Despite the myth, Canada has never been Cuba’s friend

Sixty-six years ago today Fidel Castro’s forces overthrew General Fulgencio Batista. The Cuban revolution had profound impacts on that country and the hemisphere.

It delivered a major blow to the US empire with Cuba assisting anti-imperial and colonial struggles across the globe. Largely dark-skinned Cuban forces, for instance, fought to help defeat apartheid South Africa in Angola.

Canada’s response to the Cuban revolution is far less supportive than is sometimes presented in leftist publications.

Twenty months before Batista was overthrown, the Canadian ambassador said the brutal despot was “still the best hope for the future” because he “has offered the stability demanded by foreign investors.” Benefiting from US influence, Canadian corporations were major players in Cuba at the time of the revolution.

A year before Castro’s forces took Havana the Canadian ambassador said “the benevolence of President Batista is not to be questioned. He may be lining his pockets at Cuba’s expense but it is traditional for Cuban Presidents to do so and it is in part made necessary by the uncertainty of political life here. But as a dictator he is a failure, if the standard is Hitler or Mussolini. Public protests against the regime are possible; an opposition is in existence and is weak only because of fundamental weaknesses in the personalities of the opposition.”

After Batista’s downfall the new government tried to gain greater control over the economy. Among other steps, US banks were nationalized without compensation. Canadian banks were also nationalized, but more amicably — with compensation. In response to these moves by the new Cuban government, US hostility rose and Uncle Sam eventually cut off trade and diplomatic relations with the country. The US also supported an invasion of Cuba, which Ottawa endorsed. Just days after the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker claimed Castro was a threat to the security of the hemisphere. On April 19, 1961, he told the House of Commons that events in Cuba were “manifestations of a dictatorship which is abhorrent to free men everywhere.”

(In A Journalist’s Life on the Left Ed Finn describes the collapse of a paper he helped establish in the early 1960s. The Newfoundland Examiner went under after the Canadian Labour Congress abruptly cut off financial support because Finn’s colleague “wrote a blistering column denouncing the United States for its unprovoked but foredoomed Bay of Pigs invasion.” The piece criticized the Kennedy Administration for “financing and equipping a mercenary army with the aim of overthrowing the Castro government and giving the island back to the corrupt Batista regime, the crooked casino operators, and the brutally anti-labour American fruit plantation owners.” In a letter rescinding its funding, CLC Secretary-Treasurer Donald McDonald said its US counterpart, the AFL-CIO, supported the Washington orchestrated invasion and so did the CLC.)

The next year the Canadian navy participated in the US blockade commonly known as the Cuban missile crisis. According to Lieutenant Bruce Fenton, they “assumed responsibility for surveillance of Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic while the United States Navy was engaged in operations around Cuba.” A Canadian aircraft carrier, two submarines and 22 specialized antisubmarine ships searched for Soviet subs in the Atlantic.

Despite tacit support for US actions against Cuba Ottawa never broke off diplomatic relations, even though every other country in the hemisphere beside Mexico did. Three Nights in Havana explains why Ottawa maintained diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba: “Recently declassified State Department documents have revealed that, far from encouraging Canada to support the embargo, the United States secretly urged Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well positioned to gather intelligence on the island.”

Ottawa did not let Washington down on intelligence gathering. For half a century Canada has spied on Cuba. The Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s NSA, listened to Cuban leaders’ secret conversations from an interception post in the Canadian embassy in Havana. A senior Canadian official, close to Washington, “admitted that the U.S. made ‘far greater use’ of our intelligence during the Cuban Missile Crisis than has been revealed.” Pentagon and State Department sources cite the U.K. and Canada as the only countries that “supply any real military information on Cuba” with Canada providing “the best” military intelligence.

In subsequent years Ottawa consistently aligned with US fearmongering about the “Cuban menace” in the hemisphere. Canada backed the US-led Alliance for Progress, which was the John F. Kennedy administration’s response to the excitement created in Latin America by the Cuban revolution. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s Canada repeatedly sent gunboats to the Caribbean to counter Havana’s (usually hyped) influence. During the 1980s Canadian officials criticized Cuba’s role in Nicaragua, legitimizing the US sponsored Contras war against the Sandinista government. When 7,000 US troops invaded Grenada in 1983 to reassert US hegemony in a country supposedly overrun by Cuban doctors, Canadian officials criticized Grenada’s government and abstained on a UN resolution calling for the withdrawal of all foreign troops (predominantly American) from that country.

In recent years Justin Trudeau’s government has criticized Cuba’s actions in Venezuela. They joined the Trump administration’s campaign to reverse Barrack Obama’s reproachment by eliminating visa processing in Havana on the grounds that a mysterious ailment felled diplomats.

Despite the many economic and other challenges facings Cubans today, the Cuban revolution has definitively advanced the human condition. Imagine if a far more powerful country like Canada assisted, rather than undermined, its anti-imperialist, egalitarian, message.

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