Few events in Latin American and Caribbean history have proven as earth-shattering as when the ragtag rebel forces rode triumphantly into Havana on New Year’s Day 1959. The Cuban Revolution galvanized the hopes of popular forces throughout the hemisphere as much as it rattled the arrogance of despotic regimes.
The seeming audacity of the Revolution in toppling a dictatorship built on an edifice of elite and foreign control made it the abject obsession of U.S. interventionism. As Cuba began turning to the left, and allied itself with the Soviet Union, Washington scrambled to definitively stamp out the Communist threat in its own backyard. For the remainder of the Cold War, whether through Cuba’s support of revolutionary movements or as the operative lens of U.S. foreign policy in the hemisphere, Cuba played a determinant role in the unfolding history of inter-American affairs.
With the end of the Cold War and Cuba’s growing recovery from the “Special Period”—when the country reeled from the sudden collapse of Soviet economic support—the island now faces an entirely different geopolitical reality. The left-turning tide in Latin America, particularly in Venezuela, has been a welcome development in Havana and, in some ways, a lifeline. To the north, however, the ultra-right-wing administration of President George W. Bush, with a harsher stance on Cuba than previous administrations, has intensified efforts to destabilize and isolate the island.
This Report situates Cuba within this new political geography. And since the country’s ability to navigate these turbulent geopolitical waters depends on internal as much as international factors, we also examine one of the key debates happening inside Cuba. With this dual approach, the collection of articles in this issue seeks to elucidate some emerging trends that will determine the future of Cuba’s socioeconomic development and its long-standing challenge to U.S. hegemony.
From the beginning, the U.S. government worried about the Revolution’s regional ramifications. A State Department memo from September 1959 noted, “There are indications that if the Cuban Revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.” The CIA and the State Department immediately agreed to support “elements in Cuba opposed to the Castro Government.”
As Philip Brenner and Marguerite Jimenez note in this Report’s lead article, the current U.S. administration has in many ways reverted to Cold War strategies against Cuba. The authors weigh whether this pronounced reinvigoration of hostilities is a last-ditch effort of failed policy or indicative of greater confrontations to come.
Despite U.S. efforts to isolate the island, the revolutionary government has proven adept at cultivating a multidimensional foreign policy that enables it “to recalibrate the overwhelming asymmetry of power between Cuba and the United States,” writes Luis Suárez Salazar in his contribution. But unlike previous decades, Cuba now has a formidable and wealthy regional ally—Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Suárez details Cuba and Venezuela’s budding relationship through the nascent Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) and sees the ALBA as a logical evolution of the Revolution’s foreign policy.
Economist Pedro Monreal also examines the country’s bourgeoning economic relationship with Venezuela, naming it “the Bolivarian Matrix.” He posits that besides giving greater strength to the island’s growing economic recovery—by providing an external market for export services in health care for instance—the Bolivarian Matrix offers Cuba a “vehicle for a ‘pro-development’ pattern of international insertion.” To take advantage of this moment, argues Monreal, Cuba must make use of its vast reservoir of human capital and reverse “the structural incapacities” that prevent the economy from providing for its internal market, while at the same time expanding more valuable exports.
The last two articles in this Report, by Jorge Luis Acanda González and Haroldo Dilla Alfonso, make timely contributions to a topic of ongoing debate within Cuba that will likely play a dominant role in determining the future of the Revolution—that of “civil society.” State-society relations in Cuba defy neat classifications, but it seems that this is exactly where the Revolution is most in flux.
The articles in this Report do not collectively portend a predetermined outcome of the changes sweeping Cuba’s domestic and international relations, but serve as crucial engagements with what, in Dilla’s words, remains our ultimate concern—”the extent to which socialist values and goals can survive as genuine alternatives.”
