Abstract
The Revolutionary Offensive of the 1960s came to an abrupt close with the failure of the 1970 sugar harvest. Fidel acknowledged responsibility and offered to resign. This was, of course, refused.1 As the heroic period of the Revolution ended, the Cuban political system and Cuban society became more institutionalized and, in many ways, more resistant to innovation and debate. In adopting a state socialist model in the 1960s, the Cubans were able to make great advances in the war against poverty and in the promotion of egalitarianism, but these successes were tempered by an inability to ensure a move away from dependency and to avoid the centralization of decision-making.
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Notes
S. Eckstein, Back from the Future. Cuba under Castro (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 135.
E. Cardoso and A. Helwege, Latin America’s Economy. Diversity, Trends and Conflicts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 244.
Trade with market economies rose from 22.8 per cent of total trade in 1965 to 28.1 per cent (in 1970) and 40.1 per cent in 1975 but later shrank to 12.9 per cent in 1988. Cited by M. Azicri, Cuba Today and Tomorrow: Reinventing Socialism (Gainesville, Fla: University Press of Florida, 2000), p. 32.
This section is indebted to G Lambie, ‘Western Europe and Cuba in the 1970s: the Boom Years’ in A. Hennessy and G Lambie (eds). The Fractured Blockade. West European-Cuban Relations during the Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1993).
J. I. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe For Revolution. Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 66. Mechanization of the zafra reached 50 per cent of production in 1980 with an accompanying falling demand for labour.
C. Mesa-Lago, ‘The Economic Effects on Cuba of the Downfall of Socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe’ in C. Mesa-Lago (ed.), Cuba. After the Cold War (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), p. 133.
Pensions and social-security schemes have been privatized across Latin and Central American states to the detriment of the middle and working classes. This has contributed to an even more skewed distribution of wealth to the benefit of the domestic rich and their foreign allies. The impact of this transnationalization of capital upon one country, Chile, is discussed by S. Rosenfeld and J. L. Marré, ‘How Chile’s Rich Got Richer’, NACLA Report on the Americas, XXX: 6 (May/June 1997).
Piñeiro and his team of professional revolutionaries at Liberación remained active into the 1990s. Increasingly bypassing official channels, there was speculation that they had become involved in rogue operations and, possibly, the drugs trade. See J. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: the Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 65.
P. Gleisejes. Conflicting Missions. Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) offers an in-depth account of Cuba’s involvement in Angola. It is particularly interesting because he was permitted access to Cuban state archives which had been hitherto closed to foreign scholars.
M. C. García, Havana, USA: Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 45.
W. S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies. A Personal and Diplomatic Account of US-Cuban Relations since 1975 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 148.
C. Vance, Hard Choices (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 88.
H. M. Erisman, Cuba’s International Relations. The Anatomy of a Nationalistic Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), p. 91.
R. Dugger, Reagan: the Man and His Presidency (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 360.
This was despite the fact that Havana insisted that the Salvadorean guerrillas seized most of their arms from the enemy or bought them in the open market and that the vast majority of Cubans in Nicaragua were teachers and doctors and not military personnel. See S. B. Liss, Fidel! Castro’s Political and Social Thought (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), p. 105.
C. M. Vilas, Between Earthquakes and Volcanoes. Market State and the Revolutions in Central America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995) offers a depressing account of the aftermath of the 1987 Central American Peace Accords. They did not represent a consensual settlement given that the military establishments continue to enjoy untrammelled power; there is continued abuse of human rights, particularly within indigenous communities, and there has been no resolution of the causes of the insurgencies. These centred upon demands for political democracy, structural economic reform and social justice.
F. Castro, This is the Battle for Latin America’s Real Independence (Havana: Editoro Política, 1985), p. 11. He argued that the International Monetary Fund’s refusal to allow debtor countries to negotiate collectively instead opting for one-to-one discussions inhibited cooperative efforts to resolve the problem. An evaluation of Fidel’s views on the debt crisis can be found in P. O’Brien, ‘“The Debt Cannot Be Paid”: Castro and the Latin American Debt’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 5: 1 (1986).
The Odyssey of the Latin America left from armed struggle and Marxism to an embrace of parliamentary democracy is described in a number of texts including R. Munck, ‘Farewell to Socialism? A Comment on Recent Debates’, Latin American Perspectives, 65: 17: 2 (Spring 1990)
B. Carr and S. Ellner (eds). The Latin American Left. From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993)
G. Lievesley, Democracy in Latin America. Mobilization, Power and the Search for a New Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), ch. 3.
J. Arboleya, The Cuban Counterrevolution (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2001), p. 172.
Cuban-Americans were also involved in Operation Condor by which Pinochet sought to extend his reign of terror in Chile (1973–89) to other countries. Members of the fascist Movimiento Nacionalista Cubana (MNC, the Cuban Nationalist Movement) were implicated in the assassinations of Allende loyalist and Pinochet’s predecessor as army chief. General Carlos Pratts, and his wife Sofia in Argentina in 1974 and of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffatt in Washington in 1976. See H. O’Shaughnessy, Pinochet: the Politics of Torture (London: Latin American Bureau, 1999)
P. Verdugo, Chile, Pinochet and the Caravan of Death (Miami: University of Miami North-South Center, 2001).
These relations and their consequences for urban politics are examined in A. Portes and A. Stepnick, City on the Edge. The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). It is particularly insightful in its discussion of the class and racial divisions within the Cuban-American communities and the absence of a coherent or united view on their role in the world.
F. T. Fitzgerald, The Cuban Revolution in Crisis. From Managing Socialism to Managing Survival (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), p. 171.
G Suárez Hernández, ‘Political Leadership in Cuba: Background and Current Projections’, Latin American Perspectives, 69: 18: 2 (Spring 1991), 55. At the time of writing, she was a professor of philosophy at the Escuela Superior del Partido Comunista de Cuba ‘Nico López’ so this may be taken as an official view.
R. L. Harris, Marxism, Socialism, and Democracy in Latin America (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), p. 111.
K. Cole, Cuba from Revolution to Development (London and Washington: Pinter, 1998), p. 46.
‘In 1989, 80 per cent of cereals, 99 per cent of beans, 21 per cent of meat, 38 per cent of milk and dairy products and 94 per cent of cooking oil and lard were imported’, P. Rosset and M. Benjamin, The Greening of the Revolution (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1994), p. 19.
J. Carranza Valdés, ‘Economic Changes in Cuba: Problems and Challenges’ in J. S. Tulchin, A. Serbin and R. Hernández (eds), Cuba and the Caribbean. Regional Issues and Trends in the Post-Cold War Era (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1997), p. 201.
J. M. Blanco and M. Benjamin, Talking about Revolution (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1994), p. 29.
J. L. Domínguez, ‘The Political Impact on Cuba of the Reform and Collapse of Communist Regimes’ in C. Mesa-Lago (ed.), Cuba. After the Cold War (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), p. 106.
Opening address to the Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (10/10/91). Quoted by G. Reed, Island in the Storm (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1992), p. 33. He continued: ‘The only situation in which we would have no future would be if we lost our homeland, the revolution and socialism.’
J. Stubbs, ‘Social Equity, Agrarian Transition and Development in Cuba, 1945–90’ in C. Abel and C. M. Lewis (eds) Welfare, Poverty and Development in Latin America (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), p. 293.
L. M. Smith and A. Padula, Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 61.
W. S. Smith, ‘An Ocean of Mischief. Our Dysfunctional Cuban Embargo’, Orbis, 42: 4 (Fall 1998), 536.
The 2001 vote was 167 to 3 with Israel and the Marshall Islands voting with the US and Latvia, Micronesia and Nicaragua abstaining (CubaSi, Winter 2001–2,18).
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© 2004 Geraldine Lievesley
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Lievesley, G. (2004). The Revolution Matures. In: The Cuban Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403943972_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403943972_5
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