(Fidel Castro died four years ago. The US blockade during the Trump era has become more extreme since this essay was written. Leaders of both political parties continue to articulate the view that Cubans clamor for “freedom” from their socialist dictatorship. And Cuban support for the revolution continues).
Harry Targ
Cuban society has been an experimental laboratory...
If one set of policies became problematic, the Cubans moved in different
directions. Usually change came after heated debate at all levels of society. (Harry Targ, Cuba
and the USA: A New World Order?
International Publishers, 1992, 6)
The predominant image
projected about Cuba from U.S. official government sources and the media has
not changed much over the last two hundred and fifty years. From the founding of the United States until the 1890s Cuba was seen as a victimized land
populated by masses eager to break away from Spanish colonial control
preferably to affiliate with the United States. Early American political
figures such as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams proclaimed that the
United States was willing and able to appropriate the island nation when the
Spanish were ready to leave the Caribbean. In the antebellum period, Southern politicians
urged that Cuba be incorporated into the slave South.
In the period before the
Spanish/Cuban/American War of 1898, the images of the U.S. obligation to the
Cuban people presented in newspapers and theaters likened the former to a
masculine hero compelled to rescue Cuba, characterized as a damsel in distress.
The brutal Spanish were figuratively raping the Cuban women. At the same time
Afro-Cuban men, the narrative suggested, were unable to liberate their people.
Consequently, the United States, it was broadly proclaimed, must act on behalf
of the Cuban people.
After the
Spanish/American/Cuban War the U.S. generals and diplomats wrote the Cuban
constitution in negotiations with the departing Spanish and hand-picked Cuban
leaders. Over the next sixty years the floodgates were opened for ever larger
investments in U.S. owned sugar plantations. After World War II, the U.S.
domination of the Cuban economy expanded to include tourism, casinos, and
gangsters. In every epoch, a popular story about the U.S./Cuban relationship depicted
a stern but wise parent necessarily overseeing an energetic and passionate, but
immature, child.
But then the long
revolutionary struggle of the 1950s achieved victory and the narrative changed.
The ungrateful Cubans followed the treacherous new leaders: Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara, and a grassroots movement of peasants, workers, students, women,
Afro-Cubans, and solidarity workers from across the globe. As the U.S.
government and the dominant media saw it the revolution meant nothing but
trouble: communism; crazy ideas about free health care and education; great
debates about moral versus material incentives that even found their way into
work sites; the export of medical expertise; and sometimes the provision of
soldiers to help anti-colonial struggles. It was all bad news for almost sixty
years.
Despite the best efforts of the United States to derail the trajectory of Cuban society, the Cuban revolution survived. During the Obama administration wiser heads in Washington decided that economic blockades, internal subversion, assassination plots, and efforts to isolate Cuba from the international community were ineffective. It was time for a new policy: normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. Official spokespersons suggested and media outlets declared that the best way to help the Cuban people recover from their sixty years of pain and suffering was to establish normal diplomatic and commercial ties with the island. However, the Trump Administration overturned the modest Obama era policy changes toward Cuba, imposing over 230 new restrictions on US/Cuban economic relations.
In a 2015 essay in USA Today, “Cubans Are Still Waiting for
the Thaw,” Alan Gomez argued that Cubans were getting impatient with the pace of
change that had occurred since December, 2014, when Presidents Castro and Obama
announced the opening of relations. He quoted a Cuban economist who said that
because relations with the United States were critical to a small country like
Cuba, the latter wanted to be careful not to make any mistakes in developing new
policies.
But Gomez suggested the
Cubans were restless. He reminded the reader that Americans were very frustrated
with the stagnation of the U.S. economy during the recent recession. But just imagine
he posed:
… going through that
kind of economic malaise for more than half a century.
So when they’re told that the end is near, that the Americans and ... their money are coming to save them, you
can’t blame them for getting antsy ... as
they look over the horizon (USA Today, April 23, 2015).
Chutzpah is a Yiddish word
that means audacity or nerve. Usually it refers to statements made that are so
outlandish that they defy the imagination. This statement, suggesting that Cubans
have been waiting for sixty years for the Americans to come with their ideology
of possessive individualism, markets, support for big corporations, and the promotion of consumerism, ranks among
the great expressions of chutzpah in our time. It ignores the beacon of hope,
the inspiration, the material progress in health care, education, culture, and
work place experimentation in the relations of production, which makes Cuba an
actor many times bigger in the eyes of the world than its size. And what most Cubans see, and the vast majority of the world observes, is a desperate US attempt to starve the Cuban people into surrender.
In the end, a real transformation of United States/Cuban relations will require a fundamental change in the American consciousness such that it respects the qualities of both countries, not the superiority of one over the other, and an end to the economic blockade.
