WAYNE KUBLALSINGH
NOT MANY people know that Shakespeare wrote five major tragedies; and that they carried stern moral messages to the lieges and princes of his day. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra. His message was, it is you! You, you, you! Don't blame the fates, the Goddesses of Chaos, for your downfall. For the fates, the Goddesses of Chaos, are always there. Omnipresent, swirling round and round. Looking for an opening. Like viruses. And if you give them none, they can take none. It is you who give them this opening, by your frailties. Your tragic flaws. It is through you, your vice, your tragic wound that they enter, feast, carrying you away, your court, kingdom and all. Blood, a top-up of gall and ketchup at the end!
Not many know that in 1823 the US invoked the Monroe Doctrine and unilaterally established American sovereignty over the Western Hemisphere. Any meddling in the internal affairs of the Americas by Europe was regarded as hostile. Throughout the 19th century, it established corporate plantation control of the hemisphere. It established industrial, banking military, port, canal interests; by friendly handshakes, by dollar and gunboat diplomacy, by stoking rebellion, or by straightforward sabotage and assassination.
Not many people know that in 1903 the US stoked a rebellion in Panama, then a province of Colombia, because the Colombian government refused to give it carte blanche concessions in the Panama Canal. The new Republic of Panama gave the concessions to US interests.
Not many people know that between 1900 and World War II, the US invaded and occupied Central American and Caribbean countries, including Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. That it virtually owned Cuba, its economy and government. That when the Cuban Revolution bucked the trend in 1958, the Kennedy brothers and the CIA backed an invasion, the Bay of Pigs, to regain Cuba. And having failed, they tried to assassinate Castro near a hundred times; established a draconian embargo; and backed serial infiltrations and terrorist attacks against Cuba, including the hijacking and air-demolition of Air Cubana 455 in 1976, in which 76 people died, including the entire Cuban fencing team. The CIA-backed Cuban terrorist exiles had boarded the plane in Trinidad.
Not many people know that the CIA exiled president Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954; ordered the killing of Che Guevara, caught alive in Bolivia in 1967; and backed an insurgency against president Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, which led to his death. And that in the late 1970s and 1980s the US, mainly Ronald Reagan, clandestinely deployed the School of the Americas, paramilitary groups, puppet, proxy allies, military dictatorships, proceeds from arms sales to Iran, that killed over 250,000 citizens, soldiers, peasants in villages, towns and forests in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua. A Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos repeat.
And not many people know that since 1999, waves of nationalistic leaders have arisen in Latin Ame
