What if Cuba Did to Us What Hamas Did to Israel on October 7?

This article first appeared in New English Review. 

Amidst all the international debate over Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas and the devastation in Gaza, let me pose a hypothetical question: What if on that dark day, instead of Hamas attacking Israel, it had been a battalion of Cuban troops landing on the shores of South Florida and attacking a dance festival in a small town? What if they had massacred some 1,200 people, men, women, and children? What if they had raped many of their female victims before killing them? What if they had slaughtered entire families in their homes, raping the mothers and beheading infants in their cribs or putting them into ovens to roast them alive in front of the horrified eyes of their parents? And all this was proudly videotaped by the murderers themselves.

What if they had taken 250 or so people back to Cuba in their boats as hostages? What if, upon arriving in Havana, they had been greeted by howling mobs of civilians who spat on the victims, helped beat them, desecrated corpses, and cheered the actions of their troops? What if two years later, they still held some 50 hostages/dead bodies, after murdering many of them? (I should note that I am only picking Cuba because we have an adversarial relationship with them, and they are near our shores. I don’t actually foresee this scenario being played out.) 

How do you think our government would have reacted? Would we have simply demanded the release of the hostages and gone to the UN to ask for their support in their release? Would we have asked the UN to issue a condemnation of the Cubans’ actions? Would we have applied sanctions? Would we have negotiated with the Cuban government?

Setting aside Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis, the answer is clearly no. The overwhelming majority of the American public would demand a military response and the destruction of the Cuban military and government. That would involve a land invasion and aerial bombardment of Havana. There would be civilian casualties, hopefully, not deliberate, but inevitably, especially if the enemy chose to fight literally behind its civilians, as Hamas always does. 

So that brings us back to Israel, which, unlike the above hypothetical model, is fighting an existential battle to survive, not just to punish the evil attack on October 7. In spite of that, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are fighting honorably, trying to avoid civilian casualties. However, Hamas is perfectly content to have plenty of dead Palestinians that they can trot out for the UN and the international media to see so that they can issue condemnations against Israel.

But even in the hypothetical Cuba case, in some quarters, there would still be condemnation of the US. Some leftist professors in our universities and their indoctrinated students would march, protest, occupy, and wave Cuban flags while wearing their Che Guevara t-shirts. Just as today’s American left supports Hamas, some misfits in our society would support Cuba even in the face of heinous atrocities committed against our civilians.

I have an anecdotal story to add to my hypothetical Cuban case: In January 2009, at the University of California at Irvine, where I was teaching at the time, I witnessed one of those countless anti-Israel events held on campus, sponsored by the Muslim Student Union (MSU). The speaker was none other than Amir Abdel Malik Ali, an Oakland-based imam and a leader in the As Sabiqun fringe of Islam, a group not noted for being “moderate”. Ali, a fiery speaker who doesn’t hesitate to insult Jews when attacking Israel, has spoken often at UC Irvine. On this occasion, I approached him, as I have on other occasions, after the q and a. I engaged in a debate with him one-on-one as his student audience gathered around, trying to look mean and intimidating. As I concluded my discussion with Ali, one of the MSU members made a remark to me that if I favored peace, why did I support what the IDF was doing in Gaza? In response, I asked him what the US would do if the Cuban government were lobbing rockets into Miami. His response? “We would deserve it.”  Here is what I wrote on this event at the time. 

If I am not mistaken, today this young man is an attorney in Southern California. 

Sadly, we have a radical leftist fringe in our society that not only hates Israel, but also their own country as well. We see them regularly in the news, on our streets, in places like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, and other places. We see them in our universities engaged in violent protests at schools like Columbia, Harvard, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington-the list goes on and on. No matter what Hamas did on October 7, 2023, they are openly supporting this evil entity, attacking police, and attacking Jews. More recently, they are attacking our ICE agents over the illegal immigration issue. They fight on behalf of violent illegal criminals we are trying to deport, as well as foreign students who are causing chaos on our campuses.

So the question begs: What if Cuba (or any other country) made a terrorist incursion into our country, murdered over a thousand people, and took over 250 hostages back to their country? How many of these radicals would put politics aside and stand with the USA and our military?