THE MEANING OF “CUBA”: FOUR PERSONAL REFLECTIONS
Sandinista comandante Doris Tijerino, Cuban-American scholar Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Argentine social historian Carlos Vilas and Mexican cartoonist Rius reflect upon “Cuba” in the political imagination.
By Doris Tijerino, Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Carlos Vilas and Rius
Writing in these pages on the twentieth anniversary of the coup that overthrew Chile’s Popular Unity government, historian Steven Volk argued that certain historical moments had the resonance to be transformed into symbols that transcended–and at times transfigured–our understanding of historical events. In the aftermath of the coup, Chile (the country) became “Chile” (the political symbol), embodying the hopes, dreams and fears of the moment.
For the past 36 years, “Cuba” has been such a symbol. Attached to the name “Cuba” is a powerful set of political associations that goes beyond the actual history of events on the island. It is this very symbolisin that makes the fate of the Cuban revolution such a deeply felt topic of discussion. For many on the left, “Cuba” has meant that alternatives could be found to U.S. dominance in the Americas; that it was possible to stand tip to the arrogance of corrupt and brutal elites; that a country no longer had to bear the indignities visited upon the Third World by international capital; that independent social development was possible in Latin America. Fidelistas arose throughout the hemisphere to fight for “another Cuba” while the U.S. government supported the region’s most brutal and reactionary regimes to prevent one. After the first heady years of the revolution, however, the meaning of “Cuba” became more complicated. For many, it continued to mean Latin American sovereignty, human dignity, and social rights. For others, even if they held on to the first set of associations, “Cuba” came also to mean one-man rule, revolutionary arrogance, and the restriction of civil rights.
Recognizing the particular resonance of “Cuba ” to those on the Latin American left, NACLA asked afiew Latin American activists and intellectuals outside Cuba to write brief essays about the meaning that “Cuba” has had for themselves, for the particular movements or groups with which they have been affiliated, or for the left in general. We. did not ask for analyses or statements on Cuba itself, or declarations of solidarity; rather, we sought reflective personal essays on “Cuba ” in the political imagination of citizens/activists from a variety of leftist political perspectives. Below, we publish some of those personal reflections.
Doris Tijerino
Nicaraguan congresswoman; former national police chief; Sandinista comandante.
When the Cuban revolution triumphed in 1959, the Nicaraguan movement was looking for new political forms with which to confront the Somoza dictatorship–strategies different from those the traditional parties had been presenting to us. Up to that point, neither the armed nor the political struggle had made much headway against the dictatorship. The Cuban revolution triumphed just as the “El Chaparral” movement in Nicaragua was exterminated–annihilated–in a terrible way. Following this defeat, both the dictatorship and the traditional left announced that no revolutionary struggle could ever triumph in Nicaragua. Somoza, who had all the advantages of power and authority, including an army and U.S. support, seemed invincible. The air was heavy with uncertainty and loss of hope.
For thousands of Nicaraguans, especially the young, the Cuban revolution brought a resurgence of hope. It told us that a revolution could triumph in an underdeveloped country–that it was possible to defeat an enemy who had greater military strength. We learned that revolution was not simply the armed overthrow of a tyrant, but the substitution of one form of government for another. This required that we build a political organization–a non-Marxist organization of the left. This was a defining moment for Nicaraguan youth, which allowed us finally to break with the traditional parties.
A new movement called “Patriotic Nicaraguan Youth” was founded. It was one of the most broadly based movements to arise during the long dictatorship. It was organized and directed by young people and had absolutely nothing to do with the traditional parties. The organization was inspired by the Cuban revolution. Unfortunately, it had a very short life. Like all the movements that had the potential to threaten and destabilize Somoza’s regime, the Patriotic Nicaraguan Youth was immediately persecuted and suppressed. But from that experience, we learned to link the armed struggle, which was mainly occurring in the mountains, with the political and sectoral struggles of the cities. This was a transcendent moment for me personally, and greatly influenced all the decision-making that came later.
Because of its alliance with the dictatorship, the United States was able to use Nicaragua as a base to oppose revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. This led to the deepening, among Nicaraguan revolutionaries, of a spirit of solidarity and an internationalist sentiment. Our profound sympathies and emotional commitments to other revolutionary movements gradually became transformed into an ideological commitment to an internationalist struggle. We saw in the defense of the Cuban revolution, for example, the defense of our own revolution. To defend Cuba from the attacks that were typically launched from our own soil was to defend the sovereignty of Nicaragua.
Later, Cuba became a school that bad more to do with revolutionary practice. We learned from Cuba because the revolution had an incredible capacity to correct its own mistakes. Its capacity of self-criticism remains a dynamic and vibrant element. Cuba always spoke with us–and with all Latin American revolutionary movements–with sincerity and openness, showing us its successes as well as its mistakes. We knew that while we shared a conception of revolution and of socialism, no revolution could be a carbon copy of another. The Cubans were always immensely respectful of the nature of the Sandinista revolution, and of the political decisions we made. And the support we received in the areas of health and education was immense. When many Nicaraguan professionals left the country, they were replaced by Cubans who worked in very difficult conditions. Cuba sent us thousands of doctors and thousands of schoolteachers. There is no way to repay that debt.
Marifeli Pérez-Stable
Cuban-American scholar, vice president of the Cuban Committee for Democracy, author of The Cuban Revolution.
On January 1, 1959, I was living in a comfortable Havana suburb. Although not yet ten years old, I was moved by the promise of the bearded rebeldes and the singular euphoria of their victory. But for my family, as for thousands of others, the revolution soon lost its glow. We arrived in the United States in 1960, certain that our stay would be temporary.
As an adolescent in Pittsburgh in the early 1960s, I longed for the Cuba I had known. Though I didn’t yet see it that way, the revolution had turned Cuba into a flag of dignity that millions of people around the world upheld. Later, the civil rights and antiwar movements awakened in me a commitment to social justice that led me back to Cuba and the revolution–quite naturally and with joy, but also painfully and with skepticism. Since 1975, I have visited the island many times. Cuba is once again a part of me.
During the 1970s and 1980s, I participated in a movement of progressive Cuban Americans who supported the revolution, opposed the U.S. embargo, and attempted to ease the estrangement between Cubans on the island and in the United States. I looked forward to the day when relations between the Cuban and U.S. governments, and between Cubans abroad and on the island could properly be characterized as sane and respectful.
I still do. But the prospective terms of that rapprochement are now quite different from those I had earlier anticipated. The Cuban revolution is no more. Even before the world upon which it depended vanished with the end of he Cold War, the absence of political democracy and the inefficiency of central planning were slowly grinding away at its insides. A democratically elected government and a capitalist economy of some sort will almost certainly provide the context for full reconciliation with the United States.
Today I belong to the Cuban Committee for Democracy, an organization of moderate Cuban Americans who advocate negotiations between the U.S. and Cuban governments to end the embargo and bring about a peaceful transition to democracy. A democratic Cuba demands that we Cubans, wherever we live, overcome old stereotypes and start imagining a different way of being as a nation–neither the old prerevolutionary Cuba, nor the one that is barely surviving today.
Mostly, I hope for normality. Cuba has been a highly charged symbol for too long. For those of us who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, “Cuba” was the good cause won. The revolution challenged our minds, engaged our imaginations, aroused our passions. But that Cuba and the world that supported it are gone, and we have no right to expect the Cuban people to bear the burden of our illusions.
In the end, being a symbol has been costly for ordinary Cubans. They deserve the opportunity to find a new compass. When political democracy gives them that opportunity, they are likely to reject–at least in part–the historical imperatives that motivated the revolutionaries 36 years ago. That’s normal. It would also be normal for them to return to these imperatives, albeit articulated differently, at some other moment down the road.
Along the way I have learned a few things. Never again will I support a political project that does not uphold civil liberties. There is no greater good than the individual rights of citizens, including, of course, their social and economic welfare. But there is no democracy without the fight of the opposition to challenge the government, express its views freely, and act upon them without fear. Similarly, however powerful national identity may be, citizens have multiple identities such as race, gender, region, religion and class. Since 1959, la patria has precluded the expression of such diversity, and a democratic Cuba must not do the same. Cuba para los cubanos–the nationalist cry that moved the revolutionaries of 1959–today rings with a new ironic resonance as the government accords preferential treatment to tourists and foreign capital. Old moles do resurface.
Carlos Vilas
Argentine scholar and interpreter of the Central Amencan revotutions, winner of Cuba’s Casa de las Americas prize for The Sandinista Revolution.
When I was a politically conscious teenager living in Mar del Plata, Argentina in the late 1950s, I heard one morning of an Argentine who was making a revolution in a place that existed only in my distant and probably caricatured imagination. Ever since that internationalist revolutionary–called “Che” because of his nationality–entered my imagination, Cuba has meant a great many things to me. In truth, during these past decades, Cuba has meant a great many things even to people uninterested in politics. The island and its 1959 revolution quickly became a symbol and also an anathema, an example and also an epithet for much of what was happening in Latin America, and for what the United States was doing there.
Thirty-six years is hardly anything from a macrohistorical perspective, but in the life of a human being, it is enormous. Cuba has entered my life in many ways, through deep personal friendships, familial solidarity, even critical support and stimulation of my work. I could review that personal history, though it seems to me more interesting, and with less risk of slipping into nostalgia, to try to place these 36 years in that macrohistorical framework.
From this perspective, Cuba is a testament to courage and dignity–rare fruits in the garden of contemporary politics. “Cuba” has come to mean the courage to establish socialism under the nose of the United States at the high point of the Cold War; the courage, despite its close dependency, to define a foreign policy independent of the Soviet Union; the courage to project an effective solidarity with movements, parties and govemments throughout the world committed to national independence and social progress–even if not necessarily to socialism. “Cuba” is the commitment to effectively raise the quality of life of its people, and the commitment to develop a scientific and technical structure with few parallels in the Third World.
And politics aside, how can we imagine these past three-and-a-half decades in the culture, science, art and literature of Latin America and the Caribbean without Cuba? By way of its music, revolutionary Cuba participated decisively in the shaping of the Latin American identity and sensibility of the second half of the twentieth century. The existence of a social revolution in Cuba has been one of the central reference points of multiple aspects of Latin American life, regardless of the ideological predisposition we bring to Cuba.
We are living, without a doubt, in a time of scoundrels. The pages of Foreign Affairs and The New York Times Magazine demand the return of colonialism and the right of U.S. or UN military intervention against countries still emerging from centuries of colonialism, plunder and impoverishment. The UN Secretary General’s speechwriters emotionally celebrate the CIA’s contributions to Western democracy during the years of the Cold War at precisely the same time that in the U.S. Congress, the complicity of the CIA in the atrocious violations of human rights in Guatemala is revealed.
Now, Cuba represents the unknown–the challenge of a radical change of direction in the midst of an agressive U.S. posture which, far from helping this change along, tries with all its might to make things more difficult and painful. If in the past, the central–perhaps only–objective of U.S. policy toward Cuba was to ensure that the island did not build and enjoy socialism, now, with the same obsession, U.S. policy is trying to ensure that Cuba does not cease being a socialist country, or at least that in trying, it slides into chaos. The United States failed in the earlier attempt, and I hope that it fails again. Since its failure depends largely on Cuba, I am confident that it will.
Rius
Mexican political cartoonist, author of 60 comic books of political/historical commentary, including Los Supermachos, The Chicanos, andCuba for Beginners.
In January, 1959, when Fidel Castro entered Havana, the city had 18 daily papers. On all the island, despite the persistence of censorship, there were 28 dailies and around 70 magazines of all kinds. The magazine Bohemiawas among the more successful, one of its principal attractions being the articles written by Fidel Castro against the tyrant Batista. One could also find a humor magazine called Zig-Zag,which now and then published cartoons against the dictatorship, and the magazine of the Socialist (Communist) Party, HOY.There was an English-language paper, the Havana Post,and even a strange anarchist daily called EI Libertario.
By mid-1960, there were only three newspapers and two magazines circulating in Cuba, the papers HOY, EI Mundoand Revolución,and the magazines Bohemiaand a good-housekeeping type whose name I can’t remember. Along with all the radio and television stations, they had become the property of “the people,” which is to say the state.
In January, 1959, I was a 24-year-old political cartoonist, drawing left-wing cartoons for some of the principal newspapers and magazines of Mexico. Along with much of the world’s intellectual left, I was applauding and supporting revolutionary Cuba, evading and ignoring the tremendous repression that was inflicted upon the media, and failing to realize that Cuba was retracing the same Stalinist steps that destroyed socialism in the USSR. And with the danceable slogan “we are socialists, pa’lante, y pa’lanteand if you don’t like it you can go and take purgante,”the island was establishing an intolerance for anyone who didn’t think just like Fidel Castro.
Despite the disappearance of freedom of expression, one of the most essential human liberties, many of us continued to support the goals of the revolution. I contributed with three widely circulated cartoon histories, Cuba for Beginners, ABChe,and Cuba Libre.Was it wishful thinking? Was it the example of the many much-admired intellectuals who supported the revolution? Was it the hope that time would change Fidel and his combo’?
I began to see the reality of Cuba-without-liberties when I participated in the founding of an international competition called the Biennial of Graphic Humor in 1979. Held in San Antonio de los Baños, a small tobacco town near Havana, this event welcomed hundreds of cartoonists from all over the world. The Communist Party exercised prior censorship over all the work that was submitted. Work that did not meet with the approval of the Party was withdrawn from competition without the knowledge of the international jury–myself included. There is no other international competition in which this type of censorship prevails. When I found out and publically protested, I was given the same answer that justified the closing of the newspapers, “we can’t permit an attack on the revolution in our own media.”
This ban on criticism in any media is supported by Fidel’s famous mandate to Cuban intellectuals: “Inside the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.” With that mandate, everything is justified: the closing of magazines, the expulsion of foreign journalists, the exile of Cuban journalists (including the best cartoonists), and the disappearance of real journalism in Cuba. No one can say, no matter how fidelista he or she may feel, that you can express yourself freely in Cuba. For a critical cartoonist like me, that is intolerable.
