The Good USAID and the Bad USAID

Cuban medics in a USAID hospital in Monrovia, Liberia

YOANI SÁNCHEZ, 3 November 2014 — Just a few months ago we experienced an avalanche of official propaganda targeted to attacks on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Those initials came to represent the enemy with whom they frighten us from our television screens, platforms, and even classrooms. However, to our surprise, this week we’ve learned that some Cuban doctors arriving in Liberia will work in a field hospital financed by this “terrible agency.”

Although the official press has avoided publishing pictures showing our compatriots next to the logo of USAID, the odd photo has escaped censorship. So suddenly, there is a crack in the story of confrontation, the rhetoric of the adversary does not hold water, and clearly evident is all the moral relativism of those who fabricate the ideological crusades with which they bombard us from the mass media.

Could someone ask the Associated Press (AP) to investigate as soon as possible this “secret” conspiracy between the Plaza of the Revolution and an agency that receives guidance from the U.S. State Department? We are eager to see the rivers of ink that this strange collaboration provokes, the “revelations,” the secret memorandums and the veiled-face confessions that explain such a collaboration.

However, the answer that will be given by those who reject USAID support for Cuban Civil Society but seem fine working shoulder to shoulder with the island’s authorities, will be that in humanitarian issues have no political colors. As if to inform and technologically empower oneself weren’t a question of survival in the twenty-first century. The official press, for its part, will rush to explain that, when it’s about saving lives, Cuban doctors are willing to put aside their differences. But none of these is the real explanation.

The bottom line is that Raul Castro’s government is eager to express and receive belligerence from its great northern neighbor. What it will not tolerate and will never accept is grants to or recognition of the belligerence of its own civil society. It is anxious to take a family photo with Uncle Sam, as long as no one invites the bastard nephew that is the Cuban population.

Power is attracted to itself, these images of the last few days want to tell us. If a young Cuban receives a text message summoning him to an alternative concert, he should be careful – according to what the official commentators warn us on our little screens – because the imperialist could be behind each character. They don’t use the same ethical yardstick, however, to evaluate a health care professional who works under the tent, over the stretchers, and with the syringes funded by USAID.

How are they going to explain to the children, who have spent months being frightened by the United States Agency for International Development, that now their fathers or uncles who went to Liberia are working in a hospital built with funds from that agency?

When Ronald Hernandez Torres, one of the Cuban doctors who traveled to Liberia, wrote on his Facebook page that “this unit has the best conditions for patient care, and the best professionals from different countries working side by side,” did he, perhaps, know that all this is being funded by the same agency that is latest nemesis that the Castro regime has found to frighten us with?

As always happens, the cries of political hysteria end up drowning out the voices that raise arguments. Although, as a general rule, the official version is usually imposed because it is the highest insult, this should not discourage us to look for the reasons and to reveal the contradictions of their discourse.

I now know, that at the end of the year, when we look at the balance of reporting in the headlines of our national newspapers, the impression will be that the Havana government and USAID are irreconcilable enemies. But it is a lie. The principal confrontation that continues to be set in stone and without ceding an inch, is what emerges from the powers-that-be in Cuba toward their own people.