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Published: 08 June 2023

The Cuba-China Espionage Nexus: New or Old?

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The use of alien elements to assist in Cuban communism’s longevity is old stuff. When will the U.S. and the West figure this out and finally decide to act with valor and common sense?

A June 8 article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the communist regimes of Cuba and China had reached an agreement on a cash-for-spying scheme. Beijing would pay Havana billions to install a state-of-the-art electronic eavesdropping facility on the island. The WSJ credited the information to an intelligence source. CNN also claimed to validate the WSJ report from its intelligence information pool. Both media outlets imply that the Cuban dictatorship has granted China permission to do this. Would this be a novel occurrence?

Since 1949, Mao declared a hundred-year marathon to extend its hegemony over the world. This informal declaration of war smartly changed strategy upon its revamping of the economic model from an orthodox socialist economy to a mercantilist socialist variant in the 1970s. This politically and centrally guided economic system of state capitalism, targeted market manipulation, and intense foreign investment courting opened the way of a shift in war tactics. China perfected the use of asymmetric warfare and developed the bankroll capacity to do so. 

Cuban and Chinese communism never severed relations or contact, despite the overarching symbiotic affair with the USSR. The fall of Soviet communism and the subsequent 8-year hiatus of the short-lived Russian democratic experiment (1991-1999) which died with Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet authoritarianism, brought Castroism closer to Mao’s heirs. Excluding Venezuela, which is a virtual Cuban colony, China has become Cuba’s most important trading partner. The bond has not just been commercial.

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Published: 08 May 2023

Putting the Caimanera Protests into Context

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Maintaining political power by force is an art. It is not an ethical practice or an exercise of a moral task. Nonetheless, it is a chore that requires strict form, constant application, and pragmatic ingenuity and in this sense acquires an artist format. Regimes that adopt the totalitarian variant might even consider it a science. The Cuban dictatorship has mastered the job of non-democratic rule, judged by its capacity to retain power. They have been able to pull this off for a good part of six decades. Explained philosophically, this preservation of tyranny has been achieved by dogmatically applying Machiavellian principles, harnessing the Hobbesian total domination leviathan model, and successfully presenting it in Rousseauean-Marxist verbiage to appeal to the emotional. Decomposition, however, is a natural occurring phenomenon in artificially controlled political schemes. This is what has been happening in Cuba. We are witnessing its symptoms.    

Havana’s communist regime owes its ability to illegitimately maintain power to zealously following key strategies. Hardcore state terrorism has been one of them. This has been manifested in a combination of approaches such as heavy-handed prison sentences, political killings, historically by way of firing squads, torture, family division, limiting access to healthcare, education, housing, and employment. An immigration escape valve has also proved functional. Infiltrating real or potential opposition and dissident groups, inside as well as outside the island, has been a mainstay and is the third principal method. Yet, despite past success, Cuban communism appears to have lost its firm grip on social control, a fundamental piece of totalitarian governance.

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Published: 19 January 2023

Biden’s Rush to Rescue Castroism.

Cuban communism (yes, a kleptocracy can be communist also) continues faithfully to exercise dictatorial pragmatism, a policy institutionalized in 1959. Sharp espionage keen on strategic disinformation promotion, ruthless terror at home, and a wide range of collaborators, at state, institutional, and elite individual levels, have been staple components of the sixty-four-year-old regime’s modus operandi. Castroism has been heightening pressure on the U.S. for relief. Joe Biden is rushing to accommodate them.

Barack Obama, a Fabian socialist true believer, gave the Cuban dictatorship what it had been actively pursuing for decades: unconditional coexistence with American perks. The ruling kleptocratic stratocracy in Havana, constant revisionists of Marxist-Leninist guideposts, sought to have their wholesale thievery of American property, shelter for terrorists, crimes against humanity, and involvement in drug trafficking, ignored. By executive fiat, Obama obliged Castro-Communism as much as he could. Hillary Clinton was expected to deepen this immoral path in 2016. Donald Trump and American voters frustrated those plans.   

Trump’s victory, not only put a halt to the détente initiative between the world’s most successful democracy and the globe’s third-oldest totalitarian regime (after China and North Korea) but reversed key aspects of the Obama-Castro pact. The Marxist dictatorship’s dream of unconditional moral capitulation by the U.S. coupled with dollars was castrated, at least for the moment. Biden’s ascension to the White House promised better days for Cuban communism.

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Published: 04 January 2023

Understanding the U.S. House Speaker Stalemate.

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2023 has started with considerable fireworks in American politics. As of this writing, 6 attempts have been made on deciding who will hold the speakership of the U.S. House of Representatives. This is the third most important position in the nation’s political power arrangement, hierarchically speaking. Is this necessarily bad? Does it mean the Republican Party is in disarray? Is there historical precedents for this apparently awkward situation?

Modernity and systemic alterations have gotten us used to uniformity in these types of political courses. The U.S. presidential system, with its divided governmental design, seeks to separate power within the federal state’s composition. The American Framers purposely structured this model to remedy expected factious battles that, in the end, would require consensus. In other words, it is the bland uniformity that we have become accustomed to in previous congressional speakership elections, as well as national political conventions where state electors had certain autonomous powers to bypass party kingmakers that planned coronations instead of competitive contests that better express popular sovereignty. 

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