Rekha Chandiramani

The most honest statement ever made about Cuba policy came from a State Department memo in 1960, written before the sanctions were fully implemented. The memo, written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory, stated that the U.S. should pursue a policy to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of the Cuban government. Not: respond to "Cuban repression." Not: protect Cuban human rights. Not: promote democracy. Hunger. Desperation. Overthrow. This memo is declassified. It is in the historical record. It is not disputed. It means that every subsequent year of sanctions, every subsequent citation of Cuban poverty and dysfunction as evidence of socialist failure, every subsequent American official expressing concern for the welfare of the Cuban people: All of it happened downstream of a documented decision to deliberately produce hunger and desperation in that population. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a declassified government document. The conspiracy was the policy. The theory was written in plain English by an American official in 1960 and has been implemented faithfully for 66 years since. What they wanted to prove, they engineered the conditions to prove. And then they called it evidence.