#BTColumn – Afghanistan, Haiti and Cuba

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

Afghanistan, Cuba, and Haiti are radically different societies that offer one lesson to Great Powers and the USA in particular: Attempts at external nation-building are doomed to fail. Unilateral foreign interventions and embargoes are counter-productive. Nations build themselves.

The American media and politicians are getting their ‘knickers in a twist as the British would say, over President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan. The visuals are indeed horrific, but there was no exit from Afghanistan that was not going to be messy and chaotic.

Biden will take a short-term political hit, but in the medium, to long-term, his decision will be hailed as the best foreign policy decision of his presidency. He had the guts to take a tough decision that four presidents before him failed to take.

Yes, the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan will be worse off under the Taliban (the Taliban, created by Pakistan, will, however, never be in control of this society of competing warlords), but there are dozens of countries around the world in which women will face similar discrimination. Is the US going to intervene in all those countries? The answer is to let the international community through the UN put pressure on the Taliban to respect gender equality.

After all, Goal 5 of the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals, universally regarded as the ‘blueprint for peace and prosperity is gender equality and empowerment of women.

Will UN member states allow the Taliban to deny full participation of women and girls in every aspect of social life? Yes, of course, they will. But only if their women let them get away with it.

The Taliban will no doubt raise the issue of respect for ‘cultural diversity. Whenever some government wishes to violate the rights of some sections of their citizenry, whether it be women, persons of a different religion, or the LGBT community, they claim to be acting in pursuance of ‘respect for cultural diversity.

But human rights are either universal or they are not human rights. Let’s bear in mind the words of the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted by the member states of UNESCO in 2001, that “the defence of cultural diversity is … inseparable from respect for human dignity”.

Quite honestly, I am accustomed to American hubris, but what I find astonishing in the media coverage of Afghanistan is the extent to which the American media from the far left to the far right still share that innocent presumption: namely that the US, as the ‘most civilised, democratic and exceptional nation on the planet’, has a God-given responsibility to tutor and police the world. I can understand politicians regurgitating this crap, but the media? And you know something? Biden, by withdrawing, has cleverly created thorny problems for Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and China, right on their doorstep.

So, what about Cuba and Haiti? Haiti is a dysfunctional democracy continually teetering on the edge of dictatorship.

Cuba is a functional dictatorship continually teetering on the edge of democracy. Culturally, they are more advanced than the rest of the Caribbean (sorry, Jamaica), and in their different ways, they define the Caribbean.

Haiti, after a successful revolution against the enslavement of its people by the French, proclaimed itself in 1804 as the first black republic in the world, for which the European Empire never forgave it (France extracting a crippling financial tribute for abolishing slavery). Since then, the Haitian people have been battered by everything on God’s earth.

Cuba made a successful revolution against an American-backed brutal dictatorship in 1959, for which the American Empire never forgave it.

Neither has been left alone to pursue their own destiny, both being subject to invasions, occupations, embargoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes, not to mention well-intentioned but disastrous humanitarian interventions (there is no country in which the UN’s reputation has been more sullied than Haiti).

At the same time, the masses of both Cuba and Haiti are subject, in quite different ways, to exploitation by national elites.

The Haitian political and economic elites, in collusion with foreign forces, have pillaged the country and oppressed the masses for over a century, and all efforts to help the Haitian people by well-meaning external entities have only enriched the same predatory elites.

In Cuba, the Communist Party elites are not predatory in an exploitative sense. Indeed, they have provided and improved essential services like education, health, and housing to uplift the masses. But they have failed over the decades, out of sheer ideological stubbornness (or blåΩindness?), to develop what should be the most dynamic, socially just and prosperous nation in the Caribbean, and have therefore kept the best fruits of a dismally performing economy to themselves, leaving the poorer classes, especially Blacks, to simmer in discontent.

Of course, the Party blames the American embargo for every economic failure of the Revolution. The irony is that if the American Embargo were lifted, Cuba would almost certainly become more democratic and prosperous while preserving its autonomy. That would definitely be in America’s foreign policy interest. But then Cuba is not a foreign policy problem for the US, it’s an insoluble domestic political problem: Florida.

Both Haitians and Cubans are some of the most creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative people in the Caribbean. Let’s encourage them, hold out a helping hand when they ask for it, give them space, and let them work out their own destiny in peace and love. As José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori, seven-term President of Mexico, said of his country, ‘So far from God, so close to the US’.
Amen.

Dr. Peter Laurie is a retired permanent secretary and head of the Foreign Service who once served as Barbados’ Ambassador to the United States.