Inside Cuba

Cuba is not the only country in which life has become more S difficult in the 1990s. But it is a country in which the difficulties of daily life have given rise to an intellectual ferment that may be more anguished than in other places, challenging once-firm assumptions and suggesting solutions that question deeply held beliefs. As the space for dialogue and debate broadens with the playing out of the economic crisis, voices from within Cuba have become increasingly assertive and interesting to listen to. In this Report we offer some of those voices and some of the questions being debated—if sometimes in veiled terminology—"within the revolution.” We look through the eyes of some who are living through the ongoing crisis and trying to work their way out of it.

March/April
1999
Volume: 
32
Number: 
5

Taking Note

Fred Rosen
Last year, as the Brazilian currency, the real, came under attack from currency speculators, the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso spent over half its accumulated hard currency—some $40 million—to prop it up, prevent its wholesale devaluation and keep inflation under control.

Intro

NACLA
Cuba is not the only country in which life has become more difficult in the 1990s. But it is a country in which the difficulties of daily life have given rise to an intellectual ferment that may be more anguished than in other places, challenging once-firm assumptions and suggesting solutions that question deeply held beliefs.

Updates

Margarita López-Maya and Luis E. Lander
This past December 8, a retired lieutenant colonel named Hugo Chávez Frías, the leader of a failed military coup in 1992, capped a stunning election season by gaining the presidency of Venezuela with one of the largest pluralities in the country's history. A month earlier, in regional and congressional elections, a group of Chávez supporters bound together in a populist multiparty alliance called the Patriotic Pole (PP) gained political prominence by capturing over a third of the votes in the group's first electoral outing.

Report

Guillermo Milan
During the first three decades of the revolution, there was a gradual transformation of the Cuban population's values in favor of the revolutionary process, but transformation has come much faster than ever before in the last few years of economic and social crisis. The international shocks of the current decade have generated processes not before known in revolutionary Cuba.
Pedro Monreal
Over the course of the 1990s Cuba has dramatically changed its trade, technology and investment partners, modified its institutions of foreign trade, opened the door to foreign investment, developed international tourism at a breathtaking pace, and changed, albeit not so dramatically, the product composition of its exports. These changes represent the beginnings of the country's reinsertion into the international economy, or to be more precise, into the capitalist world system.
Dick Parker
There can be little doubt that Fidel Castro's regime has demonstrated a notable and, for many, surprising capacity for survival in the face of the economic crisis provoked by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Not only the leaders of the Cuban exile community and the hawks in the U.S. government had anticipated Castro's fall.
Jack Hammond
This past January 5, in a major speech commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the National Revolutionary Police, Fidel Castro spoke of some of the criminal consequences of Cuba's dollarized economy.
Haroldo Dilla
The first time that I heard someone argue about the importance of civil society in Cuba was in 1984, during a talk by the well-known political scientist Rafael Hernández at the then-vigorous Center for the Study of the Americas. Hernández was one of the first to raise the issue, and was thus quite isolated.
Juan Luis Martin
As in other fields of scientific production, the development of the social sciences is intimately related to the specific problems faced by a given society, and the ways different groups within that society—particularly dominant groups—respond to those problems. In Cuba, dramatic events on the international scene in the 1990s have given rise to new social, economic and political problems which have made a deep impact on the Cuban social science community.
Philip Brenner
It was a far cry from the opening even many Republican moderates had urged, but Bill Clinton's announcement in early January of some small changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba may have provided the most significant positive development in that policy since the 1970s. While the particular changes were modest, they created wedges in the embargo that had seemed iron-clad when the restrictive Helms-Burton Bill became law in 1996.

Reviews

Bernardo Ruiz
In the wake of the Clinton Administration's recent decision to reject a bipartisan commission's recommendation to lift the U.S. embargo, Peter Schwab's Cuba: Confronting the U.S. Embargo is a particularly relevant and timely text.

Interview

Steven Dudley
Steven Dudley: Many critics have said that you are being picky; that if the things Rigoberta describes did not happen to her family, they did happen to other Guatemalans. Why do you go to such painstaking effort to point out in detail the discrepancies of a book that even you contend is, at its core, true?
Jo-Marie Burt & Fred Rosen
Rigoberta Menchú, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and has been a tireless activist for indigenous and human rights, has become the subject of controversy. Last fall, anthropologist David Stoll, a professor at Middlebury College, published a book entitled Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Westview Press, 1998), in which he questions many aspects of Rigoberta's life story presented in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Verso, 1984).

Document

UN Commission for Historical Clarification
Findings of the UN Commission for Historical Clarification (Guatemala) On February 25, The UN Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) published its final report. The CEH, created by the 1996 Oslo Accords signed between the Guatemalan government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), was designed to document the nature and scope of violence and human rights violations during Guatemala's 36-year internal war.

In Brief

Immigration News Briefs
SAN FRANCISCO—On January 12, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled two to one that a case alleging civil liberties violations by the U.S. Border Patrol in highway stops can go forward as a class action. The lawsuit, filed by motorists Panchita Hodgers Durgin and Antonio Lopez, charges that Border Patrol agents have systematically engaged in the practice of stopping motorists of Latino appearance without reasonable suspicion of a crime on the highways of southern Arizona.