This article appeared a long time ago. It remains true today 26 years later. HT
The Chronicle of
Higher Education
Taking a More
Realistic View of Cuba
By Harry R. Targ
OCTOBER 19, 1994
When I was a small child, my parents took me
to Starved Rock State Park, in LaSalle, Ill. Three hundred years earlier, on a
rock formation 125 feet above the Illinois River, a group of Native Americans
had taken refuge while being attacked by enemies from below. Fully surrounded,
cut off from the outside world and its sustenance, they had eventually died of
hunger and thirst.
As I returned from my latest trip to Cuba last June, the image
of a proud, defiant, and encircled people starved to death by a more powerful
enemy flashed across my mind. I had traveled to the island as a member of a
delegation of philosophers and social scientists attending an international
conference at the University of Havana. It seemed to me that the metaphor of
Starved Rock better represented the reality of relations between the United
States and Cuba than the more-conventional metaphors favored by the news media.
Since Cuba’s social and political revolution in 1959, the media
and the U.S. government have depicted American-Cuban relations in cold-war
terms -- as a battle between good and evil, freedom and tyranny, democracy and
dictatorship, capitalism and communism. Now the cold war has ended, but the
policies of the United States toward Cuba remain the same.
Despite the fact that journalists and politicians do not seem to
have adapted to the changing world, other concerned Americans have been forging
a new relationship with Cuba. Over the last decade, the U.S. government (which
restricts travel to Cuba) has allowed some scholars, peace activists,
health-care professionals, and others able to demonstrate a professional
interest in Cuba to travel to the island. Cuban Americans also have been
allowed to return there to visit relatives.
Unfortunately, decisions made by President Clinton in August now
severely restrict the categories of people who will be allowed to visit in the
future -- including researchers. That is unfortunate, both because avenues for
research will be closed off and because the scholars who visit Cuba come back
with a story very different from the one told by American politicians.
Scholarly analyses of the historical relationship between the two countries and of recent changes in Cuba suggest that U.S. policy toward the island is misguided. 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 U.S. control of the country’s economic and political life.
Significant U.S. investment in the Cuban sugar industry began in
the 1880’s and expanded rapidly over the next 30 years. The United States
undertook a virtual military occupation of the island after the end of the
Spanish-American War in 1898.
At the time of the revolution in 1959, U.S. investors controlled
80 per cent of Cuba’s public utilities, 90 per cent of its mines, 90 per cent
of its cattle ranches, 50 per cent of its railways, and 40 per cent of its
sugar crops. Twenty-five per cent of the deposits in Cuban banks belonged to
Americans, who also owned the lavish hotels and casinos in Havana. U.S.
influence over Cuba had been insured by agreements reached in the 1930’s, which
guaranteed that Americans would purchase about 65 per cent of Cuba’s sugar
crop.
In short, by the late 1950’s, Cuba’s economy depended on
foreign-owned exports and a foreign-owned tourist industry. Most important, 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 1950’s,
powerlessness and poverty had created revolutionary ferment. Cuban
revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro sought economic and political democracy,
improved health care, better education and housing, and a diversified economy
free from foreign control.
Under the eight U.S. Presidents in office since the late 1950’s
(with only a modest reduction of tension during the Carter years), our foreign
policy has opposed the Cuban revolution. Initially, the U.S. canceled sugar
purchases, created an economic blockade of the island, and ended diplomatic
recognition. Although the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco -- the Central Intelligence
Agency’s planned invasion of Cuba with 1,400 dissident Cuban refugees -- was
crushed in three days, efforts to overthrow the revolutionary government
continued.
Since the Bay of Pigs, the United States has put pressure on its allies to end their ties to Cuba, supported subversion and assassination teams, paid for projects to destroy crops on the island, encouraged defections and the flow of refugees to U.S. shores, supported at least 12,000 Cuban refugees in Florida in various covert and other anti-Cuba projects, and periodically threatened the island with military assault.
The low-intensity war on Cuba gained another weapon when
Congress created “Radio Marti” in 1983 and “TV Marti” in 1990 to beam
anti-Castro propaganda to the island. In 1992, Congress further tightened the
economic blockade by barring multinational corporations with U.S. involvement
from trading with Cuba.
Few Americans know that in spite of being forced by U.S.
hostility to seek alliance with the Soviet Union, Cuba went to great lengths to
establish its own international identity and carried out economic programs at
home that sometimes contradicted Soviet advice. For example, in both the 1960’s
and the 1980’s, Fidel Castro adopted some economic reforms and programs that
Soviet advisers strongly opposed, decentralizing economic decision making and
giving incentives to workers. These policies have been described in detail by
scholars, including the political scientist Max Azicri in his 1988 book Cuba:
Politics, Economics, and Society. Other scholars have analyzed similar
issues and trends in such collections as the 1989 The Cuba Reader: The
Making of a Revolutionary Society, edited by Philip Brenner, William
M. Leo Grande, Donna Rich, and Daniel Siegel, and the 1990 Transformation and
Struggle: Cuba Faces the 1990’s, edited by Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk.
It is true that Cuba got oil, heavy machinery, and other
products from the Soviet Union, but it received them in exchange for
agricultural and other commodities, not as handouts. The distinction is
important, because it highlights the fact that Cuba was not a mere extension
and tool of the Soviet Union, as U.S. policy makers have portrayed it.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba has taken several
steps to make up for its trade losses. Economists, political scientists, and
others who have visited Cuba in recent years have witnessed steps that the
Cuban government has undertaken to increase tourism to earn valuable foreign
currency; establish joint tourism ventures with investors from Spain, Great
Britain, and Canada, among other countries; pass new laws encouraging foreign
investment; expand its sophisticated, government-supported program of
biotechnological research; and increase exports of new serums and medical
equipment to a variety of countries. Despite the portrait in the U.S. media of
a country isolated from the rest of the world, Cuba has expanded its trade with
Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Scholars have observed other important changes in recent years,
including the government’s agreement to allow Cuban citizens to use American
dollars to buy goods not available under rationing (although Mr. Clinton in
August restricted the right of Cuban Americans to send dollars to the island),
transformation of state-run farms into agricultural cooperatives, and legalization
of the establishment of small private enterprises. These changes have been
debated on Cuban television and in thousands of workplaces around the country.
Even before the economic crisis brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars noted that Cuba had begun to institute a variety of reforms to try to rekindle enthusiasm for the ideals of the revolution and to engage Cubans more directly in decisions affecting their lives. For example, the campaign of “rectification” (now halted because of the economic crisis) sought, among other things, to increase worker participation in plant decisions and to involve more young people and women in politics.
Some reforms have continued in the 1990’s. The rules for last
year’s election were changed to give Cubans more voice in the political
process. In prior elections, people voted for representatives to municipal
assemblies, which in turn selected the provisional assemblies, which 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 elected are serving for the first time, and they
include larger numbers than ever before of young people, women, and Cubans of
color.
Evidence gathered by academics and others in visiting
delegations suggests that despite the economic problems, most Cubans still
support their government. At the time of the 1993 election, right-wing
Cuban-American radio 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 fewer than 10 per cent of the ballots were
defaced or left blank. Despite the fact that most U.S. media outlets never
mentioned the Cuban election, many American scholars and researchers saw it as
a referendum affirming the Cuban government.
It is important to note that even the Cubans on the island who
blame the country’s government for their economic hardships view militantly
right-wing Cuban Americans (such as Jorge Mas Canosa of the Cuban American
National Foundation in Miami, who has advised Presidents Reagan, Bush, and
Clinton on Cuba) as a greater threat to the country than the economic crisis. I
and many of my colleagues who have attended scholarly meetings on the island
have heard this sentiment voiced by ordinary Cubans again and again. Most
Cubans see vocal Cuban-American leaders such as Mas Canosa as direct
descendants of the hated former dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar and his
henchmen.
In sum, several of Cuba’s economic difficulties are rooted in
its history of foreign domination, first by Spain and then by the United
States. 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
those in the United States, the literacy rate is 97 per cent, and the number of
teachers has increased elevenfold since the revolution. While poor by many
indicators -- such as per-capita income -- compared with most other third-world
countries, Cuba has accomplished an admirable degree of social and economic
development.
The implications for the United States seem clear: It is time
for a change. Our current policies are not only irrational, given that the cold
war that inspired them is over; they are inhumane and out of touch with the
desires of most Cubans, whom we claim to be trying to free.
It seems unlikely that U.S. policy will change, however, until the American public becomes much better 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 speak out and try to present a broader and more realistic picture of today’s Cuba, for surely mutual isolation and hostility are unnatural for two countries just 90 miles apart.
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 in economic and political structures around the world. It is
time for the United States to begin negotiating the end of its economic
blockade. Then it can start to forge reasonable new political, economic,
cultural, and scientific connections with the island.
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).
