Harry Targ
Date posted originally: Saturday, February 23, 2008
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 that 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 19th 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
“realpolitik” philosophy which says that Cuba is within the U.S. sphere of
influence; and the historically claimed right of the U.S. to control Cuba’s
destiny enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s.
Despite this hostility, since 1959 there has been a high
level of support for the revolution among Cubans because it provided
substantial economic advances for the people and satisfied their thirst for
self-determination. Consequently, even during the “special period” of the 1990s
support, while declining, held because the revolution continued to represent
the spirit of nationalism for the vast majority of the Cuban people.
Finally, a continuous element of the Cuban revolution has
been change and a pragmatic spirit that addresses needs, possibilities, and
dangers as they arise. Cuba has been one vast laboratory experiment in which
new policies, priorities and programs have been introduced to meet the
exigencies of the moment. Alongside inevitable dogmatisms and bureaucratic
resistances has been the willingness of Cubans to throw out the old, the
unworkable, the threatened, and replace it with the new as history requires
(shifting from fertilizer, pesticides and hybrid seeds to organic agriculture
for example). Over its long history, the revolution ended foreign ownership of
the Cuban economy. It created an egalitarian society. It provided health care,
education, jobs and a rich cultural life for most of its citizens.
At the most fundamental level, the revolution fulfilled all
of the economic and social goals Fidel Castro articulated in his 1953 “History
Will Absolve Me” speech. For most Cubans alive before 1959, there is no
question that the revolution has been an outstanding success. This is true for
their sons and daughters if one could compare what would have been their
possibilities before 1959 with what they have achieved today. The revolution
has worked.
And finally, in the great debate between the U.S. and Cuba
as inspirations and models for most of the citizens of the globe, Fidel Castro
might say again “History Will Absolve Me.”
