As “news” of street protests in Cuba reached my eyes and ears, I immediately thought: CIA.
We’ll see how this plays out but the truth remains: Whenever there’s unrest in an official enemy of the U.S., the safest bet is to assume meddling and interference from The Home of the Brave™.
This post is not about communism, Castro, and all that.
It’s about two words: Pattern. Recognition.
To help you with that, I offer some context below.
“Eyeing Cuba for almost a century”
February 15, 1898, was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in on board the USS Maine.
“At 9:40 p.m., the ship's forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water,” writes author Tom Miller. “Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption — this one deafening and massive — splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air.”
By the time the sleeping giant was jarred into alertness by the Maine explosion, Cuban and Filipino rebels were already fighting Spain for independence in their respective lands. The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission.
“Yet,” writes Miller, “the visit was neither spontaneous nor altruistic; the United States had been eyeing Cuba for almost a century.”
“At a certain point in that spring, McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war,” historian Howard Zinn added, “and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention.”
American newspapers, especially those run by Hearst (New York Journal) and Joseph Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism.
When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to supply pictures, he reported that he could not find a war. “You furnish the pictures,” Hearst replied, “and I’ll furnish the war.”
Spain was easily defeated, the legend of Teddy Roosevelt manufactured whole cloth, and the Cubans (and Puerto Ricans) found themselves exchanging one colonial ruler for another.
“Of transcendent importance”
Today's mainstream perception of Cuba has little to do with the fabricated heroics of one of the faces carved on Mount Rushmore (As TR once declared: “Democracy has justified itself by keeping for the white race the best portions of the earth's surface.”)
Since 1959, it's mostly been about Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution, the ensuing U.S. blockade, and events like the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Mariel boat lift.
We hear much less and thus know much less about the relentless low-intensity U.S. assaults on Cuba. For example, the Cuba Project, a.k.a. “Operation Mongoose” was initiated by the liberal [sic] Kennedy administration in 1962 with the stated objective of helping the “Cubans overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.”
This CIA effort included efforts like:
Poisoning crops and livestock
Destroying businesses — from small fishing fleets to large petrochemical installations
Targeting civilians by bombing Cuban hotels internally and Cuban missions abroad
Relentless assassination attempts on Fidel Castro
The U.S. aggression toward Cuba since 1959 denied the world a chance to witness what that revolution may have become. But, in reality, Cuba has never stood a chance. As far back as the American Revolution, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams announced that U.S. control of Cuba was "of transcendent importance.”
Postscript: The event that set all this into motion, the alleged bombing of the USS Maine, was investigated by Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy in 1976. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the explosion was probably caused by “spontaneous combustion inside the ship's coal bins," a problem common to ships of that era.
Again, I have two words for you: Pattern. Recognition.
This practice will save you a lot of stress while keeping your mind clear to find productive solutions.
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Seeing patterns...yes.
Funny that IQ tests are pretty much all about patterns, yet people who see patterns in real life applications are told to "follow the 'science'",(or experts, or whomever), and are summarily dismissed.