United States–Cuba Relations

United States–Cuba relations are presented as a test of whether standards for political violence apply equally to powerful states and their opponents. The book argues that the United States’ prolonged use of force against Cuba, including actions continuing into the 1990s, would under the doctrine invoked by Washington give Cuba grounds to retaliate—an implication that exposes the double standard behind official claims about terrorism and self-defense.

The standard of retaliation

The comparison turns on a question of consistency: if a state may use violence against another in response to that other state’s violence, should Cuba have had the same right against the United States? The book answers by applying the American doctrine to American conduct. It describes years of terror beginning in late 1959 and argues that, under this logic, Cuba should have been entitled to use violence against the United States. The point is not to endorse such retaliation, but to show what follows when a rule is treated as legitimate for one side and denied to the other.

Cuba within the argument about terrorism

The Cuba example belongs to a wider challenge to the convention of reserving the label terrorism for violence committed by enemies. The book distinguishes the literal definition—calculated violence or its threat for political, religious, or ideological ends—from a propagandistic usage that identifies as terrorism chiefly the acts of adversaries. It argues that coercion against civilians for political purposes also appears in official doctrines of state action, including the United States’ stated doctrine of low-intensity warfare. Under a consistent definition, the identity of the actor cannot by itself determine whether the act counts as terrorism.

That comparison also informs the book’s account of the “war against terrorism.” It argues that powerful states avoid applying their own definitions to their own conduct because doing so would expose a contradiction between their public condemnation of terrorism and their use of coercive violence. The Cuba case makes that contradiction concrete: the same doctrine that is used to justify force against an opponent would, if applied without exception, recognize a claim to force against the United States.

Historical context and consequences

The discussion places Cuba’s experience alongside the Reagan administration’s campaign against Nicaragua and the broader history of state-backed violence. It describes the campaign against Cuba as continuing into the 1990s and invokes it as one example among several that, in the book’s argument, are omitted from conventional accounts of terrorism. The comparison is structural rather than a claim that the cases were identical: both serve to test whether the rules invoked by the United States are universal principles or permissions reserved for its own use.

The book’s wider criticism is that selective standards help preserve a cycle of violence. If an opponent’s violence is treated as terrorism while a powerful state’s comparable conduct is exempted or renamed, the underlying principle is not applied consistently. Cuba therefore functions not only as a subject of bilateral history but also as a challenge to the asymmetry built into official language about terrorism, legitimate force, and the right of retaliation.