A Vassal Republic

 It seems increasingly like our elite institutions are all pulling together to enable Trump's next act of aggression, imperialism, and robbery—this time, against the people of Cuba. 

For months now, the U.S. has maintained a crippling oil blockade that has sabotaged the island's economy, leading to rolling blackouts and almost certainly causing the preventable deaths of Cuban civilians by interfering with life-saving medical treatment. 

Now, the Justice Department has handed Trump a pretext to invade the country by rolling out a suspiciously-timed criminal indictment of the Cuban president related to a decades-old downing of a plane. 

Not to be outdone, the Supreme Court is also doing its part to ensure that as soon as the U.S. topples Cuba's government, the pillaging can begin—just as it did the last time the U.S. fought a war for Cuba, at the turn of the century. 

In an 8-1 ruling yesterday, the Roberts Court allowed American corporations and individuals to collect damages from any entity that used nationalized or expropriated Cuban property in its business—i.e., any property that was "tainted by confiscation," as the majority opinion put it. 

This would include just about any business of any kind in Cuba. 

The chess pieces are all in place, then, to ensure a good plunder. It is clear the pseudo-legal means by which the loot will be extracted from the country, as soon as the U.S. government invades. 

The U.S. military topples the government—just as it did in Venezuela—under the pretext of carrying out a criminal arrest of the head of state. Then—as soon as a new, U.S.-friendly puppet is installed—resources can start flowing off the island into the pockets of American corporations again—just as they did under Batista. 

American companies can start filing lawsuits on day one after the invasion—laying claim to untold millions in Cuban assets—the "last poor plunder of a bleeding land," as Lord Byron would have called it. 

And all under the cracked legal theory that anything so much as "tainted" by association with the 1960 Revolution must rightfully belong to Americans. 

The stage is set for the massive suctioning of resources out of Cuba and into American corporate pockets to resume the course that the Revolution so rudely interrupted more than sixty years ago. 

Of course, the official rhetoric of U.S. leaders serves to disguise this motive, even as the Supreme Court ruling has laid it bare. Marco Rubio released a new video the other day calling on Cubans to reject their government and put their trust in the beneficent intentions of the U.S. government. 

But at the same time, the administration is openly arguing in U.S. courts that it wants to enable private lawsuits to seize nationalized assets in Cuba in order to deter investment in the island and to enrich American corporations, who doubtless yearn for the good old days when Yankee businesses could extract resources from the island without local resistance. 

History here repeats itself. As Bertrand Russell wrote of U.S. policy toward Cuba in the 1960s: "When Kennedy declares to an enthusiastic multitude that he will restore freedom to Cuba, it must be understood that he means freedom for the children to die agonizing deaths from hookworm and for the rest of the population to be subject to brutal and corrupt dictators who will provide riches for inhabitants of the US and a very few from Cuba." 

This was essentially the same policy the U.S. adopted toward Cuba at the end of the Spanish-American war, over a century ago. 

In that conflict too, the President talked big about bringing "freedom" to the island—much as Marco Rubio is now. "But the independence that Cuba achieved by the Spanish-American War," as Russell wrote, "was that of obeying the US instead of Spain." 

As Anatole France puts it in The White Stone (1905)—a book that contains some of his finest polemics against colonialism—far from "liberating" Cuba from Spain, the U.S. "reduced" the island to "the state of a vassal republic." As Edgar Lee Masters adds, in his book The New Star Chamber: "the American people beheld the United States move up and occupy the place vacated by Spain"—stepping into the shoes of the very tyranny from which they has just proposed to "liberate" the Cuban people.

Earlier generations would have had no trouble recognizing this for the bald-faced robbery it is—however dressed up in may appear in the forms of law. 

As James Russell Lowell's Hosea Biglow said of the Mexican-American war: 

... here we air ascrougin' 'em out o' thir own dominions,

Ashelterin' 'em, ez Caleb sez, under our eagle's pinions,

Wich means to take a feller up jest by the slack o' 's trowsis

An' walk him Spanish clean right out o' all his homes an' houses;

Or as William Vaughn Moody wrote of the Spanish-American war: 

'T was only yesterday sick Cuba's cry

Came up the tropic wind, "Now help us, for we die!"

[...] We charge you, ye who lead us,

Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain!

Turn not their new-world victories to gain!

[...] Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity!

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.