The world has changed considerably since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Unlike 1959, the world is now characterized by economic globalization and unipolar imperial domination, especially in Latin America. At the same time, in many locations, it is characterized by a much greater resistance on the part of civil society. Like this new world around it, a part of which once saw in Cuba the vanguard of popular power and resistance to imperialism, the Cuban Revolution has changed as well—but not entirely.
The Cuban Revolution continues to play an important role of resistance in Latin America. But despite its ability to survive U.S. aggression and the post-Soviet transition, the uneven and problematic way that Cuba has met these challenges makes the country’s future hard to predict.
The Revolution has resisted the Empire by creating new international alliances at the state level, though much less so at the popular level. It has not been able to participate with the recent wave of social movements against their shared enemies—imperialism and neoliberalism—because those movements demand tolerance of difference, freedom of speech, unrestricted access to print and electronic media, and the creation and participation in non-territorial networks. All these are internally impeded, restricted or controlled by the Cuban government.
Not only in its internal politics, but also looking outward, Cuba is unreceptive toward alternative social movements. Its participation in the popular social resistance against neoliberalism and globalization, then, cannot be other than limited, since that resistance demands participatory democracy and a strong civil society with transnational rights.
Nonetheless, the Cuban Revolution has successfully resisted U.S. domination in the post-Soviet period and has formed effective international alliances. Indeed, the most successful measure of Cuba’s ability to resist U.S. domination has been the very survival of its revolution. It has been able to overcome or avoid the economic embargo and political isolation imposed upon it by the United States since it expropriated foreign firms and declared itself socialist in the early 1960s. Soviet subsidies, of course, were fundamental in achieving this, but since the collapse of the USSR, Cuba has had to alleviate the effects of the embargo with new economic measures and new alliances.
The extent of Cuban reliance on its main trading partners during the first three decades of the Revolution cannot be overstated. Even as Soviet support of Cuba began to diminish during the perestroika period of the early 1980s, 86% of Cuban trade was with the countries of the Eastern Bloc, at preferential or subsidized prices. When the Bloc collapsed, the effect on trade was immediate and severe: the price that Cuba paid for a barrel of oil, for example, went from $14 to $40 overnight. In the first years of the Revolution, Cuba had received eight tons of oil for one ton of sugar, while in 1992 it received only one and a half tons of oil for that same ton of sugar. Added to the 70% drop in imports, Cuba lost access to the advantageous credits of Eastern Europe.
Yet the economic catastrophe that hit Cuba in the 1990s cannot be entirely blamed on external events. Cuban economic planners suffered from a lack of foresight and an inability to administer the relative bonanza of the 1970s and early 1980s when the economy was growing. During this period, the costs of Cuba’s imports, even under preferential prices, were greater than its ability to pay—just as productivity was falling and the costs of production were rising. Economic administration suffered from the burden of rising bureaucratization and corruption, and the economy was never able to move beyond its dependence on sugar. (The price of sugar, always volatile, fell from 27 cents a pound in 1980 to 4 cents a pound in 1985.) The threat to the regime thus came from within and without. The government decided to first face the internal threat.
In 1986, with the very future of socialism apparently at stake, the Cuban regime began the “rectification” of the “errors” that, it concluded, had resulted from the abandonment of revolutionary morale.1 Cuba’s rectification process was very different from perestroika, by which Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to open the Soviet economy and the entire country to the world. Instead, the Cuban regime reaffirmed the traditional principles of the Revolution and denied any need for reforms of the economy or state.
As centralized economic decision-making was being abandoned in Central and Eastern Europe, Fidel Castro returned to centralization, arguing that higher morale and increased altruism, rather than material incentives, were needed to inject new life into the Revolution. He reacted to the events in Eastern Europe by calling for renewed inflexibility against the ills of imperialism, the privatization of property and the dismantling of the Revolution. So that news of what was happening on the other side of the world did not become contagious, Soviet newspapers ceased to circulate in Cuba.
The realistic fear of U.S. intervention, especially as the USSR was disintegrating, helped make Castro’s case all the more persuasive. And indeed, with Soviet economic and military support gone, the United States began to take new measures to intensify the effect of the embargo. In 1992, for example, in an effort to put an end to Russia’s customary trade relations with Cuba, the first Bush Administration gave Russian leader Boris Yeltsin a loan that would allow him to buy sugar on the world market. The following year, Bill Clinton agreed to give economic aid to Russia on the condition that it cease selling oil to Cuba.2 An era was clearly coming to an end.
It was then that the Cuban government began the so-called “Special Period”—framed as resistance to the growing global delegation of national economic management to transnational capital. The autarchy to which this policy led was highlighted as genuine independence in the face of overbearing neoliberalism. If it was necessary to return to pre-modern strategies in order to survive, then so be it. With the shortage of gasoline, the plow replaced the tractor, and the bicycle replaced the car and the bus. During this period, the state turned as much to patriotism as it did to socialism to mobilize the population.3
Cuba also began looking outward for ways to counteract the loss of its old military and trading partners. Resistance to the United States has played a determining role in the nurturing of Cuba’s new international alliances. The Cuban government has sought to contribute to the creation of a Latin America that can collectively resist U.S. strategies—the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), for example—that subordinate the region to U.S. needs. In this context, Cuba has been well disposed to cooperating with Mercosur, the South American common market that promotes integration.
The most visible and important alliance that Fidel Castro has established in recent years has been with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, a fellow soldier who projects an image of resistance to outside aggression and who has become another thorn in the side of the United States.4 Cuba and Venezuela provide one another with mutual assistance: Venezuela helps Cuba with its oil supply, while Cuba helps Venezuela with doctors, medicines, teachers and scientists.
Both Venezuela and Cuba consider the FTAA to be contrary to Latin American interests. In its place, Chávez has been promoting a form of regional cooperation called the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas—its central tenets include food self-sufficiency and a financial aid fund for poorer countries—which Cuba also sees as a means of regional self-defense against the United States. In the 1960s, Cuban-trained Venezuelan guerrillas fought the government of then-President Rómulo Betancourt in an attempt to expand the radius of revolutionary action from its focal point on the island. Perhaps in acknowledgement of that past, Castro has pointed out that the political changes in Venezuela, brought about without the use of arms, have been “a lesson for revolutionaries that there are no dogmas or unique roads.”5
The belief that Latin American unity will help insure against the possibility of U.S. aggression against Cuba might explain why Fidel Castro defends the conciliatory policies of Brazil’s President Lula toward the international financial institutions, saying that before criticizing Lula “we should analyze the concrete conditions.”6 In a radical change compared with previous decades, when Cuba readily criticized regional governments that did not follow a sufficiently revolutionary line, the Cuban government now favors an environment of consensus in Latin America—a consensus, it must be said, that is contrary to the way it defends its own power within Cuba.
Cuba has also initiated amicable relations with China, a country with which it had maintained decades of hostility thanks to the Sino-Soviet split, during which Cuba stood firmly with the USSR.7 Cuba’s other significant opening has been toward the European Union, although the growth of diplomatic and commercial relations between Cuba and the European Union has been accompanied by Europe’s insistence on raising the thorny question of political dissent on the island.8
The Cuban Revolution prospered politically and economically when the world was divided in three. Then, Cuba gave the Soviet Union the opportunity to have a foot in the Third World and, by way of the Cuban Revolution, to demonstrate its international solidarity. This was especially important when the Soviets had to compete with China for influence among national liberation movements. Cuba, throughout that period, was the beneficiary of the interchange of mutual aid with the USSR, which permitted it to project itself internationally with material means beyond its own resources and with the revolutionary aura that it had rightly earned.
Originally, the Third World was a place of possible alternatives to the capitalist First World and the statist Second World, as well as the site of liberation struggles against imperial domination. But the fall of Eastern Europe made the previous conceptions of global organization irrelevant. Not only did the political concepts that organized the world disappear, but so did the concepts that gave coherence to projects of emancipation.9 The concept of the Third World has now lost its old significance and instead has become synonymous with backwardness, frustrated development and a lack of democracy. Global capitalism has not only buried the idea of the three worlds, but also the division between East and West; it even questions the distinction between North and South.
Nonetheless, cuba continues to play a significant role of resistance in Latin America. This is due principally to the fact that neoliberalism, far from playing an emancipatory role, has aggravated the conditions of life for vast parts of the population. In the Latin American context, Cuba’s resistance to the United States reflects, in extreme form, what is common to all the countries of the region: a desire to resist imperial power—whether military, economic or both.10 To this we can add the fact that for decades, Cuba has been the only country in Latin America that has managed to hold off the United States while other countries, bigger and with more resources, have been dominated by the Empire.
Cuba has gained legitimacy in Latin America by being able to defend itself and its right to be different. Nevertheless, Cuba’s defense of its sovereignty and its insertion among the nations of Latin America face a contradiction in the realm of counter-hegemonic movements. Its resistance to subjection and subordination in the international sphere has not found commonality with civil society’s struggles for democratic forms of citizenship and a redefined relationship between state and society.
There is now a parallel resistance to Empire in the form of the social movements associated with the World Social Forum, and despite the “brokerage” role played by Chávez, there are few important points of contact between these movements and Cuba. The Cuban government has no patience, for example, with movements like the Zapatistas.
The social hemispheric alliance, one part of which meets in the World Social Forum, is trying to create an alternative democratic model of development and to change the policies of hemispheric integration. Cuba cannot participate in this process because it would have to open itself to society’s participation in the discussion. Globalization from below presupposes heterogeneity, diversity in participation and autonomy of the movements. Counter-hegemonic globalization not only challenges the neoliberal doctrine of capitalist expansion and resurgent imperialism, but it offers alternative visions of global organization.11
The creation of and participation in local, national and global support networks (with which the Zapatistas have been so successful) are activities prohibited or restricted by the Cuban government, like access to the Internet, one of history’s most significant innovations in interpersonal communication. The Cuban government sees in technological modernization a danger to the state, while the Zapatistas utilize it to mobilize from below for international solidarity.
The Cuban government’s insistence on old-style socialism has little attraction outside of Cuba because it constrains rather than liberates social forces.12 Because the Cuban regime continues to act as a social engineer in a world of recognized human diversity, it cannot join the Zapatistas and other popular movements in speaking to the totality of the population that opposes imperial designs.
Despite these limitations, Cuba has survived through a crushing embargo, recovered after the loss of Soviet subsidies, and found new economic and ideological partners—all by exploiting the gaps in the very system that has tried to defeat it. Whether or not Cuba can one day see the new world already glimpsed by movements from below, it has successfully shown the limits of Empire’s domination.
About the Author
Daniela Spenser is based at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico City and has published widely on Soviet-Latin American relations. She organized the November 2002 Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project Conference.
Notes
1. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), p. 164.
2. Volker Skierka, Fidel Castro: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), pp. 269-270.
3. Ibid., pp. 282-287; Pérez-Stable 1999, p. 176.
4. Adolfo Gilly, “Fallujah y Mosul: ellos y nosotros,” La Jornada, November 18, 2004, p. 33; “Promete Rice una política sin concesiones contra Cuba y Irán,” La Jornada, January 19, 2005, p. 25.
5. Gerardo Arreola, “Firman Cuba y Venezuela pacto alternativo al ‘perverso’ ALCA,” La Jornada, December 15, 2004, p. 30.
6. Ibid., p. 30.
7. Llegó Hu Jintao a Cuba para concretar significativos acuerdos de inversión,” La Jornada, December 9, 2004, p. 31.
8. “Suavizar las sanciones políticas a Cuba, solicitan representantes de países de la EU,” La Jornada, December 15, 2004, p. 31.
9. Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bahl and Peter Gran, History After the Three Worlds: Post Eurocentric Historiographies (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 7-8.
10.David Slater, Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations (London: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 194-195.
11.Ibid., pp. 201-204; 216-221.
12.Tzvi Medin, “Ideología y conciencia social en la Revolución Cubana,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, Vol. 8, No. 1, Jan-Feb (1997), electronic version, p. 7.
