Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

For the last thirty years the story had always been, “We have to defend ourselves against Cuba because it’s an outpost of the Russians.” Okay, all of a sudden the Russians weren’t there anymore—so what happens? All of a sudden it turned out that we really had Cuba under an embargo because of our love for democracy and human rights, not because they’re an outpost of Communism about to destroy us—now it turns out that’s why we have to keep torturing them—and nobody in the American press even questions this development. The propaganda system didn’t skip a beat: check back and try to find anybody who even noticed this little curiosity. Then in 1992, a liberal Democrat, Robert Torricelli, pushed a bill through Congress called the Cuban Democracy Act, which made the embargo still tighter—it forbids foreign-based U.S. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba, it allows seizure of cargo from foreign ships that trade with Cuba if they enter U.S. waters, and so on. In fact, this proposal by the liberal Democrat Torricelli was so obviously in conflict with international law that George Bush himself even vetoed it—until he was out-flanked from the right during the Presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, and finally agreed to accept it. Well, the so-called “Cuban Democracy Act” was immediately denounced by I think every major U.S. ally. At the U.N., the entire world condemned it, with the exception of two countries—the United States and Israel; the New York Times apparently never discovered ...