmer, in an act of desperation – greater even than he’s in at the moment – sanctioned a blockade of the Isle of Wight.

He’s decided that the very existence of this beautiful island off England’s south coast poses an ideological threat to the United Kingdom as a whole, and its 140,000 residents and local government must be taught a lesson.

He orders a Royal Navy flotilla to surround the verdant island, killing off the tourist trade and throttling the restocking of shops, however vital their products.

Power cuts become the norm, and health care is placed under serious strain.

No matter that the Isle of Wight is not about to occupy Great Britain’s main land mass, its occupants are not allowed to sleep easy because the UK’s prime minister is keeping them guessing as to what he might do next.

Starmer’s desperation may be real – elections loom that are unlikely to flatter him – but the scenario isn’t.

And, okay, he legitimately governs the Isle of Wight, so it’s far from a perfect analogy, but – allowing for differences of scale and so on – to my mind it’s no more ludicrous and immoral than President Trump’s current oil blockade of Cuba.

In fact, as far as I can see America could and should have normalised relations with Cuba after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

And yet I don’t feel up to now the slow strangulation of this beautiful island and its resourceful inhabitants has been getting nearly enough media attention.

Eclipsed by the Middle East

Unsurprisingly headlines have been dominated by Trump’s war of choice with Iran, and that country’s consequent attacks on its neighbours.

To paraphrase a media professor I heard talking about war reporting some years ago, ‘It privileges kinetic activity above the impact on civilians.’

In other words, you’re more likely to see ‘bang-bang’ dramatic explosions than hear about the suffering behind the lines.

As I write, mercifully, there have been no American bomb blasts in Cuba, but it would be a fool who guarantees there won’t be, given the fool in the White House’s erratic behaviour and previous threats to that vulnerable nation.

Indeed, yesterday, according to the Daily Express via MSN, Trump threatened to take Cuba ‘almost immediately’.

And if I was in Cuba now I would become more worried the more resolved things become in Iran, because the American president has suggested his nation’s largest aircraft carrier could swing by the Caribbean jewel on its way back from the Middle East and ‘stop about 100 yards offshore’.

Now I’m no sailor, but I’m pretty sure you’d ground an aircraft carrier that close to a beach, but that’s not the point; given the experience in Venezuela – Trump’s capturing of its leader Nicolás Maduro, who could securely bet against a repeat performance in Cuba?

A wee bit of history

Cuba was part of the Spanish empire, right from when Columbus ‘sailed the ocean blue’ in 1492 up to 1898, though an independence movement had been growing from the 1860s.

Coincidentally, an American military vessel, the USS Maine, and its sinking in Havana Harbour was the trigger for the Spanish-American war from April to August of 1898. This ultimately led to American buying Cuba from the Spanish – together with other acquisitions Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines – for $20 million.

Cuba became an independent republic in 1902, but under a legal amendment, the US leased Guantánamo Bay Naval Base from Cuba. This was home to Camp X-Ray, the notorious detention centre for alleged members of Islamic terrorist groups, now replaced by the ‘permanent’ Camp Delta.

Allegations persist of torture being meted out on the inmates still held there, decades after the so-called ‘war on terror’. They are not on American soil, and so are in a legal limbo.

In ‘Memories of Cuba’ further down, fnd out why a doctor with a worrying lack of mature facial hair had to visit me in my hotel room, how opening a freezer cabinet is a job in itself, which iconic rebel might be on a fridge magnet, and how many Cubans it takes to make a phone call.

Plus more photos like the one above.

– that’s beyond the paywall – but a free trial is available

Political ping-pong

It turns out Cuba’s ‘independence’ was a bit of a mirage. Under the fledgling state’s constitution, the United States retained the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and to supervise its finances and foreign relations.

And, guess what, the Americans occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909 after a disputed election. There then seemed to be a ping-pong period when the Americans would have their man in Havana, only for a popular vote or revolt leading to – shockingly – a more democratic outcome.

That’s a gross simplification of mine – forgive me. But I’m trying to spare you the word count of too much detail. Suffice to say the ping-pong slowed down and two figures – anti-matter versions of each other – became dominant for decades: the repressive Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar, aka Batista, and the Communist figurehead Fidel Castro.

Where are we now?

I can only assume that Donald Trump carries a deep-seated wound, an ideological reflex, dating at least from America’s failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the year after Castro came to power.

Why else would he feel the need to impose what looks clearly to me like collective punishment on the island’s 10 million inhabitants? (I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have swapped notes on tactics.)

Cuba’s clearly no military threat to the States so I can only conclude it constitutes an ideological threat. It’s not flattering to the US’s sense of itself that there’s an alternative economic system in a small country next door.

Cuba’s state health care system and labour rights legislation and so on seem to offend Trump, as they have a number of presidents before him. But none of his predecessors post-1960 have seen fit to try and starve the people into submission.

Wight wing

Unless the good burghers of Ventnor suddenly find revolutionary fervour aflame in their collective breast I doubt they’ve got anything to fear from a Starmer policy of gunboat diplomacy.

Frankly, they’re more likely to be concerned – like the rest of us Brits – about pot holes.

And unless, say, leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch is about to stage a coup and seeks to be a populist leader for the newly rebranded Wightians, I think the islanders can sleep pretty soundly for now.

I only wish our Cuban cousins could sleep as insouciantly.

Read on for tales of my adventures on this fascinating island, including the scuba in Cuba that nearly ended my career, what – or who – a guy was trying to sell me in a gents’ toilet, and the bloke on a fridge magnet who nearly brought about the end of the world. Really.

That’s all past the paywall (free trial available) below… ⤵️⤵️⤵️

Through the peephole. One of my attempts at photographic art on my Cuban holiday in 1998. I remember thinking it was one of the most beautiful views I’d ever seen. But then I was raised in Watford.

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