Death in Cuba

 Like everyone else, I am unsure what to make of the reported incident yesterday, in which an American-registered speedboat apparently exchanged fire with the Cuban coast guard. 

The Secretary of State of course immediately disavowed any U.S. government involvement in the incident. And indeed—it must be said—if this was a CIA op, it was an even more obviously foolhardy and doomed one than the Bay of Pigs. Ten people on a motor boat in the Gulf were not going to incite a revolution that would topple the Castroist regime. 

Unless the point of this was not to spark unrest that would overthrow Cuba's government—but rather to provide a pretext or casus belli for further U.S. intervention—something along the lines of the border skirmishes that preceded the Mexican-American war in the 1840s. 

But seemingly belying that narrative, the official U.S. response has been pretty restrained so far. Trump administration figures have been uncharacteristically muted in their statements about the incident. They have not obviously pounced on it as an excuse to start yet another war (they have so many going already!)

The same cannot be said for all members of Congress. The Wall Street Journal quoted one Florida congressman who seemed prepared to wave the bloody shirt. "The dictatorship in Cuba has just attacked a boat from Florida and murdered those on board," he said; adding: "This regime must be relegated to the dust bin of history!"

One is reminded of the cries of "Remember the Maine!" that preceded the Spanish-American war—yet another stupid and unnecessary conflict sparked by an incident off the coast of Cuba—that time in Havana Harbor. 

That was the war that prompted William Vaughn Moody to urge that "sick Cuba's cry" for freedom must not be used as a pretext for U.S. imperialism and aggression (as it ultimately was). Tell us not, he wrote, that our nation "stooped to cheat / And scramble in the market-place of war[.]"

Decades later, Edna St. Vincent Millay would write, in her great antiwar poem about the "Conscientious Objector," that Death "has business in Cuba [...] many calls to make[.]" He apparently has business there still. 

Let us choose, with Millay, not to give Death a leg up. Let us join Moody in urging that Cuba's suffering not be used as a pretext for American imperialism. I grant, with all the critics and dissidents, that the Castroist regime is horrid and dictatorial and repressive; and now the island is suffering even further from U.S. restrictions on its fuel supply. 

But let not "sick Cuba's cry" become an excuse for war and aggression. Let this not be another "Remember the Maine!"—sensationalized in the yellow press in order to cause even more death and destruction. 

As Moody wrote of Cuba and the Philippines, in condemning U.S. imperialism stemming from the Spanish-American war: "For save we let the island men go free, / Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts / Will curse us from the lamentable coasts / Where walk the frustrate dead."