Strategic Writing on Cuba - Review Essay

Parameters, Winter, 2001 by Russell W. Ramsey

Seven years have passed since this reviewer's essay "On Castro and Cuba: Rethinking the 'Three Gs'" appeared in Parameters, and policy lines on US-Cuban relations have hardened in both Washington, D.C., and Havana since then. Yet there are important signals of impending policy changes emanating from both countries, and we explore here several works which set the tone for understanding the issues, followed by a more detailed examination of three new books which are significant contributions to the massive literature on this topic.

In 1994, Premier Fidel Castro carried out his sweeping policy adjustments occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its previous mentorship of Cuba. Politically, these adjustments included the authorization of a massive economic emigration from Cuba to Florida and the lifting of state censorship and other tight security rules affecting Cuban relationships with foreigners visiting or living in Cuba. Economically, Castro opened the Cuban socialist economy to allow about one-third of his population to live "outside the revolution," which means holding a job in a growing free-market sector created primarily by European investment and using the US dollar as primary currency. At the time of my earlier review, most Cuba analysts concluded that the demise of Fidel Castro as Premier and of fidelismo (passionate belief in Fidel's revolution) was imminent. Those analysts were wrong, and the works reviewed below show why.

To appreciate what has happened in Cuba since the demise of the Soviet Union, one should read Robert T. Buckman's chapter on Cuba in the Stryker-Post volume Latin America 2001. Buckman shows, dispassionately, that fidelismo may seem to be an illogical, failed policy to the outsider, but that Fidel Castro and his revolution are deeply meaningful to the seven million or so Cubans who live within it. Their basic necessities of life (food, first-line medical care, education, and shelter) are taken care of in exchange for a drab economic existence in old houses with leaky roofs and utilities that function with increasing irregularity. This judgment is corroborated by lectures delivered by Dr. Gilberto Fleites, a Cuban oncologist, on 7 January 2000, and from Dr. Juan Valdez Paz, a Cuban historian, on 14 January 2000, both at the Felix Varela Institute in Havana. For an overview of where scholarship is moving on Cuba and its tumultuous history, Robert Whitney's "History or Teleology?" in Latin American Research Revi ew is the best short summary. The books reviewed by Professor Whitney point clearly to a growing emphasis on the "mambi" theme, a reference to Cuba's non-white eastern population who have always been excluded to some degree from the island's political system and among whom all revolutions have either started or at least had an important strand. This view was further confirmed by Dr. Herbert Perez, another Cuban historian at the Oriente (Eastern) University in Santiago, on 10 January 2000.

Professor Thomas C. Wright's revised (2001) edition of Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution reflects the somewhat chastened writing of the neo-Marxist left in the United States. Gone are the romantic interpretations of Castro's role in the Cuban struggle of 1956-1959, and of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's ill-fated filibuster in Bolivia in 1967. Professor Wright accurately portrays the limited neo-Marxist dimensions seen in Colombia's recent years of domestic mayhem. He continues to laud the Salvador Allende administration of Chile and judges the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship to have been all bad, an externally imposed pawn of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Yet I have heard prominent Chilean Marxist scholars who suffered at the hands of General Pinochet's terror apparatus, the DINA, state that the Allende government was ineffective, and that the system imposed by Pinochet now calls on Chilean leftists to become social democrats working to achieve an economic safety network for the poor. Further, Pro fessor Wright insists that the Nicaraguan people genuinely wanted the continuance of the Sandinista government in 1990, while dozens of former Sandinistas state that their government was venal, needlessly militarized, and economically counterproductive. While chastened in tone, some US neo-Marxists within academia still cling to a governmental philosophy that was shown by Professor Timothy WickhamCrowley's 1992 study, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America, to have little authenticity within Latin America, and appearing to succeed (Cuba and Nicaragua) only as a result of external financial support now vanished with the collapse of the USSR.

The book Cuba: The Contours of Change, edited by Susan Kaufman Purcell and David Rothkopf, is the one reviewed here which will attract most readers, for it addresses the fundamental policy questions extant between the two bad neighbors. This slim volume is a set of essays presented at a conference series entitled "Cuba: Preparing for the Future" conducted from April to June 2000 by the Council of the Americas, a think-tank group often sought-after by US political leaders for advice and endorsement of their Cuba policies. Professor Purcell is vice-president of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, with a long record of influential policy writing on Cuba, and she concludes in this book that the US economic embargo of Cuba is unfortunate but necessary. She cites the demonstrated durability of Fidel Castro's regime as evidence that his 1994 policy adjustments are not a transition to free-market economics and political democracy, but are, in fact, a shrewd scheme for maintaining his personalistic revol ution in power. This view is opposed by Professors Andrew Zimbalist and Manuel Pastor, Jr., who see the 1994 reforms as stop-gap measures which are economically unsustainable within the greater environment of NAFTA and the Caribbean Economic Community (CARICOM). Rabid opponents of Fidel, however, will not take much comfort here, for Zimbalist and Pastor merely conclude that the reforms are unstable and unsustainable, but do not see them as soon to be replaced by sweeping neo-liberal policies in Cuba. The facts behind both of these viewpoints were clearly sustained in lectures by the Cuban economist Dr. Julio Carranza on 7 January 2000, and by diplomatic history specialist Dr. Carlos Aizugaray on 13 January 2000, both at the Varela Institute in Havana.