Where Is Cuba Heading as Castro Era Draws to a Close?

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In the 1960s, many people around the world were inspired by the Cuban Revolution. It was the first state that had proclaimed itself a socialist society in the Americas, and the North American New Left looked to Cuba as a model for the Third World; some went to Cuba as volunteers. (Later, the Vietnam War would become its focus of attention.)

Many African-American intellectuals, then fighting for civil rights in the segregationist American South, were particularly enthusiastic, as Cuba proclaimed the elimination of racial discrimination as its official policy.

On New Year's Day 1959, the 26th of July Movement led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara had marched into Havana after more than two years of guerrilla warfare, and the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country.

The exuberant revolutionaries proceeded to nationalize agriculture and industry - mostly American-owned - at breakneck speed. As Washington reacted with economic and military pressure, including the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for help and protection and later that year Castro proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist.

Cuba had become, as far as the U.S. was concerned, an outpost of ‘Soviet imperialism'.
As we know, the closest the Cold War came to becoming a nuclear conflagration was during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Indebted to the Soviets, in the 1970s Cuban troops fought on behalf of left-wing regimes in Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, as surrogates for the Soviet Union. Communism, for many, appeared to be on the march.

Cuba back then saw itself as a vanguard of Marxist revolution - though when Guevara had tried to incite one in Bolivia, he was killed for his trouble in 1967. (Dead almost 46 years now, his image remains ubiquitous, thanks to the posters of him so many students had taped onto their dorm walls back then!)

Like many, I was caught up in the enthusiasm over Cuba. In the late 1960s, I wrote my MA thesis in political science at McGill University on Cuban-American relations.

I spent 10 days in Cuba in late December 1975, at a time when few North Americans could travel to the country. (I flew in via Jamaica.) I was able to walk around Havana, travel on buses, and speak to people at the university, without any hindrance.

The First Congress of the Communist Party was being held, December 17-22, and the various parks and sides of buildings were festooned with revolutionary slogans. The old Havana Hilton had been renamed the Hotel Habana Libre and was a hive of activity at the time.

This is all, so to speak, now ancient history. Announcing that "history is on our side" is a foolhardy enterprise. The Soviet Union and its east European allies were themselves nothing but history by 1991, leaving Cuba economically adrift. Very hard years followed, a time that came to be known as the "Special Period."

To survive, Cuba has in many ways reverted to what it was prior to the revolution.

The country now allows for self-employment, freer travel, and the buying and selling of homes and cars.

Small businesses have sprung up everywhere. Tourism once again has become a mainstay of the economy, and foreign capital, from Canada, Spain, and elsewhere has flowed in.

Many socially unsavoury practices have followed in its wake, and (despite the continuing American trade embargo) the U.S. dollar is again king, fuelling an underground economy. The health and education systems, too, have suffered declines.

The country has moved backward in terms of race relations as well.

Cuba was a Spanish-ruled sugar plantation economy, with a largely black workforce, until the Spanish-American War of 1898. Slavery had only been abolished a decade earlier.

After independence in 1902 little changed. The population of African descent remained at the bottom of the economic and political ladder and whites at the top, with Mulattoes (of mixed European and African lineage) in between.

In the years following the triumph of the revolution the Cuban government was one of the world's most dedicated regimes in the fight against discrimination. It achieved significant gains in racial equality through a series of egalitarian reforms in the 1960s.

But today things are different - Afro-Cubans are often excluded from positions in tourism related jobs, where they could earn tips in hard currencies. They are relegated to poor housing.

"The government hasn't allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn't exist," contends essayist Roberto Zurbano in a recent article in the New York Times. After all, it's a socialist country!

Meanwhile, the aging and ailing Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul in 2008, and the latter has said he will step down in 2018.

What happens then? Many older Cubans in the largely white anti-Communist expatriate community in Miami foresee a triumphant return to their homeland, but it's doubtful that they will ever regain control of the country.

It is more likely that post-Castro Cuba will become a country with a mixed economy and a pluralist political system, on the Scandinavian model.