The United States has never failed to marginalize its own Caribbean culture while at the same time using its military and financial strength to serve as a divisive and coercive malignant influence throughout the entire Caribbean region.
The Barack Obama administration has done little to alter the general Caribbean view of the United States as a patronizing bully that sees the Caribbean as a region to invest heavily for the benefit of U.S. travel and hotel businesses while at the same time encroaching on Caribbean sovereignty by claiming the region is menaced by drug dealers and terrorists.
The United States, rather than embrace its own Caribbean cultures in the Florida Keys and New Orleans and its surrounding bayou country, has adopted a policy of treating the Caribbean as a «soft underbelly» of the United States where the only things that matter are a constant military presence and an assurance that the nations of the region follow the United States foreign policy lines and maintain the financial status quo that permits wealthy American businessmen like Mitt Romney to hide their assets from the U.S. tax man…
The decades-long embargo of Cuba, the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic and the 1989 invasion of Panama, the covert 1980s CIA war against Nicaragua, the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 2009 coup in Honduras, and constant U.S. interference in the affairs of the nations of the region, particularly Haiti, all serve as reminders of why it’s past time for the United States to disengage from the Caribbean if it cannot learn to respect Caribbean culture and live with it.
The United States turned Guantanamo Bay into a place that will be forever known as an American gulag in the Caribbean where torture was and may still be the rule rather than the exception.
The United States is a malignant influence in what should be the most tranquil region of the world. Caribbean culture is marked by its care-free life style and not the anal-retentive bullying culture of the United States. Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Vieques, Culebra, Andros Island, Aruba, Curacao, Guantanamo Bay, and even the Caribbean Florida Keys should see an evacuation of U.S. military and security elements.
It’s way past time for the Caribbean to free of the North American oppressors and that includes Caribbean islands from Key Largo to the Leeward Islands where U.S. cancerous tumors known as FBI field offices and naval and coast guard facilities are reminders of the general harm that the United States has brought and continues to bring to a region that should be a zone of peace and tranquility.
The United States seeks to exercise control over the Caribbean through the Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered across the street from the White House in Washington, DC, and through the military jurisdiction of the U.S. Southern Command based in Miami.
However, Caribbean nations understand that the United States does not have their best interests in mind through contrivances like the OAS and, instead, are joining up with alternative organizations run by and for the peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America, for example, the Union of South American States (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CECAM).
The United States’ treatment of its Cajun and Creole Caribbean populations of southern Louisiana – witnessed with the total disregard of these groups in hurricane Katrina and in the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon ecocide — and the 1982 imposition of an interior U.S. border checkpoint north of Key Largo where U.S. citizens and visitors from the Keys were required to prove their citizenship before passing into southern Florida, shows a complete lack of respect for Caribbean peoples by Washington.
The 1982 Keys incident led to the proclamation of the Conch Republic by residents of the Keys who believed that if they were to be treated like foreigners, they would become foreigners. Some Key West residents are descendants of white Europeans and Africans who moved to the island from Abaco island in the Bahamas, which makes Key West a Caribbean island with an indigenous population.
Similarly, the native populations of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are Caribbean peoples and should be free of the colonial masters who rule them from Washington and Miami.
The United States has sat by idly and watched its NATO allies, Britain, France, and the Netherlands, re-impose colonialism on the Caribbean territories of the Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Curacao, Sint Maarten, and Bonaire, among others.
Britain abolished the elected government of the Turks and Caicos and imposed direct rule from London. Last May, it was discovered that the Intelligence Service Curaçao (VDC) was routinely wiretapping Curacao government officials and private citizens, including Prime Minister Gerrit Schotte.
[The] VDC is an adjunct of the Netherlands signals intelligence agency, the Nationale SIGINT Organisatie (NSO), which, in turn, provides its communications surveillance «catch» to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
After Schotte discovered he and others were being wiretapped by the VDC and NSO, he and his government were dismissed by the Dutch-appointed governor.
The pro-Dutch Justice Minister of Sint Maarten, Roland Duncan, ordered the telecommunications firm United Telecommunication Services (UTS) not to disclose any information about wiretapping operations on Sint Marten to a Curacao parliamentary inquiry into the illegal surveillance.
The Curaco inquiry was led by Curaçao Parliament Chairman Ivar Asjes. The wiretapping in the Dutch colonies was colonialism at its worst and colonialism with an obvious American surveillance stench about it.
The United States has been quietly urging the governments of the Caribbean to increase their wiretapping operations, even though such a move would violate constitutional guarantees of privacy. There has been fierce opposition to such increased surveillance in Antighua and Barbuda and St. Kitts and Nevis.
The situation in Colombia, where the government of President Alvaro Uribe conducted a massive illegal surveillance operation – with more than a wink and a nod from Washington – serves as an example of Washington’s long-range plans for the Caribbean – to turn the entire region into an expanded Guantanamo Bay , an Orwellian «paradise.»
The Caribbean, from Key West and the Bahamas to Barbados and the San Andres islands, occupied by Colombia, should reject all proposal from Washington that would change the character and very essence of the Caribbean.
Recently re-elected President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has signaled his desire to help move Caribbean and Latin American nations further away from the United States, its NATO lackeys, and Israel. Israeli and American diplomats have traveled widely throughout the Caribbean and warned the small island states against recognizing Palestine or supporting its initiatives in the United Nations.
The small states, which are reliant on tourism, were told of the consequences of their support for Palestine: they could say goodbye to Jewish tourists and visits from Jewish-owned cruise ships. Caribbean governments are well-versed on the extortionist tactics of the dastardly duo of Washington and Tel Aviv.
The Caribbean must undergo a renaissance and transform itself into a region free of the contrivances brewed up in the policy cauldrons in Washington. A paradise on earth deserves total freedom from American neo-colonialism whether it comes in the form of the military, law enforcement, democracy training, spies, or American trash culture and genetically-modified harmful food products.
Wayne Madsen, Strategic Culture Foundation http://www.strategic-culture.org