Burying Cold War the opposite of true US intentions in Cuba: Writer

The United States is not honest in normalizing relations with the revolutionary government of Cuba, but it is almost certainly laying the groundwork for a “color revolution” in the Latin American nation, an American writer and political analyst says.

Daniel Patrick Welch, a Boston-based political commentator, made these remarks in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday while commenting on US President Barack Obama’s landmark three-trip to Cuba.

Obama told Cubans on Tuesday in an unprecedented live television address that he came to their country to open a new chapter in the relations between Washington and Havana. “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” Obama said.

But, the US president also criticized Cuba’s human rights record, and said a "full flowering" of the relationship would happen only with progress on the issue of human rights.

"In the absence of that, I think it will continue to be a very powerful irritant," Obama said.

Welch said “the audacity of a US president going to Cuba and using the opportunity to chide and lecture the Cuban government and the Cuban people on human rights is an affront to reason, honesty, and human decency.”

“It makes me really angry to think that the United States which has treated the entire hemisphere, all of Central and South America, and the Caribbean as its moral and ecological dumpster for 150 years, is repulsive,” he stated.

“It’s unbelievable that they would think that after overturning country after country, all the invasions, all the occupations, from Guatemala to Chile, to Nicaragua, to Honduras, [to] Colombia – they even created a whole country to get back at Colombia; you know, they started Panama because Colombia wouldn’t buckle under – invaded the Dominican Republic seven times. It’s shocking. The arrogance and complete tone deafness of the US imperial hubris is just beyond belief,” the analyst noted.

Obama perpetrating political ploy

“Look at how this relationship is developing. You have this imperial power that had its foot on the neck of this poor revolutionary country for 80 years -- for 60 years or whatever it is – and now they're going to ease up -- or pretend they are. Obama has no authority to do this. He is really just spitting in the wind,” Welch said.

“What’s also happening is a fraud, an enormous fraud. Obama is perpetrating this political ploy to look good for the cameras, have this photo-op. The United States has no intentions of ending the Cold War in any form whatsoever. It’s ramping it up, and restarting the Cold War 2.0 all around the world, and that includes Latin America,” he argued.

“The recent overthrow of the government in Honduras was a US coup, the attempt to overthrow governments in Venezuela is a US-sponsored attempted coup, meddling with the government in Brazil is an attempted US coup, and this is an attempted US coup,” he pointed out.

The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961 and placed an official embargo against the country in 1962.

The two countries became ideological foes soon after the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power and their ties remained hostile even after the end of the Cold War.

The Republican-controlled US Congress has been a major opponent of normalization of ties as well as the embargo lift.

Cuba needs to be vigilant

Welch said “I have enormous respect for the great revolutionary people of Cuba, and I know that they have a resilience that is beyond measure, but I am very concerned with these developments. I suspect that within few years you will see an attempted color revolution in Cuba just as you did everywhere else where the US touches."

“The US is not the good guys. They never have been and they never will be. And to think that is somehow going to end well for Cuba is a mistake I think,” he added.

“I think there have to enormous vigilance, an enormous attempt to control what comes into the country, and what influences the CIA, and the US corporations, and the neocons with their foreign policy and neolibs with their economic policy wreak on the country,” the commentator advised.

In order for the US embargo to be lifted, the Cuban government should continue to change its policies and rethink its handling of human rights issues, Obama said on Monday, speaking at a joint press conference with President Castro following their meeting in Havana.

In response, Castro said full normalization of relations between America and Cuba depends on the US Congress lifting the embargo.

Castro hit back at US "double standards," and advised Washington to have a close look at its own long history of racial, economic inequality and human rights abuses.

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