The Cuban Experiment - Part One

With socialism on the island of Cuba closer than ever to collapse, Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio traces the Cuban Experiment, from the Batista regime which pre-dated the revolution, to the present day. 

Transcript

Hi everyone. 

Venezuela, of course, is the story of the moment, inescapable as much because of what took place with the US action in early January, as because of what it means, internationally, potentially to everyone on the planet, in this accelerated landscape of imperialism. 

It’s also a story that is almost limitless in its reaches, in what it relates to. Here in Latin America it’s no different, and is a story that relates to sovereignty, environment, energy, history, migration, and on and on. It’s also a story which has brought the unique island of Cuba back under the spotlight, an island in crisis, battered through history but especially so since the pandemic, and which has just lost one of its last remaining international sponsors in Venezuela, specifically as regards the decades-long support afforded to the nation by Venezuelan oil, now no longer. 

There’s a lot of talk of how Cuba is on the brink of collapse, and that this may prove to be the end of the Cuban revolution, which in truth died long ago, but which stubbornly clings on to its corpse. Whichever way round you look at it though, it seems like a very good time to take a good look at what - for a long time now - I’ve regarded as the Cuban Experiment. 

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Cuba has had many difficult moments since the revolution in 1959, and even before then, because it’s worth remembering that the Cuban revolution happened for a reason, and that Cuba before this was under the authoritarian rule of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, with a regime infamous for corruption and human rights abuses. And, in fact, one of the reasons why Fidel Castro achieved such early traction among grass roots Cubans was because the country had suffered endemic poverty, and everyone knew it, and in the first few decades after the revolution, everybody remembered it. 

During the Batista years, Cubans from all sections of society came together in opposition to the regime. Cuban author and journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner, who died in 2023, wrote that at the time “the talk was about democracy, freedom and respect for human rights”, and that “the objective was to restore the rule of law that had been swept aside by Batista.”

From a political perspective, though, poverty was nothing new, and had been lived by Cuba since forever, especially outside of Havana among working-class agrarian communities. But what changed under Batista, which really angered Cubans, was the regime’s compliance with American business, because the perception was that the rich were getting richer on the back of Cuban poverty. Havana of the 50s was more like the Vegas of today, a hotspot for US tourism where gambling, drugs and prostitution flourished. 

Not that everything changed, economically, when the Castros, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos took over, and although the first US blockade happened in 1962, the truth is that US economic pressure was already in place since the moment the revolution took place, accentuating difficulties on the island, and driving the island towards international administrations which were in opposition to the United States, which of course meant the USSR. 

Domestically, though, the general sense was Cuba was engaged in a collective project for the good of the people. These days, for instance, we look at rationing as being something which reduces our choices - and bizarrely, we also equate it to a loss of freedom, as though commercial choices are a central part of being free - but at the time rationing meant that everyone had access to things which they had been entirely unable to afford before. Today - and we’ll come to this - people fleeing Cuba, numbering perhaps a quarter of the population - do so for economic reasons, but at the time, almost everyone who left and moved to the United States did so for political reasons, with the majority of the initial wave of migration between 1959 and 1962 comprising of Cuba’s economic elite. Later, as the one-party state began to clamp down on dissident voices, though, it also led to political repression and saw the beginning of the exodus of professionals. 

Nonetheless, for working class Cubans, the introduction of national health and education systems changed life altogether, boosting literacy and life expectancy, as well as land reform which gave workers a direct stake in the land they tilled. It’s also impossible to ignore the great immeasurable effect of the charisma of Fidel Castro, and his coalescing effect among the people. And it wasn’t just him, the ongoing fetishization of Che Guevara across the world tells its own story. 

The point being that, immediately after the revolution, and for years to come, Cuba absolutely believed in itself, and when people believe in themselves, especially as a collective project which remembers the hard-won nature of the victory, then they’ll take any hardship. Why do I say this? Because this is in direct opposition to where Cuba finds itself today, with no ongoing, lived memory of why a revolution took place three generations ago, with no sense of a collective project, and devastating economic hardships which cannot be resisted by a core belief system. The Cuba of early 2026 is a shell of what it was before, and the only remaining tangible foundation of the revolution and its core beliefs is the Communist Party, and its ongoing national control. But there is barely a Cuban left who believes in the project, from their heart, and does not long for an end to the chapter, for a burial of the corpse.

So, will Cuba fall? Perhaps. The end of socialism on the island has never been closer.

In this series, we’ll look at Cuba’s evolution through the revolution, and bring the story right up to the present. It feels like the right time, so that as the story develops over the next few weeks and months, as it inevitably will, we’ll have the context in the bank, and not have to go round scrabbling to properly understand everything that lies beneath. 

In the second episode, we’ll take a look at the heyday of the revolution.