THE CUBAN REVOLUTION REMAINS SIGNFICANT FOR HUMAN LIBERATION

 Harry Targ

I wrote in 1992 about the Cuban Revolution (Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International Publishers, 6):

“….the Cuban revolution (even until this day) has constituted a living experiment that most progressive forces around the world identify with. Even though each society has its own history, class structure, level of development, and revolutionary potential, Cuba’s desire to create a government to serve its people and at the same time to transform them from a traditional consciousness to a revolutionary consciousness is shared by progressives everywhere. For progressives, Cuba is a laboratory, a grand social experiment that will provide knowledge for others as they seek fundamental change in their own societies…..Cuba’s successes in the years ahead are successes of all progressive forces and, similarly Cuba’s defeats are defeats for all who wish to create egalitarian and humane societies”. 

 (From an Internal Memorandum Circulated in the Eisenhower Administration Recommending Policies to Undermine the Popularity of the Cuban Revolution)

“… every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. ”. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06/d499

On The Cuban/US Experience: Revolution and Counter Revolution

And yet Americans are more ignorant of the nature of the Cuban Revolution and U.S.-Cuban relations than are the people of almost any other country in the world. Except for those few Americans with access to a handful of liberal and radical publications the people of this country have been subjected to an unrelieved campaign of distortion, or outright slander of Fidel Castro and the revolution he leads. The determined hostility of American leaders to the Cuban Revolution, the implementation of a system of economic harassment, and the threat of military intervention, not only endanger the Cuban Revolution, but increase the tempo of the cold war at home and abroad (Editors, “The Cuban Revolution: The New Crisis in Cold War Ideology,” Studies on the Left, Volume 1, Number, 1960, 1).

This statement was published in the summer of 1960! sixty-five years later the same assessment of United States/Cuban relations still holds.

The story of the Cuban revolution needs to be retold as we move ahead to stop a war on Cuba, end the economic blockade, and establish a new United States/Cuban relationship.

                              Havana street scene in 2010. Inset below: school kids in Havana, 2010. Photos by Desmond Boylan / Reuters

The Revolutionary Vision

The idea of “revolution” refers to a fundamental transformation of economic and political structures and peoples’ consciousness of their place in society and the values that should determine human behavior. Also, revolution is not a fixed “thing” but a process. That means that changes in structures, patterns of behavior, and consciousness are changing over time and in the case of revolution are moving toward, rather than away from, more complete human fulfillment.

What has been most fascinating to observe about the Cuban Revolution has been its constantly changing character. Cubans have debated and made decisions about gradual versus fundamental changes, the need to experiment with different ways to allocate scarce national resources and, most critical, how to respond to external economic, political, and military assaults.  Cuban society has been an experimental laboratory, changing public policies as contexts demand. If one set of policies became problematic, the Cubans moved in different directions. Usually change came after heated debate at all levels of society.

For example, after the 26th of July Movement seized power, the revolutionary regime launched programs to reduce rents for urban dwellers, established a nationwide literacy campaign, and after a cool U.S. response to the new government, put in place a large agrarian reform program. As United States hostility escalated Cuba established diplomatic and economic relations with the former Soviet Union. From that point US/Cuban hostilities became permanent.

Cuban History

The story of the Cuban revolution needs to be retold as we move ahead to establish a new United States/Cuban relationship.

Cuba was a colony of the Spanish for 400 years, an economic vassal of the British and the United States for more than 100 years, and a slave state from the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century.

The domination of the island by foreigners, juxtaposed with a culture enriched by African roots (the indigenous people were largely obliterated by the Spanish), led to repeated efforts to resist colonialism before 1898 and neo-colonialism after that. Slaves, Afro/Cubans, and Spanish born landowners seeking freedom from the Spanish crown often rose up to overthrow the yoke of imperialism.

Cuban Revolutionaries, inspired by visionary poet Jose Marti, were on the verge of defeating Spanish colonialism in the 1890s. The United States sent armies to the island to defeat the Spanish and establish a puppet government to insure its economic and political control.  To secure support for the war at home the American media and popular music were filled with images of Cuba as the “damsel in distress” and bungling Afro/Cuban revolutionaries. The dominant ideology of the United States, manifest destiny and white Christian duty, drove the argument for war on Spain.

After the 1898 war, the United States military, with the support of small numbers of compliant Cubans, created a government that would open the door completely for United States investments, commercial penetration, an externally-controlled tourist sector, and North American gangsters. The U.S. neo-colonial regime on the island stimulated pockets of economic development in a sea of human misery. Responding to grotesque economic suffering in the 1950s a band of revolutionaries (led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Celia Sanchez, and Haydee Santamaria) defeated the U.S. backed military regime of Fulgencio Batista.

Vilma Espin, Cuban Revolutionary

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 began in the nineteenth century and was driven by 400 years of nationalism, a vision of democracy, and a passion for economic justice. This vision was articulated in Fidel Castro’s famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech given before being sentenced to prison after a failed military action against Batista in 1953. He spoke of five goals of his revolution: returning power to the people; giving land to the people who work it; providing workers a significant share of profits from corporations; granting sugar planters a quota of the value of the crop they produce; and confiscating lands acquired through fraud. Then he said, the Revolution would carry out agrarian reform, nationalize key sectors of the economy, institute educational reforms, and provide a decent livelihood for manual and intellectual labor.

The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the people’s health: these are the six problems we would take immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and political democracy (Fidel Castro, “ History Will Absolve Me,” Castro Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953).

Almost immediately the revolutionaries who had seized power in January, 1959 began to implement the program envisioned by the Castro speech. Over the next sixty years, with heated debates inside Cuba, experiments--some successful, some failed--were carried out. Despite international pressures and the changing global political economy, much of the program has been institutionalized to the benefit of most Cubans.

Education and health care became free to all Cubans. Basic, but modest, nutritional needs have been met. Cubans have participated in significant political discussion about public policy. And Cuban society has been a laboratory for experimentation.

In the 1960s Cubans discussed whether there was a need for monetary incentives to motivate work or whether revolutionary enthusiasm was sufficient to maintain production. Debates occurred over the years also about whether a state-directed economy, a mixed one, or some combination would best promote development; how to engage in international solidarity; and whether there was a need to affiliate with super powers such as the former Soviet Union. Central to the Cuban model is the proposition that when policies work they get institutionalized; when they fail they get changed.

The United States reaction to the Cuban Revolution has been as the Studies on the Left article warned in 1960. U.S. policy has included military invasions, sabotage, assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, an economic blockade, subversion including beaming propaganda radio and television broadcasts to the island, efforts to isolate Cuba from the international system, restrictions on United States travelers to the island, listing Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, and in the long-run most importantly portraying in government statements and the mass media the image of Cuba as a totalitarian state that oppresses its people.

On December 17, 2014. President Raul Castro and Barack Obama announced that the U.S./Cuban relationship would change.  The United States and Cuba, President Obama said, would begin negotiations to reestablish diplomatic relations, open embassies, and move to eliminate the U.S. economic blockade and restrictions on American travel to the island. This announcement was broadly celebrated by nations everywhere, the Pope who had lobbied Washington for the policy change, and Americans and Cubans alike. Of course, in both countries there were skeptics and the strong and vocal Cuban-American lobby immediately condemned the announced policy changes.

The United States and Cuba began negotiating the announced normalization of relations and several steps have been taken by both countries including:

 -freeing the last three of the Cuban Five by the United States and the release by Cuba of U.S. agents Roland Sarraff Trujillo and Alan Gross from Cuban prisons

-easing restrictions on remittances from Cuban/American families to relatives on the island

-using executive action in the United States to loosen restrictions on American travel to Cuba and reestablishing the capacity for banking connections with the island

-authorizing flights from the United States to Cuba by multiple airlines

-giving authority to some companies to invest in small businesses in Cuba and the increase in trade of selected U.S. commodities, primarily agricultural products and building materials

-taking Cuba off the State Department list of sponsors of terrorism

And President Obama deliberated with President Raul Castro at the April, 2015 meeting of the Summit of the Americas in Panama, communicating the image of the return to normal diplomatic relations.

However, much needed to be done to complete the normalization of diplomatic relations.  The U.S. economic embargo had not been lifted. The Helms-Burton Act, which prohibits foreign companies from having commercial relations with the island and then the United States, was not repealed. And the House of Representatives passed a resolution that challenged President Obama’s executive authority to expand the categories of U.S. citizens who could travel to Cuba without applying for a license from the Treasury Department. In addition, many issues of relevance to the two countries such as those involving immigration, control of drug trafficking, and cooperation on disaster relief were yet to be resolved.

Most Americans, including Cuban/Americans, supported the full normalization of relations. But a small number of politicians from both political parties who opposed normalization of relations continued to use their legislative and public political leverage to reverse the will of the American and Cuban people. One example was the misrepresentation of the case of Assata Shakur, who had lived in Cuba for over thirty years. Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party was tried and convicted on dubious grounds of murdering a police officer in New Jersey and who fled to Cuba in 1984, was being used by anti-Cuban activists to resist the normalization of relations, claiming that Cuba is harboring “terrorists.”

Where Does the Foreign Policy of Donald Trump Fit?

Taking “the long view” of United States foreign policy, it is clear that from NSC-68; to the response to the Soviet challenges in space such as during the Sputnik era; to global wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; to covert interventions in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has consistently pursued global hegemony, a program of which Cuban policy is a part. It is also clear that the pursuit of empire has of necessity involved the creation of a permanent war economy, an economy that overcomes economic stagnation by the infusion of enormous military expenditures.

It is also clear that justification for empire and military spending has necessitated the construction of an enemy, first the Soviet Union and international communism; then terrorism; and now China. And Cuba has always served as such an enemy in “our back yard.” The obverse of a demonic enemy requires a conception of self to justify the imperial project. That self historically has been various iterations of American exceptionalism, the indispensable nation, US humanitarianism, and implicitly or explicitly the superiority of the white race and western civilization.

In this light, while specific policies vary, the trajectory of US foreign policy in the twenty-first century is a continuation of the policies and programs that were institutionalized in the twentieth century. Three seem primary. First, military spending, particularly in new technologies, continues unabated. And as the Council on Foreign Relations warned there is a the danger of the United States “falling behind,” the same metaphor that was used by the writers of the NSC-68 document, or the Gaither and Rockefeller Reports composed in the late 1950s to challenge President Eisenhower’s worry about a military/industrial complex, the response to Sputnik, Secretary of Defense McNamara’s transformation of the Pentagon to scientific management in the 1960s, or President Reagan’s huge increase of armaments in the 1980s to overcome the “window of vulnerability.”

Second, the United States continues to engage in policies recently referred to as “hybrid wars.” The concept of hybrid wars suggests that while traditional warfare between nations has declined, warfare within countries has increased. Internal wars, the hybrid wars theorists suggest, are encouraged and supported by covert interventions, employing private armies, spies, and other operatives financed by outside nations like the United States.

Also the hybrid wars concept refers to the use of economic warfare, embargoes and blockades, to bring down adversarial states and movements. The blockades of Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are examples. Therefore, the hybrid war concept suggests the carrying out of wars by other, less visible, means.

Third, much of the discourse on the US role in the world replicates the bipolar, superpower narrative of the Cold War and, in addition, the dangerous rise of the Global South. In both cases the enemy is China. As Alfred McCoy has pointed out (In the Shadows of the American Empire, 2017), the United States in the twenty first century sees its economic hegemony being undermined by Chinese economic development and global reach. To challenge this, McCoy argues, the United States has taken on a project to recreate its military hegemony: AI, a space force, biometrics, new high-tech aircraft etc. If the US cannot maintain its hegemony economically, it will have to do so militarily.

In addition to the Chinese threat, countries of the Global South, to some degree inspired by Cuba, have been meeting to establish greater economic cooperation to overcome their common experiences of centuries of European and United States dominance. Tiny Cuba has been an exemplar of Global South resistance. And China has stepped forward as a “great power”. allying with this new movement with the vision of creating a multipolar world.

Recognizing these continuities in United States foreign policy, commentators appropriately recognize the idiosyncrasies of foreign policy in the Trump era, particularly during his first term. He reached out to North Korea and Russia. He has rhetorically claimed that the United States must withdraw military forces from trouble spots around the world, including the Middle East. He declared that the United States could not be “the policeman of the world,” a declaration made by former President Nixon as he escalated bombing of Vietnam and initiated plans to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile.

However, while Trump moved in one direction he almost immediately undermined the policies he has ordered. His announced withdrawal from Syria, while in the abstract a sign of a more realistic assessment of US military presence in the Middle East was coupled with a direct or implied invitation to the Turkish military to invade Northeast Syria to defeat the Kurds. Also, at the same time he was withdrawing troops from Syria, the Defense Department announced the United States was sending support troops to Saudi Arabia. He withdrew from the accord with Iran on nuclear weapons and the Paris Climate Change agreement.

Time after time, one foreign policy decision has contradicted by another. Sometimes policies seem to be made with little historical awareness and without sufficient consultation with professional diplomats. (One is reminded of the old Nixon idea, the so-called “madman theory.” Nixon allegedly wanted to appear mad so that adversaries would be deterred from acting in ways contrary to US interests out of fear of random responses).

During his first term the contradictory character of Trump foreign policy left the peace movement befuddled. How does it respond to Trump’s occasional acts that go against the traditional imperial grain at the same time that he acts impetuously increasing the dangers of war? How does the peace movement participate in the construction of a progressive majority that justifiably seeks to overturn the Trump era and all that it stands for: climate disaster, growing economic inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and hybrid war?

While much of the foreign policy of his first term in office was confused, since he assumed office in 2025, he asserted an unequivocal tilt toward militarism. In the fall of 2025 he began an assassination campaign against those in small boats sailing in the Caribbean, alleging that those on the boats were carrying drugs. He escalated threats against Venezuela and in early January 2026 kidnapped the President and First Lady of Venezuela. This was followed in February by a brutal bombing campaign against targets in Iran (in conjunction with Israeli militarism). During all this time the United States supported Israel’s genocidal war on the Gazan people. And from time to time during this militarization of his foreign policy he has implied or stated directly that Cuba would be next. Direct killing now is being coupled with hybrid war.

Perhaps the task for the peace movement is to include in the project of building a progressive majority ideas about challenging the US as an imperial power, proclaiming that a progressive agenda requires the dismantling of the permanent war economy. These are truly troubled times, with to a substantial degree the survival of humanity and nature at stake. The war system is a significant part of what the struggle is about.

As Global Health Partners has written about US/Cuban policy today:

“Washington’s ever-tightening embargo has thrown Cuba into the worst economic and healthcare crisis in its history. The U.S. is using its spurious inclusion of Cuba on the list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism” to wield increasingly punitive measures that limit the supply of food, fuel and basic medical supplies. To bolster this inhumane policy, right-wing members of Congress are slipping new, outrageous sanctions into broad budget legislation aimed at keeping the U.S. government running.

No War on Cuba! End the Blockade!

The dramatic gestures by Presidents Obama and Raul Castro set the stage for the normalization of diplomatic relations, but with the reversals in policy by Trump (Biden did not reverse Trump’s Cuba policies either) more work needs to be done.

First, activists must continue to pressure their legislators to repeal the Helms-Burton Act and oppose any efforts by their peers to re-impose legislation that will stop the process of change. Lobbying should be complemented by rallies and marches. Support should be given to those organizations which have been on the front lines of Cuba Solidarity for years such as Pastors for Peace. In addition, people to people exchanges, community to community outreach, and high school and university study abroad programs should be encouraged. (There were many US/Cuban educational exchange programs in the first decade of this century)

Second, those in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution should support the economic reforms initiated by the Cuban people before the resumption of the brutal US policies by Trump. The clearest manifestation of these principles is reflected in the development of workplace cooperatives in both cities and the countryside and before the draconian US policies access to adequate diet, health care, and education, Educating the American public should include information that  Cuba, before escalated  US aggression, had been embarking on new economic arrangements that began to fulfilled human needs, in the spirit of the “History Will Absolve Me” speech. AND, it could be argued that Fidel Castro’s vision for Cuba might also be relevant for the United States.

In sum, the solidarity movement should continue the process of public education about Cuba, explaining the realities of Cuban history, celebrating Cuban accomplishments in health care and education, and recognizing the richness and diversity of Cuban culture. Ironically, despite the long and often painful relationship the Cuban people have had with the United States, the diversity of the two nation’s cultures are inextricably connected. That shared experience should be celebrated. NO WAR ON CUBA! END THE BLOCKADE!