This week the big news is that the United States and Cuba are in high-level talks. Donald Trump brags: “I have the honor of taking Cuba. … I can do anything I want with it.”
These comments follow earlier messages associated with this and other conquests: “They really want it. They are begging for it” (the “it” in Cuba’s case being Trump’s “friendly takeover.”) Those repeated lines have been sticking in my craw.
There’s a reason why they bother me so. I have been reading some of the critiques of the U.S. embargo that human rights groups have made over the years, and the word I see repeated throughout these reports is “violation.” Our policy is a violation of international law.
Stan Dotson
According to a U.N. Human Rights panel, the most recent oil blockade and its complete asfixiation of the island is “a serious violation.” Therein lies the connection: In Spanish, violación means “rape.” A rapist is a violador.
The U.S. has been “violating” Cuba for decades, and now the chief violator claims, as so many perpetrators want to claim, that “they wanted it; they were begging for it.” To complicate matters, many Cuban Americans are cheering him on in his quest to “take it” and “do whatever he wants” with it.
My psychologist friends tell me one of the biggest challenges in overcoming rape trauma is “identification with the aggressor” syndrome. This is a defense mechanism that kicks in when victims feel completely beaten down and powerless; they wind up adapting to the aggression, sometimes taking on characteristics of the violator, even seeing the violator as a hero, a savior.
This diagnosis, first named in the 1930s by Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in his treatment of victims of childhood sexual violence, later was applied to a whole range of abusive relationships involving an imbalance of power. It sheds light on the phenomenon of so many Cuban Americans identifying with the MAGA movement and viewing Trump as a hero-savior.
It explains why, this week, I heard a couple of people on the streets of Havana — a taxi driver and a street vendor — telling me they think Trump is great, that he will bring about much-needed change in Cuba. These two are in the minority, at least as far as the Cubans I regularly talk to; most tend to identity Trump as a monster figure wreaking havoc on the world. But there are those, here as well as in Miami, who gladly egg on the violation, no matter the suffering it imposes on the Cuban people.
Identifying with the aggressor is not new; the syndrome did not suddenly appear in the 1930s. As people of biblical faith, we would do well to re-read the sacred story with this phenomenon in mind.
Take David and Bathsheba. The core story goes like this: A powerful ruler rapes a vulnerable, unprotected woman. She eventually enters his harem as one of his many wives and raises their son to be the next king (and serial rapist as Solomon took ownership of 700 wives and 300 concubines).
What if we “unredact” the King David files and fill in the blanks of the story to narrate it as a clear tale of violent aggression and identification with the aggressor syndrome?
Church history also offers examples. One comes from Michele de Cuneo, an explorer on Christopher Columbus’ second voyage who documented an episode of a rape he committed with complete immunity.
It is a flaw in traditional theological education that we have redacted a critical study of Christopher Columbus out of church history. The conquest of the New World would not have happened without a strong theological underpinning that gave moral justification for the theft of resources and the violation of indigenous and African people.
Cuneo wrote about the time when Columbus “gave” him a captured Taino woman:
Having brought her into my cabin, and she being naked as is their custom, I conceived the desire to take my pleasure. I wanted to put my desire to execution, but she was unwilling for me to do so and treated me with her nails in such wise that I would have preferred never to have begun. But seeing this … I took a rope-end and thrashed her well, following which she produced such screaming and wailing as would cause you not to believe your ears. Finally we reached an agreement such that, I can tell you, she seemed to have been raised in a veritable school of harlots.
We can only imagine with horror the process this Indigenous woman underwent, going from fierce resistance to acting the harlot in adaptation to his desires, identifying with the aggressor in order to survive.
“Some Cubans have fallen prey to the identification with the aggressor syndrome.”
Since 1959, as Revolutionary Cuba has been persistently violated, some Cubans have fallen prey to the identification with the aggressor syndrome. They have joined forces with the violator and bombard social media with blame-the-victim memes — “Cuba’s suffering is its own fault.”
Do you hear echoes of “Bathsheba shouldn’t have been sunbathing” and “that naked savage was asking for it”?
Throughout the decades, though, Cubans in large part have fought the violation tooth and nail, screaming and wailing to high heaven, and up to now have counted on the strong support of the larger international community to provide a measure of safe haven. Current politics of the violator have changed that dynamic.
Now Cuba is feeling more and more alone, with many of its historic allies cowering in fear, unwilling to maintain the resistance. The capitulation of Mexico and Brazil and Jamaica and Nicaragua to Trump’s threats, in essence their participation in his process of “taking” Cuba, has the appearance of an international “gang violation.”
Lent is a time for penitence and repentance. May we who occupy space in the body politic of a predatory violator, but who seek to live and move and have our being in another body, one that was broken for us, may we read the unredacted history of our nation this Lenten season and pray along with the penitent King David: “Create in us a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us.”
And while we pray, while we await that renewal and cleansing, let us join in the tooth-and-nail fight for the violation to stop.
Stan Dotson previously served as associate pastor at First Baptist Church, Matanzas, Cuba. He and his wife, Kim, now serve on the pastoral staff at Ebenezer Baptist in Marianao, which is the founding congregation of the Martin Luther King Center in Cuba. They also work to form and support congregational partnerships between churches in the United Staters and churches in the Fraternity of Baptist Churches of Cuba.