The Real Reason U.S. Wants To Crush Cuba! w/ Christian Parenti
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, come see me on tour. We'll be in Burbank, California, August 30th with a live celebrity panel show. And then September 18th through the 20th in Chicago, Illinois and Rosemont, Illinois.
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and jumps the medium and hits them head on. It's the Jimmy Dore Show.
We got a special guest with us, Christian Parenti is here with us. He's an investigative journalist, academic, and the author of several books, including Lockdown America, Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, and Radical Hamilton, Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder. He's reported from various locations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and China. His work has been featured in an HBO documentary titled Fixer, The Taking of Ajo. Oh, I can't say that name.
Ajmal Naqshbandi.
Nice. Currently, he is a professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Welcome back to the show, Christian Parenti. Hello, Christian. How are you?
Hello, Jimmy. I'm well, thank you. Great to be here. Good to see you.
So you wrote... I don't know anything about Cuba except what I saw in The Godfather. But you do. You wrote this article most recently in Covert Action magazine. And it's entitled Cuba's Real Crime in the Minds of American Elites. And let me just read a little bit of it. In the eyes of American policy elites, Cuba's most unforgivable crime is not even its socialism, which is now badly frayed, but rather its sovereignty. Cuba's persistent independence and oppositional survival as a state in an American imperial is an American imperial humiliation. So tell me, what are you saying there?
Well,
Cuba has, you know, Cuba occupies a special place in the imagination of the blob, the U.S. foreign policy establishment. And it's hard to say, as the left and supporters of Cuba used to say, that, you know, America... hated Cuba because Cuba was socialist and Cuba showed that socialist experiments in which there was, you know, nationalization of that is to say confiscation of privately held American companies and
What is Christian Parenti's thesis on why the U.S. is intensifying pressure on Cuba?
and turning them into public property owned by the state of Cuba and or by the workers of the establishments, that this was the crime that so offended the elites. But the fact of the matter is that Cuba has, for a long time now, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, been moving towards a mixed economy, moving towards capitalism. It has been liberalizing its rules, backing off of centrally planned economics allowing private ownership of the means of production, that is to say private ownership of businesses. This has been going on since the early 90s. At this point, as I lay out in the article, it's like 55 percent of all retail is private. Cuba has a workforce of 4 million, 1.6 million of those workers are employed by private employers.
there have been from since the beginning of this liberalization of the cuban economy in the early 90s uh the united states has prevented American businesses from being involved. But there have been Canadian, Mexican, Spanish, Italian companies in there since the early 90s. Recent pressure by the Trump administration is forcing many of these firms out. For example, Sherritt is a big Canadian nickel and cobalt miner in Cuba, and they have been forced out by the expansion of sanctions under the trump administration so this new threat against cuba by the trump administration what i'm trying to do in this article is think about what is this about why are they so hell-bent on crushing Cuba, even though Cuba is open for business.
Its original crime, i.e. socialism, is really very, very badly frayed, right? And they have, right after the publication of this article, they passed another law in Cuba that liberalized even further. And now, really, in many ways, the only barrier that American capitalists face in investing in Cuba is the American government. So why is the Trump administration after Cuba? I think it has to do with the fact that Cuba... is still sovereign, and that the Cuban Revolution has humiliated the Central Intelligence Agency and the US defense establishment, and that this is too much, and that it's still, even as it has largely abandoned socialism, it still stands as some sort of symbol
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–2:41
2
What is Christian Parenti's thesis on why the U.S. is intensifying pressure on Cuba?
2:41–19:09
3
How has Cuba’s economy changed since the 1990s and why does Parenti say socialism is 'frayed'?
19:09–28:59
4
Why does Parenti argue U.S. policy targets Cuban sovereignty rather than ideology?
28:59–34:15
5
Which CIA conflicts and intelligence operations shaped U.S.–Cuba relations historically?
34:15–59:53