With Roger D. Harris

“We look for the poorest patients,” the Cuban doctor in charge of the eye clinic said. “Often we travel to remote rural areas and bring them to the clinic in a bus.” The clinic, in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, was part of Misión Milagro (Miracle Mission), run jointly by the Cuban and Venezuelan governments. The larger mission has treated over seven million patients in 33 countries since 2004. Local Nicaraguan doctors, trained by the Cubans, are now in charge in Ciudad Sandino.

Misión Milagro is despised by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Washington has imposed sanctions on officials in countries using this and other Cuban medical missions. Supposedly aimed at stopping the “trafficking” of medical staff, the real intent is to destroy services that have proved immensely popular for their free, high-quality treatment, often in remote areas with few health facilities. The US falsely demonizes Cuba’s aid as “forced labor,” which is also a source of income for the besieged county.

Successes of Rubio’s “enemies of humanity”

Rubio’s attack on medical brigades is only the most recent example of the hybrid warfare conducted by successive US administrations against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Already designated as “strategic threats” to US security, according to Rubio, these countries are now also labelled “enemies of humanity.” In reality, all three countries have made major advances in human development, albeit constrained (most heavily in Cuba’s case) by Washington’s attacks.

Cuba’s medical brigades derive from its community-based health system, whose success is recognized in medical journals and affords Cubans with a three years’ greater life expectancy than people in the US. Health services in Venezuela and Nicaragua have learnt from this model. For example, Nicaragua’s 180 casas maternas, assisting women in the late stages of pregnancy, have drastically reduced maternal deaths.

Venezuela leads Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in building affordable housing: its Great Housing Mission, begun in 2011, handed over its five-millionth home a year ago. Nicaragua is building more than 7,000 “social interest” homes annually.

Cuba, sadly, has an ongoing housing crisis principally caused by the US embargo producing a severe shortage of building materials. One-third of homes are unfit, while its 13,500 annual building program inevitably falls short.

However, Cuba invested in its education system during the most prosperous years of the revolution, when it benefited from the international solidarity of the Soviet Union. Cuba’s schools serve the most remote communities and attendance is close to 100%. ELAM, its medical school for internationals, has trained an astonishing 31,180 doctors from 122 countries.

Venezuela invested heavily in education as a means of empowering the populace, building thousands of new schools in under-served barrios and rural areas. By 2005, illiteracy was eradicated using Cuban-developed methods. By 2008, four out of five young adults were enrolled in higher education, the highest rate in the region.

All three countries guarantee free education at all levels, including university. Nicaragua, for example, has created new technical colleges training some 46,000 students.

Cuba and Nicaragua are two of LAC’s safest countries. A common factor is that their police forces were completely reformed, post-revolution, and they have been able to limit drug trafficking and keep at bay the violent gangs that bedevil other countries.

The Venezuelan revolution inherited chronically high crime levels, but in recent years has achieved a significant decrease in homicides, which has been publicized not only by Caracas but by the US president. However, Trump deceitfully claims Venezuela has achieved this by deliberately exporting its criminals to the US.

In terms of national security, Nicaragua and Venezuela have among the lowest military spending levels in the LAC region; Cuba, subject to constant US threat, is among the highest. Nevertheless, its spending of around $130 million annually pales by comparison with that of over a trillion by the US.

Socially conscious foreign policy

Perhaps most challenging to the US has been the independent foreign policy and the championing of regional integration by the three countries striving for socialism.

Back in 2004, Venezuela and Cuba successfully founded ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), scuttling Washington’s neoliberal free trade FTAA initiative. Venezuela followed with PetroCaribe, supplying oil to Caribbean nations on favorable terms. The founding of CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) in 2010, again spearheaded by Venezuela, provides an alternative to the US-dominated OAS (Organization of American States) as a region-wide political forum, which explicitly excludes the US and Canada.

The three leftist states have also been international leaders in support of Palestine. Cuba was the first country in LAC to formally sever diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973. Nicaragua severed relations in 1982. These were temporarily reinstated by the neoliberal government in 1993, only to be again severed in 2010 after the Sandinistas returned to power. Venezuela severed relations with the Zionist state in 2009. Also in 2009, fellow ALBA nation Bolivia severed relations with Israel. These were temporarily reinstated in 2019 by the Áňez coup regime but again severed by current Bolivian President Luis Arce in 2023. Last year, Nicaragua filed a case against Germany at the International Court of Justice over its military and political support of the genocide by Israel.

Human rights weaponized

Washington disregards the achievements in these three countries that former Trump functionary John Bolton called the “troika of tyranny,” instead weaponizing “human rights” to characterize them as authoritarian dictatorships. This is hypocritical in two senses.

One is that their human rights records are, by any standards, no worse than many other countries in the region, and are in most respects better than that of the US itself.

The other is that the US has been the primary cause of tightened security in these countries. The alleged limits on political expression are a response to constant interference – military interventions, coup efforts and assassination attempts. Biden, for instance, upped the bounty on the head of Venezuela’s president to $25 million.

Washington leads the chorus of complaints, when a demonstration in Cuba is suppressed or a political party in Venezuela or Nicaragua banned. The US tries to act as if it were an impartial observer, rather than – as is invariably the case – the funder or supporter of whatever opposition group is being “victimized.”

Washington’s concern about “human rights” is a charade, which disappears if the government in question is a US client state; e.g., El Salvador.

If countries pose a “strategic threat” to US interests, it is because of their record in improving the most important human rights which, according to the United Nations, are “the right to life, food, education, work, health, and liberty.” In respect of these wider rights, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua show that huge progress can be made by progressive, revolutionary governments which have rejected the neoliberalism pursued in LAC countries favored by Washington.

Sanctions on Venezuela have led to the deaths of over 100,000 Venezuelans by 2020. The blockade of Cuba, costing the country $13.8 million daily, is so destructive that nearly one in ten Cubans has left the country in the last three years. Nicaragua is losing $500 million in development funding annually because the US is blocking loans from the World Bank and other institutions.

It could hardly be more obvious that Washington’s aim is to destroy each country’s social achievements and impoverish their people so that those who do not die, fall sick or migrate eventually will rise up against their governments. And then the likes of Rubio makes inane statements such as offering “unwavering support and solidarity for the Cuban people.”

Washington’s endgame

What do successive US administrations and the opposition groups that they support actually want to achieve in the targeted countries?

Over 30 years ago, prominent Cuban exiles were calling for “a sudden, dramatic and, if necessary, convulsive shift to free-wheeling capitalism.” Twenty years ago, the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, set up by President George Bush, set out a broad neoliberal vision for the country. A trawl of recent statements by exile groups reveals many vague demands for “democracy,” “transparent institutions,” “support for youth,” and so on, with some limited, specific proposals such as “restitution of property rights” (for Cubans in Miami looking to cash in on potentially valuable property their families abandoned 60 years ago).

The Nicaraguan opposition is profoundly divided between left and right, with the right wanting to exclude the left from power, while the marginal “left” opposition has never had significant political support (Sandinistas successfully mobilize the progressive vote in elections). The UNAMOS party, some of whose members were formerly Sandinista officials in the 1980s, offers a program focused on restructuring the government with only vague objectives for social development.

The far-right opposition in Venezuela, led by Washington’s darling Maria Corina Machado, promises a bloodbath with no amnesty for the Chavistas. Machado’s surrogate Edmundo González Urrutia ran for the presidency in 2024 on a platform calling for extreme neoliberal privatization of education, health care, housing, food assistance, and the national oil agency.

Regardless of the expressed aims of opposition groups, the likely outcome if one or more of the three governments lost power is evident. The coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018 was a foretaste: murders of police and of Sandinista sympathizers, uncontrolled availability of firearms, empowerment of local criminals, importing violent gang members from El Salvador, destruction of public buildings and much more.

The kind of anarchic chaos that exists in Haiti is a very possible outcome, possibly leading to a repressive, authoritarian regime – but Washington-friendly – like that in Bukele’s El Salvador.

The often-overlooked accomplishments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been made despite enduring aggressive US interventions. Washington continues to hypocritically weaponize human rights, using hybrid warfare to erode these achievements and justify regime change as a democratic project.

Published in Dissident Voice, Popular Resistance, Tortilla con Sal, Counterpunch, Venezuela Analysis, Global Research, Orinoco Tribune, Resumen Latinoamericano, Nicanotes.