Marco Rubio's State Department Resurrects McCarthyism To Further His War On Cuba And Silence Anti-War Voices.

The Trump administration its bringing McCarthyism Back.

Written By: Justin K.P.

Marco Rubio’s State Department put out a deeply disturbing report titled “Cuba: the Capital of 21st-century communism”, which explicitly calls for resurrecting McCarthy-era blacklists of the Cold War to dismantle what little is left of the anti-war movement in the United States.

As Marco Rubio furthers his pet project of war with Cuba, he is simultaneously trying to use fear mongering about Cuba to crush the marginal anti-war left in America.

The Trump administration has been ramping up the barbaric blockade on Cuba at the behest of Marco Rubio, to, as Trump himself boasted , force a “humanitarian threat” on Cuba, causing “no oil, no money and no anything” for regular Cuban civilians in hopes it will lead to regime change.

As economist Mark Weissbrot documented earlier this year the Trump administration, “issued an executive order that threatened to impose tariffs on any country in the world that dared to export oil or petroleum products to Cuba” and the “U.S. blockaded oil from Venezuela, Cuba’s largest supplier,” noting that “The collapse of oil imports has had immediate and life-threatening effects. More than 80 percent of Cuba’s electricity is generated from oil. Blackouts have already increased dramatically as capacity has fallen. Hospitals, health services and pharmaceutical availability have been disrupted; the UN High Commissioner for human rights has warned of ‘an increasingly severe impact on the human rights of the people of Cuba’ from loss of water delivery—including drinking water and sanitation. Even the delivery of aid shipments is disrupted due to the lack of fuel—causing widespread food shortages and rising food prices.”

Among other things, the blockade has prevented cancer treatment for children because due to the blockade, “Pediatric oncology patients—and oncology patients in general—have a different diet than the rest of the population. They have different needs. Now it’s more difficult to access that food. Some have family members abroad and perhaps received some assistance, which made their lives a little more bearable within the hospital setting. But now even that’s not available. Everywhere you look, there’s an additional complication on top of what we already had,” as the head of pediatric oncology at Cuba’s National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology, Dr. Forteza Saéz, has said.

Even the Wall Street Journal has acknowledgedthat because of the U.S. blockade on Cuba, “Children are being sent home from school early, people can barely afford basic food like milk and chicken, and long lines have sprung up at gas stations. Cuba’s crucial tourism industry is paralyzed. Some popular hotels, crippled by ongoing blackouts, have begun to shut down, ferrying remaining guests to other lodging”, and “The Caribbean island’s Communist authorities are rationing dwindling fuel supplies, curtailing public transportation and furloughing workers”.

At the same time, the Trump administration has been laying the groundwork for a U.S. war with Cuba, including by issuing a bogus indictment against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro as a pretext for military intervention.

Rubio has even apparently lied to Trump about carrying out talks with Cuba in order to justify the continuation of the blockade.

In February, Drop Site News reported :

All the evidence would seem to suggest that the opportunity for Trump to strike a historic deal is at hand. But, despite the president’s claims, there are and have been no negotiations involving high-level officials between Havana and Washington, according to five Cuban and American officials, all of whom asked for anonymity given the sensitivity of the Cuba-U.S. relationship.

When it comes to Trump’s claims of those talks, it turns out he isn’t lying. Instead, sources tell Drop Site, he’s being lied to. “He’s saying that because that’s what Marco is telling him,” said a senior Trump official, referring to an internal effort by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make Trump believe that the U.S. and Cuba are engaged in serious negotiations without ever doing so. The idea, the source said, is that in a few weeks or months, Rubio will be able to claim that the talks were futile because of Cuban intransigence. With diplomatic off-ramps being blocked, this would make Rubio’s vision of regime change the only path forward for an administration loath to reverse course on anything.

Rubio is hell-bent on war with Cuba in part because “Cuban Americans are a powerful voting bloc in South Florida, and that community has long advocated for the downfall of the regime. If Rubio were the one to pull it off, it would help make him a Republican front-runner in future elections,” as Bloomberg noted.

Rubio’s Strangelovian report recently put out has two purposes: to manufacture consent for war with Cuba, and to resurrect McCarthy hearings against anti-war activists.

The paper absurdly claims that “For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history” and that “the Cubans perfected a new model for a long war of attrition, organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.”

This is a clear attempt from Rubio to manufacture consent for a war with Cuba, and make it seem like Cuba is an enemy and attacking America, when in reality “Cuban leaders …have said they are open to negotiations on everything from human rights to democracy to tourism and direct foreign investment” as Drop Site noted- partly to curry favour with the Cuban diaspora in America which wants to use U.S. foreign policy for their political grievances in Cuba.

Aside from attempting to manufacture consent for war with Cuba, the paper is a launching point for restarting the McCarthy hearings and blacklists in America.

The paper explicitly endorses the “harsh government crackdowns against its domestic institutional organs – blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions, and a slate of anti-communist laws at both the state and federal levels” as ways to combat a supposed communist “campaign of subversion against the United States”.

The paper names virtually every organization engaging in anti-war activism in the United States as part of this larger “Communist plot”.

It accuses “the Democratic Socialists of America, National Lawyers Guild, CodePink, and Communist Party USA” of being part of this plot because they are “ formally committed to lobbying for an end to the U.S. embargo” on Cuba that is currently denying food and medicine for ordinary citizens.

It also names other anti-war organizations to be cracked down on, including The People’s Forum, Black Alliance for Peace and Code Pink.

It accuses the anti-war organization Code Pink of being part of the supposed “Cuban-aligned left” for opposing the barbaric U.S. siege warfare on Cuba, and accuses the DSA of having “a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime” for the same reason.

Even figures as mainstream and prominent as journalist Amy Goodman- the host of Democracy Now!, Ben Cohen -the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and playwright V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, are listed in the report as part of this supposed “Cuban influence operation” through absurd guilt by association.

The participants also listed participants in the “Nuestra América Convoy,” which attempted to bring aid to Cubans starving under Rubio’s medieval siege on the country as part of the plot, including “Hasan Piker; Amazon Labor Union founder Christian Smalls; a delegation from the Democratic and Isra Hirsi, campus activist and daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.)”.

Previously , the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued administrative subpoenas against activists who took part in the convoy bringing aid to Cuba, in what was an apparent launch of this broader Neo-McCarthyite campaign.

As Rubio continues to impose a sadistic blockade on Cuba and ramp up the campaign for war, he is seemingly using this opportunity to run a new McCarthy hearing and destroy what little is left of the anti-war left.

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