Below is the edited text of speech given by SAM McGILL at ‘End sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela’ public meeting at Bolivar Hall in London 17 February 2023
This year marks 200 years since the inception of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’, the warning given by US President James Monroe to the European powers to recognise the whole of the Americas as lying within the United States’ sphere of interest. Ever since it has been elevated to a universal law of imperialist order.
The Monroe Doctrine heralded a new phase in the exploitation of Latin America and the Caribbean: from the slavery and genocide of European colonialism to the massacres, coups and immiseration of US domination, bleeding dry the open veins of Latin America in the name of ‘liberty’.
President Theodore Roosevelt used it to proclaim the right of the US to exercise ‘international police power’ and justify sending US Marines south of the border. Santo Domingo (Domincan Republic), Nicaragua and Haiti soon saw the reality of US missions ‘protecting’ them from European intervention.
February 2023 marks another significant anniversary: 125 years since the deliberate sinking of the USS Maine in Havana, igniting the Spanish-American war. The US hoped that the prediction of the 19th-century US President John Quincy Adams would come true – that following Spain’s defeat, Cuba would gravitate towards the US for annexation like ‘an apple severed from its native tree’. The invasion and political subjugation of Cuba soon followed. Neighbouring Puerto Rico has remained colonised ever since.
Now as then, the Monroe Doctrine is about political and economic control. Referring to Venezuela, Mike Pompeo recalled of his time as US Secretary of State that ‘we could not tolerate a nation just 1,400 miles from Florida rolling out the welcome mat for Russia, China, Iran, Cuba in a century-old violation of the Monroe Doctrine’. Domination of Latin America and the Caribbean remains a foundation of US imperialism.
Imperialist plunder
As the head of US Southern Command Laura Richardson remarked only last July, the Latin American continent is ‘off the charts rich… 60% of the world’s lithium is in the region… heavy crude… light sweet crude…rare earth elements…the Amazon’. You can almost see the dollar signs in her eyes. No resistance to US plunder is permitted. They overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 for daring to expropriate land stolen by the United Fruit company; they orchestrated, armed and funded more than a decade of Contra war in Nicaragua following the 1979 revolution; they invaded Grenada in 1983 following the assassination of Maurice Bishop, who had declared ‘they like to talk a lot about backyard and frontyard and lake — well, Grenada ain’t nobody’s backyard, and ain’t part of nobody’s lake!’ The list goes on, including the state terror conducted through Operation Condor from 1975 onwards, the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador and the 1989 invasion of Panama.
Britain has always been entirely complicit in the plunder. As Eduardo Galeano wrote: ‘Industrial exports, freightage, insurance, interest on loans, and profits on investments fed British prosperity. The British economy paid with cotton textiles for the hides of Rio de la Plata, the guano and nitrates of Peru, the copper of Chile, the sugar of Cuba, the coffee of Brazil.’ British buccaneers of the highest order attempted to capture Cuba, with the Royal Navy invading Guantanamo as early as 1760, attacking Santiago and laying siege to Havana: they only relinquished their claim on the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ in exchange for a piece of Florida. Following independence in 1811, the British empire attempted to push back Venezuela’s borders in order to extend the territory of what was then British Guiana. Later the Vesteys, one of Britain’s wealthiest aristocratic families, acquired cattle ranches in Venezuela and Brazil, driving land clearances and ethnic cleansing.
Since the 1960s, Britain has conducted covert operations in Chile, Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador, whilst the British embassy in Havana has long operated as a proxy for covert US operations against Cuba. In recent years a shadowy ‘Venezuela reconstruction unit’ has operated out of the British Foreign Office. In the last 15 years, successive British governments have recognised reactionary coups in Honduras, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru whilst the Bank of England has stolen and continues to sequester in its vaults in nearly $2bn of Venezuelan gold. They are the real pirates of the Caribbean.
Radical resistance
Against this bloody history stands a proud tradition of resistance: from the sixteenth century uprisings against Spanish colonialism by indigenous leaders such as Tupac Amaru and Guaicaipuro, to the revolutionary independence movements of José Marti, Simon Bolivar and Toussaint Louverture three hundred years, to the achivements of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chavez and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, Latin America continues to be a beacon of resistance.
For over 60 years the Cuban revolution has dared to construct a socialist society less than 90 miles from US shores: Quincy Adam’s apple has defied gravity. Withstanding invasion, sabotage, terrorism, biological warfare and a sustained economic blockade, Cuba continues to show that socialism is the only system that can provide for humanity.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has ploughed oil revenues into housing, healthcare, education and social missions. For this crime the Venezuelan people have faced down coups, mercenary attacks and a blockade which UN special rapporteurs have likened to a medieval siege. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas have defied imperialist sanctions and destabilisation, pushing forward with social programmes and ecological development.
No wonder the United States categorises these countries as a threat to its national security. By prioritising people over profit and maintaining a principled anti-imperialist stance, these revolutionary nations are indeed a threat to the US and Britain; the threat of a good example – of the alternative offered by socialism to a world where the top 1% capture 20 times as much global wealth as the poorest half of humanity and one person dies every four seconds from hunger or lack of medicine.
