Predictions of imminent collapse have been the staple of North American conventional wisdom on Cuba for the last 50 years. The Cuban Revolution was not expected to survive the loss of the U.S. sugar quota in the early 1960s, or the embargo during the 1970s, or the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, or the punitive Torricelli (1992) and Helms-Burton (1996) laws that followed. And surely the Cubans would not survive the passing of Fidel Castro.
For almost half a century, much of the U.S. discourse on Cuba has focused more on predicting the Cuban future (“what will happen after Fidel?”) than understanding the Cuban past. Because of this tendency, many in the United States have failed to appreciate the power of the Cuban past to shape the Cuban present, from which the Cuban future will emerge. The more useful task, then, is to examine the sources of the Cuban Revolution’s tenacity and to make some sense of its past—not as a way to predict outcomes but rather to contemplate possibilities.
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The Castro government emerged from an enormously popular revolutionary movement, one in which its claim to legitimate power was initially never in doubt. Since then, many factors have contributed to keeping in power both the Cuban leadership and the government over which it presides. Certainly the oft-cited resort to political repression is not without some basis in fact. The system has indeed relied on an extensive and efficient domestic intelligence apparatus, acted on authoritarian reflexes, and has been neither slow nor unwilling to apply repressive measures to maintain internal consensus.
But repression alone is far too facile an explanation for the endurance of a government that has persisted under extraordinary circumstances, during years of withering economic adversity compounded by five decades of U.S. sabotage, subversion, and sanctions. Rather, the Cuban leadership’s capacity to survive is much better explained by its relation to the larger logic of patria (loosely translatable as “fatherland”), understood as a place-bound source of self-identification. In 1959, the proposition of nation and the purpose of revolution were fused such that the value of nationality was invested in the virtue of territorial sovereignty.
The antecedents of the Cuban Revolution reach deeply into the 19th century, precisely when men and women across the island were developing the very consciousness of being “Cuban.” No other ideals so profoundly shaped the formation of Cuban national sensibility as those of sovereignty and self-determination, as Cubans launched anti-colonial insurgencies in 1868, 1879, and 1898. The proposition of being Cuban took form as a consciousness of self derived from a sense of place, as a deepening recognition of the need to relocate power within Cuba and reorder the purpose of power on behalf of things Cuban. But mostly it stood as an affirmation of the prerogative of being Cuban in Cuba. To the degree that Cubans invested selfhood into nationhood, one could not be imagined without the other.
This 19th-century construct of nationality also implied the promise of inclusion and prospects for betterment. It offered the possibility of becoming and being someone, to be party to, part of, and participant in a polity, one for all Cubans, of course, but especially for the dispossessed and displaced: an entirely plausible formulation, because it implied status and dignity, suggesting a far more inclusive definition of nationhood than had ever been previously imagined in Cuba. In a society where status was often the prerogative of property, nationality offered access to self-respect and pride, available to all, openly and equally. The transcendental ideal of patria was all-encompassing and accessible, more relevant to more people, something to surrender to and subordinate all competing identities.
For the vast numbers of men and women implicated in the premise of being Cuban, the realization of nationality could not be imagined under any circumstance other than national sovereignty and self-determination: a people apart in possession of a place of their own. The plausibility of “Cuban” as a transcendental category of identity relied on possession of place, unmediated and unencumbered, a condition vital to sustaining the logic of a separate nationality. The premise of what made Cubans Cuban was invested in the promise of patria, which gave the proposition of nationality both reason and rationale. Central to this construct was the defense of patria—at all costs—without which nothing remained and for which, therefore, no sacrifice was too great, no struggle too long.
The power of Cuba Libre’s appeal was contained in the promise of agency and the possibility of voice, of Cubans as protagonists in their own history, creating their own nation. To be Cuban implied devotion to patria, dedication to duty, disposition to struggle, and always a commitment to sacrifice. This was the faith with which Cubans passed into the realm of a separate nationality and aspired to sovereign nationhood, sustained by the conviction of faith as a means of redemption, as suggested in the lyric of the national anthem: “To die for the patria is to live.”
The pursuit of patria was sustained through the appeal to sacrifice as the ethical imperative of being Cuban. Sacrifice of self was conflated with salvation of nation. The most powerful means of socialization into nationality were transacted within the paradigm of sacrifice, as standard of duty in which all Cubans were implicated by virtue of nationality. José Martí repeatedly invoked sacrifice as the central thematic element in the formulation of duty as the condition of being Cuban. Patria demanded sacrifice, he insisted. For Martí nationality represented “a brotherhood of sacrifice”; he emphasized “the necessity of sacrifice” and the need “to rise, with nobility, at the time of sacrifice and die without fear as an offering to the patria.”1
These were the ideals that repeatedly propelled Cubans to arms all through the 19th century. But the United States appropriated the victory in 1898, intervening in the anti-colonial conflict and calling it the “Spanish-American War,” and thereupon proceeded to eviscerate all but the most cynical definition of national sovereignty. A sense of unfinished purpose settled over the republic, registered variously as disappointment and disillusionment, but mostly as an enduring discontent. The failure to realize the goals that had served to mobilize three generations of men and women to dramatic action and heroic sacrifice in the 19th century created a yawning moral void in the civic realms of the republic.
What remained pending, then, and what persisted into the early decades of the 20th century, were unfulfilled hopes to make good on. The aspirations of the 19th century survived as ideals that retained the power to summon Cuban mobilization in the 20th. This too was the legacy of patria, understood as an unfinished project to whose fulfillment later generations were committed as the duty of being Cuban, and which later developed into the principal source of oppositional discourse in the republic.
The 19th-century liberation project, deeply inscribed in the dominant configurations of nationality, was represented in multiple forms, including legend and lore. It was preserved in popular memory and passed on as learned history, as well as song, story, and verse. But most of all it was honored as a legacy to live up to and make good on. The experience forged the virtues around which attributes of nationality were assembled—as ideals, to be sure, but ideals so central to the terms of self-representation as to make them the standard by which Cubanness was measured.
To be Cuban implied an obligation to remember, endlessly, what had made the nation possible and what would be necessary for it to endure. The moral of the past was fashioned as historical knowledge, learned at home and taught at school. Domains of selfhood and nationhood closed in upon one another, acting upon each other—that is, nationality as something to surrender to as a frame of reference and source of self-esteem. These were not sentiments invented by the revolution of Fidel Castro; they formed part of the larger political culture inherited by Cuban leaders after 1959 and in which they themselves had been formed.
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Whatever else the Cuban Revolution addressed after 1959, whatever else the revolution sought to remedy, at the core of its purpose and claim to historical authenticity was the logic of patria. The Cuban leadership subsumed into the project of revolution a historic mission: redeeming the patria, which implied above all defending national sovereignty and self-determination, specifically from the United States. Within the logic of Cuban historical sensibilities, both as a matter of popular memory and a learned past, confrontation with the United States was perhaps not only inevitable, but necessary—possibly even desirable. “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” exulted the headlines of the newspaper Revolución in January 1961, when the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, whereupon the Cubans proclaimed themselves independent.
The Cuba–U.S. confrontation released powerful nationalist sentiments and revived long-standing historical grievances, which in turn contributed to a unanimity of national purpose perhaps unattainable by any other means. It drew upon vast support across the island that, certainly initially, cut across racial categories and transcended class and generational lines in both the cities and the countryside. All through the decades that followed, confrontation with the United States served as a powerful means of political mobilization and an inexhaustible source of moral subsidy, a drama in which the United States—perhaps unwittingly—played a decisive supporting role. “Señores imperialistas,” taunts the well-known billboard opposite the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, “we’re not afraid of you at all!”
The U.S. response to the revolution was unambiguous. Over the course of 50 years, the United States pursued the overthrow of the Cuban government with a single-minded purposefulness, through a combination of political isolation, military intervention, covert operations, and economic sanctions. All in all a good means, the U.S. strategists convinced themselves, of effecting political change in Havana.
There was a pathology at work here, of course, one so profoundly inscribed in prevailing notions of U.S. self-righteous motive as to obscure the malevolence of U.S. intent. The Cuban people, not the government, have borne the brunt of sanctions. This is not a matter of unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions. On the contrary, from the early 1960s through the enactment of Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws in the 1990s, sanctions were designed with malice of forethought, to make daily life in Cuba as difficult and desperate as possible, to inflict hardship and increase suffering, to deepen popular discontent with the goal of inciting a people to rebellion. The purpose of sanctions has been to politicize hunger and to foment popular disaffection in the hope that, driven by want and motivated by despair Cubans, would rise up against their government.
As early as 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered economic sanctions, convinced that “if [the Cuban people] are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”2 The only way of alienating internal support for the Cuban government, insisted Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory in the same year, was “through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” He added: “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba” as a means “to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government.”3
The U.S. intent to provoke rebellion was transparent and readily understood by the Cuban leadership. Sanctions did indeed contribute to raising the level of political disaffection. Many Cubans lifted their voices in protest, asking for change and demanding reform. But it was also true that expressions of dissent were greeted harshly by authorities in Havana, ill-disposed to tolerate political opposition in the context of deepening economic crisis and increasing U.S. pressure. Cuban authorities were alive to the U.S. purpose and responded accordingly. Authorities moved swiftly and severely to contain political dissent. Imprisonment, house arrests, and harassment have been only some of the most common responses to the first signs of open political dissent.
Defending the nation became indistinguishable from defending the revolution and accelerated the centralization of power and facilitated the curtailment of civil liberties—all in the name of defending the patria. National security developed into an obsession in Cuba. Opposition was portrayed as tantamount to treason. Dissent was perceived as both pernicious and perilous to the nation’s survival. The U.S. call for oppositional space within Cuba, in the form of an opposition party, for example, or for an opposition press, could not but arouse suspicion and raise the specter of subversion. That the United States extended moral support and material assistance to dissidents served further to cast a pall over government critics’ credibility.
Fifty years of sanctions have had far-reaching consequences, and that they were not the consequences intended does not make them any less noteworthy. In fact, they contributed to the very developments they were purportedly meant to undermine. In varying degrees, the U.S. government did in fact achieve its purpose: Conditions in Cuba worsened. Scarcities increased. Hard times worsened. Cubans faced mounting shortages, increased rationing, and deteriorating services, circumstances in which the needs of everyday life in their most ordinary and commonplace forms were met often only by Herculean efforts.
Such conditions of dire need and urgent want were hardly the most auspicious circumstances for Cubans to contemplate a “transition to democracy.” It became all but impossible to go about normally in one’s daily life. So much time and energy were expended in what otherwise and elsewhere were routine household errands and ordinary family chores; days were frequently filled with unrelieved hardship and adversity in the pursuit of even the most minimum needs of everyday life, day after day: hours on lines at the local grocery store, hours waiting for public transportation, hours without electricity.
A people utterly prostrate, preoccupied with matters of survival as the overriding reality of daily life, were not readily disposed to think about elections. Nothing perhaps could have more effectively arrested and reversed a “transition to democracy” than the grim and relentless urgency with which Cubans faced daily life. As recently as March and April 2008, according to a survey by the International Republican Institute, more than half of Cubans interviewed considered economic needs to be their principal concern. Less than 10% identified political freedom as the main problem confronting the island.4 As one Cuban colleague recently told this author: “Necessities first, then democracy.”
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The United States challenged the Cubans on the grounds that the Cuban leadership was best prepared to defend: the ideal of patria, as a matter of national sovereignty and self-determination, the defense of which the Cuban leadership claimed a historic mandate to uphold. Within the context of Cuban historic sensibilities, U.S. policy has not only contributed to Cuban intransigence but, more importantly, has lent credibility to that intransigence. Rather than weakening Cuban resolve, sanctions have strengthened Cuban determination. U.S. policy has served to bring out some of the most intransigent tendencies of Cuban leaders in the defense of some of the most exalted notions of Cuban nationality.
The duty of sacrifice to redeem the patria was a historical legacy to be assumed and discharged by successive generations of Cubans. As conditions deteriorated during the dark days of the Special Period, the extended time of economic crisis following the Soviet collapse, Cuban efforts to raise flagging morale appealed explicitly to patria. “Everything for the patria,” proclaimed billboards across the island, and another: “Above all, we have patria.” In Havana and in provincial towns and cities, on streets and highways, in schools and at workplaces, and in all state offices, billboards and posters alluded to Cuba as an “eternal Baraguá,” metaphorically alluding to legendary insurgent leader Antonio Maceo’s refusal to surrender to Spain in 1878 and the Cuban determination to persist and prevail.
There was no more compelling repository of patriotic morale than the words and works of José Martí. During the 1990s Martí was everywhere, evoked to remind Cubans of the duty to sacrifice. The meaning of Martí’s oft-quoted passage was unambiguous: “For me, patria will never be triumph, but rather agony and duty.”5 It is unfortunate that most U.S. politicians and policy makers dealing with Cuba never read Martí.
The proposition of patria loomed large in Cuba as source of moral validation from the outset, but especially during the 1990s. It has been central to the purpose of the revolution, and indeed in no small way accounts for Cuban endurance through more than five decades of punitive sanctions. The ideal of patria resonated in Cuba, for it drew upon a vast reserve with deep historical sources. If in the end the invocation of patria had been the last and only rationale to defend the revolution, the Cuban leadership would still have retained a powerful claim on the allegiance of vast numbers of Cubans. It has been a sentiment of enormous vitality and resonance, one that could be defended without compromise, no matter what its defense may cost.
For U.S. political leaders and policy makers to array themselves against the full logic of Cuban historical sensibilities, as they did, was to confront propositions that transcended the specific claims upon which the Cuban leadership based its authority to rule. The U.S. government failed to appreciate adequately the power of the appeal to historical notions of patria as a source of moral sustenance and means of internal cohesion. The imperative of patria offered very few choices: “¡patria o muerte!”
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What does the fidelista past suggest about the post-Castro future? Cubans have become a very different people in the last 50 years of revolution. They are a people comfortable with who they are, proud of their accomplishments, mindful of their failures. Cuba struggles now to maintain what remains of its dignity, from which so much of national identity has been derived. The United States appears determined to exact the full toll for this Cuban aspiration to dignity. Cuba has been under sanctions for almost half its existence as an independent republic. What may appear to U.S. eyes as Cuban intransigence is, in part, a manifestation of Cuban refusal to submit to the United States, borne by a people still convinced that they have a right to national sovereignty and self-determination. They have engaged the United States with a powerful sense of self-esteem and succeeded—success in this instance understood as survival.
This is one vantage point from which to draw perspectives on the future, but the prospects are not unmixed. The invocation of patria as a strategy of political survival and source of national consensus for the last 50 years has not been without risks, and indeed may have far-reaching implications. The ideals of sovereignty and self-determination were contemplated not only as a means of self-fulfillment and source of self-esteem, but always with the promise of a better life as a reason to struggle and sacrifice, to make good on the premise of patria. Much had to do with the egalitarian purpose to which the 19th-century project of liberation was dedicated, the populist impulses that evoked social justice, racial equality, and economic well-being—in Martí’s words, “with all and for the good of all.”6 This was the purpose to which patria was to be dedicated.
Patria as a transcendent ideal to which all were enjoined to submit resonated with promise in the late 19th century and through the 20th. But the efficacy of patria as usable paradigm in the 21st century is not without limitations. The repeated invocation of struggle and sacrifice on behalf of patria, a call that had as its purpose the promise of redemption and upward mobility, but which 100 years later has become associated with a deepening impoverishment and devastating downward mobility, may well jeopardize an ideal that has been central to the terms of Cuban self-representation.
The Special Period had a withering effect on the moral premise of patria. What remains to be seen is the capacity of the proposition of patria to sustain collective esprit and maintain national cohesion. If the defense of patria has become associated in the popular imagination with adversity and insecurity, the very source of the imperative of the collective is placed in peril. For the premise of patria to be proven unfounded, or the promise of patria to be revealed as unrealizable, cannot but bode ill for a people whose collective sense of self has been profoundly inscribed in a historic notion of nation.
The trauma of the Special Period, experienced by many hundreds of thousands of households across the island as scarcity, want, and hunger, etched itself deeply into Cuban sensibilities. The Special Period affected more than the patterns of daily life. Changed too were the ways that Cubans took measure of their circumstances. Not perhaps since the early 1960s were existing value systems subject to as much pressure as they were during the 1990s.
Many who saw no future in Cuba emigrated, in the hope of finding the future somewhere else. Others burrowed deeper into the netherworld of the black market in search of ways to make do and carry on. Yet others who saw no future delayed marriages and deferred families of their own, hoping for the promise of a better day so as to continue with their lives. Birth rates, which often provide insight into the ways that a people experience their times, plummeted to what many anticipate will be recorded as the lowest in the 20th century. Still others who saw no future ended their lives. Suicide rates, which also convey a sense of the times, increased. Mortality data has not been published for these years, but almost everyone seems to know someone who committed suicide.
New fault lines appeared on the moral physiognomy of Cuban daily life and acted to reconfigure the normative terms by which Cubans entered the 21st century. The Special Period must be seen as a defining experience, although the direction and the distance—perhaps the depth—of the new fault lines are not yet apparent. An entire generation came of age during these years, and it remains to be seen how that experience will shape Cuba’s future. The Special Period will no doubt assume its place as one of those epochal divides, a reference point by which people make that profoundly personal distinction about their lives as “before” and “after.”
The implications of this experience for the very meaning of nationality are far from clear, and indeed may in the end be among the lasting consequences of the revolution. More than 1 million Cubans live outside the island, many of whom are the children and grandchildren of the very men and women who made the revolution. Cuba could no longer reasonably guarantee them a future commensurate with their expectations, and they departed in search of the future elsewhere. It is now commonplace to speak of the Cuban emigration in terms of a “diaspora,” of a people displaced and a nation divided. The very meaning of nationality has become conflicted and contested: ominous portents indeed.
Louis A. Pérez Jr. teaches history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of several books on Cuban history and U.S.-Cuban relations, most recently Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
1. José Martí to Ricardo Rodríguez Otero, May 16, 1886, in José Martí, Obras completas, ed. Jorge Quintana, vol. 1 (Caracas, 1964), 411; Martí, “Manifiesto de Montecristi: El Partido Revolucionario Cubano a Cuba,” March 25, 1895, in ibid., 243; Martí, “El Delegado en Nueva York,” November 1, 1892, in ibid., 342–643.
2. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Harold Macmillan, July 11, 1960, in John P. Glennon and Ronald D. Landa, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States: Cuba, 1958–1960, vol. 6 (Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Historian, Department of State, Washington, D.C., 1991), 1003.
3. Lester D. Mallory to R. Roy Rubottom Jr., April 6, 1960, in ibid., 885.
4. Marc Lacey, “In Rare Study, Cubans Put Money Worries First,” The New York Times, June 5, 2008.
5. Martí to Federico Henríquez y Carvajal, March 25, 1895, in Martí, Obras completas, 248.
6. Martí, “Con todos y para el bien de todos,” November 26, 1891, in ibid., 697–706.
