CubaMinrex. Sitio del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba

Bush wishes to annex Cuba to the United States

An interview with Ricardo Alarcón

By Francisco Corteza
Progresoweekly/Services of AMATE International
July, 2004

The president of the Cuban parliament, Ricardo Alarcón, said in Havana that U.S. President George W. Bush, with his new anti-Cuban measures, has turned Cubans living in the United States into second-class citizens and that Bush intends to annex Cuba to that country.

“He is creating an apartheid” against Cubans living on U.S. soil, Alarcón said in an interview granted to AMATE at the building of the National Assembly of the People's Power (the Cuban parliament) in this capital.

“The worst about Bush's new plan is not only the sanctions it imposes against the family but also the fact that, for the first time, it presents a U.S. plan of governance for the future, which would take effect right now. The White House will now designate a so-called coordinator for the so-called transition, who would direct an initial stage of the government it intends to install here.

“Beginning now, the U.S. government would create what it has called a Permanent Committee of the Government of the United States for the Reconstruction of the [Cuban] Economy, which means [the U.S.] would manage the island's economy once it destroys the revolution. That's the equivalent of annexing Cuba to the United States,” the parliamentary leader denounced.

“It may seem an exaggeration, but one can perfectly understand that people who have dreamed up immediate actions such as punishing families, elderly Cubans in both countries with their sanctions, and ridiculous measures, such as forbidding the shipment to Cuba of clothing and hygiene supplies, see annexation as their final objective,” he said.

Alarcón reminded a listener that Bush's 500-page report, which describes the way the United States will govern Cuba, includes plans to strip Cubans of their homes and return the buildings to their former private owners.

Bush and his people “know that that would provoke such a deep discontent among the population that they have dreamed up a bloody and repressive plan to deal with that phase” of the annexation, he said.

Alarcón said it is still too early to do a precise economic estimate of the damage caused by the measures of immediate application imposed by Bush (they have been in effect since June 30), but he pointed out that so far those measures have led to the discontinuation of several humanitarian flights to Cuba and have complicated all other flights made from Miami, Fla.

The Republican administration now limits the trips by Cuban-Americans to their homeland to only one every three years. Other measures limit the remittances those people send to their relatives on the island by restricting the recipients to “first-category” relatives only. The administration also forbids the shipment of packages with clothing and articles of personal hygiene.

“Despite the sanctions with which the Bush administration now threatens Cubans living in the United States, many of them have said they'll look for ways to continue visiting their families in Cuba and sending help. Bush's actions go against the essence of the U.S. Constitution because they interfere – by threat of punishment – with the private lives of people, with their family relationships. Many conservative Republican politicians will never be able to understand measures like those, inasmuch as they attack family values,” the president of the Cuban parliament said.

Speaking about the repercussions in Cuba of Bush's measures, Alarcón said the island government reacted by stressing it will defend the broad social benefits the Cuban population enjoys, as well as its standard of living and nourishment in general.

“The price increases decreed after an organizational shutdown of stores in Cuba that sell products for hard currency are not significant,” he said.

The president of the Cuban National Assembly of the People's Power said the White House measures have had a political effect: to rally all Cubans on the island against them and against Bush, and to bring them together with a broad sector of Cuban-Americans in the United States who have repudiated said measures.

“The people who created these measures are seeking electoral, immediate results, such as to tranquilize and ensure the votes and influence of extremist Cuban-Americans who no longer have any ties to their homeland and who at one point accused President Bush of being a traitor to their cause,” he said.

Alarcón pointed out that, when announcing the anti-Cuban measures, Under Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Roger Noriega made a distinction between two groups of Cubans living in the United States.

“They are interested in the votes next November from the Batistianos, from the Cuban far right led by people like Lincoln Díaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and have cast aside the people born in Cuba who retain their links with Cuba and who arrived in the United States recently,” he said.

The Cuban deputy also pointed out that the reactions of many levels of Cuban-Americans against Bush's measures prove that the Cubans who live in the United States represent not only “exiles” but also a community that lives abroad.

“What exile in the world visits, and fights for maintaining his right to visit, his country of origin?” he asked.

The parliamentary leader considered that the failure of Bush's measures is a matter of time. “Apparently, the Democratic Party candidate, John Kerry, has said he will eliminate them if he reaches the presidency, but even if Bush is re-elected the rejection of the actions he has just applied will spread until it leads Republicans to an electoral disaster later on,” he predicted.

“The actions were applied under pressure from the annexationist Mafia in Miami, which is desperate, which wants to hasten the end of the Cuban revolution no matter what, to use all the resources of the North American state for that purpose, because never before in history did the U.S. right wing hold the presidency, the leadership of both houses of Congress and three dozen individuals of Cuban origin in key positions in a Republican administration,” he said.

“If despite this combination – which includes global concepts such as preventive warfare and attacks such as the one against Iraq – they cannot achieve their objectives, they may lose the presidency or the majorities in both houses,” he said. “With time, the fate of all their measures will be failure.”

In this context, Alarcón warned about the possibility of some type of war operation by the United States against Cuba in the near future.

“It is true that they're very bogged down with the situation in Iraq, but the people in the White House work with such irrationality that they might think that creating a new focus of tension, in this case with Cuba, they might distract U.S. public opinion away from Iraq,” he stressed.

Alarcón believes that if the U.S. government – which has not discarded the option of a military attack against Cuba – comes to that conclusion, it might resort to air attacks and other operations.

“In our country, they're going to meet total resistance. We are prepared and will not be caught short-handed as in other cases in history. Here, the population is cohesive. There are no religious differences or ethnic confrontations,” the parliamentarian cautioned.

Bush, re-election and Michael Moore

The president of the Cuban parliament, who is a specialist in the analysis of U.S. policy, did not wish to make predictions about the presidential election in that country next November.

“Bush has committed many blunders. No other politician in the world would have remained in power if he had committed just one of those blunders. However, the North American president has managed to remain standing in the surveys.”

As a corollary of that outlook, Alarcón announced that he will appear in a Cuban TV panel this weekend, after a nationwide showing of Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

In that film, he said, you can see from the theft of the 2000 elections by the Republican candidate (with the aid of the Cuban-American extremists and Florida's Republican government) to the position of the Democrats, who allowed the fraud to continue.

“Kerry has said he will continue the war in Iraq if he wins the White House; and he supported Bush when the latter, with fallacious arguments, invaded that country,” he said.

With regard to Cuba, Alarcón said, the Democratic challenger has made it clear that he will continue to try to destroy the nation's political, social and economic systems. “More of the same,” Alarcón said, although he admitted that it was difficult for a person with Bush's absurd anti-Cuban policies “to have emerged,”

Nevertheless, Alarcón reiterated that Bush “stole the election in 2000, waged war on Iraq with fallacious arguments, took the U.S. economy – which held $500 billion – and would return it (if he lost the election) with a $500 billion deficit, and he is the first U.S. president who must admit that he did not create jobs in his country but instead reduced them.

“The results of the November elections will depend on whether millions of Americans, still deceived by Bush, will open their eyes,” he predicted.

Nevertheless, he stressed, Kerry does not offer a government program that is really an alternative to Bush.

“The person who has an alternative program is Ralph Nader [the independent candidate], but we already know – in view of the traditional structures of U.S. elections – that he will not win,” Alarcón said.

Francisco Forteza is a Cuban journalist.

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