In a speech this week to the Organization of American States, Vice President Mike Pence issued the standard, obligatory denunciation of the communist regime in Cuba, which the U.S. national-security establishment (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA) have targeted for regime change ever since the Cuban revolution in 1959. Pence stated:

In Cuba, the Castro name has begun to fade, but under a handpicked successor, their legacy endures and the oppressive police state they established is ever-present. Under President Donald Trump, America will always stand for Que Viva Cuba Libre.

That's pure nonsense. Under American conservatives and the U.S. national-security establishment, America has always stood for "Que Viva Una Dictadura conservativa en Cuba."

The last thing that American conservatives and Pentagon, CIA, and NSA officials want for Cuba is genuine freedom. When they say they want a Cuba "libre," what they really mean is that they want to replace the Castro regime with a pro-U.S. right-wing dictatorship, just like the one that the Cuban revolutionaries ousted from power in the revolution — the brutal dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista. That's what they call "freedom."

Batista is their model. U.S. officials loved him. They supported him. They adored him. That's because he did the bidding of the U.S. government. He obeyed the CIA's orders.

So, why did the Cuban people oust Batista from power? For the same reason that the Iranian people ousted the CIA's hand-picked Iranian dictator from power in the Iranian revolution in 1979. Batista, like the Shah of Iran, was one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators in the world. Batista was a dictator who partnered with the Mafia, the premier criminal organization in the world. He permitted the Mafia to operate casinos in Havana in return for the payment of generous bribes to the government. He also permitted the Mafia to use Cuba as a way station for the importation of heroin into the United States.

To ensure that the Mafia's Havana casinos could compete effectively against those in Las Vegas, Batista's partnership with the Mafia included having government henchmen go out and kidnap young girls in outlying towns and villages in Cuba and bring them into Havana to be raped by well-heeled gamblers. It was a perk that the Las Vegas casinos were unable to offer. It was one of those rapes that inspired a woman named Celia Sanchez, not Fidel Castro, to launch the Cuban revolution.

What if anyone objected? He was arrested, incarcerated, tortured, and sometimes killed. There was never an independent judiciary or legislature to stop or inhibit Batista. His was a dictatorship in the pure sense of the word, no different in principle from the dictatorship that Castro would adopt. One was a right-wing dictatorship, the other a left-wing dictatorship.

That's what the battle that the U.S. national-security establishment has waged against the Castro regime has always been all about — trying to get rid of Castro to install another right-wing dictatorship in Cuba, one that will be "pro-U.S.," meaning that it will do whatever the U.S. national-security triumvirate wants it to do.

Look at Chile. To this day, American conservatives, the Pentagon, and the CIA express great pride over having brought "freedom" to Chile in the U.S. national-security state's regime-change operation in the early 1970s, when they violently ousted from power the leftwing, democratically elected socialist regime of Salvador Allende and replaced it with the rightwing unelected military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Never mind that Pinochet and his national-security state goons proceeded to round up tens of thousands of people and incarcerate, torture, rape, disappear, or execute thousands of them. Since the victims were suspected of believing in communism or socialism or of having voted for Allende, it was considered entirely appropriate to kidnap, torture, rape, disappear, or execute them.