The piggy bank rattled again. Less than a month ago, in September 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded  $ 6,669,000 in grants  for projects aimed at a  regime change in Cuba, a euphemism to avoid saying  direct intervention by a foreign power .

The Democratic administration has especially favored the International Republican Institute (IRI) with a bipartisan generosity that Donald Trump never had. Other groups from Florida, Washington and Madrid who have called for the invasion of the island and paint an apocalyptic panorama in Havana have also received splendid games, thus securing more money next year.

The public coffers of the United States seem inexhaustible for the anti-Castro industry. In the last year,  at least 54 organizations  have benefited from the State Department’s programs for Cuba, the  National Endowment for Democracy (NED)  and the  USAID . In the last 20 years, this agency  has awarded Creative Associates International , a CIA front, more than 1.8 billion dollars for espionage, propaganda and the recruitment of agents of  change on the island. One of its best known projects, the so-called  Cuban Twitter  or ZunZuneo, resulted in a superb failure that unveiled a plot of corruption and flagrant violations of US law. The ZunZuneo  cost the USAID director the job, but Creative Associates International’s operations are under fire, now undercover.

The American researcher  Tracey Eaton , who for years has followed the route of these funds, commented in a recent interview that many of  the financing programs for  regime change  in Cuba are so stealth that we will probably never know who all the recipients are or the amount. total, and judging by the known million eyes, the grant must reach a pharaonic figure. Democracy-building  strategies   are considered  trade secrets  and are exempt from disclosure under the US Freedom of Information Act,  according to letters Eaton has received from the State Department and the USAID .

The United States goes berserk at the alleged hint of Russian, Chinese or Islamic intrusion into local politics and online platforms. However, he does not hesitate for a minute to rudely intervene in Cuba,  as the digital daily MintPress News has exposed  ,  which documented how private Facebook groups instigated the July 11 riots in several Cuban cities.  The participation of foreign citizens in Cuba’s internal affairs is at a level that can hardly be conceived in the United States , the publication says, adding:  The people who sparked the July 11 protests in Cuba continue to plan similar actions for October and November. .

The military superpower’s plans for political subversion are a shame and a scandal, but there is no indication that Washington will now achieve what it could not in 60 years. In fact, this obsession of the US government is two centuries old, as Louis A. Pérez, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, has shown in a brilliant essay entitled  Cuba as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder .

“The issue of Cuba has rarely been a matter of reasoned disquisition. It defies an easy explanation, and it certainly cannot be understood solely – or even primarily – within the logic of calculating policies that give shape to US foreign relations, mainly because there is no logic, “writes the historian.

What does make sense is the permanence in time of   Cuban intransigence . Ernesto  Che  Guevara used to repeat in his speeches in the first years of the 1959 revolution that  Cuba will not be another Guatemala . In other words, its independence from the US empire would not be boycotted with media bombings first, induced mobilizations and military attacks later.

The custom of overthrowing pro-independence alternatives is so long and the arrogance by an overwhelming military and media force so blind, that the US government has not been able to foresee its continuous defeats nor has it overcome the trauma of having a rebellious island  almost within sight of our shores. , as John Quincy Adams said, and to top it all, without the slightest interest in being  the state that we lack between the entrance to the Gulf and the exit of the vast Mississippi Valley .

The great truth of all this, Louis A. Pérez wisely comments, is that Cubans have learned from history, but Washington has not.

(Originally published in La Jornada, Mexico)