THEN…
Havana, 2010. “The United States always gets what it wants,” the young driver of a tour bus said when I asked his thoughts on Cuba’s long-term prospects. In a later exchange, he repeated this grim estimate. “The United States always gets what it wants.”
I’ll return to that thought later.
I found Havana quite the sight eleven years ago. Horse-drawn carriages and Pedicabs shared the roads with Plymouths, DeSotos, Studebakers and other pre-revolution antiques, which rumbled along in loud defiance of Detroit’s planned obsolescence. The busy street scene was embedded in a architectural crazy quilt, from European Baroque to American neoclassical to Soviet brutalism.
Most of the buildings appeared to be in a state of elegant and not-so-elegant decay. Ornate light standards from the Batista era stood askew in The Capitol’s plaza, where stray dogs begged from tourists. The faces in the streets were white, black and mulatto, with the fashions ranging from Miami chic to rural grunge.
A bit of history: in 1960, the US placed a trade embargo on exports to Cuba after the Castro regime nationalized the US-owned oil refineries without compenstion. The embargo reduced exports not just from America, but also the latter’s trading partners. This had the added utility of pushing the government of Fidel Castro into a tighter economic embrace with the Soviet Union. The White House and its stenographers in the corporate press had already branded a socialist admirer of the American Revolution as a brutal communist dictator, so this was just realpolitik gravy.
The Soviet Union granted Cuba comfortable credit terms, cheap fuel and ready access to Russian technology and aid. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, 80 percent of Cuba’s imports and exports – mostly with East Bloc nations – evaporated. Without Russian fuel, and still under the US trade embargo, the nation fell into crisis. Cuba’s food production system collapsed and the average Cuban’s caloric intake dropped 30 percent.
Castro euphemistically referred to this time of crisis, from 1990 to 1994, as the “Special Period.”
With only a trickle of fuel to transport the diminishing foodstuffs into the cities, Castro abandoned the top-down Soviet model for agriculture and called on Cubans to grow their own food on any available plot of land. The result was the largest program in organic farming ever undertaken by a nation.
During the “Special Period,” Cuban agronomists and scientists learned how to feed cattle with protein-heavy plant diets. And in the absence of pesticides, insects were bred to control pest infestations from other insects. Cuban doctors discovered natural plant remedies to replace some pharmaceutical drugs. Out of sheer necessity, Cubans began to work with nature rather than against it.
Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country. And with shrinking foreign exchange the nation began to exchange medical expertise for oil, as it did with Venezuala.
The nation dispatched thousands of doctors to Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, and to Southeast Asia after the 2004 tsunami. In 2005, Fidel Castro offered to fly 1,100 doctors into Houston, to provide medical attention to the victims evacuated from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Castro’s public offer included 26 tons of equipment, according to a CNN report. US officials simply ignored Castro’s offer.
I spoke in 2010 with Gregory Biniowsky, a British Columbian lawyer and environmentalist, who had lived in Cuba intermittently since 1993, working on Canadian-Cuban development programs. Sitting in Biniowsky’s apartment in Old Havana’s Malecon district, I learned that Cuba was a success or failure depending on the angle of perception.
“It depends on how we want to evaluate Cuba. If you look at GDP, efficiency, sure. This is a centrally-planned bureaucratic economy, with lots of wastage,” he said. But, by other measures – being healthy, having a guaranteed place to live and having strong community networks – Biniowsky says Cuba was unlike other developing nations.
“I could see the fundamental difference between poverty and misery. There’s lots of poverty in Cuba. There’s no misery. In the Dominican Republic and Jamaica there’s rampant misery – misery being tarpaper shantytowns, kids with the swollen bellies, no doctors, rampant violence, corruption. That’s misery. Cuba is the only country that can boast that they have no street children. And we’re talking about tens of thousands of street children throughout Latin America.”
NOW…
With the 1959 revolution, Castro’s peasant army chased out President Batista’s cronies along with a clutch of Miami/Vegas-based mobsters. At that time, one quarter of the people were illiterate and half died before the age of 60. Cuba now has a 99.8 percent literacy rate, according to UN statistics. The nation has the longest life expectancy and lowest infant mortality of any developing country. Overall life expectancy in Cuba – 78 years – puts the nation on a par with the US.
Dominican friar and journalist Frei Betto warns his fellow Brazilians, “if you are rich in Brazil and go to live in Cuba, you will know hell.” Meaning no designer clothes, no vacations abroad, and no keeping a home cook. But if you are middle class, “get ready to experience purgatory.” Meaning lots of bureaucracy, long queues at the market, and many products “frequently unavailable because of inconsistency of imports.”
“However, if you are if you are salaried, poor, homeless or landless, get ready to meet paradise. The Revolution will guarantee your three fundamental human rights: food, health and education, as well as housing and work.” You will never go hungry and your family “will have schooling and health care, including complex surgeries, totally free, as a duty of the State and the right of the citizen.”
A qualified paradise for the poor, perhaps. Cuba has an autocratic culture, with no free press to speak of. Private complaints about the leadership are tolerated, but public criticism is not. Dissenters have been exiled, jailed or harassed. Neighbourhoods reportedly have citizens’ groups called “Committees for Defense of the Revolution,” organized for promote social welfare and report on counter-revolutionary activity. In essence, a snitch network.
While in Cuba I spoke to a number of Cubans, who shared their fears for the future. One was a former mechanical engineer who had taken a more profitable job as a cab driver in the tourist district to support his family. Asked if he would ever consider leaving the country, he shook his head sadly and said it was impossible given the necessity of supporting his family. Most Cubans still support the goals of the revolution, he added, his eyes filling with tears. I was a tourist in a heavily surveilled state. Was he being sincere? All I’m sure of is that his tears were real.
Of course, the corporate press is eager to peg Cuban discontent more on the socialist regime itself, rather than offshore economic warfare. Yet official documents dating back to 1960 note that, by “denying money and supplies to Cuba,” the US hopes to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of [the] government.”
The sanctions block Cuba from trading freely with other nations, ensuring a chronic shortage of goods—including medicines—that cannot be manufactured on the island. In 2014, the UN estimated that the sanctions were responsible for a $1.1 trillion loss to Cuba’s economy. In June, for the 29th year in row, the United Nations condemned the sanctions against Cuba. The vote in the General Assembly was 184 to 2, with only the United States and Israel voting against.
During a global pandemic, Donald Trump ratcheted up sanctions against Cuba with 243 new measures, including a decision to include Cuba on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism. Trump’s added restrictions led the US “to immediately cut off various sources of foreign exchange income, such as tourism, Cuban-American travel to our country, and remittances,” observed Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel.
And here is a supreme historic irony. At the western end of the island in Veradero, Cuba’s socialist leadership had been doing a cautious, postmillennial tango with western capital by maintaining a string of low-end pleasure palaces for tourists loaded with hard currency. At the eastern tip of the island, in the province of Guantanamo, the US maintains a concentration camp for alleged Muslim terrorists on land they’ve staked under a disputed 99-year lease.
The tourist centres are drying up, but the torture centre still stands, with 39 prisoners remaining from the global rendering dragnet of the Bush/Cheney years.
Lest you think the recent actions against Cuba can be blamed on Orange Thing alone, or even the Republicans, the enthusiasm for making the Cuban economy scream and blaming the results on its socialist leadership has long-running bipartisan consensus, from presidents John F. Kennedy to John Biden.
We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime.
- July statement from Joe Biden’s office.
Biden’s statement followed July anti-government protests in Cuba. Not surprisingly, the corporate press failed to note one of the primary vectors of unrest, the spiralling hostility of the US sanctions/blockade.
And here we see another form of bipartisan consensus: in the coverage of the July protests both the corporate press on the right (FOX, et al) and the nominal left (NYT, et al) failed as always to recognize the empire’s role as both arsonist and fire chief.
On his Substack blog, former Time magazine contributor Walter Kirn writes:
The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom. One wire-service headline used the protests to raise concerns about viral spread in crowds. A puzzling message. It wasn’t meant for the defiant Cubans, who weren’t at liberty to read it and whose anger at their rulers clearly outweighed their concerns about contagion. It had to be aimed at English-speaking Americans. But to what end?
Whatever that dangling question entails, the recent corporate reporting on Cuban protests involves that infinitely renewable resource, bullshit. The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, and other outlets misattributed a large July 11 pro-government protest at the Máximo Gómez monument in Havana to anti-government protesters. Fox News did them one better by having Texas senator Ted Cruz praise the bravery of anti-government protesters in Cuba, while the channel showed footage from a pro-government rally in Havana with the slogans on the signs digitally blurred out.
Fox News also offered up Miami Mayor Frances Suarez’s call for a “coalition of potential military action in Cuba.” Bay of Pigs, Part 2.
Six decades after a young lawyer by the name of Castro led a small band of militants in a successful uprising against the Batista regime, the US government and its media proxies appears hellbent on seeing tattered, battered Cuba return to its previous subservient state. Why so determined? I think a clue is supplied in MIT media professor Noam Chomksy’s explanation of why the Reagan administration felt so threatened by a socialist revolution that followed in Nicaragua, in 1976. Any functioning, self-determined socialist nation operating in the southern hemisphere offered “the threat of a good example,” in Chomsky’s words. One good example was bad enough, but two? Unthinkable. Zero? Ideal.
Will the United States eventually get what it wants, as my Havana bus driver predicted a decade ago? Will it add Cuba back to the other baubles in its Caribbean necklace, including Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic? The geopolitical history of Latin America and the Caribbean doesn’t bode well, yet Cuba has dodged more than a few bullets. There were no less than 638 covert assassinations attempts against the late president Fidel Castro, according to Cuban intelligence. The island’s survival as an independent nation to the present day makes for an extraordinary ongoing story of resistance and resilience.
The USA is a bad loser; they carry a grudge against Cuba because they lost...and will never forgive or forget that humiliation. They simply can't grow up...
Cuba is not perfect. It has internal problems related to its lingering Leninst ideology. But its primary problem is, and has always been, los estados unidos and the crippling sanctions imposed by that happily weakening imperialist bullyboy.