The Cuba In Our Mind
Mini Teaser: Castro has never seemed more firmly ensconced in power. Those who have been bold enough over the years to declare themselves his enemies are now dead, in exile, in jail, or cowering in fear of arrest.
When the Soviet empire imploded some six years ago, most
observers--East and West--assumed that the disappearance of the
Castro regime in Cuba was but a matter of time. After all, no member
of the socialist family of nations had received such generous
economic subsidies from Moscow; none was more culturally vulnerable
to outside influences or more geographically exposed; none had made
so heavy an ideological investment in Lenin's vision of the future.
Having bet on the wrong horse, Castro's Cuba was therefore
destined--to borrow Trotsky's durable phrase--for the dustbin of
history.
So far, at least, those predictions seem to have proven excessively
deterministic. True, in the absence of Soviet oil, machinery,
foodstuffs and other consumer products, Cuban living standards have
fallen catastrophically, and may not yet have touched bottom. True as
well, ordinary Cubans, particularly young people, are deeply
alienated from the regime. (Cuban walls now bear such pungent
inscriptions as "Down with You-Know-Who!") Finally, until the recent
immigration agreement, unprecedented numbers of Cubans were
attempting to leave the island on makeshift boats.
Nonetheless, Castro has never seemed more firmly ensconced in power.
Those who have been bold enough over the years to declare themselves
his enemies are now dead, in exile, in jail, or cowering in fear of
arrest. While everything else in Cuba seems to be breaking down, the
repressive apparatus is more effective than ever. The small dissident
movement, hounded by the police and government mobs, offers an
example of high courage--but no apparent alternative for ordinary
Cubans. The very fact of Castro's survival in the face of multiple
predictions of his demise seems to have braced up the Cuban dictator
psychologically. It has also strengthened the interpretive hand of
those of his apologists, supporters, or sympathizers abroad, who
would have us believe that, whatever has happened elsewhere in the
world, in Cuba--a country once known for rum, cigars, beaches,
gambling, and the rhumba--communism has finally found a place where
it really "works."
This view is not wholly confined to the far left. Not long ago a
right-wing Chilean congressman of my acquaintance urged me to
consider the possibility that "in some countries, socialism, that is,
Marxist socialism, can become a national project." When I objected
that this particular national project seemed destined to starve an
entire people to death, he agreed. It was an unpleasant project, he
averred, certainly not one he would wish for Chile, but an authentic
expression of that particular country's national quest nonetheless.
Or consider an excerpt from a cover story of the international
edition of Time magazine (December 6, 1993). "Through a combination
of charisma and pride," wrote senior editor Johanna McGeary, Castro
"still holds the island's fate in his hand...Cubans [regard] their
revolutionary heroes as Americans do...Che Guevara is their
Lafayette, Fidel their George Washington." If this is so, one cannot
help wondering why, thirty years on, we are still awaiting the
appearance of Cuba's version of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and
James Monroe. Or is it rather that Cuba--unlike the United States,
France, or for that matter Russia--is somehow capable of surviving
indefinitely on the myth of a single cathartic revolutionary moment?
If Cuba turns out, after all, to be the one place in the world where
communism really "works," Ernest Preeg has shown us just what
"working" really means. In the old days (that is, before 1989), 85
percent of Cuba's trade was with the Soviet Union, 90 percent of
which was restricted to five primary products. Because it was based
not on comparative advantage but purely circumstantial political
alignments, this relationship introduced radical distortions into the
island's economy. For example, in 1986 Cuba received eight times the
world price of sugar for its harvest. This naturally led Castro's
planners to increase the acreage devoted to sugar by one third, while
reducing that devoted to food productslike corn by in some cases as
much as 50 percent.
The sudden loss of the Soviet market is therefore a triple blow.
There is no ready-made outlet for what Cuba is geared to produce
(sugar); the prices it can now command for sugar are a fraction of
what it formerly received; and there is no apparent alternative
source of foreign exchange. This means not only that there are no
resources with which to buy what cannot be produced at home (e.g.,
foodstuffs), but that new investment to restructure the economy must
be postponed indefinitely. Meanwhile, lack of fuel, fertilizer, and
spare parts has undercut even the sugar harvest, which did not quite
reach four million tons in 1994 (slightly less than half what it was
in the heyday of the Cuban-Soviet relationship). It is expected to be
even less in 1995.
But Cuba's decline is not merely quantitative, but qualitative as
well. As Preeg observes:
"Cuba has become an undeveloping country. Bicycles are replacing
automobiles. Horse-drawn carts are replacing delivery trucks. Oxen
are replacing tractors. Factories are shut down and urban industrial
workers resettled in rural areas to engage in labor-intensive
agriculture. Food consumption is shifting from meat and processed
products to potatoes, bananas, and other staples."
Cuba is not, of course, the first country in (what used to be called)
the Third World to pursue a strategy of autarky leading to
de-development. But--given its demonstrated superiority in political
repression--it is one of the few countries capable of carrying such
policies forward over the longer term. There are precious few
loopholes in the system, which means that dogmatism and rigidity will
not be as extensively tempered in Cuba (as in, say, Franco's Spain)
by inefficiency, corruption, and administrative oversight.
The one area where Cuba can expect to move forward is in tourism,
where some European and Canadian concerns have started to make new
investments. But in spite of the fulsome claims made, Cuba cannot
replicate the past success of Mexico or Spain in this regard, since
the effects on the economy as a whole are limited by the small space
reserved for market logic by the large, still nearly universal
non-market economy. More to the point, an increase of tourist
revenues to $250 million by 1995--which seems already to have been
achieved--pales into insignificance when compared to the loss of $6
billion in Soviet resources since 1989.
There is also much talk of new investments in nickel, sugar,
telephones and such basic industries by Mexican, Canadian, British,
and other European consortia. There are, in fact, some three hundred
foreign firms now operating in Cuba, but most of these have yet to
make a new investment commitment; rather they are positioning
themselves in the eventuality that the U.S. trade embargo is lifted
and the government shifts to a full-scale market rationale.
(Presumably they are also betting that no successor-state will
penalize them for collusion with the Castro dictatorship, a wager
they may just lose.) So far the needed changes have not
occurred--not, at least, on a scale sufficient to encourage the
investors to move beyond the realm of speculation and marginality.
Stated succinctly, without drastic economic and political reform
there is no way out. But of course, to change the system too
drastically would render it unrecognizable, and altogether beg the
question of whether Cuba has really proven Marx right after all.
Guilt-managing as Art Form
Over the last five years there has been a subtle but perceptible
shift in Cuban studies in the United States to take these new
realities into account. Whereas formerly much of the emphasis was on
the alleged economic and social "successes" of the revolution,
particularly in the areas of education and health, today the
viability of the regime is located in its historicity, in its deep
roots with the Cuban past, and its continuing capacity to validate
certain pre-Castro trends and tendencies in Cuban politics--a need
which, to follow the logic of the argument, even now is best served
by hunger, rationing, repression, and cultural isolation. If one
accepts--but only if one accepts--the notion that Cuban history is
"about" the need for independence from the United States to the
exclusion of just about everything else, then the Castro regime's
demonstrated capacity to liberate the island from American influence
can be represented as a towering achievement which requires little or
no other justification. It is a case of heads I win (things are
better because of socialism), or, alternatively, tails you lose
(things are better even if they are not).
This intellectual shell game is the subject of Irving Louis Horowitz'
The Conscience of Worms and the Cowardice of Lions. In a few brief
but telling pages, it retraces the crooked path--twisted in both the
geometric and moral sense--taken by what we might call "Castrology"
in the United States these past three decades.
(Several of the other titles under review here appeared too late for
inclusion in his survey, but serve to demonstrate the degree to which
the problem persists.) Horowitz is particularly qualified to
undertake this task, since he is a distinguished sociologist in his
own right, and for nearly twenty-five years the editor of Cuban
Communism, long established in its many editions as the reader of
record.
Horowitz reminds us that in its early days (1959-62), the appeal of
the Castro regime for the intellectual left in the United States was
precisely its utopian, existential characteristics (at last, a
non-Stalinist version of revolutionary change!), and those who, per
contra, pointed to its incipient authoritarian features were
dismissed as philistines and Cold War provincials (C. Wright Mills,
Listen, Yankee!, 1960). Oddly enough, however, these same people
expressed no disappointment whatever when Castro shortly thereafter
dropped all pretense to "humanism," and adopted the Soviet model,
right down to the doorknobs and light switches.
Rather than re-examine their original premises, they simply took
refuge in the argument that whatever had gone wrong in Cuba was
entirely the fault of the United States. The classic exposition of
this argument--guilt-mongering raised to a high art form--is William
Appleman Williams' The U.S., Cuba, and Castro (1962), and its point
of view survives in many quarters of our political culture today, in
spite of the many disclaimers the Cuban dictator himself has made on
the subject. (Unlike his foreign apologists, Castro fully grasps the
contradiction between deploring a policy and celebrating its outcome.)
By 1968 it was clear that the Cuban regime had not made much progress
towards economic development, so it was necessary to emphasize its
"moral" achievements--such as the elimination of material incentives
to productivity. (During this period, which lasted roughly into 1973,
Che Guevara rather than Castro was the operative icon.) Castro's
periodic quarrels with the Soviets gave the claim a superficial gloss
of credibility. Sophisticated European ideologues like K.S. Karol
(Guerrillas in Power), even argued that Cuba in its revolutionary
purity had as its destiny "to reveal to the rest of the world [not
merely] the real nature of America's foreign policy," but also to
"la[y] bare the true nature of the Soviet bloc." "In this revisionist
scenario," Horowitz dryly observes, "it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who
would provide the blueprint for Cuban happiness."
By the mid-1970s such romantic jeux d'esprit were forgotten; Castro
had fully dispensed with moral incentives and composed his
differences with the Soviets. (Plans to publish a Cuban edition of
the complete works of Trotsky were likewise shelved.) Now, in fact,
the Maximum Leader was spending much of his time (and a huge
percentage of his limited resources) advancing Soviet interests in
the Third World through the export of weapons, advice, and soldiers.
At that point, many of his American admirers transferred their
admiration from literacy campaigns or figures on milk production, to
Cuba's putatively selfless "proletarian internationalism" (e.g., the
Cuban military adventurism in approved locales like Angola, the Horn
of Africa, and later Central America). Strange to say, these were the
very same people who were quick to denounce other Latin American
military institutions, the "bureaucratic-authoritarian" state in
places like Argentina, Brazil and Chile, and the U.S. relationship to
both. In other words, and to paraphrase Molotov, Cuban militarism
(like European fascism in 1940) turned out to be "a matter of taste."
This methodological double standard, Horowitz writes, amounts to
nothing less than "a subversion of social science in favor of covert
political support for a dictatorship."
These are strong words, but if anything they understate the case.
Well into the mid-1980s--that is, before the collapse of the Soviet
Union--many researchers (notably Andrew Zimbalist and Claes
Brundenius) persisted in arguing (in Horowitz' paraphrase) that
"unqualified dependence on sugar as a crop [was] overestimated, that
Soviet aid ha[d] been greatly exaggerated, and that the rectification
process ha[d] been a great success." Only an unforeseen
catastrophe--the end of the Socialist Commonwealth of
Nations--brought Castrologists up short. Now many of them argue that
all of the problems of the island, from the shortage of fuels to the
lack of political liberalization, can be directly traced to the
continuing U.S. trade embargo.
At the end of the day, then, it appears that we are supposed to judge
the Cuban Revolution--an epochal event putatively representing one of
the culminating moments in mankind's struggle for liberation and
dignity--not on the basis of its production indices, contributions to
human welfare, or improvement in the quality of the country's civic
and cultural life, but on Castro's success in defying a trade
embargo. Yet at the same time we are assured that whatever
deficiencies persist after thirty-five years of socialism would
somehow be corrected--if only American tourists could join with
Canadians, Europeans and Latin Americans to gamble and whore once
again at Havana's beachfront hotels!
Such logic-defying exercises make sense only if one accepts a
monistic interpretation of the island's history, one which confuses
the Castro regime with the country, and casts Cuba into the role of
eternal victim, exempting it (and its leadership) from any
responsibility for its follies or errors. Post-Gorbachev Castrology
in the United States thus takes up its position at the point where
Cuban nationalism and anti-Americanism (domestic or foreign)
intersect.
The centrality of Cuban nationalism to Cuban historiography hardly
requires emphasis. Indeed, the two are virtually inseparable. The
official canon--which presented the country's struggle for nationhood
as a story with a happy ending--was barely established in Cuban
school textbooks at the beginning of this century before it was
broadly repudiated. Disillusioned by the results of the first two
decades of independence (1901-21), successive waves of "revisionists"
rummaged through the past to explain their country's lingering
deficiencies. These they variously attributed to the island's Spanish
heritage, to its emergence as a nation-state three quarters of a
century later than other Latin American countries, to the untimely
death in 1895 of the great "apostol" of cubanidad José MartÃ, and
above all to the United States, whose tardy but decisive intervention
in the war of independence (1895-98) all but assured that the new
republic would be forced into a quasi-protectorate with its powerful
neighbor to the north.
The bill of indictment against the United States was long and
detailed, intemperate in tone and relentlessly unforgiving: from the
Platt Amendment, by which Washington arrogated to itself the right to
intervene in the island (revoked only in 1934), through the two U.S.
occupations (1906-09; 1917-22) and the heavy-handed involvement of
Ambassador Sumner Welles in the revolution of 1933; to the creation
of the "sugar quota" which reserved to Cuba a quarter of the U.S.
domestic market (forcing it into a monoculture from which there was
no easy escape).
Some of the historians who raked these coals back and forth during
the 1930s and 1940s, like Emilio Roig de Leuchenring, were communists
or at least close to the Cuban party, and they remained on the island
after the advent of Castro to enjoy privileged berths in the new
state apparatus. But many were not. The most eminent "revisionist" of
all was Herminio Portell-Vilá, who from his chair at the University
of Havana trained several generations of Cuban students (one of them
was, in fact, Fidel Castro) to attribute all of their country's
problems to the United States. Such histrionics did not prevent
Professor Portell-Vilá from marrying an American, from periodically
teaching at American colleges, even from accepting a Guggenheim
Foundation grant to finish his multi-volume screed Historia de Cuba
en sus relaciones con Estados Unidos y España (1938).
Nonetheless, once Castro began expropriating American companies and
goading the United States into suspending the Cuban sugar
quota--which is to say, once he began to put his old professor's
preachings into practice--Portell-Vilá took the first available ship
to Miami. (He later established himself in Washington as an expert on
Cuban affairs at one of the more right-wing lobbying groups.) An even
more interesting case is that of Carlos Márquez Sterling, whose
Historia de Cuba, still available as far as I know from an émigré
publishing house in Miami, rants against the United States in
virtually every chapter except the last--the one which, after all,
explains why Señor Márquez Sterling was signing the prologue in Miami
rather than Havana.
Revisionist Theories
The ideological fit between revisionism and Castroism is too evident
to require comment. Rather more interesting, however, is the way that
revisionist themes have resurfaced in the work of Cuban-American
historians working in the United States, many of them born here or
brought to this country as small children. Three particular cases
present themselves for our attention. Two are chapters by Louis A.
Pérez, Jr. and Jorge DomÃnguez in Leslie Bethell's portmanteau volume
Cuba: A Short History. The other is Marifeli Pérez-Stable's The Cuban
Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy.
For some time now Louis Pérez, Jr. has been the principal exponent of
Cuban revisionism in the United States, utilizing the latest social
science concepts and techniques to make some of the same points, with
the rather different twist that, unlike Portell-Vilá or Márquez
Sterling, he has no vested interest in separating the traditional
agendas of Cuban nationalism from the Castro regime. Quite the
contrary: he sees a significant continuity between the two (which has
an interesting political subtext of its own). The particular period
with which he deals in this volume is 1930-1959, which is to say, the
runup to Castro's seizure of power, but he ranges rather more widely
over time to get there.
For example, he dusts off the hoary myth that by 1898 the Cuban
insurgents had virtually defeated the Spanish army, and would indeed
have obtained independence on their own, had not the United States
intervened at the last minute to assure itself control of the new
state. This is simply untrue. (We should be grateful, however, that
he forebears from claiming--as many Spanish and Cuban historians
still maintain--that the United States purposely exploded its own
battleship Maine to provide an excuse for intervention.)
He dredges up the old arguments against trade reciprocity with the
United States (as if there was really much of an alternative for a
small country which was shattered by nearly a decade of civil war,
and whose colonial elites fled after the collapse of the metropolitan
power with what capital they could take with them). "Within a decade
of the war of independence," Pérez writes, "the United States had
become a pervasive presence in Cuba, totally dominating the economy,
thoroughly penetrating the social fabric, and fully controlling the
political process." (Of the three assertions only the first is at all
defensible; the second is true only for the urban elites, and not
always them; the third would come as an acute surprise to a
succession of hapless American ambassadors who struggled for more
than two decades to get a handle on Cuban politics.)
It is certainly true that Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s could hardly be
called an independent country in the same sense as was Argentina,
Colombia, or even Mexico. American investment and American markets
occupied too central a role, and the failure of Cubans to generate a
political class with its own sense of self meant that the U.S.
embassy in Havana was expected to play a proconsular role, whether it
actually did so or not. The situation was anomalous and left the door
open for many misunderstandings. Pérez, however, has no feel for
ambiguity. Instead, he writes that
"Cuba participated in and depended entirely on the United States
economic system in much the same way as U.S. citizens, but without
access to U.S. social service programs and at employment and wage
levels substantially lower than their North American counterparts."
This amounts to saying that Cuba was a slave-labor colony for
American capital, and that the relationship with the United States
was entirely one sided. Now, evidently, wage and employment levels in
pre-Castro Cuba were substantially lower than in the U.S., but so
were living costs. More to the point, thanks to a privileged position
in the U.S. sugar market, Cuban living standards were significantly
higher than most other countries in the region, (and taken as a
whole) indeed higher than any Latin American country except for
Argentina and Uruguay. True, the gap between urban and rural Cuba was
abysmal, as was the lack of adequate social services outside Havana
and a few other cities (which by the 1950s nonetheless accounted for
nearly half the island's population).
But there was nothing about the relationship with the United States
that necessarily dictated that the economic benefits of reciprocity
had to be distributed in this particular fashion; how successive
Cuban governments utilized the island's earnings from sugar, tobacco
and rum was a matter of near-total indifference to the U.S.
government or private business. What is true is that, like all other
primary producing countries, Cuba was highly dependent economically
on forces beyond its control--the world price of sugar, the cost of
borrowing money, the ups and downs of the U.S. economic cycle. The
wonder of it all is that Cuba benefited so hugely from its
"dependency." If Castro and his followers missed this point (as Pérez
seems to miss it now), it was not lost on the dozens of other
countries that lobbied the Senate Agriculture Committee to take
Cuba's place when the Eisenhower administration suspended the
island's sugar quota in 1960.
Not that all Cuban governments before 1958 were completely
insensitive to landlessness, illiteracy, and social injustice. As a
matter of fact, at the time of Castro's seizure of power it was one
of the more advanced Latin American countries in both social services
and labor rights. However, it also suffered from a succession of
governments (mostly civilian) who outdid themselves in cynicism,
nepotism, and corruption. Pérez is aware of this problem, but
apparently regards it as vestigial; instead, he defines the central
issue as alleged U.S. pressure to keep Cuba from diversifying its
production and trade.
No doubt many Cubans believed that this was the dominant purpose of
American policy; it is even possible to find dispatches from American
diplomats who thought so as well. On the evidence, American
reciprocity did not promote a satisfactory level of Cuban
diversification and development. But let the record show as well that
its absence has not done so either: the island today is far more
dependent on sugar exports than it was at the time the United States
suspended the quota in 1960.
Relative to What?
What happened after Castro came to power is summarized in fifty-some
brisk pages by Jorge DomÃnguez. A professor of government at Harvard
and author of numerous books and articles on Cuba, DomÃnguez manages
to remain faithful to the spirit of revisionism without falling into
some of its obvious factual pitfalls. For example, he freely admits
that Castro did not request U.S. aid during his first visit to this
country as Cuban supremo in 1959, but manages to load the blame onto
American shoulders nonetheless. "Had such aid been requested and
granted, it would have tied Cuba's future closely to the world
capitalist economy and to the United States." The revolutionary
leaders, he adds, understood this, and also grasped that "it was
impossible to conduct a revolution in Cuba without a major
confrontation with the United States." Thus Castro and his associates
are exonerated in advance from failing to even try to reach an
understanding with Washington, while the United States (in its
incarnation as a "world capitalist economy") stands condemned for
existing at all!
DomÃnguez's evaluation of the performance of the Castro regime is
even more casuistic. He freely admits that there has been a signal
inability to increase production or diversify exports and
markets--which is to say, Cuban living standards overall have dropped
these last thirty-some years. He even concedes that this situation
has been greatly aggravated by Castro's penchant for military
adventures abroad, which consistently diverted managerial talents and
enormous resources into nonproductive outlets. Nonetheless, since the
country's economic burdens have been more equitably distributed than
before, we can regard the revolution as a "relative success."
Relative to what? If the socialization of poverty is a "relative
success," one has to wonder whether "relative failure" is even
conceptually possible.
Marifeli Pérez-Stable's book seems to promise a good deal more. In
the first place, she is sensitive to the full complexities of Cuban
politics in the 1950s, and does not fall into the trap of assuming
that all roads necessarily lead to Fidel Castro's accession to power.
Quite the contrary, she begins by insisting that "social revolution
and the ensuing radical transformation of Cuban society were neither
inevitable nor aberrational." The old Cuba, she writes, "sheltered
these options as well as others that were never or only partially
realized."
In two brilliant opening chapters she identifies a persistent
structural problem: by the 1950s, sugar had ceased to be the motor of
economic growth in Cuba, yet it still outweighed all the other
alternatives. Moreover, Cuban politics being what they were,
advocates of import-substitution industrialization were isolated and
ineffective. (Paradoxically, part of the problem was the relative
strength of the labor movement, itself a product of Cuba's unusually
advanced version of agro-industry.) Thus, Pérez-Stable writes, Cuba
was prevented from generating its own version of "dependent
capitalist development," such as occurred in other Latin American
countries in the 1950s and 1960s.
These observations are provocative and interesting, inasmuch as they
allow us to imagine what might have happened in Cuban history. But
they do nothing at all to help us understand the events that actually
occurred. Castro's victory over Fulgencio Batista was the product of
the dictator's unpopularity, not the need (real or imagined) for some
sort of social transformation. Castro understood this better at the
time than Pérez-Stable seems to understand it now, since his program
before taking power was confined to the restoration of the
Constitution of 1940, which was a perfectly bourgeois document to
which no one on the island (or for that matter, in the United States)
could have taken exception.
Unfortunately, once Castro achieves power, Pérez-Stable's
considerable powers of analysis sharply decline. The dividing line
between the official version of Cuban events and the author's own
account becomes confused and uncertain. The role of the United States
is often distorted, sometimes downright wrong. Also, she seems not to
fully grasp the difference between Leninist and pluralist approaches
to labor history. Clichés like "sovereignty, equality, inclusive
development" act as self-justifying props, even though they often
describe phenomena quite the opposite of their normally accepted
meanings. Cuban society in all of its complexity is suddenly
compressed into a one dimension, subsumed under the incantation
"Fidel-Revolution-Fatherland."
In these middle chapters, Pérez-Stable veers back and forth between
pinpointing the hard facts of Cuban political sociology and
attempting to soften their ideological implications. Perhaps the best
example is her account of "proletarian power" in socialist Cuba:
"The working class bore the burden of legitimating socialism, but
workers did not have the power to make national policies. Their
charge was to work hard. The Communist party exercised power on their
behalf, and Fidel Castro was the premier expositor of their welfare.
The correct proletarian conciencia was to abide by party directives
and charismatic authority. In that sense, Cuban socialism was like
the other contemporary socialist experiences: the working class
wielded power vicariously."
What is perhaps most remarkable about this and other similar passages
is the peculiar tone in which they are written--as if the revolution
were still a promise yet to be tested, rather than something about
which there is now a wealth of data based on actual performance. When
it comes time to face the bottom line, she has no choice, then, but
to let the readers down without much advance warning. After a
dizzying ride through thickets of utopian rhetoric and S-curves of
socialist triumphalism, Pérez Stable suddenly announces:
"Two decades after the revolution there was still no room for
dissent: Con Cuba o contra Cuba continued to define Cuban politics.
Ninety miles away from the United States and the prosperous
Cuban-American communities, the Cuban government surely had to
contend with unreasonable comparisons and inordinate expectations.
Still, the challenge for Cuban leaders lay in satisfying basic
needs--especially in the supply,