A Sea Change in Latin American Politics Challenges the “Washington Consensus”
As the Soviet Bloc began to stagnate economically in the 1980s, the industrial capitalist giants led by the United States increased pressure on poor countries to shift from state-directed to so-called “market economies.” The G7 countries, the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, and Canada, launched a campaign to demand that countries downsize their governments, deregulate and privatize their economies, and shift from producing goods and services for domestic consumers to exports. These policies, known as the “neo-liberal policy agenda” or the “Washington consensus” were promoted by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization., and international bankers and CEOs of the major multinational corporations.
The theory behind the neo-liberal policies was that by opening their economies to foreign investors and stimulating exports, developing and former Socialist countries would receive scarce dollars, yen, marks and other international currencies to stimulate their own development. Unfortunately for these countries the reality became radically different from the theory. For example, in Latin America, there was over 80 percent economic growth between 1960 and 1980, before the neo-liberal policies went into effect and only 9 percent growth from 1980 to 2000. For almost all countries of the Western Hemisphere economic inequality dramatically increased and the percentages of the people living in poverty rose.
By the dawn of the new century about 1/4 of Latin Americans lived in poverty (less than $2 a day). Surprisingly, statistics indicated a direct relationship between productivity growth and the percentage of the population living in poverty; productivity and poverty increased at the same time. In addition, the work that most Latin Americans did has significantly changed. From 1950 to 1990 there was a 29 percent decline of those who worked in agriculture, a modest 5 percent increase in industrial work, and a 23 percent increase in service sector employment. In the 1990s, it was estimated that almost all job creation was in the so-called “informal sector.” That is, most new job seekers were engaged in street markets, drug dealing, prostitution, unregulated sweatshops in small facilities or people’s homes, or other low-paying, unregulated work.
Despite the dramatic decline in the quality of life experienced throughout Latin America, since the 1980s, the G7 countries, the international economic organizations, and the private banks and corporations continued to promote neo-liberalism through strident rules involving borrowing and inequitable trade agreements. However, over the last decade, resistance to neo-liberalism has generated a massive anti-globalization movement.
During its early stages, grassroots groups began to protest when their governments accepted loans with conditions attached from the IMF. Indigenous people mobilized to protest international energy and other corporations clear-cutting their land to extract natural resources and at the same time destroying communities.
Then, in 1994, the Zapatistas, a largely indigenous movement in the Mexican state of Chiapas, rose-up against their government’s participation in the NAFTA trade treaty with the United States and Canada. It gained international recognition and support from opponents of neo-liberal globalization everywhere.
In 1999, a coalition of environmentalists, workers, indigenous people, and others shut down the World Trade Organization in Seattle to protest so-called “free trade” which they saw as benefiting corporations and banks, rather than people. The so-called “battle of Seattle” made it clear that a new world movement was in formation. Since then, anti-globalization activists of all sorts have met in World Social Forum meetings in Brazil, India, Kenya, Venezuela and spread to Africa, Europe, and North America. This week the latest World Social Forum is meeting again in Brazil.
The latest stage of protest against neo-liberalism is reflected in a massive transformation of politics in Latin America. In a series of elections throughout the region candidates and parties have been elected to office opposing neo-liberalism and “the Washington Consensus.” These include anti-neo-liberal governments elected in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and, the most recent U.S. target, Venezuela. While these regimes vary in their opposition to neo-liberalism, they threaten economic “business as usual” U.S. interests.
Venezuela now is transforming its own internal economic and political life while building a coalition of states to stand up to U.S. regional dominance. The Venezuelan story began when its citizens elected a former army officer Hugo Chavez to the presidency in 1998. Chavez launched a so-called “Bolivarian Revolution.” At home it included a new constitution recognizing the rights of all citizens to a job, education, health care, and basic nutrition. Since then literacy and medical campaigns have dramatically transformed the quality of life of the 80 per cent of the population that were poor. Local planning councils and Bolivarian Circles have empowered the vast majority of Venezuelans to participate in political decision-making. The government has encouraged worker managed and owned factories and has redistributed 2.2 million hectares of state-owned land to 130,000 peasant families and cooperatives to revitalize agriculture.
Finally, Venezuela has made agreements with her neighbors, to trade oil for products that they produce. For example, thousands of Cuban doctors have been working in Venezuela in exchange for valuable oil. In addition, it has worked to build a South American common market, and with others, is constructing a regional development bank. It has initiated similar ties with countries in the Caribbean and Central America.
No doubt, Venezuela’s vast oil resource has underwritten its domestic reforms and community building in the region. But the country is historically among the few which have used profits from their scarce resource to redistribute wealth, income, and power to an underclass.
The Bush administration worked to undermine and overthrow the Chavez regime, including supporting an abortive military coup against him in 2002. It tried to threaten and isolate the regime in the region the way the U.S. has tried to do to Cuba since 1960.
Given the sea change in the politics of the entire region, a wiser policy for the new Obama administration would be to support Latin American regimes that promote and guarantee their citizens economic rights. It is time to give up old and discredited foreign policies based on market fundamentalism and covert interventionism. In an article describing a letter 200 Latin American scholars wrote to President Obama urging a new US policy for the region Cynthia McClintock, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University wrote: that “… the key goal of our letter was to encourage President-elect Obama to consider the ‘new left’ in Latin America as part and parcel of the movement for change in the United States.”
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
THE BUSH YEARS: THE END OF THE REAGAN REVOLUTION
THE BUSH YEARS: THE END OF THE REAGAN REVOLUTION
Our assessment of the Bush years (2001-2008) must be grounded in an understanding of the almost thirty years of a failed ideologythat guided domestic and foreign policy. This failed vision of government and public policy has its roots in the Reagan "revolution."
Domestically the Reagan administration embraced a governmental philosophy that claimed that government can never help solve social, political, and economic problems. Rather, government was the problem. In keeping with this philosophy, Presidents Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Clinton, and the last Bush reduced government by cutting social services; redistributed more of society's wealth from the majority to the tiny minority by cutting taxes for the rich; reduced funding for mass transportation and public education, and attempted to gut long-standing programs that have served the needs of the population well, such as social security. This century government became disabled such that when an enormous tragedy such as Hurricane Katrina occurred, the Bush administration was totally unprepared to come to the aid of people in need.
Twenty-first century government served the people less than government did thirty or forty years ago. The Bush administration through taxes and selective government programs tilted societal resources further toward the rich. The top 1% of wealth holders in the United States control over 42% of the country's wealth, an increase of about 10% over the 1970s. On foreign policy, Bush embraced the neo-conservative global vision. Neo-conservatism became the basis for policy in the 1980s and beyond. Basically, neo-conservatives in the Bush administration- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, and a host of others- argued that as the last remaining superpower the United States has the right and responsibility to impose its wishes, its vision of government and public policy, and its institutions on the world. If people resist, the neo-conservatives said, the United States should impose its domination by force.
9/11 became a "transformative moment". It gave the Bush administration the excuse to make war on Afghanistan and Iraq and to embark on efforts to overthrow troublesome governments such as that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. In addition, the transformative moment led the president to declare what became known as the Bush Doctrine, the proclamation that the US has the right to act unilaterally and militarily when it thinks a group or nation might be thinking about attacking us. In other words Bush claimed that the United States had the right to engage in military attacks peremptorily. To facilitate preemptive strikes, the Bush administration maintains about 700 military bases in 132 countries.
In the end, this administration has tried to undermine and cripple government and expand militarily all around the world. As 2009 dawns we are in the midst of an economic depression that might become comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s with massive unemployment, growing mortgage foreclosures, and declining social services. And we are bogged down in two wars and live in a world in which most nations and peoples no longer respect the United States.
The current economic crisis and unending wars are results of Bush administration policies and a thirty year tradition of government for the rich and visions of creating a global order based on US dominance. President Obama must return to the view that government can and must help those in need. He must shift his approach from a foreign policy based on threats and military interventionism to negotiation and working with other governments in international organizations.
January 23, 2009
Our assessment of the Bush years (2001-2008) must be grounded in an understanding of the almost thirty years of a failed ideologythat guided domestic and foreign policy. This failed vision of government and public policy has its roots in the Reagan "revolution."
Domestically the Reagan administration embraced a governmental philosophy that claimed that government can never help solve social, political, and economic problems. Rather, government was the problem. In keeping with this philosophy, Presidents Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Clinton, and the last Bush reduced government by cutting social services; redistributed more of society's wealth from the majority to the tiny minority by cutting taxes for the rich; reduced funding for mass transportation and public education, and attempted to gut long-standing programs that have served the needs of the population well, such as social security. This century government became disabled such that when an enormous tragedy such as Hurricane Katrina occurred, the Bush administration was totally unprepared to come to the aid of people in need.
Twenty-first century government served the people less than government did thirty or forty years ago. The Bush administration through taxes and selective government programs tilted societal resources further toward the rich. The top 1% of wealth holders in the United States control over 42% of the country's wealth, an increase of about 10% over the 1970s. On foreign policy, Bush embraced the neo-conservative global vision. Neo-conservatism became the basis for policy in the 1980s and beyond. Basically, neo-conservatives in the Bush administration- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, and a host of others- argued that as the last remaining superpower the United States has the right and responsibility to impose its wishes, its vision of government and public policy, and its institutions on the world. If people resist, the neo-conservatives said, the United States should impose its domination by force.
9/11 became a "transformative moment". It gave the Bush administration the excuse to make war on Afghanistan and Iraq and to embark on efforts to overthrow troublesome governments such as that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. In addition, the transformative moment led the president to declare what became known as the Bush Doctrine, the proclamation that the US has the right to act unilaterally and militarily when it thinks a group or nation might be thinking about attacking us. In other words Bush claimed that the United States had the right to engage in military attacks peremptorily. To facilitate preemptive strikes, the Bush administration maintains about 700 military bases in 132 countries.
In the end, this administration has tried to undermine and cripple government and expand militarily all around the world. As 2009 dawns we are in the midst of an economic depression that might become comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s with massive unemployment, growing mortgage foreclosures, and declining social services. And we are bogged down in two wars and live in a world in which most nations and peoples no longer respect the United States.
The current economic crisis and unending wars are results of Bush administration policies and a thirty year tradition of government for the rich and visions of creating a global order based on US dominance. President Obama must return to the view that government can and must help those in need. He must shift his approach from a foreign policy based on threats and military interventionism to negotiation and working with other governments in international organizations.
January 23, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The Middle East Crisis Remains the Same in 2009 as 2006
This radio commentary was prepared during the Israeli war on Lebanon in the summer, 2006. Its portrait of the main actors in the tragic circumstances of Middle East peoples remains unchanged today.
The commentary hints at the fundamental role the United States has played in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Israeli vision of a “Greater Israel” empire, and the need for a movement of progressives, particularly among Democrats, to mobilize to end US complicity with Israel’s violent policies which victimize Palestinian peoples while continuing to expose Israeli citizens to terrorist retribution. Unfortunately, none of these core features of the Middle East catastrophe have changed.
This time the peace movement must expand its militancy demanding that the incoming Obama administration end its support of Israeli militarism and promote two independent and economically viable states in the region. HT
***************************************************************
ASSESSING THE CURRENT MIDDLE EAST CRISIS:
CONSEQUENCES FOR EFFORTS TO REDUCE VIOLENCE
Harry Targ
The Crisis is Upon Us
The current Middle East crisis has emerged with shocking rapidity. We have seen a seemingly unending escalation of violence against expanding civilian targets in Lebanon, Gaza, and Israel. Neoconservatives such as Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Shawn Hannity, and William Kristol, proclaim that the war in the Middle East constitutes the onset of “World War III,” a view that is in keeping with their vision of why the United States needs to exert military power globally.
Key Actors in the Middle East Drama
To better understand the immediate causes of this Middle East crisis and its relationship to United States foreign policy the major actors in the tense drama must be examined.
First, “Political Islam” refers to those movements, primarily in the Middle East, the Gulf, North Africa, and Asia that fuse the drive for political power with religious fundamentalism. In the main, Political Islam is profoundly reactionary in terms of democracy, human rights, and economic justice. Paradoxically, Political Islam drew much of its initial support from US global policy. For example, the United States provided massive aid and training to rebels fighting against the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan in the 1980s, including today’s enemy icon, Osama Bin Laden. In fact, President Carter began funding the creation of Political Islam in Afghanistan before the Soviet Union sent troops to that country.
Hamas and Hezbollah, allied with outside actors Syria and Iran, formed in the 1980s. They sought to capture the support of Palestinians and their allies in response to growing Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people and the corruption of the Palestine Liberation Organization. These two formations have represented terrorism and religious fundamentalism and yet at the same time have provided significant social services and a political voice for the repressed Palestinian population.
Second, we need to reflect more systematically on Syria and Iran as regional political actors with ties to Political Islam. Both countries seek to expand their influence in the region and sympathize with local Islamic militants to do so. It is clear that both Syria and Iran are targets of the US. Israel receives huge military support from the United States and the two share an interest in destroying Syria and Iran: the US wants to control oil, and Israel territory and people.
Third, the Israeli government is driven by a vision of regional hegemony and the elimination of the Palestinian people as a political force. As Noam Chomsky has argued, Israeli governments (and the United States) have always envisioned a region based on a “Greater Israel,” that is Israeli control of the politics and economics of Southern Lebanon, Western Syria, and Palestine. Crushing the growing popularity of Hamas and Hezbollah is a necessity from the vantage point of this vision and ultimately as well destroying their base of support in Syria and Iran. Like the assassination attempt of an Israeli politician in London in 1982, the recent capture of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon provided the excuse for Israel’s brutal and massive military escalation of violence causing the deaths of hundreds of men, women, and children with no connection to Hezbollah.
Fourth, the Middle East crisis has profound consequences for the United States and the Bush administration. President Bush by word and deed has given the green light to Israel to expand its violence in Gaza and Lebanon. He has forestalled diplomatic activity to bring a halt to the violence. He even has been slow to remove US citizens trapped in the war zones of Lebanon. Further, the six month escalation of tension between the United States and Iran suggests that the former would not oppose an Israeli strike on the latter. The US would get its war on Iran without having to carry out the war itself. In the end, this Middle East crisis could give renewed intellectual justification for the neoconservative vision of a globalization of American power.
Finally, this administration seems to be increasing support for militarism in the face of growing danger of war in virtually every region of the world: the Korean, Peninsula, East and South Asia, the Middle East and the Gulf, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The Bush administration, more than every other administration since World War II, seems wedded to the unlimited use of military force as opposed to diplomacy.
It remains to be seen whether the growing worldwide protest against the Israeli war on Lebanon and US acquiescence to it will bring a desperately needed ceasefire soon and, in the future, whether the election of anti-war candidates in the fall, 2006 US congressional elections will change United States policy in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
This radio commentary was prepared during the Israeli war on Lebanon in the summer, 2006. Its portrait of the main actors in the tragic circumstances of Middle East peoples remains unchanged today.
The commentary hints at the fundamental role the United States has played in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Israeli vision of a “Greater Israel” empire, and the need for a movement of progressives, particularly among Democrats, to mobilize to end US complicity with Israel’s violent policies which victimize Palestinian peoples while continuing to expose Israeli citizens to terrorist retribution. Unfortunately, none of these core features of the Middle East catastrophe have changed.
This time the peace movement must expand its militancy demanding that the incoming Obama administration end its support of Israeli militarism and promote two independent and economically viable states in the region. HT
***************************************************************
ASSESSING THE CURRENT MIDDLE EAST CRISIS:
CONSEQUENCES FOR EFFORTS TO REDUCE VIOLENCE
Harry Targ
The Crisis is Upon Us
The current Middle East crisis has emerged with shocking rapidity. We have seen a seemingly unending escalation of violence against expanding civilian targets in Lebanon, Gaza, and Israel. Neoconservatives such as Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Shawn Hannity, and William Kristol, proclaim that the war in the Middle East constitutes the onset of “World War III,” a view that is in keeping with their vision of why the United States needs to exert military power globally.
Key Actors in the Middle East Drama
To better understand the immediate causes of this Middle East crisis and its relationship to United States foreign policy the major actors in the tense drama must be examined.
First, “Political Islam” refers to those movements, primarily in the Middle East, the Gulf, North Africa, and Asia that fuse the drive for political power with religious fundamentalism. In the main, Political Islam is profoundly reactionary in terms of democracy, human rights, and economic justice. Paradoxically, Political Islam drew much of its initial support from US global policy. For example, the United States provided massive aid and training to rebels fighting against the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan in the 1980s, including today’s enemy icon, Osama Bin Laden. In fact, President Carter began funding the creation of Political Islam in Afghanistan before the Soviet Union sent troops to that country.
Hamas and Hezbollah, allied with outside actors Syria and Iran, formed in the 1980s. They sought to capture the support of Palestinians and their allies in response to growing Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people and the corruption of the Palestine Liberation Organization. These two formations have represented terrorism and religious fundamentalism and yet at the same time have provided significant social services and a political voice for the repressed Palestinian population.
Second, we need to reflect more systematically on Syria and Iran as regional political actors with ties to Political Islam. Both countries seek to expand their influence in the region and sympathize with local Islamic militants to do so. It is clear that both Syria and Iran are targets of the US. Israel receives huge military support from the United States and the two share an interest in destroying Syria and Iran: the US wants to control oil, and Israel territory and people.
Third, the Israeli government is driven by a vision of regional hegemony and the elimination of the Palestinian people as a political force. As Noam Chomsky has argued, Israeli governments (and the United States) have always envisioned a region based on a “Greater Israel,” that is Israeli control of the politics and economics of Southern Lebanon, Western Syria, and Palestine. Crushing the growing popularity of Hamas and Hezbollah is a necessity from the vantage point of this vision and ultimately as well destroying their base of support in Syria and Iran. Like the assassination attempt of an Israeli politician in London in 1982, the recent capture of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon provided the excuse for Israel’s brutal and massive military escalation of violence causing the deaths of hundreds of men, women, and children with no connection to Hezbollah.
Fourth, the Middle East crisis has profound consequences for the United States and the Bush administration. President Bush by word and deed has given the green light to Israel to expand its violence in Gaza and Lebanon. He has forestalled diplomatic activity to bring a halt to the violence. He even has been slow to remove US citizens trapped in the war zones of Lebanon. Further, the six month escalation of tension between the United States and Iran suggests that the former would not oppose an Israeli strike on the latter. The US would get its war on Iran without having to carry out the war itself. In the end, this Middle East crisis could give renewed intellectual justification for the neoconservative vision of a globalization of American power.
Finally, this administration seems to be increasing support for militarism in the face of growing danger of war in virtually every region of the world: the Korean, Peninsula, East and South Asia, the Middle East and the Gulf, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The Bush administration, more than every other administration since World War II, seems wedded to the unlimited use of military force as opposed to diplomacy.
It remains to be seen whether the growing worldwide protest against the Israeli war on Lebanon and US acquiescence to it will bring a desperately needed ceasefire soon and, in the future, whether the election of anti-war candidates in the fall, 2006 US congressional elections will change United States policy in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Israeli Genocide?
January 6, 2009
Dear Editors,
Is Israel Committing Genocide?
Below is the language of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on Genocide initiated in 1948. Is there any doubt that the government of Israel is engaging in genocidal policies against the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip?
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Both Israel and the United States are signatories to the Genocide Convention. However, the Bush administration is fully supportive of Israel’s policies.
President Elect Barack Obama must be called upon to condemn the Israeli killing.
Harry Targ
West Lafayette
Dear Editors,
Is Israel Committing Genocide?
Below is the language of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on Genocide initiated in 1948. Is there any doubt that the government of Israel is engaging in genocidal policies against the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip?
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Both Israel and the United States are signatories to the Genocide Convention. However, the Bush administration is fully supportive of Israel’s policies.
President Elect Barack Obama must be called upon to condemn the Israeli killing.
Harry Targ
West Lafayette
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
LAST OF THREE ARTICLES ON THE CUBAN REVOLUTION
This month the world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. This revolution, and its bigger than life heroes and heroines, has been an inspiration to peoples from the Global South, and progressives, particularly youth, in developed countries. For all its flaws, the Cuban Revolution validates the slogan of international activists who chant: "Another World is Possible."
Happy 50th Anniversary Cuba!
(Below I insert a few commentaries I have written over the years on Cuba).
February 19, 2008
Reflections on the Cuban Revolution Today
Harry Targ
President Bush now travels through the African continent trumpeting the United States as a model for the peoples of the Global South. At the same time Fidel Castro steps down as Cuba’s chief of state stimulating reflections on 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?
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.
The hostile United States policy since the 1950s has been driven by the needs and hopes of capitalism; cold war fears of “communism;” the “realpolitic” 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.”
Harry Targ teaches U.S. foreign policy and political economy at Purdue University. His book on Cuba is called Cuba and the USA: A New World Order?, International Publishers, 1992.
Happy 50th Anniversary Cuba!
(Below I insert a few commentaries I have written over the years on Cuba).
February 19, 2008
Reflections on the Cuban Revolution Today
Harry Targ
President Bush now travels through the African continent trumpeting the United States as a model for the peoples of the Global South. At the same time Fidel Castro steps down as Cuba’s chief of state stimulating reflections on 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?
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.
The hostile United States policy since the 1950s has been driven by the needs and hopes of capitalism; cold war fears of “communism;” the “realpolitic” 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.”
Harry Targ teaches U.S. foreign policy and political economy at Purdue University. His book on Cuba is called Cuba and the USA: A New World Order?, International Publishers, 1992.
Cuban Revolution Survives Economic Crisis; Still a Challenge to Market Orthodoxy
by Harry Targ
Summer, 1999
The Cuban revolutionary government, challenged by the United States for forty years still survives in a post-cold war international system. The scruffy band of guerrilla fighters, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, came to power in 1959, dethroning long-time dictator and U.S. client Fulgencia Batista.
From the beginning the United States engaged in sabotage, external attacks, an economic blockade, ending diplomatic relations, and prohibiting U.S. tourists from traveling to the island, all to undermine the regime and generate enough opposition to the Castro forces to overthrow it. Despite well publicized policy "changes" in recent weeks, the Clinton Administration is still committed to the overthrow of the Cuban revolution. But why?
THE POWER OF A GOOD EXAMPLE
Primarily, the Cuban political and economic system remains committed to its own brand of national autonomy and socialism. The Cuban state continues to provide free health care and education, a basic rationed diet of food to all Cubans, almost free housing, and free and low cost cultural attractions to all Cubans. Racism, and more recently sexism and homophobia, has been significantly reduced in Cuban society. And, even in the face of sabotage and covert operations against the island nation, political democratization at the local, regional, and national levels has been increasing.
Even while Cuba's articulated autonomous, communitarian, egalitarian, socialist principles are not fully achieved, the island nation 90 miles from the United States represents a challenge to what Clinton supporters call "market democracies." For the United States, all nations must cut back government programs, end supports for the disadvantaged, sell off profitable and efficient state-owned enterprises and "let the market" manage peoples’ lives. For the Cubans, "the magic of the marketplace" would mean giving up national autonomy to the 250 multinational corporations and banks that dominate the global economy, the end to free health services and education, and the dramatic shift in the distribution of the wealth of the country from the vast majority to tiny minorities (including Miami Cubans who would return to claim properties their families left over 40 years ago). In short Cuba remains an alternative model of social, political, and economic development for poor countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This the U.S. seeks to challenge.
CUBA SHIFTS FROM SURVIVAL TO REDEVELOPMENT
How is Cuba surviving the radical changes in the world and its own economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? The collapse of the Socialist Bloc led to deep economic crisis for Cuba. Between 1991 and 1994, the Cuban gross domestic product declined by 35%, imports dropped by 75%, oil imports declined by half, and caloric intake dropped from roughly 2800 to 1735 per day. The impacts of the 40-year U.S. economic embargo in this context became all the more costly to Cuba (1997 estimates say the embargo cost the Cuban economy $800 billion just for that year alone).
The Cubans were forced to adapt to the collapse of socialism and the complete global capitulation to "marketplace" global capitalism. In 1994-95 a series of new laws were put in place to facilitate economic recovery. They included the legalization of the dollar in local transactions, shifting agriculture from state farms to agricultural cooperatives owned by groups of farmers, the opening of private agricultural markets for the sale of surplus produce, the legalization of small business enterprises run by families, and the legalization and expansion of foreign investment, particularly to encourage joint venture investments with foreign companies. (Only U.S. investors have been excluded, not by the Cuban government but by the United States government).
As to economic strategy, the Cubans committed themselves to rebuilding their tourist industry, expanding their innovative pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries for export, maintenance and enhancement of traditional exports such as nickel, sugar, tobacco, and citrus, increasing research and development of energy resources, and encouraging small enterprises as an alternative to the black market.
By 1998, Cuba had joint venture agreements with 340 foreign companies, oil and gas production had risen, tourism had earned upwards of $2 billion per year, and tourist and housing construction on the island had grown markedly.
The Cuban economy has made significant advances since the depths of the economic crisis in 1993-94 (caloric intake on a daily basis is up to 2,400 from the desperate 1,735 figure and the vital health and education systems survive even in weakened form) but life remains hard for most Cubans. Many must work two jobs. Those with access to dollars live easier lives than those that do not (maybe half the population) creating a modest but potentially destabilizing system of economic stratification.
Tourism has created boom times but also prostitution, ugly commercialism, overcrowding, and some unsavory cultural penetration by those from European, North American, and Latin American societies.
However, while Cuba has been forced to make significant changes in economic policy to relink with the capitalist global economy, it remains committed to the original goals of the revolution-healthy, well-fed, educated citizens- and sees the state as playing a significant role in maintaining and enhancing these goals. Hence, Cuba continues as a challenge to the dominant market orthodoxy that is sweeping the world and continues to the present, in word and deed, the vision of altruistic women and men of all races struggling together to achieve a better world for all.
by Harry Targ
Summer, 1999
The Cuban revolutionary government, challenged by the United States for forty years still survives in a post-cold war international system. The scruffy band of guerrilla fighters, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, came to power in 1959, dethroning long-time dictator and U.S. client Fulgencia Batista.
From the beginning the United States engaged in sabotage, external attacks, an economic blockade, ending diplomatic relations, and prohibiting U.S. tourists from traveling to the island, all to undermine the regime and generate enough opposition to the Castro forces to overthrow it. Despite well publicized policy "changes" in recent weeks, the Clinton Administration is still committed to the overthrow of the Cuban revolution. But why?
THE POWER OF A GOOD EXAMPLE
Primarily, the Cuban political and economic system remains committed to its own brand of national autonomy and socialism. The Cuban state continues to provide free health care and education, a basic rationed diet of food to all Cubans, almost free housing, and free and low cost cultural attractions to all Cubans. Racism, and more recently sexism and homophobia, has been significantly reduced in Cuban society. And, even in the face of sabotage and covert operations against the island nation, political democratization at the local, regional, and national levels has been increasing.
Even while Cuba's articulated autonomous, communitarian, egalitarian, socialist principles are not fully achieved, the island nation 90 miles from the United States represents a challenge to what Clinton supporters call "market democracies." For the United States, all nations must cut back government programs, end supports for the disadvantaged, sell off profitable and efficient state-owned enterprises and "let the market" manage peoples’ lives. For the Cubans, "the magic of the marketplace" would mean giving up national autonomy to the 250 multinational corporations and banks that dominate the global economy, the end to free health services and education, and the dramatic shift in the distribution of the wealth of the country from the vast majority to tiny minorities (including Miami Cubans who would return to claim properties their families left over 40 years ago). In short Cuba remains an alternative model of social, political, and economic development for poor countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This the U.S. seeks to challenge.
CUBA SHIFTS FROM SURVIVAL TO REDEVELOPMENT
How is Cuba surviving the radical changes in the world and its own economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? The collapse of the Socialist Bloc led to deep economic crisis for Cuba. Between 1991 and 1994, the Cuban gross domestic product declined by 35%, imports dropped by 75%, oil imports declined by half, and caloric intake dropped from roughly 2800 to 1735 per day. The impacts of the 40-year U.S. economic embargo in this context became all the more costly to Cuba (1997 estimates say the embargo cost the Cuban economy $800 billion just for that year alone).
The Cubans were forced to adapt to the collapse of socialism and the complete global capitulation to "marketplace" global capitalism. In 1994-95 a series of new laws were put in place to facilitate economic recovery. They included the legalization of the dollar in local transactions, shifting agriculture from state farms to agricultural cooperatives owned by groups of farmers, the opening of private agricultural markets for the sale of surplus produce, the legalization of small business enterprises run by families, and the legalization and expansion of foreign investment, particularly to encourage joint venture investments with foreign companies. (Only U.S. investors have been excluded, not by the Cuban government but by the United States government).
As to economic strategy, the Cubans committed themselves to rebuilding their tourist industry, expanding their innovative pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries for export, maintenance and enhancement of traditional exports such as nickel, sugar, tobacco, and citrus, increasing research and development of energy resources, and encouraging small enterprises as an alternative to the black market.
By 1998, Cuba had joint venture agreements with 340 foreign companies, oil and gas production had risen, tourism had earned upwards of $2 billion per year, and tourist and housing construction on the island had grown markedly.
The Cuban economy has made significant advances since the depths of the economic crisis in 1993-94 (caloric intake on a daily basis is up to 2,400 from the desperate 1,735 figure and the vital health and education systems survive even in weakened form) but life remains hard for most Cubans. Many must work two jobs. Those with access to dollars live easier lives than those that do not (maybe half the population) creating a modest but potentially destabilizing system of economic stratification.
Tourism has created boom times but also prostitution, ugly commercialism, overcrowding, and some unsavory cultural penetration by those from European, North American, and Latin American societies.
However, while Cuba has been forced to make significant changes in economic policy to relink with the capitalist global economy, it remains committed to the original goals of the revolution-healthy, well-fed, educated citizens- and sees the state as playing a significant role in maintaining and enhancing these goals. Hence, Cuba continues as a challenge to the dominant market orthodoxy that is sweeping the world and continues to the present, in word and deed, the vision of altruistic women and men of all races struggling together to achieve a better world for all.
BLOCKADING CUBA: WILL THE COLD WAR EVER END?
This month the world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. This revolution, and its bigger than life heroes and heroines, has been an inspiration to peoples from the Global South, and progressives, particularly youth, in developed countries. For all its flaws, the Cuban Revolution validates the slogan of international activists who chant: "Another World is Possible." Happy 50th Anniversary Cuba!
Below I insert a few commentaries I have written over the years on Cuba.
BLOCKADING CUBA: WILL THE COLD WAR EVER END?
Harry R. Targ
Summer, 1994
When I was a small child my parents took me to Starved Rock State Park in LaSalle, Illinois. Three hundred years earlier, on a rock formation 125 feet above the Illinois River a community of Native Americans took refuge while being attacked by enemies from below. Fully surrounded, cut off from the outside world and its sustenance, they eventually died of hunger and thirst.
As I returned from my latest trip to Cuba in June, 1994, the image of a proud, defiant, and encircled people starved to death by a more powerful enemy flashed across my mind. I had traveled there as a member of a delegation of philosophers and social scientists attending an international conference at the University of Havana. It occurred to me that the metaphor of Starved Rock better represents the reality of relations between the United States and Cuba than more conventional metaphors given in the media. Since Cuba's social and political revolution in 1959, the media and the U.S. government have depicted American-Cuban relations as a battle between good and evil-between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship, communism and capitalism-the hallmark of the Cold War lens to the world. And now despite the end of the Cold War around the world, the actual policies of the United States toward Cuba remain the same, as if nothing had changed.
Despite the efforts of journalists and politicians to portray Cuba in Cold War terms, over the last decade scholars, peace activists, artists, health care professionals and others have traveled to Cuba if they could show they had a professional interest in doing so. Travelers to Cuba, along with scholars and journalists, included Cuban-Americans who had been allowed to return home to visit relatives. As a result of decisions made by President Clinton in August, these categories of people, including researchers, will be severely restricted in their travels to the island. A door which had been opening for research, and scholarly dialogue, such as my annual participation since 1990 in the meetings of North American and Cuban philosophers and Social Scientists, may be ended.
Those of us who have visited Cuba over the last several years have gained a clearer picture of the changes occurring there. Those changes, as well as the history of Cuban-American relations, suggest that U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba is misguided. For example, it is vital to remember that the Cuban economy and political system were shaped by 450 years of Spanish colonial rule, followed by 60 years of almost total United States control of Cuban economic and political life. Significant United States investments in the Cuban sugar industry began in the 1880s and expanded dramatically over the next 30 years. This was paralleled by the U.S. intervention in Cuba's war with Spain in the 1890s and the virtual U.S. military occupation of the island after the end of the so-called Spanish-American War. By the time of the revolution in Cuba in 1959, U.S. investors controlled 80 percent of Cuba's public utilities, 90 percent of its mines, 90 percent of its cattle ranches, 50 percent of its railways, and 40 percent of its sugar. Twenty-five percent of the deposits in its banks belonged to Americans. Also U.S. influence over Cuba's destiny was insured by agreements in the 1930s guaranteeing the American purchase of about 65 percent of Cuba's sugar crop. Finally, Americans owned Havana's lavish hotels and casinos. In short, by the time of the Cuban revolution in 1959, Cuba's economy depended on foreign-owned exports and a foreign owned tourist industry. Most importantly, the wealth accumulated from that economy was disproportionately distributed among small numbers of foreign investors and wealthy Cubans, leaving most of the population in poverty.
The inequitable economic system that had been created in the era of Spanish colonialism and reproduced later under U.S. control was maintained by a Cuban dictatorship supported by the United States. By the 1950s,powerlessness and poverty had created revolutionary ferment. Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro articulated goals of economic and political democracy, improved health care, better education and housing, and the diversification of an economy free from foreign control.
Throughout the eight U.S. administrations since the late 1950s (with only a modest reduction of tension during the Carter years), U.S. foreign policy has opposed the Cuban revolution. From the time of the first agrarian reform program in May 1959 that expropriated the very largest U.S. and Cuban landowners, the United States has supported the destabilization and overthrow of the Cuban regime. Although the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco when the Central Intelligence Agency planned invasion of Cuba with 1,400 dissident Cuban refugees was crushed in three days, the efforts to overthrow the revolutionary government continued. Before the Bay of Pigs the U.S. canceled sugar purchases, created an economic blockade of the island, and ended diplomatic recognition. Since the failed invasion the U.S. has pressured allies to end their ties to Cuba, supported subversion and assassination teams, funded various projects to destroy crops on the island, encouraged defections and the flow of refugees to the United States, supported at least 12,000 Cuban refugees in various covert and other anti-Cuban projects in Florida, and periodically has threatened the island with U.S. military assault. The United States low intensity war on Cuba gained another weapon when Congress voted to create Radio Marti in 1983 and TV Marti in 1990. These beam anti-Castro propaganda to the island. In 1992 Congress further tightened the economic blockade by passing the Torricelli Bill which restricts foreign corporations partially owned by U.S. multinational corporations from trading with Cuba.
Few in our country know that while the U.S. hostility forced Cuba to seek alliance with the former Soviet Union, the tiny island nation went to great lengths to establish its own international identity and to carry out economic programs at home that sometimes contradicted Soviet advise. For example, it was Cuba and not the Soviet Union that initiated support for the MPLA government of Angola in 1975. At home, Cuba for a time adopted policies based upon moral rather than material incentives towards work in the 1960s over the objections of Soviet advisers. In the 1980s the Cubans carried out economic policies of "rectification" that were defined as different from those of the Soviet Union. It is true that Cuba traded many of its agricultural commodities, such as sugar, tobacco, citrus products, medicines, and health services to the Soviet Union for oil, heavy machinery and other products not otherwise accessible to Cuba. In fact, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European Bloc, Cuba carried out 85 percent of its trade with them. But it negotiated trade agreements, not handouts. The distinction is important because for thirty years U.S. administrations portrayed Cuba as a mere extension and tool of the Soviet Union. Nothing could be further from the truth.
With the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, its chief trade partner, Cuba has initiated a variety of reforms to make up for its losses. It has committed itself to increase tourism to earn valuable and scarce foreign exchange; established joint ventures in this sector with investors from Spain, Great Britain, Canada, and other countries; passed new laws encouraging foreign investment; expanded its sophisticated government program of biotechnological research; and increased exports of new serums and medical equipment to a variety of countries. And despite the portrait in the U.S. media of a country isolated from the rest of the world, Cuba has expanded its trade ties with Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Further, it has enacted reforms allowing Cubans to use dollars to purchase scarce goods in newly established dollar stores, transformed state-run farms to agricultural cooperatives, and legalized the establishment of small privateenterprises. Debates about these changes have occurred on Cuban television and in thousands of workplaces around the country.
Even before the current economic crisis Cuba had initiated a variety of reforms to rekindle enthusiasm for the revolution and engage Cubans more directly in decisions affecting their lives. The program referred to as a campaign for "rectification," sought to increase worker participation in factory decisions, to get people within communities to construct new housing and public buildings with materials provided by the government, and to return defense to local militias. Central to the campaign has been efforts to involve young people and women more directly in politics.
Reforms have continued into the 1990s. Last year's election was changed to give Cubans more of a voice in the political process. In prior elections, people voted for representatives to municipal assemblies, which in turn selected the provisional assemblies that then selected national legislators. In the 1993 election, however, Cubans voted directly for candidates for the national legislative body. Eighty three per cent of the legislators selected are serving for the first time, including larger numbers than ever before of young people, women, and Cubans of color.
Evidence suggests that, despite Cuba's serious economic problems, most Cubans still support their government. At the time of the 1993 election, rightwing Cuban-American broadcasts from Miami urged Cubans to reject Castro's regime by not voting or by defacing their ballots. But more than 90 per cent of eligible voters did vote, and less than 10 per cent defaced their ballots or left them blank. Despite the fact that most U.S. media outlets never mentioned the Cuban elections, many scholars and researchers observing the election saw it as a referendum affirming the Cuban government. Even Cubans who blame the government for Cuba's economic hardships regard militantly right-wing Cuban Americans, such as Jorge Mas Canosa of the Cuban American National Foundation, who has been a close advisor on Cuban affairs to Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, as more of a threat than the economic crisis. Most Cubans on the island see the vocal Cuban Americans as political descendants of the former hated dictator Batista and his henchmen.
In sum, several of Cuba's economic difficulties are rooted in its history of colonial rule and then U.S. domination, economic embargo, and political and military hostility. But the Cuban revolution has survived, creating a humane regime for most of its population with particular successes in health care, education, housing, and science. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates are similar to the United States, the literacy rate is 97 per cent, one-third of the entire population is engaged in some kind of education, and there are eleven times more teachers now than before the revolution. While poor by many indicators, Cuba, compared to most Third World countries, stands out for its social and economic development and remains, even with its current difficulties, an inspiration for millions of peoples around the world.
The implications for U.S. policy seem clear: It is time for a change. Our policy of trying to starve the island is inhumane and out of touch with the desires of most Cubans, whom we claim to be trying to free. Our policies are irrational given the fact that the cold war that gave rise to them is over. Cuba is no longer allied with a superpower enemy of the United States. Cuba is reforming its economic and political system in line with changes occurring around the world. And, finally, most Cubans, fiercely nationalistic and proud of their revolution, reject what the Clinton Administration and its Cuban-American political allies offer them: a return to a pre-1959 era of poverty and powerlessness for the many.
It is time for the United States to begin negotiating the end of its economic blockade and to forge political, economic, cultural, and scientific connections with the island. It seems unlikely that U.S. policy will change, however, until the American public becomes more informed about the history of Cuban-American relations and the current state of affairs in Cuba. Those of us who have visited and studied Cuba must continue to speak out and need to be heard, for surely mutual isolation and hostility are unnatural for two countries just 90 miles apart.
Harry R. Targ is professor of political science at Purdue University. He is the author of Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International Publishers, 1992.
Below I insert a few commentaries I have written over the years on Cuba.
BLOCKADING CUBA: WILL THE COLD WAR EVER END?
Harry R. Targ
Summer, 1994
When I was a small child my parents took me to Starved Rock State Park in LaSalle, Illinois. Three hundred years earlier, on a rock formation 125 feet above the Illinois River a community of Native Americans took refuge while being attacked by enemies from below. Fully surrounded, cut off from the outside world and its sustenance, they eventually died of hunger and thirst.
As I returned from my latest trip to Cuba in June, 1994, the image of a proud, defiant, and encircled people starved to death by a more powerful enemy flashed across my mind. I had traveled there as a member of a delegation of philosophers and social scientists attending an international conference at the University of Havana. It occurred to me that the metaphor of Starved Rock better represents the reality of relations between the United States and Cuba than more conventional metaphors given in the media. Since Cuba's social and political revolution in 1959, the media and the U.S. government have depicted American-Cuban relations as a battle between good and evil-between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship, communism and capitalism-the hallmark of the Cold War lens to the world. And now despite the end of the Cold War around the world, the actual policies of the United States toward Cuba remain the same, as if nothing had changed.
Despite the efforts of journalists and politicians to portray Cuba in Cold War terms, over the last decade scholars, peace activists, artists, health care professionals and others have traveled to Cuba if they could show they had a professional interest in doing so. Travelers to Cuba, along with scholars and journalists, included Cuban-Americans who had been allowed to return home to visit relatives. As a result of decisions made by President Clinton in August, these categories of people, including researchers, will be severely restricted in their travels to the island. A door which had been opening for research, and scholarly dialogue, such as my annual participation since 1990 in the meetings of North American and Cuban philosophers and Social Scientists, may be ended.
Those of us who have visited Cuba over the last several years have gained a clearer picture of the changes occurring there. Those changes, as well as the history of Cuban-American relations, suggest that U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba is misguided. For example, it is vital to remember that the Cuban economy and political system were shaped by 450 years of Spanish colonial rule, followed by 60 years of almost total United States control of Cuban economic and political life. Significant United States investments in the Cuban sugar industry began in the 1880s and expanded dramatically over the next 30 years. This was paralleled by the U.S. intervention in Cuba's war with Spain in the 1890s and the virtual U.S. military occupation of the island after the end of the so-called Spanish-American War. By the time of the revolution in Cuba in 1959, U.S. investors controlled 80 percent of Cuba's public utilities, 90 percent of its mines, 90 percent of its cattle ranches, 50 percent of its railways, and 40 percent of its sugar. Twenty-five percent of the deposits in its banks belonged to Americans. Also U.S. influence over Cuba's destiny was insured by agreements in the 1930s guaranteeing the American purchase of about 65 percent of Cuba's sugar crop. Finally, Americans owned Havana's lavish hotels and casinos. In short, by the time of the Cuban revolution in 1959, Cuba's economy depended on foreign-owned exports and a foreign owned tourist industry. Most importantly, the wealth accumulated from that economy was disproportionately distributed among small numbers of foreign investors and wealthy Cubans, leaving most of the population in poverty.
The inequitable economic system that had been created in the era of Spanish colonialism and reproduced later under U.S. control was maintained by a Cuban dictatorship supported by the United States. By the 1950s,powerlessness and poverty had created revolutionary ferment. Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro articulated goals of economic and political democracy, improved health care, better education and housing, and the diversification of an economy free from foreign control.
Throughout the eight U.S. administrations since the late 1950s (with only a modest reduction of tension during the Carter years), U.S. foreign policy has opposed the Cuban revolution. From the time of the first agrarian reform program in May 1959 that expropriated the very largest U.S. and Cuban landowners, the United States has supported the destabilization and overthrow of the Cuban regime. Although the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco when the Central Intelligence Agency planned invasion of Cuba with 1,400 dissident Cuban refugees was crushed in three days, the efforts to overthrow the revolutionary government continued. Before the Bay of Pigs the U.S. canceled sugar purchases, created an economic blockade of the island, and ended diplomatic recognition. Since the failed invasion the U.S. has pressured allies to end their ties to Cuba, supported subversion and assassination teams, funded various projects to destroy crops on the island, encouraged defections and the flow of refugees to the United States, supported at least 12,000 Cuban refugees in various covert and other anti-Cuban projects in Florida, and periodically has threatened the island with U.S. military assault. The United States low intensity war on Cuba gained another weapon when Congress voted to create Radio Marti in 1983 and TV Marti in 1990. These beam anti-Castro propaganda to the island. In 1992 Congress further tightened the economic blockade by passing the Torricelli Bill which restricts foreign corporations partially owned by U.S. multinational corporations from trading with Cuba.
Few in our country know that while the U.S. hostility forced Cuba to seek alliance with the former Soviet Union, the tiny island nation went to great lengths to establish its own international identity and to carry out economic programs at home that sometimes contradicted Soviet advise. For example, it was Cuba and not the Soviet Union that initiated support for the MPLA government of Angola in 1975. At home, Cuba for a time adopted policies based upon moral rather than material incentives towards work in the 1960s over the objections of Soviet advisers. In the 1980s the Cubans carried out economic policies of "rectification" that were defined as different from those of the Soviet Union. It is true that Cuba traded many of its agricultural commodities, such as sugar, tobacco, citrus products, medicines, and health services to the Soviet Union for oil, heavy machinery and other products not otherwise accessible to Cuba. In fact, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European Bloc, Cuba carried out 85 percent of its trade with them. But it negotiated trade agreements, not handouts. The distinction is important because for thirty years U.S. administrations portrayed Cuba as a mere extension and tool of the Soviet Union. Nothing could be further from the truth.
With the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, its chief trade partner, Cuba has initiated a variety of reforms to make up for its losses. It has committed itself to increase tourism to earn valuable and scarce foreign exchange; established joint ventures in this sector with investors from Spain, Great Britain, Canada, and other countries; passed new laws encouraging foreign investment; expanded its sophisticated government program of biotechnological research; and increased exports of new serums and medical equipment to a variety of countries. And despite the portrait in the U.S. media of a country isolated from the rest of the world, Cuba has expanded its trade ties with Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Further, it has enacted reforms allowing Cubans to use dollars to purchase scarce goods in newly established dollar stores, transformed state-run farms to agricultural cooperatives, and legalized the establishment of small privateenterprises. Debates about these changes have occurred on Cuban television and in thousands of workplaces around the country.
Even before the current economic crisis Cuba had initiated a variety of reforms to rekindle enthusiasm for the revolution and engage Cubans more directly in decisions affecting their lives. The program referred to as a campaign for "rectification," sought to increase worker participation in factory decisions, to get people within communities to construct new housing and public buildings with materials provided by the government, and to return defense to local militias. Central to the campaign has been efforts to involve young people and women more directly in politics.
Reforms have continued into the 1990s. Last year's election was changed to give Cubans more of a voice in the political process. In prior elections, people voted for representatives to municipal assemblies, which in turn selected the provisional assemblies that then selected national legislators. In the 1993 election, however, Cubans voted directly for candidates for the national legislative body. Eighty three per cent of the legislators selected are serving for the first time, including larger numbers than ever before of young people, women, and Cubans of color.
Evidence suggests that, despite Cuba's serious economic problems, most Cubans still support their government. At the time of the 1993 election, rightwing Cuban-American broadcasts from Miami urged Cubans to reject Castro's regime by not voting or by defacing their ballots. But more than 90 per cent of eligible voters did vote, and less than 10 per cent defaced their ballots or left them blank. Despite the fact that most U.S. media outlets never mentioned the Cuban elections, many scholars and researchers observing the election saw it as a referendum affirming the Cuban government. Even Cubans who blame the government for Cuba's economic hardships regard militantly right-wing Cuban Americans, such as Jorge Mas Canosa of the Cuban American National Foundation, who has been a close advisor on Cuban affairs to Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, as more of a threat than the economic crisis. Most Cubans on the island see the vocal Cuban Americans as political descendants of the former hated dictator Batista and his henchmen.
In sum, several of Cuba's economic difficulties are rooted in its history of colonial rule and then U.S. domination, economic embargo, and political and military hostility. But the Cuban revolution has survived, creating a humane regime for most of its population with particular successes in health care, education, housing, and science. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates are similar to the United States, the literacy rate is 97 per cent, one-third of the entire population is engaged in some kind of education, and there are eleven times more teachers now than before the revolution. While poor by many indicators, Cuba, compared to most Third World countries, stands out for its social and economic development and remains, even with its current difficulties, an inspiration for millions of peoples around the world.
The implications for U.S. policy seem clear: It is time for a change. Our policy of trying to starve the island is inhumane and out of touch with the desires of most Cubans, whom we claim to be trying to free. Our policies are irrational given the fact that the cold war that gave rise to them is over. Cuba is no longer allied with a superpower enemy of the United States. Cuba is reforming its economic and political system in line with changes occurring around the world. And, finally, most Cubans, fiercely nationalistic and proud of their revolution, reject what the Clinton Administration and its Cuban-American political allies offer them: a return to a pre-1959 era of poverty and powerlessness for the many.
It is time for the United States to begin negotiating the end of its economic blockade and to forge political, economic, cultural, and scientific connections with the island. It seems unlikely that U.S. policy will change, however, until the American public becomes more informed about the history of Cuban-American relations and the current state of affairs in Cuba. Those of us who have visited and studied Cuba must continue to speak out and need to be heard, for surely mutual isolation and hostility are unnatural for two countries just 90 miles apart.
Harry R. Targ is professor of political science at Purdue University. He is the author of Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International Publishers, 1992.
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