In Playa Girón, the invasion financed, organized and directed from Washington.    Photo taken from Cubadebate

By Guillermo Alvarado 

Less than a month to go before the virtual summit on Democracy, Human Rights and the Fight against Terrorism, to which U.S. President Joseph Biden invited a group of rulers who are friends of his or faithful servants of his designs.

This issue is dedicated to analyzing how the northern power promotes democracy in our region, which it considers a backyard or testing ground for its didactic methods, which are generally based on threats or the use of military force.

It was not long after he had broken his teeth in Playa Giron, where the invasion financed, organized and directed from Washington with the purpose of defeating the Cuban Revolution failed, when he went back to his old ways, this time against the Dominican Republic where he launched his army in 1965.

In that country, a group of citizens and military, led by Francisco Caamaño, fought to reinstate in the presidency the progressive and nationalist leader Juan Bosch, deposed by a coup d'état in 1963.

Lyndon Johnson, then head of the White House, announced that he would not tolerate another Cuba in the Caribbean and organized an "Inter-American peacekeeping force", in reality a non-pacifist armed group, directed by the Pentagon.

The military superiority of the invaders, supported by the local oligarchy, was imposed, Joaquín Balaguer Ricardo was placed as president after flawed elections and the always helpful Organization of American States was summoned to certify the birth of the new "democracy".

Colonel Caamaño did not cease in his struggle for freedom and in 1973 he disembarked in Caracoles Beach with a small group of followers, but in the first confrontations he was captured, wounded by the regime's army, shot and his body dismembered and incinerated.

Balaguer justified the atrocious crime with the phrase: "in the country there were no prisons for a man like Colonel Caamaño", which shows that he learned very well the lessons of his American mentors.

This was not the first time that soldiers from the North set foot on Dominican soil, since in 1916 the government of Woodrow Wilson ordered an invasion under the pretext of collecting a large debt.

In reality, what he was looking for was to take over the sugar plantations, operated with labor from the also occupied Haiti, to sell that product to Europe, whose fields were devastated by World War I.

If President Biden had the courage to tell his guests these sad stories at the summit of which I spoke at the beginning, he would undoubtedly understand the visceral hatred that the empire has against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.