Reflections on the North East Gate of Gitmo

Obama and US Foreign Policy

Vincent J. Curtis                                                                             


 5 November 2008

            Throughout the election campaign, President-elect Obama claimed that he could make the world love America again.  All it will take is his charm, his personality, his rhetoric, his policies, and his inspirational leadership in the White House and America will be admired again by the world, unless you happen to be one of America’s partners in NAFTA.

From Ahmadinejad of Iran, to Kim Jong Il of North Korea, to Chavez of Venezuela, he said he can soften the hard hearts of dictators, despots, and tyrants as President Bush and other conservative Republicans cannot.  To the democratically elected president of Columbia, Uribe, however, he maintains a hardened heart.

As senator, Obama gave a remarkable speech in February in which he said, in effect, that the world would be a safer place if America stopped developing and deploying new weapons, and he became president.

            A tour of the north-east gate of Naval Station Guantanamo, and a little reflection, will quickly disabuse a thoughtful person of such possibilities.

            The north-east gate of Gitmo is the only land connection between the naval station and the socialist paradise of Cuba.  It is the final check point of the cold war.  Here you will see the watch towers, the armed guards, the wire, and the defenses.  Tension at this control point remains high.

            American forces on Gitmo pose no military threat to the Cuban regime, and the Cuban leadership is undoubtedly aware of this.   At the same time, it would be suicidal for the Cuban regime to attack Gitmo.  So why does Cuba still maintain a threatening posture?

            Anybody who understands the costs of military activity knows how expensive it is for the Cuban regime to keep tensions high.  The poor Cuban taxpayer and the straitened Cuban economy are forking over a lot of money for the regime to keep up the pressure; money that could be well spent improving the general welfare of the Cuban people.  Yet the Cuban regime persists, decade after decade, and president after president, Republican or Democrat.  Why?

            The answer is that the Castro regime needs justification to keep the Cuban people repressed.  While Fidel Castro may seem to be popular, he and his brother Raul, being tyrants, cannot trust anyone very much.  The Castro regime has to keep the Cuban people looking over their shoulders so that they won’t conspire and combine against it.  A near state of war against America provides justification for the activities of the secret police and for the sacrifices in money and freedom the Cuban people have made, apparently to defend themselves and their revolution, but really to protect Castro’s life and position as head of the Cuban state.

            But Cuba is a specific example of a general phenomenon.  The internal dynamics of tyrannies and despotisms make it necessary that a state of tension be maintained between these states and their neighbors; and between these states and the United States, since the hyperpower is the most convenient scapegoat in the world.  Maintaining a state of tension with foreign countries serves to protect the tyrant or the despot at home.  Tension abroad justifies intrusive security at home.

            Natan Sharansky, former Russian dissident and a former minister in the Israeli government, devoted his book The Case for Democracy to analysis of this phenomenon.  It was this book that encouraged President Bush to attempt to democratize Iraq after the war of 2003.

The situation at Gitmo with Cuba, it turns out, is but a specific example of the general case.  If the demon power wasn’t the United States, it would be Great Britain, or Israel.  Tyrants and despots need to maintain a tension at home akin to a war footing to protect their own lives, and in Cuba tension with the United States justifies the pressure at home.

            Since the tyrant and the despot fear a reduction in tension with the United States, the likelihood that a new personality in the White House will cause them to change their rhetoric or their policies against America is nil.  They fear for their own lives too much.

            The personality in the White House has little to do with whether America is liked or not by the rest of the world.  No president in recent years was more affable and more liberally forthcoming on the international arena than the Democrat centralist Bill Clinton.  Yet his liberality saw the rise of al-Qaeda, with all its acts of terrorism against America before 9/11.  His charm failed to create a Palestinian state; and his affability failed to stem the rise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.  The French regime of Jacques Chirac remained unmoved by the centrality of his politics, also for domestic reasons.

If personalities as widely different as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush cannot make the Syrians, the North Koreans and the Iranians love America, whose can?

            It is understandable that Americans want to be liked in the world, and to a certain extent they expect to be.  Yet widely, they are not.  The internal dynamics of many foreign states cannot permit their regimes to have good relations with the United States; in fact it is necessary to the survival of the regime that bad relations exist between the tyrant’s country and America.

            For that reason, no candidate with an ounce of understanding of the ways of the world can responsibly say that with his (or her) charming personality in the White House American relations with the rest of the world will be changed for the better.  America is not the only country in the world with domestic interests.  The proof of this will come when the Castro regime falls utterly, and a new regime takes its place.

The next Cuban regime will have to justify its existence by rapidly improving the economy of Cuba, as Raul Castro is already trying to do.  For that, better relations with America will be needed.  So no matter how crusty the American president happens to be, relations between Cuba and America will improve and tensions here will relax.

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Vincent J. Curtis is a free lance writer, and has written on military affairs for many years.  He toured the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January, 2008.

2011 update:  This piece was based on a piece written in February, 2008, entitled: "Reflections on the North East Gate."  Neither that piece nor this adaptation above, though offered, were ever published.  However, the recent troubles beginning to be reported in Cuba make posting of these thoughts worthwhile.