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In a lecture last month on the War on Terror, Noam Chomsky asked a provocative question: "Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the 'war on terror'"? Says Chomsky:

The basic reasons were explained in internal documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years. State Department planners warned that the "very existence" of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of US policies going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; not Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere, much like Iran’s crime of successful defiance in 1979, or Syria’s rejection of Clinton’s demands.

Not arrogant enough for you? Read on:

Punishment of the population was regarded as fully legitimate, we learn from internal documents. "The Cuban people [are] responsible for the regime," the Eisenhower State Department decided, so that the US has the right to cause them to suffer by economic strangulation, later escalated to direct terror by Kennedy. Eisenhower and Kennedy agreed that the embargo would hasten Fidel Castro's departure as a result of the "rising discomfort among hungry Cubans."

Ancient history? Hardly:

When Cuba was in dire straits after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington intensified the punishment of the people of Cuba, at the initiative of liberal Democrats. The author of the 1992 measures to tighten the blockade proclaimed that "my objective is to wreak havoc in Cuba" (Representative Robert Torricelli). All of this continues until the present moment.

Although our four-decades-long hammering of the Cuban people may look a lot like terrorism, it clearly isn't. Can't be. To paraphrase President Nixon — when America does it, it isn't terrorism.