IN IRANIAN President Ebrahim Raeisi’s meetings with leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba during his recent three-nation tour of Latin America, the pressing and most prominent issue in discussions was resistance against United States interventionism across the world.
Latin America holds massive geopolitical significance in Iran’s foreign policy. The implications of President Raeisi’s trip extend beyond just bilateral relations. They signify a broader shift in the existing capitalist world order, with independent countries finally announcing their arrival on the big stage.
Iran’s call for a stronger resistance front against the United States – stretching from West Asia to the Western Hemisphere – resonates with millions of people in Latin America who want independence and economic prosperity.
A quick review of history reveals why Latin American countries – Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba in particular – are against the United States and are so enthusiastic about forging alliances with like-minded countries from the other side of the world.
There is no nation in Latin America and the Caribbean that has not been on the receiving end of the unutterable horrors of US imperialism at one time or another.
American meddling has come in various shapes and forms – from spying and military coups to proxy wars, from full-blown military invasions to annexation of territories – dating back to the early 1800s.
A brief list of events that stand out in the long history of US meddling in Latin America includes:
- The US invaded Mexico in 1846 and annexed what is now known as the Western United States. It went on to invade Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean Island of Grenada, Panama, and Haiti, and orchestrate coups in Guatemala, Brazil, Haiti, Venezuela, and Honduras.
Since President James Monroe issued a unilateral declaration in 1823, supposedly to counter European interference in the Americas, the US has involved itself in the daily affairs of the region, often to replace adversarial governments with friendly regimes to secure US commercial interests.
US policy in the Western Hemisphere was guided to a large degree by the Monroe Doctrine for almost a century until President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the doctrine in 1904 by introducing what came to be known as the ‘Roosevelt ‘Corollary’.
The corollary granted the United States the authority to intervene in any Western Hemisphere country that it deemed necessary.
Since the introduction of the Monroe Doctrine, any military intervention in Latin America, and anywhere else in the world for that matter, has been framed as missions not to expand American power but to promote republican institutions and rescue the less fortunate people.
This paternalism was also heavily tinged with racism: American expansionism was justified on the grounds of white supremacy. American leaders essentially regarded Latin Americans as ‘coloured’ natives in need of guidance from superior whites.
- When President William McKinley sent American troops to Cuba in 1898 to fight against the Spanish colonial army, he said he was doing so to stop ‘oppression at our very doors.’
In many ways, 1898 was a watershed year for American imperialism on a global scale, and Cubans were the first to experience the impact of this profound transformation in the American psyche: The US was no longer content with the territory it held in North America.
The Spanish-American War of 1898 put an end to three centuries of Spanish rule, but it also put the United States in control of not only Cuba, but Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
The Cubans, who had fought tenaciously for independence, initially cheered the American involvement. However, they would watch in frustration as the United States increasingly assumed the role of their new overlord.
In the years following the war, the US used everything in its imperialist toolbox, including the imposition of American-friendly dictators, to maintain control of Cuba.
It is no coincidence that when the Republic of Cuba was finally established on May 20, 1902, it found itself in the grip of periodic rebellions and assaults on American assets.
The US signed a treaty with Cuba in 1903 that gave it near-total control of Cuban affairs. The treaty allowed the US to establish a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, (which would become synonymous with CIA prisoner abuse and torture a century later).
A protest against electoral fraud in 1906 gave the US the pretext it was looking for. American forces landed in Cuba once again supposedly to quell the unrest. They assumed direct military control over the embattled nation.
When American soldiers left Cuba a few years later, President William Howard Taft warned that it was ‘absolutely out of the question that the island should continue to be independent.’
US interventions in the daily affairs of Latin American countries led to a surge of nationalism across the region in the 1920s and 1930s. Cuba was particularly swept by anti-American sentiments.
US President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged the Cuban army to revolt, paving the way for the rise of a sergeant named Fulgencio Batista.
Batista’s ascent to power began in 1933 through an uprising known as the Revolt of the Sergeants, which ousted the interim government of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada.
Batista appointed himself chief of the armed forces and effectively ruled Cuba by installing a series of puppet presidents until 1940 when he won the presidential election on a populist platform.
He invited American investors and gangsters to Cuba to lay the foundation of a lucrative tourism industry, mostly based on prostitution and casino gambling.
However, Batista is most notorious for his decision to cancel the congressional election of 1952.
Fidel Castro, a charismatic lawyer, was a candidate in that election. Castro turned to revolution when the US-backed military strongman’s coup blocked his path to electoral politics.
Batista fled Cuba on New Year’s Day 1959. The following day, Castro descended from his mountain stronghold to Santiago to deliver his first speech as leader of the Cuban revolution.
‘ time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will achieve its true objective. It will not be like 1898 when the Americans came and made themselves masters of the country,’ he declared.
Americans would not sit idly by and watch the jewel in the crown of their Latin American imperialism slip through their hands.
In 1961, the CIA sponsored Cuban exiles to invade the island in a failed attempt to depose Castro. Successive US presidents vowed to bring him down while the CIA made several attempts on his life.
Castro survived and devoted his life to fighting American imperialism, etching his name in history as an icon of anti-Americanism. He became a hero to millions of freedom-loving people around the world.
The embargo the United States imposed on Cuba in 1960 following Castro’s hugely popular revolution not only remains in place but has been strengthened over the years.
Last year, the United Nations General Assembly – for the 30th time – strongly rebuked Washington for its crippling embargo on Cuba, with 185 countries voting in favour of a (non-binding) resolution slamming the embargo.
‘If the US government was really interested in the welfare, human rights and self-determination of Cubans, it could lift the blockade,’ said Yuri Gala, Cuba’s deputy representative at the UN.
Cuba was not the only Latin American country where the wind of anti-American sentiments blew strongly. Elsewhere in the Americas, entire nations were standing up to US interventionism.
The US used the same refrain it had invoked against Cuba in 1898 a decade later when the Taft administration declared that it was overthrowing the government of Nicaragua to impose ‘republican institutions’ and promote ‘real patriotism’.
The United States has been poking its nose into Venezuela’s internal affairs since the 19th century.
For most of the 20th century, US meddling in Venezuela, which sits atop vast natural resources, was mostly about oil. But that has not been always the case.
The United States orchestrated its first coup in Venezuela in 1908 when US Marines helped Vice President Juan Vicente Gómez seize power.