From the Dead International Order to Ultimate Independence:
The Hour of Resistance
LA TIZZA (https://latizzadecuba.org/)
I.
If there is one valuable thing about Trump's language, it is that it is naked. He does not hide in euphemisms or linger in diplomatic circumlocutions. His threat to send an aircraft carrier to take Cuba once the work in Iran is finished is not campaign hyperbole, nor one more piece of his chaotic negotiating style, nor a joke of an unlikely imperial after-dinner conversation. It is the verbatim confession of a policy that was never anything other than the preparation of the final blow.
For decades, broad sectors were anachronistically torn between yes and no reforms, between tactical concessions and gestures of goodwill, between the hope of a reasonable negotiation and the calculation of how much to give up for the beast to calm down its rhetoric. Trump has destroyed all faith in this supposed scenario with a stroke of the pen, and he helps us -- it must be recognized -- to lift the veil of that absurd stubble. All those who have believed with extreme naivety in recent months that some reasonable negotiation scenario was possible, came out shorn. Trump was never interested in negotiating; just buy time. Its stark language has saved us the work of hermeneutics: it is no longer necessary to read between the lines; Now we can read the deck of a warship.
The less time we waste trying to unravel the crazy dynamics of its comings and goings, trying to put a parenthesis between its rhetoric and our real capacity for dialogue, or obsessively debating what we can concede to modify the enemy's policy towards Cuba, the less time we will be giving to those who have already decided. The only possible and realistic scenario today is to prepare without delay and with absolute responsibility for a comprehensive asymmetric war. Cuba has made every possible effort to avoid war, without reaching the silence of the cannons implying sinking into the mire of shame.
II.
But the nakedness of imperial language reveals something even deeper and more definitive. It is not that the president of the day despises the international order; The order that supposedly guaranteed minimum security conditions to countries and peoples is dead. And some insist -- also within our ranks -- to continue measuring the vital signs of a corpse that has been rotting for a long time.
Cuba is a member of the BRICS, a signatory to the vast majority of the agreements that inscribe it within the global architecture of the United Nations, and has for decades deployed selfless humanitarian aid to the Global South that makes it a moral creditor of any order that claims to be civilized. And yet, an aircraft carrier announced to take Havana does not provoke the urgent convening of the Security Council, nor preventive sanctions, nor even the credible threat of multilateral diplomatic isolation. It causes silences. It causes petty calculations of powers that believe themselves to be safe. It provokes, in the best of cases, lukewarm communiqués that no one fears and that no one will comply with.
We should go further: what Trump is doing is not decreeing the demise of the international system, but exposing the impudence of its real functioning. What has died is not the system, but the precarious harmony between its strong parts. Along with the usual expendable lives, the classical hegemon has also sacrificed the opening act of the system and that scaffolding called "international order", because they now hinder it in its geopolitical offensive against competitors who are no longer external to capitalism but emerge from its own cultural, rational and ideological framework.
When competition was raised against what was perceived as "anti-systemic" -- even if such opposition was more imagined than true, as it ended up happening in the case of the USSR --, the system needed counterweights, balances, a backdrop for its hegemony. Today, when the challenge is posed in overtly interbloc terms and comes from powers that have undermined the Bretton Woods pact -- through which Washington emerged unquestioned urbi et orbi --, that international order has become an obstacle.
The same thing happens with the international order as with classical liberalism: when the elasticity of the State ceased to be useful for absorbing the energy of popular struggles and demands, capital gave birth to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal recompositing of Latin American dictatorships. The creature now sacrifices the scaffolding of its authorship, as insufficient.
Let us, then, spend less time in summoning the reaction of an already dead order and let us use all possible forces to build a new one at gunpoint. An order where the guarantee of security is not a piece of paper deposited in Geneva, but the certainty that every inch of land will be defended, and that this defense will be the founding fact of an insurgent international legality, born of the cannons of dignity and not of the notarial acts of the empire or the delirious weekly jokes of a possessed person. But it is not madness that is Trump's fundamental trait, but a capitalist order that needed to give itself such delirious architecture to sustain itself at all costs and at any cost.
III.
Let no one expect, however, a seventeenth State to come to our rescue. The bitter reality has confirmed that Russian energy aid was a temporary window, collegial and negotiated with the empire itself previously. There is no geopolitical bloc today with the real will and structural capacity to disobey Washington and modify the architecture of exception imposed on Cuba. That is the naked fact of our tactical solitude, and to assume it is not defeatism: it is the first act of true strategy.
But there is a fact that the US, Trump and his select group of fascists in power try to ignore with the arrogance of someone who only knows how to read kilotons and nuclear warheads: the enormous lesson of Iran and the Axis of Resistance, of the mobilized Iraqi forces, of the Yemenis who bent Saudi logistics, of Hezbollah that resists the persistent attacks of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon. of HAMAS that continues to govern what remains of Gaza, in the midst of even -- let us avoid laughing at such a dramatic event -- a "ceasefire" that as always only the victims observed. These peoples had no aircraft carriers, no Security Council to protect them, and no geopolitical bloc to save them. They have a doctrine. An authentic and genuine pedagogy of resistance that the empire has never been able to decipher.
Imperialism can capitalize on "surgical" coups, assassinate generals, destroy infrastructure, and manage the spectacle of its air power. But there is one variable that escapes all its algorithms: wear resistance. Prolonged asymmetrical warfare bleeds budgets, breaks domestic consensus, devours parliamentary majorities and turns every tactical victory into a political defeat.
Resistance is, certainly, more costly in lives and is infinitely more politically effective than submitting to preserve a life that, without sovereignty, is no longer so or has minimal guarantees of being so. Choosing resistance is not an act of suicidal heroism; It is the rational calculation of those who have understood that life under occupation is a deferred death, and that the only currency that the empire respects is the unacceptable cost that a people is willing to inflict and assume on it. We did not arrive at this point in history by poets; Time and time again, through thick and thin, we have been forced to write in blood to dream and have a homeland, a flag, a people, "the land, the water, the air... fire."
IV.
The recent executive order signed by Trump is the material expression of this new state of affairs. It is not just another turn of the screw to the blockade: it is the written formalization of a state of total exception over Cuba. Any gesture towards the island, even solidarity or humanitarian, is totally prohibited under its articles.
They seek to precipitate internal collapse by asphyxiation, without uncomfortable witnesses, without aid workers, without food, without medicines. It is war by other means, codified in the language of decree.
To justify it, the empire maintains a permanent game of double narrative that deserves to be dismantled with urgency and precision. On the one hand, "Cuba is about to fall", "it is next", "it is a failed state" that requires nothing more than a final push. On the other, Cuba is an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States," to the point that an aircraft carrier is assigned to it.
What are we left with? If we are a threat capable of inflicting damage of such magnitude, how is it that we are about to fall? If we are about to fall, why do they need a state of total exception and the deployment of their naval power?
The answer is simple: neither statement is true. They are interchangeable pieces of a propaganda machine designed to justify what has no justification. And we...What will we do? To become specialists in substantive and surreptitious, non-visible discourses?
Everything is on the surface, who does not want to see it, should not expect to cure their presbyopia with an aircraft carrier a hundred yards from the coast of Cuba.
But let's take seriously, for a moment, the logic of the adversary. If Cuba, this May Day, forced five hundred thousand people to march in front of the US embassy in Havana in the midst of this crisis, if it forced more than six million Cubans to sign a declaration against the policies of the empire, then we are facing a regime with a superhuman power of coercion. capable of mobilizing wills on a scale that the empire itself cannot match. If that power is real, they should think twice before attacking: how do you deal with a country that controls its population in such a way?
But if, on the contrary, those marches and those signatures were not the product of any coercion, if they were born of an authentic desire to defend Cuba beyond any threat, if they were the free gesture of a nation that does not need to be forced to defend its own, then they should think about it even more. Because what they are facing is not a failed state or a population that will receive them with flowers, but a cohesive people, willing to resist at any cost and by any means.
In either case, the conclusion is the same: invading Cuba would be the most costly and prolonged mistake in U.S. imperial history.
And as our Fernando Martínez Heredia said before dying: "Whatever comes to mind to the Americans, as if it were with an energetic president; We don't care, the same if he's a nice guy or if he's a madman, we don't care about both."
V
But we have not come this far by spontaneous generation. The attack on the Twin Towers was the pretext for the installation of the internal state of emergency that was established with the Patriot Act within the United States, breaking that pact of non-intrusion into private lives that capitalism supposedly defends. That order of exception was then transferred to the world with the (lost) wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: any legal framework ceased to matter. The internal needs of a world order defined and delimited by Washington became essential.
Trump is not an anomaly or an accident; it is the product of the return of that neoconservative project that was left incomplete.
But make no mistake, we would not have gotten this far without the Gaza episode. There, in that live-streamed genocide, this new global order of exception was inaugurated. The international community accepted the commission of a genocide on expendable lives, lives that can be killed without legal or political consequences. We did not understand at the time that international law was not being violated in Gaza; A new order was being founded, one where barbarism is public, condoned and televised. And that is the order under which an aircraft carrier threatens Cuba today.
Iran is in this epoch what the Soviet army was in theirs: the only power with a real will not to give in and to modify the present correlation of forces against imperialism. But the question that burns in Our America is another: where is the Axis of Resistance in Latin America? It is urgent to constitute it, and for this the logic of the State is not going to be of much use to us. From them come only calls for dialogue, respect for a dead international order and the appeal to a multilateralism that smells of death even before it has been born.
The war in the Persian Gulf has shown that in an asymmetrical scenario, control over strategic roads and resources is decisive. It is therefore necessary to warn very clearly: all US bases in Latin America will become de facto legitimate targets. Every Caribbean country that lends its territory for troop movements against Cuba, or that leaves its waterways free for the transit of aircraft carriers, or its airspace for the passage of U.S. aircraft and drones, will place itself on the battlefield. All bases in Florida and on the U.S. coast that can serve as supplies will also be legitimate targets, as well as transit zones for goods used by the United States.
This is not a threat or trench bravado. It is the technical description of what a prolonged asymmetric war against an empire logistically dependent on a hemispheric network of bases, sea routes, and footholds would mean. The enemy forces us to think in terms of total war. We must do so with the coldness and heat of those who defend their existence, which in reality is not only their own.
All groups of solidarity with Cuba, all movements willing to the maximum possible internationalism, must prepare to unleash scenarios of resistance within their own countries that include U.S. bases as legitimate objectives, inside and outside the United States. Only one resistance organized and regional may allow us to modify the correlation of forces. It is not only a matter of defeating this new scenario of aggression that the empire imposes on Cuba and the entire region. It is a question of eliminating U.S. imperialism from Our America once and for all.
Trump, without knowing it, gives us the historic possibility of unleashing the true struggle for the independence of our peoples and closing that nefarious chapter of our history that is the North American empire. What he offers as a threat of death, we receive as the long-delayed opportunity to complete the unfinished independence.
We do not ask permission to defend ourselves. We do not call for an order that no longer exists. We do not request the protection of institutions that validated the genocide. We tell the empire, with the calmness of someone who is playing much more sacred things than permits to receive an investment, that every aircraft carrier deployed, every base used, every drone launched, every supply ship, will have an answer in times, places and ways that we will choose.
And we tell the people of the United States that we are in time to prevent them from being dragged into a confrontation, hatched in the comfortable halls of Washington, by the same people who turn their backs on the serious social problems that afflict them as a people. A confrontation in which they will know precisely the minute they enter, but they will not be able to affirm the moment when they will leave or at what costs. To the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, we say that the time has come to decide.
There will be no neutrality possible at this hour. It will be organized resistance or it will be cowardly complicity. It will be definitive independence or it will be permanent servitude.
We have already chosen.
From: https://www.lahaine.org/
Translation by NSCUBA (Nova Scotia)
