Cuba 191, the United States, 2. That's called a diplomatic thrashing. One hundred and ninety-one countries voted at the United Nations in favor of a resolution introduced by Cuba against the economic, commercial, and financial restrictions imposed by the United States upon the Castro brothers' government since 1961. Only two nations voted against: the United States and Israel.
That has been happening for a long time now. What's new this year is that the Obama administration is celebrating the outcome in secret, although the law and common sense force U.S. diplomacy to reject the resolution. The president himself had urged Congress to repeal the embargo.
In any case, the United States really did not defend itself. After all, these U.N. resolutions are not binding. They are mere propaganda within an organization so discredited that it elected Venezuela and Ecuador to the committee that oversees Human Rights.
What's interesting is the way the Castro dictatorship manages to divert people's attention from the very heart of the issue -- the persistence of a Stalinist dictatorship derived from the Soviet model eradicated from the West a quarter of a century ago -- and refocus it on a fabricated perception: an impoverished island besieged by the greatest power on earth. David against Goliath.
How does Cuba do it? To understand this, you need to know that the small island nation, unproductive and mistreated, needy and beggarly, which pays nothing to nobody because its squanders its resources, has a very powerful foreign projection, which it learned from the KGB: Cuba has some 12,000 people engaged in the task of promoting the causes selected by Fidel Castro and inherited and continued by his brother Raúl.
What are those causes? Basically, the denunciation of the United States and of wicked and exploitative capitalism. Everything that opposes that common enemy is welcome -- the ayatollahs' Iran, Gadhafi's Libya in the past, Putin's Russia today, and so called 21st-Century socialism. Everything. Anything.
Who are those 12,000 functionaries, the transmission belt of the Pharaonic diplomacy of Fidel, a narcissist afflicted, like so many others, by the grandiose urgency to impose his will upon the world?
In the first place, the General Directorate of Intelligence, with 1,500 well-trained officers disseminated worldwide. Each of them seduces, recruits or handles a dozen local contacts. The members of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), another arm of the intelligence machine present in all countries and all international organizations.
The 119 Cuban embassies in 140 sites, with 21 consulates general, all of them controlled by Security. The academic, literary or artistic institutions that have contacts abroad and travel overseas or host travelers. Any piece will fit in the puzzle: a concert by Silvio Rodríguez, a conference in Panama. Whatever.
Bottom line: Thousands of people are thus linked directly or indirectly to the political life and communications of most of the world's nations, most especially to those of the major countries in the West, which end up responding to the dictates from Havana.
Of course, I'm not including counterintelligence in this estimate. This apparatus, forged in the image of the East German Stasi, has in its staff 0.5 percent of the Cuban population, about 60,000 persons devoted to the task of infiltrating and controlling the so-called enemy groups inside the island, which include not only the democrats who ask for freedom but also Masons, Christian churches, suspicious groups such as the LGTB, or self-employed entrepreneurs who attempt to create small home-based businesses to survive amid so much repression and stupidity.
As soon as the word goes out to take that annual resolution to the U.N., that huge mechanism moves to achieve its objective. Always there are links to foreign ministries and houses of government, even if formally they are enemies. Cuba maintains those personal relations as if they were gold powder.
Everything is utilized, from giving free medical treatment to a relative of a deputy, a general or local chief of police, to sending cigars to the heads of government, or finding a gigolo to satisfy the needs of a Cuban spy of Puerto Rican origin, as happened to Ana Belén Montes.
This lady, sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment for espionage, whose pardon Obama is currently weighing, reached a very high position in the Pentagon. Her official function was to gather all the analyses of the various agencies and inform the White House about the island's dangerousness. However, her real task, which she performed for Havana's benefit, was to reveal to the Castro brothers the sources of U.S. intelligence (a disclosure that cost some people their lives) while telling the sweet story of a small, defenseless country that didn't pose any danger to the security of the United States.
Washington, which has lost the reflexes it had during the Cold War, does not know how to fight against that enemy - or it cannot, or it will not. In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift describes how, after a shipwreck in Lilliput, captain Lemuel Gulliver is tied down and captured by a legion of 6-inch-tall dwarfs. That's what's happening to the United States. It is not David against Goliath. It is Gulliver against 12,000 very efficient dwarfs.
