In Search of a Cuban Truth

American incursions into Cuban political space make dialogue among parties within Cuba even more challenging.

Photo: Ricardo IV Tamayo, Unsplash

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Cuba is a country of multi-faceted realities all existing simultaneously. There are multiple Cubas depending on vantage point. But it is a country easy to stereotype, especially from the outside.

Only the most starry-eyed international leftist could perceive Cuba as a utopian success story. Not even the Cuban political leadership sees the country in that way. There is an array of challenges, some material, some social and political.

Cubans from all walks of life are deeply fatigued after extended periods of shortages and privation, now intensified markedly by the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of the world economy that has accompanied it.

Younger generations of Cubans are generally much less anchored in the historical nationalist symbolism of grievance with the United States—the package of real and perceived insult and offence that fuelled Cuban nationalism through the twentieth century and helped nurture the seed of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Unmoored from this context, under- or unemployed, not seeing a future of opportunity, many young Cubans are like the free atoms of physics.

At the other end of the life journey, the need to provide social security and care to the elderly in Cuban society is a pressing need constrained by scarce resources. The Cuban nationalist narrative inherited from José Martí, “father of the Cuban nation,” claims that there is no race question in Cuba because that was resolved by the union between European and Afro-Cubans forged in the Wars of Independence against Spain in the 19th century. However, the issue of race is a factor in marginalized communities and social groups.

Cuba may be a heavily bureaucratized state in the spirit of the “institutionalized revolution” (think of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico, as Fidel Castro did in the 1990s), but it is not a failed state. Cubans are well-educated, and the country has enviable levels of literacy and a health care system that, in more normal times, was a model of community preventive care commended by world health organizations, and which produced health indicators like rates of infant mortality that were better than some much richer, industrialized countries. The level of cultural achievement, preparation and public appreciation is high in the visual arts, music and dance.

The label “Communist” is a distraction from understanding the full nuance of Cuban realities. The real issue is one of sometimes dogmatic instinct rather than the label. To be sure, there is a single Communist Party of Cuba. But, in its historical context, Fidel Castro in effect engineered a reverse takeover of the then existing Communist Party to acquire administrative capacity lacking in his own more loosely organized 26 July Movement. There had always been an active Communist movement in Cuban politics since the mid-1920s, and two Communists served as Cabinet ministers in the (elected) wartime government of Fulgencio Batista from 1940-1944. The Cuban governance model is nowadays more accurately a fusion of more pragmatic and less ideological goal-oriented policymaking. The Cuban State itself created a private sector that, despite some regulatory growing pains, exists and will continue to grow. The Cuban constitution recognizes private property.

The demonstrations that took place in various cities and towns across Cuba on July 11, 2021, brought many of these domestic issues and challenges bubbling to the fore. They also suggested a need for ways to incorporate wider and more diverse public participation in the civic affairs of the country, concrete and more sustained attention to marginalized communities and sectors of Cuban society, and greater freedom and independence of creative expression, as Cuba continues to evolve.

But the reaction to July 11 also laid bare other facets of the Cuban reality.

The well-organized social-media machinery of the Cuban expatriate world, especially in Miami, Florida, attempted immediately to create a narrative that expunged the effects of the U.S. trade and investment embargo on Cuban economic development and, by extrapolation, to set aside the entire U.S.-Cuba relationship. According to this sanitized version of a more complicated reality, the Cuban government alone was responsible for the troubling state of the Cuban economy. The public-relations need was presumably to counteract the position of the Cuban Government, namely that the aggressive extraterritorial reach of the U.S. embargo harmed their ability to develop the economy for the benefit of the Cuban people.

The corollary message of the expatriate Cuban activist community was that people must “pick a side.” History provides precious few examples of durable success when sides have been picked—the French Revolution produced the Jacobin Terror, the Russian Civil War ended in the Bolshevik dictatorship, the Spanish Civil War yielded Francisco Franco’s Fascist Spain.

But how to pick a side when multiple facts are simultaneously true? The Cuban Government, like all governments, is responsible for its actions. At the same time, the deleterious impact of the U.S. embargo is an inconvenient truth that cannot be airbrushed away.

When the Biden Administration asserts that it stands in support of the Cuban demonstrators, what does such support mean? By the example of history, it actually means rhetorical exhortation to regime change, which continues to be the fundamental policy of the United States. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Professor of History and Director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a preeminent expert on the U.S.-Cuba relationship, has summarized what American “support” means: “To stand with the Cuban people has meant armed intervention, military occupation, regime change, and political meddling—all normal events in US-Cuba relations in the sixty years before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. In the sixty years after the revolution, standing with the Cuban people has meant diplomatic isolation, armed invasion, covert operations, and economic sanctions.”

The danger is that some Cubans might misinterpret the intention of the United States. Any kind of nation-building is out of favour in the United States. A collapse scenario is actually contrary to U.S. national security interests. But nonetheless American incursions into Cuban political space, including, for example, a pipe dream of triggering a Cuban-style Arab Spring uprising through external support of internet access, make internal dialogue among parties within Cuba even more challenging by effectively tainting any possible process. Cubans who are on social media are more likely to do the same things as everyone else in the world, stay in touch with friends, exchange jokes and memes and watch videos, as they are to organize regime change.

The Cuban trova singer, Carlos Manuel Puebla, once wrote Los caminos de mi Cuba, nunca van a donde deben (“The roads of my Cuba never lead where they should”). In this context, as parties to the current version of the Cuban memory wars, both foreign and Cuban, fail to understand Cuban history, they may well find that the next generation of Cuban activists on the Island are again Cuban nationalists. And the cycle repeats itself.

The way forward in Cuba requires dialogue and accommodation.