The fangs of the US Empire are now being bared against not only the Cuban people but also against the American people. The Empire has issued subpoenas to two American citizens — Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, and Hasan Piker requiring them to provide Empire officials with detailed information about a trip that Benjamin and Piker recently took to Cuba.
The purpose of their trip? To assist the Cuban people, who the Empire has targeted with death and suffering as part of the Empire’s six-decade-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual effort at securing regime change on the island. The Empire wants to replace Cuba’s communist regime, which the Empire claims is a grave threat to US “national security,” with a pro-US dictatorship that will do the bidding of the Empire, much like the Fulgencio Batista regime that Cuban revolutionaries succeeded in ousting from power since 1959.
The US national-security establishment has never forgiven the Cuban people for doing that. It has also never forgiven them for installing a regime that declared its independence from US imperial control. Ever since, the Empire has targeted the Cuban people with a ruthless and brutal economic embargo that targets the Cuban people with death by starvation and illness and severe economic impoverishment in the hopes that they will some day rise up in a violent revolution against Cuba’s communist regime.
Why are Empire officials targeting Piker and Benjamin? Because the two of them have supposedly violated the beloved six-decade-old U.S economic embargo by traveling to Cuba and bringing supplies to the Cuban people in a desperate attempt to help Cubans survive rather than die at the hands of the US Empire.
In other words, the ruthless and vicious fangs of the US Empire are turning both outward toward the Cuban people and inward toward the American people.
American citizens, who have long passively accepted the US embargo against Cuba, have witnessed the Empire’s fangs against Cubans, but Americans have rarely recognized that the fangs have also always existed against American citizens. That’s because most Americans have passively accepted the Empire’s orders not to travel to Cuba and spend their money there. The decision by Piker and Benjamin to supposedly violate the Empire’s beloved embargo has now caused the Empire to bare its fangs inward for all Americans to see.
Of course, the federal subpoenas are not a federal criminal indictment, but that could still come at any time. But the subpoenas are a message that reminds every American citizen: “We are your masters and you are our serfs. You will not travel where we tell you not to travel. You will not spend your money where we tell you not to spend your money. You will not help people who we are targeting for death, suffering, and impoverishment. You will do as you are told, or we will punish you.”
Empire officials know that Benjamin and Piker must now secure lawyers to advise them on how to proceed. Lawyers cost money — big money. If Benjamin and Piker decide to respond to the Empire’s questions, US officials will scour their testimony in the hopes of finding them lying on any point, thereby enabling them to indict them for perjury. Even if they choose not to answer the Empire’s questions, on the basis of the Fifth Amendment, the Empire can still indict them for violating the Empire’s beloved embargo and blockade.
This is what I have been maintaining for decades: that the US embargo against Cuba is not only an illegitimate act of state-sponsored terrorism against the Cuban populace but also constitutes the destruction of the fundamental rights of the American people of economic liberty, freedom of travel, private property, freedom of trade, liberty of contract, and freedom of association.
The Empire’s actions against Benjamin and Piker reminds us of what the Empire did to American citizen Bert Sacks. He committed the audacious “crime” of violating the Empire’s beloved sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which were killing, by design, tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens, especially children, in an unsuccessful attempt at regime change. Motivated by a crisis of conscience, Sacks did the same things that Benjamin and Piker supposedly have done. He traveled to Iraq with medicines and other essential items to help the Iraqi people survive the ruthless and vicious actions of the US Empire.
Empire officials went nuts over Sacks’s audacity. They fined him $10,000 and then went after him with an Ahab-like obsession to collect the money. To his everlasting heroic credit, Sacks refused to pay and refused to permit the money from being forcibly taken from him. After years of obsessive, malicious, ruthless, and vicious misconduct on the part of the Empire against Sacks, they never collected a dime from him. See my 2012 essay “Bert Sacks; A Hero in Our Time.”
It will be interesting to see how Benjamin and Piker end up faring under this same vicious and brutal Empire.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.