Believe it or not, the Bush regime has developed a plan to occupy and rule Cuba, before or after Fidel Castro leaves office. It is an Alice In Wonderland scheme, a dreamscape of the corporate mind overlaid with fantasies of armchair reactionary warriors and bitter Miami exiles.

The plan was concocted by something called the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba – a “free” Cuba meaning one that is overrun and occupied by the United States. The U.S. did that once before, in 1898, interrupting a revolution against Spanish rule with an invasion of U.S. troops. The Americans did not leave before imposing a treaty on Cuba that gave the United States permanent control of Guantanamo Bay. “Gitmo,” as it’s called in military parlance, now epitomizes torture and state lawlessness – America’s heritage in Cuba.

When the U.S. military left most of Cuba, its gangsters moved in, creating a criminal’s paradise – another American gift to the Cuban people. Lots of Cubans were involved in the colonization of Cuba by Myer Lansky and other American criminals. They live in Miami now. During the U.S. military occupation and later corporate and criminal penetration of the island, American Jim Crow practices flourished. Southern whites flooded Cuba, bringing with them their peculiar American outlook on race. Segregation, American-style, became Cuban practice. When Fidel Castro’s revolution triumphed, half of Cuba’s white population left, unwilling to face the prospect of a government that would include substantial numbers of black and brown people. They wound up in Miami, which consequently earned the distinction of having the most racist and reactionary Latino population in the United States.

These dregs of the previous Cuban society are key to the Bush regime’s plan for a new Cuba, following a U.S. invasion. The exiles are to be the point men for privatization of Cuba’s economy. In a proposal that would be laughable if it were not so profoundly evil, the Bush regime plans to revamp Cuba’s health care system, which is the envy of the developing world, an exporter of tens of thousands of doctors and tons of medicine. Imagine – the United States, which has no health care system worthy of name, has the gall to propose a revamp of Cuban health care.

As I said, the Bush regime’s commission on Cuba is consumed by fantasy, but when a superpower fantasizes, things gets serious. The commission urges that funds be directed to Afro-Cubans, who it believes are disaffected from the Cuban government. I have been to Cuba, twice. In the cities of Santiago and Guantanamo, the cradles of the 1878 revolution, the 1898 revolution, and the revolution that triumphed on New Years Day, 1959, the populations are Black, the governments are Black, and the communist party is entirely Black. But the Bush men, in their wild fantasies, would bring back the racist Miami exiles to establish a new regime in Cuba, and somehow imagine that Black Cubans would be their allies.  These people are crazy. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.