Their ecstasy demonstrates that the old Cold War mentality that held interventionists in its grip for some 45 years never went away, not even with the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, at least not insofar as Cuba is concerned.

But the excitement among among these old Cold War dead-enders pails in significance to their ecstasy over the fact that Cuba is now in the throes of a grave economic crisis, one that threatens the Cuban people with death by starvation and illness. That's because Cuba has long depended on a generous flow of oil from Venezuela, which the US government is now committed to terminating through orders to Venezuelan officials, in the hope of finally bringing down Cuba's longtime communist regime.

I can just hear it now if the Cuban regime falls: "Our 60-year-long economic embargo against the Cuban people has finally worked! It finally caused enough death and suffering among the Cuban people that the Cuban government fell of its own accord for lack of revenue!"

The excitement and thrill among interventionists for all this death and suffering only goes to show how the national-security state form of governmental structure has served to warp and stultify American values and stultify the consciences of the American people.

After all, how in the world can anyone in good conscience intentionally and knowingly inflict suffering and death on the people of a nation as a way to achieve a political goal — i.e., regime change? Isn't that why we condemn terrorism? Terrorists attack and kill civilians as a way to induce their government to change its policies. That's what the Cuban embargo has always done — attack and kill Cuban civilians through impoverishment and illness as a way to induce the Cuban government to renounce power and permit its replacement with a US-approved stooge who will dutifully follow the orders of US officials.

Recall what Cuban official Che Guevara said soon after Fidel Castro's forces had ousted from power the US-approved stooge Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban brute whose forces would kidnap young Cuban girls and deliver them to high rollers in Havana's Mafia-controlled casinos as a sexual perk. Guevara was asked what Cuba's new regime wanted from the United States. His answer: Just to leave us alone.

That was never going to happen. US officials, especially within the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, were never — could never — just leave Cuba alone. The anti-communist obsession was simply too powerful within the minds of the US national-security establishment. US officials were absolutely convinced that the Reds were coming to get us.

The Reds were everyone, US officials maintained. They were in Hollywood, Congress, the executive branch, the public schools, the civil-rights movement, and even the Army. Why, some Cold Warriors were even convinced that President Eisenhower was a Red.

The Reds were in Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and most everyone else.

Of course, since Cuba was only 90 miles away, that meant, US officials said, that a communist dagger was pointed at America's neck. There was no way that America's Cold War dead-enders could just leave Cuba alone. The anti-communist obsession dictated a never-ending war against the Cuban people — one that would last until the communist regime finally went away and was replaced with another US puppet regime. Never mind that the last thing that most Cubans wanted was to be re-controlled and re-subjugated by the US Empire.