Wikileaks, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This document contains information from Wikileaks as well as a report by journalist Tracey Eaton that creates a timeline of U.S. regime change efforts in Cuba over many years, including after the supposed normalization of relations. Published in 2016, Eaton’s report looks at grants the U.S. government gave to organizations intended to promote democracy and capitalism in Cuba. Eaton sees this as an attempt by the U.S. to continue framing Cuba as a state this is hostile to its own people and to foreign investment, which would suggest that relations were not as smoothed out as they seemed after 2014.
The Wikileaks document is an overview of dissident groups in Cuba that the U.S. supported and the problems these groups faced. Released in 2010, the Wikileaks document covers a report sent by Jonathon Farrar at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, the de facto embassy in Cuba, to the Secretary of State in 2009. The report details the struggles facing anti-government dissidents in Cuba as well the U.S.’ evaluation of them as potential harbingers of change in the country. Though the report is mostly negative, finding that older activists are unconnected to the youth and that activist groups are divided and unorganized, the report makes it clear that the U.S. was still looking for anti-government Cubans to initiate regime change even after decades of failed attempts to do so.
“USAID in Cuba (2016)
Tracey Eaton
A multimillion-dollar U.S. government–financed program was aimed at, among other things, developing an “information program focusing on the impact of foreign investors and foreign tourists on Cuba” and sensitizing the “business community and foreign leaders about the labor conditions and tourist apartheid in the island.” That’s according to a document that the U.S. Agency for International Development released on Jan. 19 [2016] in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that I made on Oct. 8, 2011. The document describes a contract that USAID awarded to the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C., for a program called, “Uncensored Cuba.” The contract ran from March 31, 2005, to April 30, 2009, and was worth up to $7,231,663. USAID wound up paying the Center for a Free Cuba $6,652,853.12. USAID censored details of Uncensored Cuba’s budget, redacting the salaries, fringe benefits, communications, travel and other costs.”
Wikileaks, and Tracey Eaton. “Spies, Counterspies, and Dissidents.” In The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, Alfredo Prieto, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, 643–50. Duke University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smxrz.134.