The Cuban Experiment - Part Two

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

On the 1st January, 1959, dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba, and Fidel Castro’s forces entered Havana, met by a feverish, supportive population. The next ten years would be the high point of the Cuban revolution, met with challenges, but driven by a transformative power which achieved social, cultural and economic change on the island. It was nothing less than a new society, but after the sixties, it would always feel as though it was a project which was holed below the waterline, and was always - in vain - chasing a dream it would never fully attain. 

On entering Havana, Castro rapidly established a provisional government. The attempted insurrection had been ongoing for most of the fifties, and by the time they overthrew Batista - they had had plenty of time to think about it - and had a plan for government. Elections would be postponed indefinitely, and Castro’s administration rapidly started a country-wide program of nationalization, land reform, and social transformation. 

Among the social, educational and health programs were foundational efforts which would later become national successes, which would become synonymous with the best of what Cuba stood for, internationally. Among these were a literacy campaign which would give Cuba one of the highest literacy rates on earth, legislation which outlawed racial and gender discrimination, and a social security system which would lead to a focus on health which was to transform life expectancy from 60 years old at the start of the revolution in 1960, to 70 by the end of the decade. Life expectancy was growing by a year, every year, during the 1960s. It would also lead to the training of generations of highly qualified medical professionals, a sector which would prove crucial not only to Cuba, but to nearby countries, nations in crisis or which had experienced natural disasters. Cuba’s greatest soft power export, from 1959 until the present day, was medics. 

Most interesting of all, though, were notions of “the new man,” which encouraged an intellectual evolution in Cubans towards an enlightened, morally and collectively-driven sensibility, away from a focus on material wealth and personal success. Although Che Guevara was already known by this point, it was his spearheading of this program which would lead to the perception of his being something akin to the intellectual backbone of the revolution. 

At the same time, though, Cuba was experiencing ongoing external threats. In 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles - backed by the USA - was a rubicon moment of what would be thrown at the island for decades to come. If anything, however, defeat of the military action enhanced Castro’s persona as an indomitable warrior-poet. Even then his rallies and gatherings were marked by hours-long, off-the-cuff speeches, which would become the norm for leftist leaders in Latin America, in subsequent generations. If your speech wasn’t at least 4 hours long, after all, what kind of revolutionary were you…?

It was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, though, which brought the tensions between Cuba and the USA to an invested, global audience. Despite the fact that the stand-off took place over 60 years ago, to some extent - given that it is generally agreed that it is the closest the world has come to nuclear war - we still live under its shadow today. That story is for another day, suffice to say that when de-escalation happened, after 13 days when the world was on the brink, also served to generate a global consciousness of the island of Cuba, and the outlier leftist regime in the western hemisphere. It’s not the only factor, but it’s one of a number which explains why since 1959, Cuba has always had an outsized role in global affairs. 

The US obsession with quelling the revolution was fuelled by this awareness, given the fact that the worry in Washington was always that the presence of a successful leftist regime in the Americas would encourage others to rise up and that it had the capacity to domino-effect social and political realities in the region. The US was not altogether wrong in this, as one of Castro’s (and particularly Che Guevara’s) external focuses was to “export revolution” and inspire similar guerilla movements across the hemisphere. 

As events developed through the decade, Cuba became increasingly isolated, which at the same time drove it deeper into the arms of the Soviet Union, with which it was ideologically aligned, but which was also very distinct in the social structures around its leftist model. 

Although these early years brought change for many in Cuba, in particular the rural poor, whose lives were transformed beyond recognition, they also saw the first exodus of the middle classes, who increasingly saw an intransigent state in which any source of private income - or wealth - was the enemy. In Castro’s view, there was no room for deviations from the central belief system in a communist future, and property and private initiatives were increasingly taken over by the state, which led to more migration, and on it went. 

Castro’s ideology was a fiercely rigid position, and although it would start to splinter in the decades to come, in an attempt at economic survival, in the sixties it was all just beginning, and everyone believed that better days lay ahead, and that the sacrifice was worth it. 

Inevitably, the government also had a zero-tolerance policy towards dissent, and saw the beginnings of arrests, internments and punitive sentences. Castro’s government targeted former Batista officials, what they perceived to be counter-revolutionaries, and any other perceived enemies. There was a real human toll, and there was also a climate of fear which began to take hold. Inevitably, these actions also drove migration. 

Towards the end of the decade, in 1968, Castro launched what was called the Revolutionary Offensive, which would nationalize all remaining small businesses. The idea was to spur collective industrialization and orient the economy towards sugar cane, with a self-imposed deadline of 10 million tons of harvest by 1970. The entire Cuban economy had this as its focus. 

It failed. 

Sugar production was still high, but not as high as the target had been set, and as was expected and needed by such a systemic national economic refocus. 

What it meant was that another re-orientation was needed, only that this time, it was external. Cuba, it was felt, needed help. 

The only real option, given the US political stance, almost visible over the water to the north of the island, was the Soviet Union. Everything was about to change all over again, and Cuba was about to make a decision it would never again be able to back away from. 

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In the third episode in the series we’ll look at the main years of Soviet influence in Cuba, between 1970 and the break-up of the USSR in 1991, what came to be known in Cuba as the Special Period.