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Be quick
A Review by Louis A. Perez, Jr

It was not too long ago that much of what the world knew about Cuba began with the letter "r": rum, rumba, roulette and romance -- to which was subsequently added revolution. Before the Revolution, Cuba was known principally as a place for play and pleasure; outsiders hardly cared if the country had an internal history. It was enough, as Marlon Brando sighed in the 1955 film Guys and Dolls, that it evoked "magical bells for lovers, full of rum and music on a make-believe island". Cuba was not to be taken seriously. What happened in Cuba in the months and years that followed January 1, 1959, caught much of the world unawares: how utterly improbable it must have appeared that something of unquestionable historic import was occurring in a place that seemed to have had no history.

In fact, as Richard Gott's authoritative Cuba suggests, the Revolution only acquired its most compelling logic in the context of Cuba's internal history, as a source of inspiration and means of validation. About 200 years ago, Cubans reached the conclusion that they were worthy subjects of history, entitled to exercise the prerogative of national sovereignty and self-determination. From the very origins of the idea of Cuba Libre in the nineteenth century, when the possibility of a separate and self-sustaining nation seized hold of the Cuban imagination, Cubans invested themselves deeply in the promise of patria in the conviction that self-determination was essential to self-fulfilment.

But the pursuit of self-determination seemed always to have encountered obstacles of daunting proportions. Gott writes sympathetically of the power of Cuba Libre to arouse Cubans repeatedly to dramatic action, of the popular mobilizations and violent confrontations, of war and revolution -and of recurring failure and frustration. The war of liberation (1895-8) against Spain produced not Cuban independence but United States intervention. For the next fifty years, the Americans had their way in Cuba, unimpeded and unembarrassed. They acquired ownership of vast expanses of national territory. They were the moneylenders, the landowners and power brokers. They bought and sold Cuban politicians and policemen the way they bought farms and factories. US ambassadors assumed the role of resident proconsuls with a discernible mixture of self-assurance and self-importance. "The United States was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba", former ambassador Earl E. T. Smith later boasted, "that . . . the American ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba, sometimes even more important than the President." The obstacles to Cuban aspirations were not all of foreign origin, of course. Many were home-grown. Unscrupulous politicians and rapacious army officers flourished in a political culture given unabashedly to malfeasance, graft and corruption, in an environment where local influence-peddlers negotiated equally with Fortune 500 companies and the Mafia.

Fidel Castro shattered this world. The triumph of the Revolution against the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista revived the plausibility of Cuban aspirations. This had to do with the idea that in overthrowing the dictatorship, unaided and unassisted, at the cost of many thousands of lives, they had also ended the US hold over the island, and in the process they had won the right to determine their own future on their own terms. The triumph of the Revolution conferred on Cuban demands for national sovereignty and self-determination a heightened sense of internal credibility and moral authority. Gott offers a compelling account of those heady days when everything seemed possible, when fervour and fearlessness combined to place Cuban aspirations within reach. Signs in government offices captured the tenor of the times: "Hemos perdido 50 anos -- hay que recobrarlos -- sea breve" ("We have lost fifty years -- we need to get them back -- be quick"). But the proposition of Revolution did not implicate everyone in its purpose. Many Cubans lay beyond the appeal of its vision and approval of its means. Certainly the material condition of vast numbers of people improved immediately after 1959. But it is also true that the upward mobility of some came as a result of the downward mobility of others. Urban reform reduced rents by as much as 50 per cent, at a corresponding loss of income to landlords, and profits for investors. Real wages increased on average by 15 per cent through a commensurate diminution in the earnings of employers. Opposition to the Revolution developed early, but was suppressed easily, and thereafter found its principal expression through emigration.

In the meantime, Fidel Castro had incurred the enmity of a far more formidable adversary in the form of the US. The demand for the primacy of Cuban interests over foreign ones challenged the premiss of the propriety of US hegemony. The nationalization of US holdings on the island, valued at more than $1 billion, followed by expanding Cuban ties with the Soviet Union, marked the Castro Government for extinction, pursued variously through invasion and military intimidation, by way of sabotage, subversion, and assassination plots, and most enduringly through political isolation and economic sanctions.

It was out of the confrontation with the US that the course and character of the Cuban Revolution obtained some of its most enduring features. The threat from the US raised the matter of national security into a concern of grave urgency. It summoned into existence an extensive and efficient state intelligence apparatus. It contributed to an environment where the privation of freedoms in the name of national security could expand easily enough into the denial of rights as a means of political coercion. Imprisonment, house arrests and harassment were only some of the most common responses to internal opposition.

But repression alone is not an adequate explanation for the survival of the Castro Government. In fact, the Cuban leadership derived in varying degrees moral authority and political authenticity precisely through its confrontation with the US. Fidel Castro early subsumed into the project of Revolution a historic mission: to make good on the nineteenth-century ideal of nation, which implied above all national sovereignty and self-determination. Confrontation with the US released powerful nationalist sentiments, which in turn contributed to a national unanimity of purpose perhaps unattainable by any other means. US hostility not only increased Cuban intransigence but, more important, lent credibility to that intransigence. It is not, as Gott suggests, that Cubans "are a people of recent creation" and that it was the Revolution that "created the Cuban nation". On the contrary, it was a people conscious of itself as a nation that created the Revolution. It is in the context of this awareness of a shared past, to which Gott is otherwise so finely attuned, that the Cuban capacity to survive four decades of US hostility must be understood.

But it is also true that four decades of Revolution have not been easy. In this, Gott is correct to emphasize that the gains of the Revolution have "not come without great cost". Cuban achievements, most notably in education, nutrition and health care, were secured through struggle and sacrifice, often against insuperable odds, in the face of chronic scarcities, shortages and rationing, against internal mismanagement and external pressure. Gott is especially good in his discussion of Cuba in the decades following the early 1960s, an account told with sympathy and sensitivity -- but not uncritically -- of the costs associated with the Cuban connection to the Soviet Union and of the even greater costs resulting from the dissolution of the Cuban connection to the Soviets. Cuban reliance on the Soviet Union, both to provide imports and purchase exports, but mostly as a source of subsidies and subventions, was as complete as it was unquestioned.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, Cuba descended immediately into calamity. What followed was an "economic catastrophe", Gott writes. Oil imports fell by almost 90 per cent. Trade and commerce came to a virtual halt. Subsidies and subventions ended. Through the 1990s, during the years of the "Special Period", life on the island settled into a grim and unremitting cycle of scarcity and shortages, more struggle and sacrifice, a nightmarish time when needs and necessities of the most basic types were seldom adequately met.

Socialism has survived in Cuba, more or less, but at a cost yet to be counted. Weariness has set in. Richard Gott visited the island during the Special Period and found a much subdued people. "Many Cubans are fed up with pulling themselves up with their bootstraps", he observes. He holds out hope that Cubans "are still capable of producing a few more surprises". Perhaps, but it is more likely that Cubans are wary of surprises. It would have been inconceivable in the early 1960s to have imagined that life in the decades ahead would have been given to unremitting struggle and sacrifice, only to end up in the 1990s in circumstances approaching prostration. An entire generation of Cubans has endured the painful experiences of seeing its children and grandchildren abandon the island to seek their destiny elsewhere. Not for the first time, of course, but it was not supposed to have been this way.

Louis A. Perez, Jr teaches History at the University of North Carolina. His books include Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the transformation of nineteenth-century Cuba, 2001.