The Organization of American States (OAS) at the meeting of its General Assembly in Honduras on 2-3 June, ended its 47-year old policy of excluding Cuba, the only country in the Americas to be so excluded. The driving force in the OAS behind the attempt to isolate Cuba, as well as behind all the activity of the OAS in its 60 year history, has been US imperialism.  The US imperialists could never tolerate that the small island of Cuba, just 90 miles off the US coast, had carried out its own revolution against the hated US puppet and dictator Batista in 1959 and charted an independent course since then. Following its failed attempt to invade Cuba in 1961, the US pressured the OAS to exclude Cuba and to go along with its policy of isolating Cuba and enforcing a savage economic blockade.  However, due to the sentiments of the peoples of Latin America for Cuba, the rise of democratic movements in Latin America in recent years, and because of the principled and internationalist policy followed by the government of Cuba in the face of grave provocations, this anti-Cuba policy has become enormously unpopular in the Americas, and threatened to bring further discredit on the US.  In these circumstances, the new Obama government in the US has made a tactical adjustment in its policy, agreeing to ‘conditional’ re-entry of Cuba into the OAS, while not lifting its economic blockade or making any significant alteration in its hostile policy towards Cuba.

The President of the Cuban National Assembly termed the resolution of the OAS meet in Honduras “a major victory for Latin America and the Caribbean and also for the Cuban people”.  At the same time he made it very clear that Cuba had neither sought re-entry into the OAS nor did it have any intention of re-entering an organisation that had been complicit in the crimes of US imperialism against the countries and peoples of Latin America for decades.  As he said in no uncertain terms: “it does not alter what Cuba thought yesterday, the day before yesterday and today.”

The OAS: handmaiden of US imperialism

In Latin America since the 19th century, the deep sentiments for unity and solidarity, on the part of the peoples and of many visionaries and patriots like Jose Marti and Simon Bolivar, has had to fight right from the beginning with the drive of the United States to establish its hegemony over the whole region.  The infamous Monroe Doctrine promulgated by US President Monroe in 1823 sought to turn the whole of the Americas into the backyard of the US where its writ would run unchallenged.

With capitalism entering the stage of imperialism from the later 19th century, and particularly with the ascendancy of the US among the imperialist powers in the 20th century, the US imperialist efforts to consolidate its stranglehold over Central and Latin America and the Caribbean intensified. With the end of World War II, the US sought to rope in this vast region into its frenzied war against communism.  The Organization of American States was born in the International Conference of American States held in 1948 under the direction of the US Secretary of State George Marshall specifically to fight communism in the Americas.

The Cuban revolution of 1959, which dealt a mortal blow to US economic and political control over the island, and which placed before its people the program and perspective of building socialism, was a slap in the face of US imperialism which it has never forgiven. It organised the expulsion of Cuba from the OAS on the pretext that “adherence by any member of the Organization of American States to Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the inter-American system, and the alignment of such a government with the communist bloc breaks the unity and solidarity of the hemisphere”! It compelled all the states of Central and Latin America to go along with its mission of trying to bring Cuba to its knees through political and diplomatic isolation and economic strangulation. Such a sustained offensive of a big superpower against a small and valiant country has no other parallel in history.

Over the last six decades, the OAS has gone along with all the numerous crimes of US imperialism in the region.  Apart from the US government-sponsored coups in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, which brought bloodthirsty puppet regimes to power, and its covert “dirty war” against popular forces in Nicaragua, there were other open instances of US military and political intervention. This included the CIA-backed invasion of Guatemala in 1954, as well as the US military invasions of the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989).  American corporations had a field day looting the rich resources of the countries of the region in collaboration with the exploiting elites and sold-out regimes in them.

Rising sentiment against US imperialism

The last few years, however, have seen a significant rise in the opposition to US imperialism in its ‘backyard’. Whereas there was always a strong current of anger against US domination among the people in this region, recent years have seen the election of governments in different countries of Central and Latin America that have refused to toe the US imperialist line on various issues, and have made opposition to US hegemony part of their policy. This has been reflected among other things in the deepening of economic and political ties between many of these countries and Cuba. After for many years managing to pressure the other OAS members to break off economic links with Cuba, the US had to accept the ‘freedom’ of these countries to build economic ties, leaving the US the only country in the region to maintain its economic embargo. Similarly, whereas after Cuba’s expulsion from OAS, all the other states except Mexico broke off diplomatic ties with Cuba, now the US is the only state in the Americas not to have diplomatic ties with it. Clearly, it is US imperialism, not Cuba, which has become increasingly isolated in Latin America. Today, Cuba has relations for trade and investment and mutual development with an increasing number of countries in the region.

In these conditions, Cuba and its leader Fidel Castro have reiterated that the OAS is a ‘political corpse’ that needs to be buried once and for all. Having been born and nurtured by US imperialism as an instrument of its hegemonic control over the Western hemisphere, the Cuban government sees no role for it in building unity and progress of the countries of the region.  It has instead put forward before the peoples of Latin America the perspective of building a new unity without US imperialism.  As a recent article in Granma International put it: “Dismantling it and founding a new organization of Latin American and Caribbean countries, without the United States, would be the only way for Latin America and the Caribbean to decide their destiny without endangering their identity and making real progress toward a great united homeland.”