Why Cuba Still Matters

[magbana]

Why Cuba Still Matters
Diana Raby

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090105raby.php

Diana Raby is senior fellow at the Research Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool (UK) and is also professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto. She has written extensively on Latin America and is also active in solidarity movements such as the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and the Venezuela Information Centre (UK). Her latest book, Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today (London: Pluto Press, 2006), argues for the crucial importance of Venezuela, along with Cuba and the ALBA countries, in the renewal of the international left in this century.

In the early 1990s there was near unanimity in the media, in Western political circles, and even among academics that the collapse of the Cuban revolution was imminent. Even today, many observers regard it as only a matter of time for Cuba to undergo a transition to democracy (understood as a narrowly defined polyarchy) and a “market economy.”

But the fact that Cuban socialism has survived the extraordinary rigors of the “Special Period” and is still functioning nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall should give pause for thought. Even the prolonged incapacity of Fidel Castro and his subsequent resignation as president has not led to chaos or upheaval, as many predicted. Why then has Cuba survived, and what does it mean for socialist and progressive politics today?

The simple answer is that, for all its problems and deficiencies, the revolutionary order is still viable. Many Cubans still believe in socialist principles; they naturally grumble about shortages and restrictions, but have few illusions about the alternative on offer across the Florida Straits.

But why is this so? What makes Cuba different from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? To understand this it is necessary to go back to the origins of the revolution and the remarkable transformation that occurred from 1959 to 1963. Before the revolution, Cuba was a U.S. protectorate, a vast sugar plantation where venal “democratic” governments alternated with brutal dictatorships. The idea of a socialist revolution here—or anywhere else in the U.S. “backyard” of the Caribbean and Central America—was unthinkable. So on January 1, 1959, when the dictator Batista fled and the bearded guerrillas entered Havana and Santiago, almost no one anticipated the scope and depth of the changes that were to follow.

The Cuban transition to socialism was one of the most rapid and thorough anywhere in the world: the first and second Agrarian Reform Laws, the nationalization of virtually all large industries and services, the extraordinary literacy campaign and the establishment of free public education at all levels, free universal health care, and the organization of a popular militia and disciplined mass organizations from neighborhood level upwards, all in the space of four years or so.

Yet in the first six months of 1959 all the rhetoric was about democracy and humanism; socialism was scarcely even mentioned until mid-1960, and was not officially adopted as the goal until April 1961, two years and four months after the initial victory (during the Bay of Pigs invasion). The 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) which had led the armed struggle and seized power was a broad and heterogeneous movement that had serious differences with what was then Cuba’s Communist party, the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). The revolution was immensely popular, but many observers expected (or feared) that it would eventually suffer the same fate as Guatemala five years earlier, where the popular Arbenz government was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup.

The tremendous euphoria generated by the revolution in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, and its initial ideological flexibility, are fundamental for understanding its significance. Taking place in a region and at a time when U.S. hegemony was undisputed, where the great Mexican revolution had been neutralized and progressive movements like those of Sandino in Nicaragua, Grau San Martín in Cuba in 1933, Gaitán in Colombia, and Arbenz in Guatemala had been crushed by overt or covert U.S. intervention, the Cuban triumph had an immediate symbolic impact. On his first trip abroad after victory, to Venezuela in late January 1959, Fidel Castro was received by delirious crowds. In February the then Chilean Senator Salvador Allende declared that “The Cuban revolution does not belong only to you...we are dealing with the most significant movement ever to have occurred in the Americas,”1 and shortly afterwards Gloria Gaitán, daughter of the assassinated Colombian popular leader, proclaimed that the Cuban experience was “the beginning of the great liberation of Nuestra América .”2 Former president of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, author of the 1938 oil nationalization in that country, also gave enthusiastic support to Cuba.

The most obvious distinctive feature of the Cuban revolution—and the essential reason for its ability to avoid the fate of Guatemala, defeating the counter-revolutionary Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961—was the unprecedented military victory of the guerrillas of the Rebel Army over the forces of the dictator Batista. It was also this which would make it possible for Marxists subsequently to present the process as a textbook case of the Leninist thesis of armed workers’ revolution. But the force that seized power was not a Communist or Marxist party, it was a broad democratic movement with an eclectic ideology derived from Cuban and Latin American popular revolutionary traditions and vague notions of social justice and national liberation. The old Communists of the PSP, which did have some roots in the labor movement and among intellectuals but had been compromised by its earlier support for Batista, had initially condemned Fidel Castro and the guerrillas as “petty-bourgeois adventurers” and only started supporting the movement on the eve of victory, late in 1958.

This made it all the more surprising to many observers when the revolutionary leadership, represented above all by Fidel Castro, pushed ahead regardless of all obstacles in the initial three years from early 1959 to 1962, sweeping aside the wealthy Cuban elite and landlord class and defying Washington to expropriate sugar estates and ranches, nationalize industries, purge the state apparatus of Batista supporters, sign trade agreements with the Soviet bloc, and then declare themselves socialist. Was this premeditated sleight-of-hand by a covert Communist leadership, as alleged by many right-wing commentators in the United States? Or was it the indignant reaction of popular nationalists when faced with clumsy and uncomprehending U.S. hostility, as claimed by liberals?

Continue article at: http://www.monthlyreview.org/090105raby.php

[Judi Lynn]

1. Haven't even finished the article yet but had to stop and thank you for this quote!

It's absolutely dynamite, when you consider those filthy a-hole reactionary vicious, violent, murderous right-wing gusanos in Miami even have a private school for their children named after the Cuban national hero, Jose Marti! This is stupendous, quoted by the author of your posted Monthly Review article:

“Everything I have done unto now and all that I shall do hereafter has as its objective to prevent, through the independence of Cuba, the United States of America from falling with added weight on Our America.”

Well, well, well.

Those ignorant, greedy fools have claimed Marti as their own all this time, pretending they shared a point of view with him. Nothing in common with the man whatsoever. I've always thought it was bizarre, knowing what little I did of him, aware, at least, that he lived in the States for a period in his life and described it as being "in the belly of the beast."