The idea of orthodox military conflict with the use of fighter and bomber planes, tanks and other conventional war machines devouring bot land and lives is still current in US military thinking, but non-conventional aggression is gaining space in the plans of the world’s main imperialist power.
USAID, that is, the Agency for International Development, an institution under the control of the US State Department, has become a preferred executor of a new type of hostile penetration. Cuba, of course, has never been absent from the list of targets, along with Syria, Libya and Venezuela.
A program overseen by USAID has sent almost a dozen youth to Cuba from Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru, with the goal of arousing opposition against the government, an Associated Press (AP) investigation revealed earlier this week.
USAID initiated the program shortly after the inauguration of US President Barack Obama in 2008, when the president spoke publicly of a “new beginning” in US-Cuban relations. It was based in Costa Rica, and run by Creative Associates International, a US company hired by USAID which was recently linked to the creation of a “Cuban Twitter,” a network aimed at connecting Cubans to promote so called democracy.
The AP report detailed how the contracted youth – some of whom were paid $5.41 per hour for their efforts – often posed as tourists, visiting college campuses and attempting to organize Cuban youth for political activism.
In the most prominent case, at a university in Santa Clara, a workshop on HIV prevention provided a “perfect excuse” to recruit activists.
According to the report, Creative Associates first made inroads with Venezuelan youth by contracting with then 22-year-old lawyer Zaimar Castillo, who directed the NGO Renova, in late 2009. An administrator at Renova, said that she and other members of Renova were flown to Costa Rica for training.
"They gave us a week of classes, teaching us what we were going to do and how we were going to do it," the administrator told AP.
In April 2010, three Renova associates traveled to Cuba, where they visited universities in two cities and met the families of various students. Their cover, according to the AP, was that they were “visiting Cuban friends”.
In an account of the trip, the associates profiled potential recruits, identifying a “target group” of 30 citizens who allegedly both opposed the government and possessed sufficient organizational skills to rebel.
The Cuban official daily “Granma” has raised the alarm by stating that, just as in the subversive project Zunzuneo, the characteristics of this new subversive project placed it within the scope of non-conventional agression against Cuba.
The Cuban daily added that this type of warfare seeks to eengineer change of regime in countries that the United States considers to be hostile to its interests, seeking change without direct intervention of traditional military forces, at a much lesser cost to the aggressor country but not to the victim.
It is now evident that in some instances the United States is discarding major military interventions, which, in Iraq and Afganistan, have left a huge toll of US losses in manpower and equipment while failing to achieve itsobjectives.
At a recent public speech Cuban president Raul Castro warned about the analogy between the Non-conventional warfare manuals of the US Armed Forces with the methods applied against Cuba and other nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
So-called experts in Washington have now turned precisely to such non-conventional
methods to try to dislodge from power those governments not liked by the US administration.
And this has been yet another chapter in non-conventional agression against Cuba.
The US like a sleepwalker, seems condemned to repeat its benighted adventures, one after the next seemingly unaware of the big drop from the parapet.
