A new video war game hit the
stores on November 9 and set a sales record of five million six hundred thousand
games on its first day and continues to be a record seller. Titled “Call of
Duty: Black Ops,” this virtual reality takes place in the 1960s, resurrecting
the so-called Cold War. Enemy territory includes Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and
Russia.
As the Associated Press reports
it, “In one mission…players must shoot their way through Havana to assassinate
a young Fidel Castro.” Players – mostly young and mostly boys – enjoy a rampage
of killing as they close in on their target. In real life, most of these players
know hardly anything about Castro. But this game is providing millions and
millions and millions of players the virtual experience of invading Cuba and
assassinating him. Thus the players become participants in the normalization of
terror that is a growing part of our culture here in the United States.
Never mind the fact that in the
real world more than 600 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro have failed. In
this virtual reality the Empire’s fantasies trump historical reality. As a Cuban news report observes: “What the government of the
United States could not accomplish in more than 50 years, it now is trying to
achieve virtually.”
The New York Times video game
critic, Seth Schiesel, supposedly a grown man whose
mind should not be quite so malleable, rhapsodizes about his new game. After
playing it, he immediately replayed it, saying, “I wanted to try to assassinate
Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion again. ”
Oh, come on, some may say, It’s
just a game!
If so,
it’s a game being played in reality by the person who is about to become chair
of the House Foreign Relations Committee. The November election
results mean that every House committee will now be chaired by a Republican.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, rightwing Representative from Florida, has dreamed for
decades of getting to this powerful position in Washington, playing a major
role in U.S. foreign policy not only toward Cuba but toward the whole world.
She was born in 1952 in Havana
where her father was an avid supporter of the Batista dictatorship. He moved
his family to Florida after the Revolution. In 1989, Florida Democrat,
Representative Claude Pepper, died in office and Ros-Lehtinen won the special
election to replace him. She centered her campaign around
freeing the terrorist, Orlando Bosch, who was one of the two masterminds of
blowing a Cuban passenger jet out of the sky, killing all 73 people aboard.
The Justice Department ruled
that Bosch should be deported because of his terrorist activities, but Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen had the backing of the wealthy and powerful Cuban American
National Foundation. Her campaign manager was Jeb Bush, the son of then
President George Bush, who overruled his own Justice Department and freed Bosch
in Miami where he walks free to this day, still bragging about trying to
assassinate Fidel Castro. Ros-Lehtinen became the first Cuban-American member
of Congress.
She was given a seat on the
Foreign Relations Committee soon after her election, agitating for the
overthrow of the Cuban government ever since. In 1996 on NBC’s “Today” program,
she expanded upon her call for action against Cuba. When Bryant Gumbel said
that most Americans probably don’t see Cuba as a threat, she replied: “What was
the threat in the Panama invasion? Did we think that Manuel Noriega’s army was
going to invade us? And what about the threat in the Persian
Gulf War? Were they going to send their jets…and invade us? There were
no threats…and yet we took forceful action.” In other words, even though Cuba poses
no threat, Washington should use its Armed Forces to attack Cuba as they
attacked Panama and Iraq.
In the British documentary “638
Ways to Kill Castro” Ros-Lehtinen told her interviewer, “I welcome the
opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro.”
The millions of people playing
at assassinating Fidel Castro and ruling the world with Black Ops have their
avatar in Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
***
Historian Jane Franklin is the author of Cuba
and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History.
E-mail: JaneFranklin@hotmail.com