Harry Targ
When Fidel Castro stepped
down as Cuba’s chief of state in 2008 reflections were stimulated about the
role of the Cuban revolution at home and abroad. Which country has had a more
progressive impact on the historical development of the world (as US leaders
would claim the United States)?
Despite enormous changes and advances since
the 1959 Cuban revolution, Cuba remains part of the Global South (what used to
be referred to as “Third World” or “developing countries”), a world which has
been shaped and distorted in its economics and politics for 400 years by the
global capitalist system. Cuba, while in many ways a developed and even
industrialized country, remains closer in economic profile and diplomatic
standing and possibility to the nations of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and
Latin America than the industrial capitalist countries of North America,
Europe, and Japan
In the words of C. Wright Mills reflecting on
the Cuban revolution at its outset, Cuba remains part of the “hungry bloc,” not
in the sense of poverty and scarcity as he meant it-Cuba is part of the
developed world in these terms- but in the sense of still struggling to achieve
its right and capacity to define its own destiny. In fact, it could be argued
that Cuba’s “hunger” for self-determination, its spirit of nationalism, is what
drove the revolution in the nineteenth century, in the 1930s, in 1959 and still
drives the revolution today.
The spirit of revolution links Cuba’s past to
its present. There have been other continuities in Cuban history as well,
particularly since 1959. The most obvious one has been the hatred and
aggressive stance of the United States. The United States suspended formal
diplomatic relations with the island nation before President Eisenhower left
office, launched a full-scale economic blockade of Cuba in the Kennedy period,
initiated a long-term program of subversion and sabotage of the islands economy
and polity, and extended the blockade to pressure other countries to cut their
ties to the island’s economy. Despite a brief opening of Cuban/US relations during the Obama presidency, harsh measures resumed and escalated in the Trump administrations (never really reversed by former President Biden).
The hostile United States policy since the
1950s has been driven by the needs and hopes of capitalism; cold war fears of
“communism;” the “realpolitik” philosophy which says that Cuba is within the
U.S. sphere of influence; and the historically claimed right of the U.S. to
control Cuba’s destiny enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s.
Despite this hostility, since 1959 there has
been a high level of support for the revolution among Cubans because it
provided substantial economic advances for the people and satisfied their
thirst for self-determination. Consequently, even during the “special period” of
the 1990s support, while declining, held because the revolution continued to
represent the spirit of nationalism for the vast majority of the Cuban people.
Finally, a continuous element of the Cuban
revolution has been change and a pragmatic spirit that addresses needs,
possibilities, and dangers as they arise. Cuba has been one vast laboratory
experiment in which new policies, priorities, and programs have been introduced
to meet the exigencies of the moment. Alongside inevitable dogmatisms and
bureaucratic resistances has been the willingness of Cubans to throw out the
old, the unworkable, the threatened, and replace it with the new as history
requires (shifting from fertilizer, pesticides, and hybrid seeds to organic
agriculture for example). Over its long history the revolution ended foreign
ownership of the Cuban economy. It created an egalitarian society. It provided
health care, education, jobs, and a rich cultural life for most of its
citizens.
At the most fundamental level, the revolution
fulfilled all of the economic and social goals Fidel Castro articulated in his
1953 “History Will Absolve Me” speech. For most Cubans alive before 1959, there
is no question that the revolution has been an outstanding success. This is
true for their sons and daughters if one could compare what would have been
their possibilities before 1959 with what they have achieved today. The
revolution has worked.
And finally, in the great debate between the
U.S. and Cuba as inspirations and models for most of the citizens of the globe,
Fidel Castro might say again “History Will Absolve Me.”
