Review of a book by Aviva
Chomsky, Barry Carr and Pamela Maria Smorlakoff (Eds)
Published by
Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2005
The Cuba
Reader — History, Culture, Politics
Reviewed
by William Krehm
This compendium, mostly translated from the Spanish, offers a wealth of nuance from a generally left of centre viewpoint. Its great merit as it ranges over hill, dale and mountain is that it focusses on what has made of Cuba a special gem of Latin America. Neither the epics of Latin America as a whole or of Cuba in particular could have arisen without their mountainous settings. Fidel Castro retreated with two or three dozen revolutionaries into the Sierra Maestra of the eastern under very noses of the US secret service and their pet dictator Fulgencio Batista. And the very heroism involved was too out-sized, once victorious, to endure completely uncorrupted. In his book on the early Castro Revolution, Hugh Thomas described the typical white Cuban male excelling at only two things – managing a sugar estate and facing a firing squad. But Castro was to change that equation. Like him or hate him, he stood up to the United States that so repeatedly had frustrated Latin American freedoms.
After the work of the great Liberators of South America, that took the form of the Monroe Doctrine, proclaiming Latin America the private preserve of the US. But that was as nothing compared with the Platt Amendment passed by the US Congress in 1901. You may have heard of that amendment vaguely as the big bully on the block meddling in the affairs of a neighbouring small nation after it had practically won its independence from Spain after almost a half century of bloody warfare, but to appreciate it fully you must read a summary of the Amendment. It provides: (1) “The government of Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power which will impair or tend to impair the independence of Cuba, or in any manner authorize or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by colonization or, for military or naval purposes or otherwise, lodgment in or control over any portion of said island; (2) The said government shall not assume or contract any public debt or pay interest upon which, and to make reasonable sinking fund provisions for the ultimate discharge of which, the ordinary revenues of the island after defraying the current expenses of government shall be inadequate. (3) The government of Cuba consents that the US may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the US…. (5) That the government of Cuba will execute and as far as necessary extend, the plans already devised or other plans to be mutually agreed upon, for the sanitation of the cities of the island, to the end that a recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases may be prevented, thereby assuming the protection to the people and commerce of Cuba, as well as to the commerce of the southern ports of the US…. (7) That to enable the US to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the US land necessary for coaling and naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the president of the US.”
The book carries cartoons in the US press of the period advocating the intervention of Uncle Sam in Cuba. The Cubans are shown as positively simian in appearance and manner, and invariably black. Puerto Rico, already in Washington’s colonial stable is presented as a demure, white, well-dressed youngster holding Uncle Sam’s benign hand. But the real payoff was yet to come.
“The US military occupation of Cuba (1898-1900), which followed the defeat of the Spanish army, [had as one of its purposes] built into the Platt Amendment that the Americans would make it sanitary enough for commerce and immigration. About that Nancy Stepan (p. 150) recounts a burlesque tale. When the Yellow Fever Commission triumphed over yellow fever in Havana in 1900, by confirming that it is transmitted by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, the matter was of immense satisfaction in the US. Yet the mosquito theory [of its origins] had been in existence for nearly twenty years. In 1881 the Cuban physician Carlos J. Finlay proposed that the Aedes mosquito transmitted yellow fever from person to person through its bite. One may well ask why there was a 20-year delay in confirming his work.
“To a large extent, indeed, North America’s entry into the Cuban war against Spain and the occupation of the island was justified by the belief that the US brought to Cuba a moral, political and technological superiority not to be found in Spain or Cuba. But between January, 1900 and December of that year the cases of yellow fever in Havana had risen from a handful to 485. Only then did the American scientists turn to the work and collaboration of the Cuban Finlay and within months yellow fever was conquered. Shortly afterwards that control of yellow fever made possible the construction of the Panama canal.”
In all his contradictions, Fidel Castro reflects the very different social implications of Cuba’s two main crops: tobacco, of native origin, requiring great skills and little equipment but the dedication of small growers; and sugar, a foreign crop requiring much capital for mechanical equipment of the mills. You catch a glimpse of what may have influenced the otherwise highly disciplined Fidel Castro, particularly proud of his government’s health record, until his recently obvious throat troubles, rarely photographed without his big Cuban cigar. Sugar, on the other hand, was a feudal crop, with Haitian field workers smuggled into Cuba by contractors who recruited them with much misrepresentation and liquor. Local Cuban field workers during off-season, having neither jobs nor savings, fed themselves by growing food crops between the cane rows.
“In economic life, too, Cuban sovereignty was quickly weakened. The Reciprocity Treat signed with the US in 1903 privileged Cuban access to the US sugar market but at a substantial cost. US manufactured goods and other products could enter Cuba, establishing an informal economic protectorate and consolidating Cuba’s role as producer of a single crop (sugar). For the next fifty years, Cuba’s economic prosperity would depend on the outcome of Byzantine struggles over the fate of Cuba’s tariff privileges in the US Congress. Economic dependency and US military intervention and hegemony did not promote good government. Cuban politicians viewed a bloated, corrupt state as the only opportunity for acquiring wealth.
The arrival of F.D. Roosevelt in the presidency, reduced US backing for a particularly bloody regime of Gerardo Machado (1925-33). While mobs, looted, burned and killed. Machado resigned and fled.” The entire procedure was supposed to have been carried out in “legal form” according to the Constitution, that is under the influence of [US] Ambassador, Sumner Welles (p. 274). And the 1930s, in Cuba as throughout the world, were a time of economic collapse and widespread rethinking of economic and political orthodoxies, not least in the US itself. The numerous young exiles who had fled the country during the Machado years now came back home from the capitals of the world with heads full of exciting new ideas.
The Return of the Exiles with Heads Full of New Ideas
“The neo-colonial ‘politics of disappointment’ facilitated the coup d’état launched by Fulgencio Batista in March 1952, which inaugurated seven years of increasingly repressive government.
“The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was one of the most profound revolutions in Latin American history – in many ways more than the 19th century wars of independence that left unchanged the basic structures of Latin American society. The post-Stalinist, Third World revolutionary Marxism that it helped define was also a factor in the emergence of a youthful New Left in Europe and the US.
“In the US, this dynamic tended to be perceived in Cold War terms – and indeed, the Soviet Union sought to present itself as a defender of colonial peoples (at least those outside its own sphere of influence). The locus of the Cuban revolution shifted towards the Left in the first two years. This happened because of the pressure from workers, agricultural laborers, and peasants anxious to broaden and deepen the initial cautious policies of the new government and as US resistance to economic nationalism and social reform led to the breaking of diplomatic relations. Along with these factors came a growing reliance on the Soviet Union.
“The agrarian reform, enacted in the summer of 1959, set the stage for an aggressive commitment to redistribution of the country’s wealth for the good of the nation as a whole. ‘Great landowners must understand that their duty is to adapt themselves to the new circumstances.... Not a single Cuban must suffer from hunger,’ declared Fidel Castro. Nationalization as a policy gained strength until 1968, when the last remnants of the private economy were essentially abolished.
“In the economic sphere, Cuba’s growing dependence on the Soviet Union reproduced the old colonial pattern of reliance on exportation of a single crop – sugar – with the important difference that the USSR chose, for political reasons, to subsidize Cuba’s economy, instead of profiting from it as had previous colonial powers. In the political sphere, Cuban leaders found themselves obligated to support the USSR when it might have been more in their interest not to, though they sometimes continued to challenge Soviet policies on the international level.” The shipping of Soviet nuclear missiles to Cuba, would never have happened had it not been for Washington’s dunderheaded nostalgia.
The Argentinian “Che Guevara” tells the story how he joined Fidel Castro and eighty other conspirators in Mexico and set off in the motorboat Granma in last November 1956. Their initial experiences were disastrous, but hardened the 21 who survived after the first weeks on Cuban soil. Taking refuge in the mountainous terrain of the Sierra Maestra the guerrillas managed to win the support of the local peasantry, who had suffered from the land-grabbing of speculators and local army chieftains. Become seasoned warriors from the defeats suffered, the band soon emerged as victors. The government responded by resettling thousands of peasants in the cities. Children died for lack of food and medical attention. The scandal of this cruelty not only rocked Cuban public opinion but echoed abroad. The government reversed itself. That brought the Castro band recruits and soon they established links with the cities below.
21 Survivors of the Granma Make a Revolution
Oddly enough, the US State Department, though it held Batista in low regard, was determined to keep the Castro group with its aggressive nationalism and social reform ideas out of power. One CIA group, however, viewing the problem in its geopolitical context, saw an early approach to Castro “in a context of checks and balances” to be in Washington’s interest. Castro, however, was not a leader to be checked or balanced.
That soon appeared in his social programs. When we try to assess the justice or injustice of Washington’s tightening boycott against Cuba, we need a sense of what the Castro regime brought to Cuba. Nutritionist Medea Benjamin lived in Cuba from 1979 to 1983 – well before the collapse of the Soviet Union and long enough for Castro’s redistribution of the national income to have taken effect. She was there working for a project for the Institute for Food and Development Policy about food and hunger in Cuba. “‘Landing in Havana, the head of the Nutrition Institute laughed when I told her I wanted to work with malnourished children.’ What an immense pleasure to live in a society that had abolished hunger! The revolution’s leadership viewed inadequate income as the reason why people were undernourished, so it put into motion policies to boost the earnings of the poorer half of society and to enlarge the share of their earnings they could spend on food. But once people had more money to spend on food it became clear that there was not enough food to go around. One simple solution to that would have been to let prices rise, and reduce the number of Cubans able to buy food. That would have dealt with the shortages but not with people’s hunger. As Castro recalled years later, ‘A price policy to compensate for this imbalance [between supply and demand] would have been a ruthless sacrifice of the population with the lowest income. Such a policy was acceptable for luxury goods, ‘but never for necessities.’ The government chose a more equitable distribution – by need rather than by income – rationing. At the same time it generated fuller employment. With the large estates converted into ‘people’s farms’ by the first agrarian reform, there were 150,000 year-around jobs on these lands in August 1962 compared to fewer than fifty thousand in 1959. During the ‘dead season’ on sugar plantations workers now found steady work on the construction projects that sprang up everywhere – roads, schools, clinics, government offices, housing, etc. While only 29 percent of rural workers earned more than 75 pesos a month as of April 1958, two years later 44% did.
“What did people do with so much extra money? Among the most pressing desires for the poor was to eat more and better. Nationwide consumption of such coveted foods as pork and milk soared, beef consumption shot up by 50% in just two years, But supply failed to keep pace with the growing demand. The Eisenhower administration’s 1960 embargo on most exports to Cuba seriously disrupted the island’s agriculture, which had become dependent on the US for farm machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, seeds. Repeated military attacks culminating in the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1960 exacted a toll on production. Finding fewer consumer goods to buy, especially imports from the US, tenants and sharecroppers had little need for cash and produced less for the market. In an attempt to stem speculation, the wholesale food business was nationalized and those retail stores accused of hoarding and profiteering were taken over by the government. And in August 1961 a law was passed prohibiting the resale of certain goods. A rationing system was introduced for all Cubans covering the most important food items.”
Cuba’s Medical Diplomacy a Model for the Big Powers
“Medical diplomacy has been overlooked in analyses of Cuban foreign policy. Dozens of countries have received long-term and emergency Cuban medical assistance, medical education and in the donation of equipment, medicines and supplies. This was done despite the fact that half of Cuba’s physicians emigrated shortly after the revolution, reducing the number of Cuban physicians from about six to three thousand. The program involves some 16,000 doctors, teachers, construction engineers, agronomists, economists and other specialists serving in twenty-two Third World countries.”
On the other hand, on a recent visit in Cuba, I was struck by the fact that it was practically impossible to purchase any aspirin. In view of this tremendous altruistic achievement, of a country itself beggared by an economic boycott, might we not expect that President Bush’s democratic heart might not be moved to exempt trade in aspirin with Cuba?
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early 1990s, new draconian austerity measures were introduced because of the disappearance of the Soviet subsidy. A “Special Period” for belt-tightening was introduced. The government gave hard currency exports priority over islanders’ needs and wants as its deficit rose. Cutbacks in Soviet grain deliveries meant less feed for chicken and cattle, and less wheat for bread. And people were now obliged to make numerous trips to stores, since not every item was available on a particular day.
Unemployment spread. Workers who lost their jobs were given the right, under the new policy, to select from three alternative jobs. If they refused the options, they were entitled to unemployment insurance, first for three and later for one month. Previously there had been no limits on unemployment compensation. Susan Eckstein (p. 610) writes “One university professor informed me that about half the labor force in the light industry sector and in many ministries had been let go when the “Special Period” was proclaimed, Castro began courting foreign investment as never before. He publicly defended the ‘creeping privatization’ and economic ‘denationalization’ involved. ‘Capital yes, Capitalism no,’ became the slogan of the day. In the main, plants built with Soviet-bloc assistance ran the risk of becoming tombstones of bygone ‘Communist solidarity.’ To offset such obstacles, the government exempted investors from compliance with labour laws and it allowed unlimited profit repatriation for up to ten years. The government also agreed to bear construction and infrastructural costs.” Many of the impressive restoration of old buildings on Havana’s Prado were done with foreign financing under such plans.
But the greatest expectations for coping with the “Special Period” were placed on the tourist industry. That sector had grossed $200 million in 1989, and by 1992 that had risen to $700 mllions. Despite the US embargo 424,000 tourists came, but since the sector is import-intensive, only half that amount was netted in foreign currency. To the shame of most Cubans even the Ministry of Tourism began running tourist advertisements abroad featuring bikini-clad sexy Cuban girls. The government’s interest in hard currency led it to play on its pre-revolutionary reputation and to reverse its earlier puritanical stance on such matters. Cuba threatens to become a major bordello of the world once more.
With difficult problems for survival and caught in the gunsights of its powerful northern neighbour, a lot of consideration must be given to the best course to follow. An important contribution to the book reviewed is the essay on Civil Society by Haroldo Dilla, who had been an investigator attached to the government think tank, the Center for the Study of the Americas. “In the mid-1990s CEA became the target of hard-line criticism, leading to the dispersion of some of Cuba’s most creative intellectuals. Dilla is currently living in the Dominican Republic, where he is Research Coordinator at Latin America Faculty for Social Sciences. He writes, “The first time that I heard someone argue about the importance of civil society in Cuba was in 1984, during a talk by the well-known political scientist Rafael Hernandez at the then-vigorous Center for the Study of the Americas. At the time Cuban society was still not very differentiated socially and had been shaped by the intense process of social mobility led by a government that had had relatively plentiful resources and considerable social autonomy. Thus, ideas like those of Hernandez were viewed at best as needless intellectual subtleties. The situation changed in the late 1980s when Cuban society began to undergo a profound transformation as a result of the acute economic crisis and the gradual dismantling of prevailing forms of social and political control. The economic reforms implemented by the government to address the crisis opened considerable space for the market and the circulation of dollars, while undermining the average citizen’s purchasing power. One of the significant signs of this change has been the decline in the state’s previously unchallenged capacity to control the distribution of resources, social and political discourse, and ideological production.
“The partial withdrawal of the state opened spaces that were filled by associations, communication networks, or simply aggregates of people. Independent spaces for activities and debates appeared that were unthinkable only a few years earlier, whether as a result of the opening of the market or as result of the inability of the old ideological apparatuses to control the whims of thought. A civil society demanding its own space began to emerge in Cuba.
“In the early 1990s, pronouncements about civil society were very cautious, given the reticence of the people involved to discuss a subject that had been proscribed by Soviet Marxism. To make matters worse, it was also a topic that appeared in the US agenda aimed at subverting the Cuban Revolution. Fortunately, this reticence vanished in 1992 when Fidel Castro made a positive allusion to the role of civil society in Latin America in a speech at the Rio Summit. Cuban intellectuals interpreted that speech as a signal that the subject was now safe to talk about. Everyone simply wanted to know whether the role of civil society would be positive or negative in rebuilding Cuba’s consensus. The new debate was constrained by hostility from two fronts. On the one side, there was the hostile meddling of the US government interested in using Cuban civil society for subversive and counter-revolutionary ends. On the other, there was the Cuban political class, which was not inclined to allow competition in the control of resources and values.”
STEPWISE TRADING AWAY THE EMBARGO FOR MORE DEMOCRATIC LIBERTIES
Having from The Cuban Reader an objective account of the suffering inflicted on the Cuban people by the US embargo, we will attempt a purely apolitical program for removing some of the worst features of that 45-year policy misstep of Washington that would be to the eventual advantage of both parties. Before clipping the claws of this beast unknown in international legal lore, a few observations are in place. There is no use seeking a solution in the laws of war, for there has been no official war between these two nations. And to suggest that Cuba, even were it not impoverished to a state approaching beggary, is in any way a military threat to the US is ridiculous. The aggressor on all previous military encounters between the two nations was the United States. The success of a tiny nation in repelling attacks planned and backed by the US, the attempts as assassinating the Cuban head of state have no justification in the law of nations. Nor has it earned the US esteem in Latin America and throughout the world. The lack of support of the US embargo is indicated by the fact that the rest of the world is engaged in trading with Cuba, even though its demeaned condition due to the US embargo restricts the scope of possible trade and investment by other countries.
We would propose that the United States and Cuba, brought together by some peace-loving powers, join in a staged plan for Cuba to start making carefully defined criticism of Cuban government policy within that country in return for specific successive reductions in the scope of the US embargo against trade and investment by US citizens with that republic.
Since each stage would be preceded by friendly negotiations, the two countries could take equal credit and responsibility for the steps in such a plan. The choice of the successive relaxations of the embargo, and the greater freedom of expression in matters not affecting the basic communist regime would lie entirely the hands of the two countries affected, so that they would not surrender control of the timing and the nature of the mutual concessions.
After all, the Soviet Republic in its early days went through its New Economic Policy and came out of it stronger. The Castro regime, due to the disappearance of the Soviet subsidy, has already had to make far greater concessions to the a free market economy than would probably be necessary by allowing a greater degree of criticism by a loyal opposition in its administration of the mixed capitalist-economic economy of the country as it exists today. Starved of resources, it is also beset with serious inefficiencies some of which can be traced to the absence of an independent loyal opposition. What the proposed plan would offer would be freedom in the press and forums to express views critical of government administrative policies, without even increasing the amount of private investment that exists today. It is even conceivable that the proposed plan would make it possible to do away with undesirable private sector innovations that have already been granted – for example, the notorious expansion of the sex trade.
Given the degree of this indignity that the embargo has visited on an innocent nation, it is certainly worth the effort. If either side refuses to join the other in even exploring the possibility of embarking on such a plan, it would certainly forfeit credit in the eyes of the world.
Progress on the scheme just outlined, might pave the way for a far more ambitious project: the organization of a Latin American central bank that would not replace, but rather would supplement the present central banks of the individual Latin American countries. The readers of Economic Reform will have noted the disastrous effects in countries like Mexico, Ecuador, and the Argentine of having in one way or another adopted the US dollar either for their currency or required as backing for their own. Great effort was made by rightist think tanks and individual economists for a similar arrangement in Canada, which fortunately our government had the good sense to resist.
When the central bank of any country adopts the currency of another as its monetary base or the backing for its monetary reserves that is tantamount to a free loan of the amount of the foreign currency used for such. About 60 percent of the world’s central bank reserve are in US dollars and that is one of the things that still allow the US to live with its enormous debt.
A Latin American bank such as we propose would have its reserves made up almost entirely of currencies of the Latin American countries (say in the proportion to their Gross Domestic Products), with just marginal amounts of dollars, pounds, euros, yen and yuan. With its reserves thus constituted, the L.A. Central Bank could concentrate its finance on trade and investments amongst the Latin American countries. This would provide a tremendous help to them in overcoming their inherited role as borrowers, with endless frustrations barring the way to financial independence. Since the Mexican banking crisis begun in 1994, that country’s huge foreign debt contracted in US dollars on the advice of foreign banking consultants, resulted in 85% of the Mexican banking system ending up in foreign hands. A big pill for a country as nationalist as Mexico to swallow!
A further word of explanation is in place here. When a private bank makes a loan it creates a multiple of the money base actually in its vaults. The rest is essentially float and fiction. What ultimately backs it all up in addition to the bank’s own capital, and the deposits made by the public, is the creditworthiness of the government, through its central bank as “lender of the last resort.” The government actually invests the money it creates into existence. What banks must keep their eye on is making sure that they will always have the legal tender in their vaults to honour a cheque drawn on them. In recent years, the statutory reserves required to back the money it created were done away with altogether, or almost so in the case of the US, so that the leverage that banks operate with is greater than ever. Today the credit of the financially powerful states plays the role that was once assigned – at least in theory – to gold and silver. That has made it more difficult for a borrowing nation to meet its own financial needs, let alone developing into a lender. That is why our proposal for a Latin American Central Bank is all the more timely for dealing with situations like those of Mexico, Cuba, Ecuador, the Argentine and Brazil, and Latin America as a whole.
The very mention of a Latin American central bank owned by governments and financing essential public investments at near-zero interest rates is certain to elicit objections that Latin America is far too corrupt to indulge in such plans. Perhaps because He on High had foreknowledge that somebody was going to propose this plan for a central Latin American bank that would invest money into existence rather than borrow it into existence, that the Attorney-General of New York State, Eliot Spitzer was inspired to continue and even intensify his investigations of corruption on Wall St. Currently he has disclosed such “cooking of the books” in the very re-insurance industry – the ultimate guardian at the gates. No matter how great the corruption in some Latin American circles might be, what Mr. Spitzer has disclosed would be hard to match.
And one of the purposes of both our proposals is to come to the help of Washington to step down with some grace from its dangerously tempting role as lone economic superpower that no longer is based on reality. Moreover, international interest rates are rising ominously once again as the one “blunt tool” to fight rising oil prices. But higher interest rates happen to favour money-lenders and penalize productive effort. If it is true that it would be wise for Cuba to tolerate some loyal criticism within its chosen system, it is no less a fact that Washington could also profit from a coordinated abandonment of its Big Bully – Bad Loser role.