Harry Targ
Thursday,
April 5, 2012
ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND CULTURE:THE CUBAN EXPERIENCE
Harry Targ
(These remarks were prepared for a presentation before a musical performance
at Purdue University by Sierra Maestra, the stirring band formed at the
University of Havana in 1976. The band was named after the mountain range in
Eastern Cuba that was the site of the formation of the Cuban revolutionary
force that overthrew the U.S. supported dictator in the 1950s. The nine-person
band promotes and celebrates the classic Cuba Son music that has its roots in
the diversity of class, race, ethnicity, and gender in Cuban history).
People’s lives begin with the struggle for existence and are supplemented
by the pursuit of joy and liberation. Culture, often reflecting the pain of
daily existence and the vision of a better life, is intimately embedded in
history, economics, and politics.
Cuba’s revolutionary poet Jose Marti describes his place in history, economics,
and politics.
“I am a truthful man,
From the land of the palm,
Before dying, I want to
Share these poems of my soul.
My poems are light green,
But they are also flaming red
My verses are like a wounded fawn.
Seeking refuge in the mountain.
(Pete Seeger reports learning these two additional Marti verses from a Cuban of
African descent in 1983.)
Red, as in the desert,
Rose the sun on the horizon.
It shone on a dead slave
Hanging from a tree of the mountain.
A child saw it, trembled,
With passion for those that wept,
And swore that with his blood
He would wash away that crime.”
Latin American social theorists and activists of the era of the Cuban
revolutionary process (since the 1950s) defined the economic and political
context of countries like Cuba, less passionately but rigorously, as a result
of dependency. For example, Brazilian social scientist, Theotonio Dos Santos
wrote about what he called “the structure of dependence.”
“Dependence is a situation in which a certain group of countries have their
economy conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy, to
which the former is subject.”
Andre Gunter Frank, looking at the broad sweep of history beginning with
the rise of capitalism out of feudalism referred to “the development of
underdevelopment.” During the fifteenth century the sectors of the globe now
referred to as the “Global North” and “Global South” were roughly equal in
economic and military power. But as a result of the globalization of capitalism
and militarism, some countries, primarily in Europe and North America,
developed at the expense of most of the other countries of the world.
Dependency theorists began to include domestic class structures in their
analysis of relations between dominant and dependent nations. In addition to
dominant and weak countries bound by exploitation and violence, within both
powerful and weak countries class structures existed. In fact, rulers in poor
countries usually were tied by interests and ideology to the interests and
ideology of the ruling classes in powerful countries. And, most importantly,
the poor, the exploited, the repressed in both rich and poor countries shared
common experiences, often a common outlook, and potentially a common culture.
I have written a book chapter about “Themes in Cuban History” from the point of
view of dominance and dependence (from Harry R. Targ, Cuba and the USA:
A New World Order? International Publishers, 1992). The chapter
addresses:
-Spanish conquest between 1511 and 1515
-Cuba as sugar producer
-Cuba as slave society. By 1827 over 50 percent of Cuban residents were of
African descent.
-Britain’s economic and military penetration of the island beginning in the
18th century
-Revolutionary ferment, particularly slave revolts, permeating 19th century
Cuban society
-The visions of U.S. leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, that some day Cuba
would join the new nation to the North.
-U.S. investor penetration of the island, challenging the Spanish and British.
By the 1880s over 80 percent of sugar exports went to the United States and
large plantations on the island were owned by Americans.
-The Spanish/Cuban/American war of 1898 which lead to a full transfer of
colonial and neo-colonial hegemony from the Spanish and British to the United
States
-The United States establishment of economic, political, and cultural
domination of the island from 1898 to 1959. Subordinate wealthy and powerful
Cubans controlled the political system, benefitting from U.S. hegemony, while
“the poor people of this earth” on the island made up the vast majority.
-1953 to 1959 armed struggle which overthrew the Batista dictatorship and the
elimination of U.S. interests on the island.
-1959 to the present Cuba haltingly, with international and domestic
opposition, pursuing a new society to “wash away that crime” of long years of
empire and dependency.
How is this history relevant to indigenous Cuban music and its connections with
U.S. culture?
Culture, it seems to me, grows out of the experience of peoples. That
experience is shaped by history, economics, and politics. Music is a common way
of communicating and sharing experience, particularly of pain and joy.
The seeds of a common Cuban culture were planted in various fields--Africa, the
sugar plantations of the island, and growing relations between Cubans and
people of African descent in the region, including the United States.
Finally, culture can be revolutionary when it expresses pain, implies a better
life, and extends the experiences of some to others--of similar class, racial,
ethnic, and gender histories.
So as we listen to Sierra Maestra and reflect on the roots of its music, its
contribution to jazz in the U.S., and the commonalities of Cuban Son and U.S
jazz and blues, we might remember Marti’s expression from the poet’s point of
view:
“With the poor people of this earth,
I want to share my lot.
The little streams of the mountains
Please me more than the sea.”
(All verses quoted here are from Pete Seeger, Where Have all the
Flowers Gone; A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, A
Sing Out Publication,1993).
Wednesday,
August 5, 2009
BLOCKADE ON CUBA STIFLES INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE
(The Obama administration has begun
to make modest changes in United States policy toward Cuba , such as easing
travel to the island by Cuban Americans and transferring money to relatives,
but the economic, cultural, and educational blockade of the island remains. The
mainstream press continues to publish decontextualized accounts of
"dictatorship," "bureaucracy," and"economic
chaos" on the island.
For example, The New York Times published a story recently pridefully
announcing that with US Homeland Security support "6,000" Cuban
doctors and other health professionals have fled the island or their
humanitarian assignments in other countries to come to the United States since
2002. The article, by Mirta Ouito, "Doctors in Cuba Start Over in the
U.S."August 4, 2009, does mention that Cuba has sent 185,000 health
professionals to 103 countries over the last 50 years. But she writes:
"Yet for many Cuban doctors, who earn the equivalent of $25 a month, the
lure of a life of freedom and opportunities in the United States is too strong
to resist." She sites an American Medical Association official who
estimates that one of four doctors in the United States was trained overseas.
While the author describes the difficulties Cuban medical defectors face in
pursuing their profession, she seemed undisturbed by the irony of a US
government program designed to attract trained health professionals from doing
important work in countries of the Global South at the same time that the most
developed country in the world has to increasingly rely on international
doctors to meet the needs of the American people.
Below is reprinted a 2004 article that described one example of literally
hundreds of academic exchanges that flourished before former President George
Bush tightened the blockade of Cuba. The 50-year blockade must end and
egalitarian exchanges between the people of North America and Cuba must be
reestablished for the benefit of all).
Harry Targ
June 17, 2004
Fourteen students and two professors returned to Purdue University on June 9
from an 18 day study abroad trip to Cuba. The students, from the Schools of
Agriculture and Liberal Arts, completed an interdisciplinary course called
“Experiencing Cuba.”The course included four days of formal instruction at the
Agrarian University of Havana, an institution much like Purdue. In addition
site visits were made to a tobacco farm and factory, an urban garden where the
new Cuban commitment to sustainable agriculture was illustrated, an ecological
preserve, and a botanical garden specializing in exhibiting and studying
tropical plants. Students also toured a special facility for Cubans with mental
and physical disabilities. As to politics, culture, and history, students
visited museums specializing in Cuban history, religion, and the arts. The
Purdue group had occasion to interact with Cubans in many places including the
university, in neighborhoods, and in other urban and rural settings. The trip
was capped by a six-day 700 mile ride across the island from Havana city to
Santiago de Cuba on the Caribbean.
The course was organized by faculty in the School of Agriculture and Liberal
Arts as part of a project to link Purdue University to appropriate academic
institutions on the island. The project would link Purdue and Cuban faculty
with interests in collaborative research, graduate students who wish to pursue
research projects involving Cuba, and undergraduate students who wish to study
in Cuba. It is hoped that at some time Cuban faculty and students will be able
to study at Purdue University when United States policy toward Cuba changes.
The organizers of the Purdue/Cuba project launched the program because Cuba has
had special historic ties, positive and negative, with the United States that
warrant study. Also, Cuba for the last 45 years has been a social laboratory
for the development of diverse social, economic, and cultural policies that
interest peoples around the world as well as the United States. For example,
Cuba’s health and educational programs have long been of interest. In the 1990s
Cuba’s adoption of policies to promote sustainable agriculture have been seen
by some as a possible model for other developing countries.
The Purdue study abroad course in Cuba was not among the first. In fact, over
the last decade the Treasury Department has issued education licenses to over
750 colleges, universities, and high schools to develop such courses. During
the Purdue visit to the island, for example, there were faculty/student groups
from the University of Georgia, the University of Charleston, Duke, and William
and Mary. A University of Michigan group was to arrive in June.
Treasury Department licensing of university programs is required because the
United States has had a 40-year economic embargo and travel ban on free and
open exchange with the island nation. Established by President’s Eisenhower and
Kennedy, the embargo and travel ban were designed to cause economic and
political chaos in Cuba that would lead to the collapse of its revolutionary
government. Since the policy never led to the desired outcome, the U.S. in the
1990s began to modify the policy to let selective groups of people travel to
Cuba, and in 2001 to allow so-called humanitarian sales of food products to the
island on a pay-as-you go basis. U.S. academic institutions and other organized
trips to the island would be authorized by Treasury if the programs had a clear
educational purpose. Just during the first quarter of 2004, 1,300 Americans
participated in 60 educational programs in Cuba. Despite the broad based
support by liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans to abolish the
economic embargo and the travel ban, the Bush administration piece-by-piece has
been eliminating the minimal educational and economic connections with the
island.
In early May, 2004, the administration announced that it would accept a series
of draconian recommendations from an appointed task force on Cuban policy to
stimulate “regime change” in Cuba. Universities which in the past had been
issued two-year licenses for educational travel would now have to apply for a
new license each year. Educational programs shorter than a full semester would
require special permission and would have to adopt the goal of U.S. policy
toward Cuba, that is “regime change.” Faculty who engage in research on Cuba or
who travel to the island to arrange for educational programs will be further
limited in their right to travel.
Along with the efforts to eliminate the academic exchanges with Cuba, the new
Bush policies cut dramatically the rights of Cuban Americans to travel to visit
relatives on the island. Heretofore, they could travel once a year and such
travel could be to visit extended family members. Now Cuban Americans can
travel to the island only once every three years and to only visit parents or
children. The amount of money Cuban Americans can send to their relatives on
the island was radically cut as well.
In 2003, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC),
which is charged with enforcing sanctions against several countries and
terrorist networks and drug traffickers, as well as overseeing travel to Cuba,
spent $3.3 million of its $21.2 million budget on Cuba. Similarly, the
Department of Homeland Security has used extensive personnel and resources to
interview travelers to and from the island. Enforcing the archaic ban on Cuba
has used disproportionately large amounts of resources compared with the
struggle against terrorism and drugs in the world.
Almost all the Purdue students who traveled and studied in Cuba reported that
the experience was intellectually stimulating. While student evaluations of the
strengths and weaknesses of the Cuban experiment varied, most shared the belief
that free and open exchange of experiences between peoples is truly
educational. It is time to end the U.S. blockade and travel ban on Cuba so that
two peoples, so close and yet so far from each other, can learn from each
other’s experiences.
