I.
If there is one thing that is valuable in the language of Donald Trump, it is its nakedness. Trump does not hide behind euphemisms or beat diplomatically around the bush. The threat of sending an aircraft carrier to take Cuba once the job is done in Iran is not campaign-trail hyperbole or another element of his chaotic negotiating style or a joke of imperial after-dinner conversation. It is the literal confession of a policy that was never anything other than preparation for the final assault.
For decades, broad sectors took part in an anachronistic debate between reform or no reform, between tactical concessions and gestures of good faith, between the hope for reasonable negotiations and calculations of how much we would need to concede to calm the beast’s rhetoric. At the stroke of a pen, Trump has destroyed any faith in all these imaginary scenarios and — we have to give it to him — helps us clear the smoke of that ridiculous charade. Everyone who in the last months naively believed that some kind of reasonable negotiation was possible has been hung out to dry. Trump was never interested in negotiating; only in stalling for time. His brutal language has saved us the trouble of hermeneutics. There’s no need now to read between the lines: now we can read the deck of a warship.
The less time we waste trying to decipher Trump’s frenzied back-and-forth, trying to draw a line between his rhetoric and our own capacity for dialogue, or obsessively debating over what concessions we can make to change the enemy’s policy towards Cuba, the less time we gift them. They’ve already made up their minds. Today, the only possible and realistic scenario is to prepare, assuming complete responsibility and wasting no time, for total asymmetric war.
Cuba has made every possible effort to avoid war. But the silence of the guns cannot mean sinking into the mire of shame.
II.
The nakedness of the empire’s language reveals something even deeper and more definitive. The issue is not that today’s president scorns the international order. The fact is that the order which supposedly guaranteed basic security conditions for the world’s countries and peoples is dead. There are some, even within our own ranks, who insist on taking the vital signs for a corpse that has long been rotting.
Cuba is a BRICS member, a signatory to the great majority of the agreements that place it within the global framework of the United Nations. For decades, it has extended selfless humanitarian aid to the Global South that makes it a moral creditor to any order that could call itself civilized. And yet the announcement of an aircraft carrier sent to take Havana provokes no urgent meetings of the Security Council, no preventative sanctions, not even the credible threat of multilateral diplomatic isolation. It provokes silence. It provokes miserable calculations by countries who believe themselves safe. It provokes, in the best-case scenario, middle-of-the-road statements that no one fears and no one will obey.
We should go further still. Trump’s actions do not decree the death of the system: they lay bare the shamelessness of how it actually works. What is dead is not the system but the precarious harmony between its strongest links. Along with the same old disposable lives, the classic hegemon has sacrificed the supporting acts of the system and the scaffolding known as the “international order,” which now stand in the way of its global offensive against competitors who are no longer external to capitalism but emerge from its own cultural, rational and ideological framework. As long as the opposing side was perceived as “antisystemic” — even if that opposition was more imagined than real, as eventually happened with the USSR — the system needed checks, balances, a backdrop for its hegemony. Today, when the challenge comes in openly inter-capitalist terms from countries that have undermined the Bretton Woods agreement through which Washington emerged unchallenged across the world, that order has become an obstacle. The same thing has happened to the international order has happened to classical liberalism: when the elasticity of the state was no longer able to absorb the energy of popular struggles and demands, capital birthed the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal recomposition of Latin America’s dictatorships. The monster sacrifices the now-inadequate framework of its own creation.
So let’s not waste time trying for a reaction from a dead order. From now on, let all our efforts go towards building a new order at the point of a gun— an order where the guarantee of security will be not a piece of paper in Geneva but the assurance that we will defend every inch of land, and that this defense will be the founding act of an insurgent international legal order, born out of the guns of dignity and not the empire’s affidavit’s or the delusional weekly jokes of a possessed man. Yet it is not insanity that defines Trump, but a capitalist order that endowed itself with the staggering, delusional architecture it needed to maintain itself at any price.
III.
No one should expect any state to ride to our rescue. Bitter reality has confirmed that Russia’s energy aid was a temporary reprieve, negotiated in advance with the empire itself. There is no political bloc today with the real will and structural capacity to disobey Washington and modify the architecture of exception imposed on Cuba. This is the naked fact of our tactical isolation, and accepting it is not defeatism: it is the first act of our real strategy.
But there is one fact that the US, Trump, and their select group of fascists in power are attempting to ignore, with the arrogance of those who illiterate in anything that isn’t kilotons or nuclear warheads: the enormous lesson given by Iran and the Axis of Resistance, by the forces mobilized in Iraq, by the Yemenis who humiliated Saudi logistics, by Hezbollah, resisting the persistent attacks of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, even amidst (nobody laugh at the twisting of events) a “ceasefire” that, as always, was honored only by the victims. These peoples have no aircraft carriers, no Security Council to protect them, no geopolitical bloc to save them. They have a doctrine: a genuine and authentic pedagogy of resistance that the empire has never learned to decipher.
Imperialism can capitalize on “surgical strikes,” assassinate generals, destroy infrastructure, administer the spectacle of its air power. But there is one variable that escapes all its algorithms: resistance by attrition. Prolonged asymmetric war bleeds budgets, shatters domestic consensus, devours parliamentary majorities and transforms every tactical victory into a political defeat.
Resistance is no doubt costlier in lives. It is also infinitely more effective in political terms than surrendering in order to cling to a kind of life that, without sovereignty, can no longer be called life, or lacks the basic guarantees to call itself life. Choosing resistance is not an act of suicidal heroism: it is the rational calculation of those who understand that life under occupation is a prolonged death and that the only currency the empire respects is the unacceptable costs that a people are prepared to assume and inflict upon it. We didn’t get this far in our story by virtue of being poets: time and again, the hard way and the harder way, they’ve forced us to write in blood in order to be able to dream, to have a country, a flag, a people, “land, water, air… fire.”*
IV.
The executive order recently signed by Trump is the material expression of the new state of things. This is not another turn of the screw for the blockade: it is the written formalization of a total state of exception on Cuba. Any gesture to the island, even of solidarity or humanitarian aid, is strictly forbidden under its terms.
They are trying to precipitate internal collapse through strangulation, without uncomfortable witnesses, without aid workers, without food, without medicine. It is war by other means, codified in the language of a decree.
To justify this, the empire maintains the never-ending game of a double narrative that must be urgently and precisely dismantled. On one hand, “Cuba is on the edge of collapse,” is “next,” is a “failed state” that needs only one last push. On the other, Cuba is such “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States” that an aircraft carrier is sent our way.
What is going on? If we’re a threat capable of inflicting such titanic damage, how is it that we’re on the verge of collapse? If we’re on the verge of collapse, why do they need a state of total exception and deployment of their naval power?
The answer is simple: neither statement is true. They are interchangeable pieces in a propaganda machine designed to justify the unjustifiable. As for us… what are we to do? Become specialists in devious, surreptitious rhetoric?
Everything has come to the surface. Those who prefer not to see shouldn’t expect a cure for their long sightedness in the shape of an aircraft carrier a hundred yards from Cuba’s coasts.
But let us seriously consider, for a moment, the logic of the enemy. If Cuba, this past May Day, was able to compel 500,000 to march to the US embassy in Havana in the midst of this crisis, if it was able to force more than 6 million Cubans to sign a declaration against the policies of the empire, then we’re dealing with a regime whose powers of coercion are superhuman, able to mobilize human will on a scale that not even the empire itself can match. If that power is real, they should think twice before attacking. How could they hope to deal with a country with that kind of control over its population?
But if, on the other hand, these marches and these signatures were not the product of coercion; if they sprang from a genuine desire to defend Cuba against all threats; if they were the free expression of a nation that does not need to be forced to defend what it holds dear, then the enemy should think it over even more. Because what stands before them is neither a failed state nor a population that will welcome them with flowers, but a united people ready to resist at any cost and by any means.
In either case, the conclusion is the same: invading Cuba would be the costliest and most drawn-out mistake in the history of the US empire.
In the words of our late Francisco Marínez Heredia, “Let the Americans try it— whether they have a maniac for a president or not. We don’t care either way. Whether he’s a nice guy or a maniac; it’s all the same to us.”
V.
We didn’t get to this point by some spontaneous process. The attack on the Twin Towers served as the pretext for establishing a permanent state of exception within the United States through the Patriot Act, shattering the pact that capitalism supposedly upholds—the promise not to intrude on people’s private lives. That state of exception was then extended to the rest of the world through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: any legal framework ceased to matter. The internal needs of a world order defined and circumscribed by Washington became all that mattered.
Trump is no anomaly, no accident. He is the product of the return of the unfinished neoconservative project.
But let nobody be fooled: we would never have gotten to this point without Gaza. It was there, in live-streamed genocide, that the new global state of exception was inaugurated. The international community accepted the perpetration of a genocide against expendable lives— lives that could be ended without legal or political consequences.
We failed to understand as it was happening that international law was not being violated in Gaza. A new order was being established; one in which barbarism is public, consensual, and televised. And it is that order under which an aircraft carrier is now menacing Cuba.
Iran today is what the Soviet Army was in its own time: the only power with the real will to not back down and to shift the current correlation of forces against imperialism. But the burning question in Our America is another: where is Latin America’s Axis of Resistance? Urgent action is needed to establish it, and state logic will be of little use here. That logic produces only calls to dialogue, to respect an international order that now lies dead, and appeals to a multilateralism that reeked of death even before it was born.
Without realizing it, Trump has given us the historic opportunity to unleash the definitive struggle for the independence of our peoples and close the tragic chapter of our history that is the US empire. What he brandishes as a death threat, we take as the long-awaited opportunity to complete our unfinished independence.
We need no one’s permission to defend ourselves. We make no appeal to an order that no longer exists. We ask for no protection from institutions that sanctioned genocide. We say to the empire, with the serenity of those who have things at stake far more sacred than investment permits, that every aircraft carrier deployed, every base used, every drone launched, every supply ship, will be met with a response in times, places, and ways of our own choosing.
To the people of the United States, we say: there is still time to prevent yourselves from being dragged into a confrontation hatched in comfortable DC sitting rooms by the same people who turn their backs on the serious social ills that afflict you as a people. You will know the minute you enter this confrontation, but you will not be able to say when you will emerge from it, nor at what cost. To the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, we say: the time has come to make your choice.
There can be no neutrality now. It will be organized resistance or cowardly complicity. Final independence or permanent subjugation.
We have made our choice.
* Play on a verse from Silvio Rodríguez’s “Me acosa el carapálida” [The pale-face hounds me]: “La tierra me quiere arrebatar / el agua me quiere arrebatar / el aire me quiere arrebatar / y solo fuego / y solo fuego voy a dar [“He wants to take my land / he wants to take my water / he wants to take my air / only fire / all I’ll give him is fire”].
Originally Published in La Tizza Magazine: Read the original in Spanish here.
La Tizza is a Cuban online magazine that since 2017 has sought to become “a platform to debate the course of the project of the Cuban Revolution, its relation to the political practices of the present, and its possible futures.” It emerged from the Network of Young Anticapitalists and is primarily aimed at young Cubans.