Cuba

Cuba is a recurring example in Noam Chomsky’s critique of how powerful states name violence and claim the right to answer it. He points to decades of U.S. actions against the island to expose an asymmetry: the doctrine used to justify force against the United States, applied consistently, would also permit Cuba to strike back, even though the international rules Chomsky invokes reject reprisals and require the same standards to apply to all states.

Cuba as a Test of Double Standards

Chomsky places Cuba within what he calls the Western Hemisphere’s supposedly undisturbed neighborhood, invoking a phrase associated with Henry Stimson. He argues that the island endured years of terror beginning at the end of 1959, during which grave acts were committed. Under the U.S. doctrine he is criticizing, he says, Cuba should therefore have had a right to use violence against the United States. The point is not offered as an endorsement of retaliation: it shows how the proposed principle changes when applied to a state treated as an adversary rather than to the United States.

The example broadens beyond Cuba. Chomsky says that the same reasoning could be extended to other states subjected to U.S. violence, and he stresses that this record is not confined to one country or one period. Cuba’s place in the argument is thus comparative: it makes visible the difference between a rule asserted for the powerful and a rule that would also be granted to those harmed by their actions.

Terrorism and the Naming of Violence

Chomsky contrasts the literal definition of terrorism in U.S. official documents—calculated violence, or the threat of it, to achieve political, religious, or ideological ends—with a propagandistic usage that reserves the label for violence committed by enemies against the United States or its allies. He argues that this political distinction can obscure the conduct of states themselves. In his account, terrorism is not inherently an “weapon of the weak” but can be part of state policy, and the label depends in practice on who is acting and against whom.

Cuba serves as one of his examples of the consequences of that selective framing. Chomsky says U.S. terror against the island continued into the 1990s, yet he notes that no one seriously proposed that Cuba had the right to bomb Washington or assassinate American political officials. The contrast is central to his argument: acknowledging U.S. violence against Cuba does not, in his view, make retaliatory attacks lawful or justified; it requires applying the same moral and legal limits to the United States that are invoked against others.

Retaliation and International Law

Chomsky challenges the claim that an attacked nation may simply return the blow. If that principle were accepted, he argues, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, Cuba, and other countries could claim a right to bomb Washington and other American cities. He presents that implication as a reason the postwar international order adopted a different rule: the use of force is prohibited except in self-defense against an armed attack, pending action by the Security Council to maintain international peace and security. Reprisals, he says, are specifically forbidden.

The rule matters to Cuba because it separates the fact of prior violence from a legal entitlement to retaliate. Chomsky argues that the United States was not under armed attack within the meaning of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter in the context he discusses, and therefore could not invoke that ground unless international law is understood to bind powerful states as well as disliked ones. Cuba’s hypothetical right to strike back exposes the inconsistency he sees in treating force as legitimate when exercised by one’s own state but illegitimate when the same rationale is claimed by its victims.

Historical Record and Moral Universality

Chomsky returns to Cuba while explaining a principle of moral consistency: if an action is right for one side, it must be right for others; if it is wrong when others do it, it is wrong when done by one’s own government. He recalls that forty years had passed since President Kennedy ordered that “all the terror of the earth” be brought against Cuba until its leaders were eliminated, after they had resisted a U.S.-led invasion. Chomsky describes the subsequent violence as extreme and says it continued into the 1990s.

He sets that history beside the Contra War against Nicaragua under President Reagan, which he says caused large-scale destruction and tens of thousands of deaths and led to the United States being condemned for international terrorism by the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Security Council; the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution. Together, these cases frame Cuba not as an isolated historical reference but as part of a wider challenge to selective condemnation. Chomsky’s argument ends on the standard itself: opposition to terrorism must apply to every actor, rather than functioning as a label reserved for violence committed by an enemy.