Brainwashed
by Caroline McSherry

I sat uneasily in a lush briefing room in the US interests office in Havana. Half listening to Larry and Jim prattle on, my eyes wandered away from Larry's face, up to the intimidating iron beak of the enormous bald eagle that hung on the wall over my head, and then back again to Larry. A scene from Return of the Jedi crept into my thoughts as I struggled to focus on Larry1s words. I remember only one short scene from the movie that felt scary to me. Princess Lea waits in a cell, powerless to resist her fate: brainwashing by the Imperial Forces. Some people in the room were angry at Larry and Jim, I felt more of an odd mix of pity and disgusted frustration.

Larry and Jim are U.S. Americans who work for the United States government in Havana. The US Interests Section functions like an embassy and is the largest foreign diplomatic body in Cuba. As Larry and Jim explained, their job in Cuba is twofold. First, they keep the State Department up to date on the situation in Cuba, which means offering their perspective on a variety of issues of interest to the United States, including the state of human rights, Castro1s well being, popular opinion and restrictions on freedom of expression. Second, they must carry out the law as directed by the US Congress, which means, in Larry1s own words, supporting the Embargo. Cyclic?

Larry and Jim offered a well-practiced defense of their involvement with anti-Castro groups in their country. Although Jim and Larry both adamantly assure us that there is no covert cooperation between their embassy and the counter-Revolutionary groups, they do offer moral support. They also supply books and magazines to the appropriate groups in order to disable the so-called 3internal embargo,2 which prohibits people from getting CNN in their homes. Apparently CNN is emblematic of a free press.

Larry and Jim must inform Washington about their continued support for the embargo, and their dialogue with virulently anti-Castro groups surely provides them with excellent fodder. On the other hand, neither of the men are able to deal with an opposing viewpoint, a range of ideas so antithetical to their sense of purpose in the world. Larry and Jim refuse to hear Cubans who are proud of their Revolution, which for them is both humanizing and liberating. One Cuban we interviewed explained that before the Cuban Revolution, he and his people were not recognized as human beings by Batista and other leaders who controlled Cuba. Women died in childbirth for want of an accessible clinic. The poor hardly merited physical or spiritual sustenance, not food, not education, much less their own voice. If nothing else, the Revolution recognized the fundamental worth of the lives of the poor and oppressed. Larry and Jim laughed at the absurd prospect that we might actually put faith in this version of the Revolution. Larry and Jim deny the Cuban populace the ability to perceive, to reason, and to think critically. They perpetuate the pre-Revolutionary regime1s vicious refusal to admit the humanity of their hosts.

With no real legal or moral space for criticism of the blockade, the fundamental irony of their lives in Cuba appears lost on the two men. The blockade was implemented forty years ago in the name of Democracy and Freedom. The idea was to force Castro1s government into submission by starving it of supplies and markets. Who could question that the Cuban people should be free to live in a capitalist democracy? It does not take much to see that beneath the rhetoric, what this plan really involves is strangling, not the Cuban government, but the Cuban people. Strangling them to a point where they will be forced to demand the removal of their own government and its replacement by something more democratic. Something that will meet with the approval of the United States. According to this mindset, the Cuban people must choose this different government in order for them to be truly free. 
Use of the word embargo is tragically misleading because it is so easy to minimize the implied violence of the term. The blockade prevents basic necessities such as food, medicine, housing materials, and oil from entering the country. It is true that the United States cannot legally prevent Cuba from trading with other countries, however our status as the world1s largest market allows us to effectively do just that. Ships that dock in Cuban harbors are not allowed to come to US waters for six months after their Cuban docking. Few businesspeople are willing to pass by the overgrown North American market for a tiny country with almost no money to offer. Those goods that do reach Cuba come at a severely inflated cost, which Cubans can ill afford.

I can not truly conceive of the painful, nonsensical, and yet very real consequences that far reaching US control of resources creates for Cubans. Watching Larry and Jim, well dressed, dignified, and inscrutable, I felt angry at myself and my own roots, trapped by my inability to do anything for, or even to truly empathize with those Cubans who suffer and are powerless in the face of this oppression whose roots are so intricately and inextricably a part of my own. My ability to reason and then my emotional instincts shut down when I learned that the Thai company that manufactures pacemakers for Cubans was purchased by a North American conglomerate and that they would no longer be available for Cubans who depended on them. What could I do with the knowledge that hundreds of children had recently died of dengue fever while their parents struggled vainly to get the needed medication from the United States, medication which I could have obtained easily had I been stricken with the disease? One Cuban doctor told me that she often does not tell her patients about medicines and technologies that would help them because the pointless knowledge of their existence would only complicate Cuba1s suffering.

We make ourselves blind to our own savage need to dominate. We need to justify ourselves as the richest and most powerful people in the world, and we unabashedly employ the rhetoric of democracy for this purpose. When relating to other countries, democracy implies to us nothing about universal human dignity and freedom, but rather indicates a system that we can comprehend and relate to, and therefore control.  At some level of our consciousness, we seem to automatically disallow any testimony that challenges our belief that capitalism is uniquely fair, inherent in human nature, and ultimately inevitable. In other countries, we enforce humiliating and farcical elections in order to disguise our own assertion of control. Even the well-intentioned presence of former president Jimmy Carter at many of these events evidences an imposition at many levels of our own sense of justice upon other peoples.  The notion that we in the United States are somehow objective, detached and able to arbitrate legitimately reconfirms our long held belief that the rest of the world would happily benefit from falling into our sphere of influence.
Our blockade against Cuba is nothing more than a power struggle. If we win, and force Cubans to give up their sovereignty and allow themselves to be swept away in the free markets, then democracy and freedom will have been decidedly lost.

Brainwashing is not a quick, physical act inflicted upon a good person against his or her will as I imagined it to be when I was young. Rather it involves an infinite array of complex motivations, perceptions, misinformation and lack of information, and underlying it all, a seemingly overpowering need for self-justification. Surely all of us have at times refused to see the reality that faces us when it is inconvenient to our preconceptions. By choosing not to admit to our own depravity in maintaining the blockade, we deny Cubans and US Americans the freedom to interact and engage each other.  We keep ourselves chained to our own fear of a challenge to our hegemony. Perhaps we are vaguely aware that behind the screen of our fear, lies the source of a real and violent wrong, a corruption too painful to acknowledge, especially to our selves. We are complicit in our own brainwashing. A willingness to critically examine our assumptions and our policies could be the beginning of new and radically liberating changes for us all.