The Cuban revolution after 50 years
by Brian Pollitt
When Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, there was widespread elation throughout Latin America. An unpopular military dictatorship had been overthrown; the young revolutionaries seizing power were obviously supported by the vast majority of the Cuban populace; and the general programme outlined by Castro – urban income redistribution, land reform and national control of the country’s major economic assets – reflected reformist nationalist sentiments throughout the continent.
From its first days its example was thus a potent threat both to Latin America’s ruling elites and to the US political and economic interests to which they were subservient.
The ideology of the Revolution in 1959 was not clearly defined and was popularly known as “Fidelismo”. (In much the same way, in later years, Nicaraguan radical thought became “Sandinismo” and Chavez’ Venezuela became a “Bolivarian” revolution.).
But from its earliest days, and certainly with the first suggestions that “Fidelismo” might adversely affect US interests in oil, telecommunications and the sugar economy, Washington sought to brand Castro as a “Communist” who had “betrayed” his Revolution. This was designed not just to foment dissent within Cuba but, more importantly, to isolate Cuba within the Western Hemisphere by asserting that the guiding political and economic philosophies of the Cuban Revolution, far from being rooted in Latin American nationalist thought, were entirely alien to it.
Cuba did not represent any Latin American interest but was, according to Eisenhower’s Administration, a mere puppet in Moscow’s Cold War with “the West”.
The interaction between Cuba’s agenda of domestic economic reforms – notably an agrarian reform which asserted State control over the bulk of the nation’s sugar factories and cane-lands – and Washington’s punitive response, expressed in economic sanctions and threats of military intervention, made US policy and propaganda a self-fulfilling prediction.
By 1961, in the Western Hemisphere, only Mexico and Canada had resisted US pressure and maintained their diplomatic relations with the island. And with shrinking prospects of securing necessary credits, investments, raw materials and consumer goods, Cuba perforce developed closer political and trading ties with the Soviet block. These were formally consolidated in April 1961 with the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion and Castro’s declaration that Cuba’s Revolution was now “socialist” and geopolitical polarization became complete with the Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Cuba’s policies within the Soviet block were generally unorthodox, not least because her national Communist Party had played no prominent role in the making of the Revolution. By 1965, she had duplicated the formal institutional structures of Soviet-style States, with a Party General Secretary, Political Committee, Central Committee, etc. but the key posts were all held by members of Castro’s inner circle from the Sierra and the 26th July movement.
After unsuccessful endeavours to industrialize – thwarted by limited national material resources (most notably oil) and by an increasingly comprehensive US economic embargo – Cuba settled for a strategy of increasing her export capacity by expanding her newly profitable sugar trade with the USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe.
Education and public health provision were also prioritized. More controversially from the standpoint of the USSR and other Latin American Communist Parties, Cuba’s international policy sought to foment revolution throughout Latin America drawing on experiences of rural guerrilla warfare that had proved successful in the making of the Cuban revolution. This conflicted with orthodox CP strategies which emphasized the leading role to be played by the urban proletariat, not the peasantry, in the making of socialist revolutions, with the general strike – not the guerrilla ambush – as the key social instrument of popular insurrection.
In this arena, Cuba’s efforts did not prosper, culminating in the disaster of Guevara’s campaign and death in Bolivia in 1967. That failure was then compounded by a costly domestic defeat when an over-ambitious plan to produce 10 million tonnes of sugar in 1970 fell well short of its target. In the early 1970s, both foreign and domestic policies were thus revised.
Domestically, and stimulated by more formal ties to COMECON and by generous additional Soviet subsidies offered for Cuba’s sugar, economic plans were more modest and placed less emphasis on “moral incentives” and unpaid voluntary labour and more on the linkages between material rewards and worker productivity. And internationally, from a small island, Cuba became what a US academic termed a “small country but a big power”.
Throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s, the Cuban armed forces had been equipped with most of the modern weaponry utilized by East European countries confronting NATO as members of the Warsaw Pact. The calculation was not that this would enable Cuba to defeat a direct US invasion but could deter it by its capacity to inflict unacceptable losses upon US forces.
Meanwhile, a continent away, South Africa’s “Defence Forces” outgunned all the so-called African “frontline States”, operating freely along the borders of Mozambique and up through occupied Namibia to threaten Angola.
As the war against Portuguese colonialism ended with the victory of the MPLA in Angola, South Africa confidently dispatched tanks, aircraft, artillery and elite infantry to join the MPLA’s pro-Western rivals and crush it.
In an audacious tour de force, quite unforeseen by either South Africa or its US ally, Cuba rapidly dispatched first the shock troops of the Ministry of the Interior, rapidly followed by the maritime delivery of heavy armour, artillery, infantry and MIG 21s and 23s.
When finally assembled in organized conventional formations, South Africa – hitherto militarily dominant throughout southern Africa – found itself outgunned and, eventually, in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, outfought by combined Cuban and MPLA forces. Abandoning the field in Angola, the South African armed forces also withdrew from Namibia, accelerating firstly Namibian independence and then the crumbling of South Africa’s apartheid regime.
When Fidel Castro attended Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as President of South Africa, his appearance prompted applause that startled many overseas observers unaware of the wider impact of Cuba’s armed intervention in Angola. It was ironic to contrast Cuba’s failure to promote successful guerrilla struggles in Latin America with the decisive impact of its deployment of a modern conventional armed force in Africa.
Cuba’s emergence as a power with a significant and unexpected international reach coincided in 1979 with revolution in Grenada and the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Ronald Reagan, inaugurated as US President in 1980, announced his determination to “roll back communism” and embarked on a vigorous programme of rearmament and of military intervention in Central America and the Caribbean. The Soviets initially sought to match US military spending but her ailing and increasingly inefficient economy bankrupted itself in the process.
Between 1989 and 1991 the Soviet block in Eastern Europe disintegrated and the USSR itself imploded.
It seemed inconceivable that Cuba’s Revolution could survive the loss of its most important trading partner and source of credits, investment, raw materials and finished goods. The US Administration certainly didn’t think it could and made the terms of its economic embargo yet more stringent in its final push to topple a regime that – while no remotely plausible threat to US “national security” - had survived the sustained hostility of no less than nine US Presidents.
In the early 1990s, Cuba’s import capability, investment, export earnings and popular living standards all collapsed, while open and disguised unemployment dramatically increased.
In such conditions – euphemistically described by Castro as a “Special Period” – the Revolution had but one major priority: survival. But it was a survival that was to maintain “the gains of the Revolution”. These in turn were defined as the maintenance of Cuba’s national independence and of her principal social gains in the fields of education and public health. Government income and expenditures were both slashed, but while the budgets for defence and public order were drastically reduced, those for education and public health were substantially maintained.
Observing such priorities contributed greatly to the maintenance of the bulk of the regime’s popular support. That support was also reinforced by nationalist sentiments exacerbated by a sustained hostility from Washington that seemed to be no more than the sterile pursuit of a historical vendetta.
Economic survival in Cuba’s new conditions demanded important changes in Cuban State policy.
The tourist industry – hitherto discouraged because of the social ills traditionally associated with that sector – was now stimulated with joint-ventures with (mainly) Spanish capital. Canadian and South African investment was secured to modernize and expand mining and extractive industries. Independent overseas oil companies engaged with Cuba in off-shore oil exploration.
China became an increasingly important source of imports and credits. By the year 2000 there was a significant overall process of economic recovery with the emergence of new or growing sectors to offset the decline in Cuba’s traditionally dominant source of export earnings: sugar. The year 2000 also witnessed important transformations in Latin American politics with the emergence of several progressive regimes willing to engage on amicable terms with Cuba. The most important of these, of course, was the Venezuelan regime of Hugo Chavez.
By 2000, Cuba’s past investments in the development of facilities for medical and educational training had provided her with a growing annual flow of trained doctors and teachers willing and able to work with deprived communities overseas.
Hugo Chavez, meanwhile, pursued social “missions” to provide free health and education facilities to Venezuela’s marginalized population in both town and countryside. Chavez could not fulfill these “missions” by relying on Venezuela’s professional medical and pedagogical classes: these were accustomed to provide their services for a generous remuneration, predominantly from the country’s urban middle class.
But Chavez commanded handsome oil revenues that he could exchange for the services of many thousands of Cuban doctors and teachers. He could thus fulfill his social “missions” while the Cuban State could earn hard currency income to offset that lost with the decline of her traditional commodity exports. Morever, Chavez could and did finance Cuba’s provision of health and educational personnel to other countries in the region such as Bolivia and Nicaragua that collectively comprised what was known as the “pink tide” of progressive regimes emerging in Latin America.
Throughout the region, Cuba hence became best known not as an exporter of armed revolution but as a provider of better health and education for the underprivileged on many countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. In such a context, the US’s pursuit of “regime change” in Cuba, employing savage (and illegal) extra-territorial economic sanctions did not leave Cuba isolated in the Western Hemisphere. The isolated power was the US itself.
On the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, one can look back on a turbulent history that has seen profound international transformations. Cuba itself has witnessed important changes in its economic and social structure and in its domestic and international strategies.
Fidel Castro himself has left the scene as regards the day-today running of political and economic events. His brother Raul presides over a government most of the Ministers of which are in their 40s or 50s. The island is open to international visitors and, since many important enterprises are joint-ventures with foreign capital, the State has a less comprehensive role in economic decision-making than it once did.
The sugar sector, which used to earn more than 70 per cent of the nation’s export earnings now earns only 10 per cent. By contrast, the service sector, which used to earn 10 per cent of export earnings now earns 70 per cent. More decentralization in economic decision-making is still required, especially in Cuban agriculture where worker productivity and total output remain stubbornly low.
But the past half-century has certainly seen Cuba earn the name by which
it was once popularly known: Cork Island. It can be battered and soaked
in stormy seas but not sunk. And to achieve that while at the same time
producing a progressively more educated and healthy population is quite
an achievement.