History as Prologue: Cuba before 2006

On July 31, 2006, a gravely ill Fidel Castro handed his conductor’s baton to Raúl Castro. The younger brother of Cuba’s larger-than-life revolutionary leader accepted the provisional reins of power as head of state, first secretary of Cuba’s Communist Party, and commander in chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. A new era had begun.

It was the moment about which U.S. policymakers and many Cuban exiles had been dreaming, when chaos would ensue and the revolutionary regime would collapse. Fearing its wishes might come true, the Bush administration warned Cubans “against leaving the island”^[1] as it anticipated a massive exodus. But there was no turmoil, no rush for the exit. The transition occurred almost seamlessly. Historian Julia Sweig aptly characterized the handover as the Cuban leader’s “final victory.”^[2]

Fidel Castro was the indispensable person without whom the Cuban Revolution would have taken a different course. But he was not a traditional Latin American caudillo. From 1959 to 2006, the country’s economy, politics, foreign policy, culture, and social organization were not merely a reflection of Castro’s personality and personal predilections because the Cuban Revolution had an organic quality. It grew from below and was shaped by the relationship between leader and followers. As sociologist Nelson Valdés explains, Castro was a charismatic leader. “His charismatic authority would not have been possible without the revolutionary practices which the Cuban populace embraced.”^[3]

For a government to remain legitimate after the passing of its charismatic leader, it needs to substitute one of two other forms of legitimacy, which sociologist Max Weber termed traditional and legal-institutional.^[4] Consider that the U.S. federal government at first relied on George Washington’s charismatic leadership for its legitimacy and then turned to tradition. Succeeding presidents through John Quincy Adams endowed the new government with legitimacy by their ties to the American Revolution. But fifty-three years after the start of the Independence War, the revolutionary heroes or their sons were no longer available. President Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who took office in 1829, had been born outside one of the original thirteen states and was only nine years old when the Revolution began. He ushered in a new era during which the right to vote was expanded significantly to non–property owners, which contributed to the government’s legal-institutional legitimacy.^[5]

Establishing governmental legitimacy was a primary task that confronted Raúl Castro in 2006. Of course, as one of the Cuban Revolution’s leaders, he could rely on traditional authority. And at first he did surround himself with leaders whose right to rule derived from their personal participation in the Revolution. But Raúl was seventy-six years old, and his colleagues—the “historical” generation that overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959—were of the same vintage. High on his agenda was reinforcing the legal-institutional authority that would be necessary to sustain the Cuban Revolution in the future.^[6] At the same time, he had to bring about change, to lead the country toward a model appropriate for the twenty-first century that would enable it to develop independently, maintain its commitment to providing basic needs equally for all Cubans, and sustain Cuba’s high standing in Latin America and the Third World. This book examines how Cuba has attempted to fulfill this agenda since 2006.

Such an examination necessarily includes a review of the way in which the country’s prior experiences prepared Cubans for the changes they experienced and instilled in them a tradition of independence. A central dynamic during Cuba’s last five centuries has been the Cubans’ struggle against domination by an external power (Spain, the United States, or the Soviet Union) that prevented the island from developing full political and economic independence.

First Four Centuries of Colonialism

Christopher Columbus “discovered” Cuba on his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, claiming it on behalf of the Spanish Crown. Prior to Columbus’s discovery, native tribes of Cuba—largely Arawak and Ciboney—had lived in peace for centuries in basic harmony with their neighbors and nature. The Spaniards outlawed the tribes’ religious practices, stole their collective property, and made them slaves for the benefit of the Crown. In contrast to the indigenous population of mainland Spanish America, the native peoples of Cuba virtually disappeared within a generation of Spain’s arrival, wiped out by overwork, disease, and mass suicides.^[7] A notable exception were the Taino Arawaks, who waged a fierce struggle against the Spanish. Their example of resistance is still celebrated in Cuba, and Taino tribal leader Hatuey is a national hero.

For much of its time as a colony, Cuba languished as a backwater in the Spanish Empire. It possessed few minerals of real worth; its value lay in its strategic location. The Spanish Crown maintained a monopoly on all of Cuba’s trade, stifled attempts to develop indigenous industry, and imposed high taxes on all imports and exports. As in other colonies, political control in Cuba remained with governors and administrators from the mother country, and Spanish soldiers enforced colonial rule. The Crown rewarded Spanish settlers who came to live in the “most lovely land that eyes have ever seen,” as Columbus described Cuba, with immense tracts of land. In the mid-eighteenth century, they began to transform their agricultural production from basic food staples to sugar, in response to European popular demand. Sugar was cultivated most efficiently on large plantations, and its harvesting was a labor-intensive process. With profits waiting to be earned and a shortage of workers on the island, Spain legalized slavery, and an active trade in African slaves began in 1763. Slave traders brought approximately 750,000 Africans to Cuba in the next 100 years. In 1862, Afro-Cubans accounted for more than half of the 1.4 million people on the island, and Cuba produced one-third of the world’s sugar supply. Slavery did not end in Cuba until 1886.

The Spanish colonial government encouraged the racial divide that slavery produced, doling out almost all prestigious positions in the military and government to whites born in Spain, known as the peninsulares—those born on the peninsula of Spain. Children born in the “colonies” to Spanish parents—the criollos, or “creoles”—were branded with an original sin of inferiority despite being “white.” The end result was a racist society in which one’s status, privileges, and rights were based on the color of one’s skin and the location of one’s birth. Spanish Catholic bishops accommodated and reinforced this standard by allowing only white Spanish priests—many of whom were “parachuted” in for limited-term appointments—to officiate in Cuban churches.

Between 1810 and 1821, people throughout South America successfully struggled to end colonialism, developing national boundaries more or less along the lines of the current configuration of Latin America—but not in Cuba, where the prosperity brought by sugar and fears of a slave uprising like Haiti’s dampened immediate demands for independence. Cuba became the refuge for the Spanish soldiers defeated in the wars of independence, and they tended to reinforce the authoritarianism, rigidity, and racism already prevalent in Cuba. The consequent tension was heightened by Cuba’s uneven development, which produced great disparities in wealth between Cubans and between regions within Cuba. This volatile mixture came to a head in 1868, when Cubans began a ten-year war for independence that would unfold over the following ninety years.

The Ten-Year War

Agitation for independence had been building for nearly two decades, particularly in the eastern part of the island, when plantation owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes proclaimed Cuba’s freedom from Spain on October 10, 1868. Joined by other planters, he freed his slaves and declared the Grito de Yara (Cry of Yara)—a call for revolution. Starting with fewer than 200 volunteers, the rebel army (called the mambises) grew within a few months to 12,000, gathering small farmers, laborers, and freed slaves. This was a conservative revolution in most aspects other than ending slavery, as the planters resented the increases in Spanish taxes and sought political power for themselves. Although Western sugar plantation owners, who depended on slavery, opposed the revolutionary effort, it was able to accumulate many successes. The rebels defeated superior Spanish forces in several battles, captured cities such as Bayamo, and established a new government and democratic constitution. But both the rebels and the Spaniards were exhausted after ten years of fighting, which left 50,000 soldiers and civilians dead. In February 1878, they signed a treaty that freed some slaves, promised future reforms, and left Cuba as a Spanish colony. Unwilling to accept continued foreign rule, rebel officers led by Antonio Maceo penned “The Protest of Baraguá,” a pledge to continue the independence war. Cuban leaders today still refer to Baraguá as a symbol of defiance against external dominance.^[8]

Maceo had to abandon the fight within a few months, after the Spanish military captured and exiled him. He did not return to Cuba until March 1895, one month after the renewed independence war began. Yet he had been working with others, such as Máximo Gómez, to plan for the war. In 1892, José Martí gathered the opposition under the banner of the Cuban Revolutionary Party as he coordinated preparations for the coming struggle. The son of poor Spanish immigrants, Martí began his first attacks on Spanish colonial rule in La Patria Libre (Free Fatherland), a newspaper he started in 1869 at the age of sixteen. Jailed for his political activities, he was then exiled to Spain in 1871. In 1881, he moved to New York, where he worked as a journalist, covering U.S. politics for several Latin American newspapers, and wrote poetry and novels.

Cuba was experiencing a severe depression in 1895, in part caused by a U.S. tariff on sugar imposed the year before. This contributed to the widespread support the rebels received. They started their campaign in the east (Oriente Province), and by the end of the year the struggle for independence had engulfed the entire island. Martí was killed in combat on May 19, 1895, only six weeks after returning to Cuba with General Gómez. Yet his concept of Cuba Libre continued to inspire the new mambises. It also set the stage for an inevitable clash with the United States. As historian Louis Pérez explains, “Cuba Libre had come to signify more than separation from Spain. . . . The independentista formula was simple: Cuba for Cubans—the one eventuality which nearly one hundred years of North American policy had been dedicated to preventing.”^[9]

Meanwhile, Spain fought back against the revolutionaries with enormous brutality, razing villages and driving Cubans out of their homes. The 200,000-soldier Spanish garrison at first seemed sufficient to counter the independentistas. But by 1898, the army’s morale was low, and Spanish repression had stimulated support for the revolutionaries. Both Madrid and Washington assessed that the rebels would likely win the war by year’s end.

“A Splendid Little War”

The U.S. declaration of war against Spain in April 1898 did not result merely from a sudden burst of popular passion—fueled by the “yellow” journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s competing newspapers—after a U.S. battleship exploded in Havana harbor killing 260 U.S. seamen. Many factors contributed to the U.S. intervention. U.S. business barons, for example, feared that a rebel victory would mean a Cuba run by Cubans, which might undermine their holdings and privileged trade deals. Even before the war, the United States had supplanted Spain as Cuba’s main trading partner.^[10] It was in response to concerns about property owned by Americans—and perhaps about the lives of U.S. citizens—that President William McKinley dispatched the USS Maine to Cuba in January. Yet there also were U.S. political leaders who convinced themselves that intervention would be a humane and selfless action because an independent Cuba could not govern itself.^[11] The “splendid little war”– as Secretary of State John Hay described the 1898 conflict—resulted in the transfer of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico from Spain’s colonial control to that of the United States. Cuba also was a U.S. prize from the war, but annexation was blocked by the Teller Amendment that the U.S. Congress had added to the declaration of war against Spain.

The Maine’s explosion on February 15, 1898, occurred as the rebels were preparing their final offensives. U.S. intervention effectively stole from Cubans the fruits of their thirty years of fighting. Four months after the United States declared war, it signed a bilateral peace treaty with Spain without any Cuban participation. The name commonly applied to the conflict in the United States—“Spanish American War”—betrays an ignorance about the limited importance of the U.S. contribution in securing victory. It also obscures the U.S. suppression of Cuban hopes for full independence. In Cuba, the conflict is known as the Cuban War of Independence.^[12]

De Facto Colonialism:
Cuba’s Special Relationship with the United States

Although Cuba was nominally independent from 1903 to 1959, it was a de facto colony of the United States. The United States withdrew its occupation forces from Cuba in 1902 on the condition that the new constitution would include the Platt Amendment, a provision that permitted U.S. unilateral intervention on the island. During the period when the Platt Amendment was in force, from 1903 to 1934, the United States occupied Cuba with troops on three different occasions. At the same time, U.S. corporations and investment banks gained control of Cuba’s basic infrastructure. Formal independence did not bring about meaningful sovereignty; Cuba was once again controlled by a foreign country.

The U.S. occupation began on January 1, 1899. Leonard Wood, the second U.S. governor-general, revealed in a letter to President McKinley the patronizing attitude the new rulers had toward their subjects. He wrote that “we are dealing with a race that has steadily been going down for a hundred years and into which we have to infuse new life, new principles and new methods of doing things.”^[13] Indeed, while the Platt Amendment was couched in the language of protecting liberty, life, property, and stability on the island, historian Lars Schoultz explains that its purpose was to “maintain control over people whom they [U.S. officials] considered unfit for self-government,” without continuing military occupation of the island.^[14] In developing the Platt Amendment as a mechanism for intervention, Senator Orville Platt and Secretary of War Elihu Root manifested President McKinley’s vision that Cuba and the United States should have a “special relationship” with “ties of singular intimacy.”

In practice, the special relationship stifled Cuban development. Spurred by special concessions that the occupation government granted to U.S. investors, the North American hold over Cuban sugar plantations quickly led to U.S. domination of Cuba’s nonsugar industries. Sugar operations were quite large, and the centrales became thoroughly integrated small cities that linked key sectors of the Cuban economy, most of which were controlled by U.S. firms. Consider that in the mid-1920s, as a result of ties between sugar mills and railroads, U.S. companies owned 22 percent of Cuba’s land area.^[15] Moreover, U.S.-Cuban trade agreements opened Cuba to inexpensive manufactured goods, suppressing the creation of an indigenous manufacturing sector. The U.S. sugar quota, which specified how much sugar Cuba could sell at a subsidized price, became the most important determinant of year-to-year survival for Cuba’s sugar workers and for Cuba’s economic planning. A “wrong” decision that might upset one U.S. senator could lead to a filibuster against Cuba’s quota. And so, for example, although Cuba had the potential to produce tomatoes and even tomato catsup commercially, both were imported from the United States because of U.S. tomato growers.

By the mid-1950s, 90 percent of Cuba’s telephone and electrical services, 50 percent of public service railways, 40 percent of raw sugar production, and 23 percent of nonsugar industries were U.S. owned. The United States was Cuba’s largest export market and the main source for its imports: 59 percent of the value of Cuban exports—including 80 percent of its exported sugar—went to the United States. Notably, 76 percent of Cuba’s imports originated in the United States. This reflected, in part, U.S.-owned firms buying from their own subsidiaries. As important, Cuba needed to import basic foods because its dependence on sugar for hard currency reduced its ability to produce rice, wheat, and flour. One-third of U.S. rice exports were sold to Cuba in the 1950s.^[16]

As U.S. businesses rapidly took root in Cuba, demand for the services of English-speaking Cubans increased. This led members of the Cuban elite to send their children to U.S. universities and even high schools so that they subsequently could take up management positions with U.S. companies on the island. Not surprisingly, the Cuban upper class came to identify with U.S. cultural values. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Americanization of the creole middle class followed the accelerating conversion of the elites, and Cuban society as a whole became imbued with a North American perspective. Baseball became the national pastime. The use of U.S. products conveyed a sense of higher status, and soon anything American was deemed better than anything Cuban—from the arts to the design of buildings to business strategies. Louis Pérez well describes the profound influence this process of acculturation had on Cubans’ worldview:

During the period of the special relationship, a limited form of democracy did emerge on the island, but it was one that Cubans associated with corruption and foreign domination. The U.S. Marines occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909, for a short time in 1912, and from 1917 to 1922. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) feared that the unpopularity of Cuba’s president—the dictatorial Gerardo Machado—might lead to instability and a radical government. He dispatched a personal emissary, Ambassador Sumner Welles, who persuaded Machado to resign, and arranged for his replacement by a reformer who would comply with U.S. requests.

Within weeks, a popular uprising—sparked by a sergeants’ revolt with Fulgencio Batista in the lead—ousted the U.S.-approved president and established a provisional government. The new government proclaimed that it would bring about national “economic reconstruction” as it began “the march toward the creation of a new Cuba founded . . . upon the most modern concept of democracy.”^[18] Welles made clear his disapproval of the revolutionaries’ chosen leader, Ramón Grau San Martín, and FDR refused to recognize Grau’s government. Welles then worked behind the scenes to entice key backers, particularly Batista and the military, to defect from the revolutionary coalition, which lasted only four months before being overthrown by the army. Batista continued to be a dependable U.S. surrogate for the next quarter of a century. Cubans learned that FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy” meant only that the United States would not intervene militarily. The U.S. success in suppressing Cuban nationalism, though, led nationalist populism to become the dominant theme of Cuban politics in the following twenty-five years.

When Batista overthrew the constitutional government in 1952, ending Cuba’s experience with “democracy,” there was little public outcry. Nelson Valdés observes that many in the Cuban elite had abandoned the concept of a distinctive Cuban national identity. In addition, the mass of Cubans associated democratic elections with the theft of Cuban nationalism, either by the mafia or the U.S. government. The revolutionary movement that triumphed in 1959 in part derived its legitimacy from its devotion to Cuban nationalism. This placed the new regime on an inevitable collision course with the United States.

The 1959 Revolution

Active opposition to the Batista dictatorship was organized by several groups and was spread across the island, especially in the cities. Each group of revolutionaries had distinctive goals, but together they shared a desire to rid Cuba of corruption, to modernize the country, and to raise living standards for the vast majority of the population. It was not until mid-1958 that the combined revolutionary organizations came together as a unified force, though they did not acknowledge anyone as their single leader. The 26th of July Movement had become the largest and most dynamic group, gaining increased support as it won military victories in the summer of 1958. The movement took its name from the date in 1953 on which Fidel Castro and some 160 others stormed the Moncada garrison in Santiago in a failed attempt to spark a general uprising to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. As founder of the rebel army and head of the 26th of July Movement, Castro quickly became the natural leader of the revolutionary government when Batista fled the country on December 31, 1958. In its first post-Batista edition, the private, popular weekly magazine Bohemia described him as a “national hero.”^[19]

A seeming upwardly mobile lawyer, Castro was a graduate of the elite Belén high school, which educated Cuba’s upper classes, and his father was a plantation owner, though not a rich one. His first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, was the daughter of Rafael José Díaz-Balart, a wealthy and prominent conservative lawyer who was transportation minister in Batista’s cabinet from 1952 to 1954. Yet Castro also had been a leader of the activist student movement at the University of Havana, a member of the leftist Ortodoxo Party, and an ardent supporter of the party’s charismatic leader, Eduardo Chibás. The 1956 platform of the 26th of July Movement could have been interpreted as either a radical manifesto or a list of modest changes aimed at “national affirmation, human dignity, and democratic order,” goals that earlier reformers historically had promised.^[20] With this profile, it is no wonder that U.S. intelligence analysts were uncertain at first whether Castro would try to radically transform the system or institute only modest reforms, which would not fundamentally alter the structure of power on the island or with the United States.

The answer came quickly, as the new government initiated major changes in 1959 and 1960. The May 1959 Agrarian Reform Law reduced the maximum landholding size to 1,000 acres, and the excess property was largely distributed to landless farmworkers. Forty percent of Cuba’s rural property was nationalized. The Urban Reform Law cut rents substantially. Cubans with more than two pieces of property were obliged to hand over the excess to the government, which then reclassified them as social property, transforming houses, for example, into day care centers.

These reforms produced little new wealth. Instead, they entailed a massive redistribution from rich to poor. The wealthiest 10 percent of the population lost much of its property, privileges, and political power. They were forced to pay new luxury taxes, their private schools and clubs were closed, private beaches were opened to the public, and private clinics were forced to treat indigent patients. At the same time, the lower classes—especially urban Afro-Cubans and all those in rural areas—received immediate benefits because historically they had suffered the greatest unemployment and had received the fewest public services. More than 40 percent of the Cuban workforce in 1958 was either underemployed or unemployed. Sugarcane workers, who made up approximately 25 percent of the national labor force, averaged less than four months of work a year, and Cuba’s official unemployment rate in 1958 was 16 percent.

In addition to tangible relief, the revolutionary government set in motion processes that would create new opportunities for the previously dispossessed. It passed new laws banning discrimination on the basis of race or gender, it began to train doctors so that good health care would be universal, and it set out to strengthen the education system. The 1961 literacy campaign engaged a large number of young educated Cubans in the revolutionary process, sparking their idealism and opening their eyes to the vast inequalities in the country. University classes were suspended as students and professors went throughout the country over a nine-month period to teach adults how to read. They succeeded in reducing illiteracy from 23.6 percent of the population to 3.9 percent.

Blacks and mulattoes constitute a much higher proportion of the population in Cuba than in the United States. The 1953 census recorded 26.9 percent of Cuba as black or mulatto; in the 1981 census, it was 34 percent.^[21] Racial discrimination before 1959 may have been less a result of interpersonal prejudice than in the United States, but it was entrenched in the way Cuban institutions functioned. Lourdes Casal, a seminal scholar on the subject of racism in Cuba, points out that several factors softened the expression of racism. “The most important leaders of the Cuban independence struggle such as José Martí (white) and Antonio Maceo (black),” she wrote, placed great emphasis on “racial unity and integration.”^[22] Still, schools for darker-skinned Cubans—when they were available—were vastly inferior than those for whites. Afro-Cubans had the worst living conditions and held the lowest-paid jobs. There was some social mobility for nonwhite Cubans, and Cubans elected Fulgencio Batista, a light-skinned mulatto, as president in 1940. But the white, upper-class Havana Yacht Club even denied membership to Batista while he was in office from 1940 to 1944.

Polarization Emerges

As the pace of change accelerated, an ideological gulf emerged between moderate and radical reformers. The struggle against Batista had brought together groups with diverse agendas. Without the common enemy, their differences came to the forefront. Some moderates joined the campaign because they were appalled by Batista’s violent repression and disregard for human rights; others had focused on his regime’s corruption and willingness to give the mafia effective carte blanche over part of Cuba’s tourist industry. Some genuinely believed that the enormous gap between the country’s rich and poor could be closed significantly through liberal democratic reforms. To these moderate Cubans, Castro was “betraying” the goals that led them to join the Revolution. On the other hand, some so-called moderates invoked “democracy” merely to protect their property and privilege. Saul Landau comments that they

In fact, the class war was only the first of three simultaneous conflicts that Castro expected the Revolution would need to fight. The second would be against the alliance of Cuban property owners and U.S. corporations that had made extensive investments in Cuba. These were the very bonds the radical nationalists aimed to cut in the hope that decisions about Cuba’s economy could be made in Havana, not New York or Washington. The United States had almost never allowed a country in its sphere of influence to act so independently. The revolutionary leadership viewed the 1954 U.S.-engineered coup in Guatemala, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, as the model of what to expect. Castro made some attempt to blunt the negative U.S. reaction he expected. On a goodwill trip to the United States in April 1959, he offered to repay owners of confiscated lands a price that was greater than their assessed values in tax records and promised to deliver 8 million tons of sugar to the United States at below-market price. But many of his speeches in 1959 and 1960 were rife with derisive and insulting remarks that were seemingly intended to taunt the United States.

The third conflict was cultural. It involved overcoming sixty years of neocolonial acculturation to U.S. values that implicitly denigrated Cuban identity and Cubans themselves. This struggle was the most difficult because it occurred at an ideological, unconscious level, where the enemy was ingrained in each person’s conception of the Cuban character. Most often the clash manifested itself as a contest over the meaning of civilization. Defenders of the old order argued that the extent to which Cuba has become civilized could be ascertained by the availability of modern technology and even “luxuries” that would enable a person to live comfortably. In contrast, Castro argued, the level of civilization should be evaluated by the percentage of people who were illiterate and unemployed and by the number of children with parasites. In effect, Louis Pérez points out, the revolutionaries sought “to rearrange in usable form the standards by which to measure civilization and in the process summon a vision of an alternative moral order.”^[24]

Victory in all three conflicts entailed sacrifices. It cost the middle and upper classes wealth, privileges, and status. Workers and peasants were deprived of normalcy: their values were challenged, and demands for their nonpaid “social labor” disrupted routines of daily life. Clashes with the United States involved the loss of life and caused the economy to suffer. Anticipating these costs, the revolutionary leadership reasoned that victories would require Cubans to sustain great leaps of faith that could be undermined if there were disunity and dissent.

The determination to create and maintain unity led the revolutionary government to close down newspapers, nationalize television and radio stations, and cancel promised elections. Efforts to develop a disciplined party apparatus led to the arrest of some who had fought against Batista but did not want to accept Castro’s leadership. Ultimately, these measures left an indelible imprint on the Cuban Revolution. Justified at first by the necessity to galvanize the mass of Cubans and enable them to develop a revolutionary consciousness, repression became routinized by the alleged demands of national security.

To be sure, the Cuban Revolution had serious enemies. Counterrevolutionaries, centered in the Escambray Mountains and located throughout the country, fought tenaciously from 1960 to 1966. In that period, more than 2,000 insurgents and 500 Cuban soldiers were killed in battle. One counterrevolutionary veteran, Lino Fernández, told a conference in 1996 that the insurgency was essentially a military operation, not a political one, because the fighters believed that the Cuban government could be overthrown only by force, not by political means.^[25] The United States began to support the counterrevolutionaries in late 1959 and attempted to overthrow the regime by mounting the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) then waged a multifaceted “low-intensity” war against Cuba, code-named Operation Mongoose, which included plans for an invasion by the U.S. Marines.^[26] The possibility of a U.S. attack has been ever present since then because even today the United States designates Cuba as one of four “state sponsors of terrorism” and several U.S. laws stipulate that Cuba is an “enemy” of the United States. A small country like Cuba, adjacent to the world’s most powerful nation, does not have the luxury to view such designations casually, as if they had no meaning. Ricardo Alarcόn de Quesada, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, remarked to two of us in a 2006 interview that he “awakes every day anticipating a U.S. attack on the horizon.”

Yet over time, as national security came to eclipse other priorities, some threats became exaggerated, fear replaced hope, and petty officials were given license to engage in spiteful acts of cruelty. The height of repression came in the early 1960s. Following the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban government rounded up and arrested “tens of thousands of people.” While most were released quickly, in 1965 Castro acknowledged that 20,000 political prisoners continued to be incarcerated.^[27] Late in that year, the military began to “draft” thousands of people whom the regime designated as “socially deviant”: homosexuals, vagrants, and Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious missionaries. They were placed in prisonlike camps named “Military Units to Aid Production” (UMAP)—ostensibly to be reeducated—and ordered to do nonremunerated labor. The UMAP program lasted for two years. Castro disbanded it in 1967 after the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists protested the incarceration of many writers and university professors.^[28]

Still, the early years of the Revolution produced an enormous outpouring of vibrant cultural expression. For example, the official newspaper of the 26th of July Movement, Revolución, included a literary supplement every Monday, Lunes de Revoluciόn, which quickly gained international acclaim from the world’s leading avant-garde authors. Lunes focused on all of the arts. In addition to the magazine, Lunes created a record company, it started a publishing house that emphasized works by new Cuban writers that broke with traditional themes, and it produced a weekly television program that featured modern plays, jazz, and experimental films.^[29] In effect, Lunes became the forum for debates about Cuban culture.

The explosion of creativity inevitably ran the risk of challenging the government’s plan for unity. In June 1961, Castro made clear that the limits of tolerance had been reached. In the course of a three-day meeting with “intellectuals,” he laid down a new dictum. The Revolution, he said, must give an opportunity to all writers and artists, even to those who were not “genuine revolutionaries,” to express themselves freely and to use of their “creative spirit.” But this freedom would be available only if their creative work was consistent with the Revolution. Castro tersely summarized the rule by declaring, “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.”^[30] The trouble was that he did not provide clear parameters as to what lay “within” and what strayed outside the borders of permissible dissent. Without guidelines, enforcement became arbitrary. Writers and artists feared that the pronouncement was intended to stifle not to endorse freedom of expression, and their interpretation was reinforced in November, when Castro shut down Lunes de Revoluciόn.

As the Cuban revolutionaries implemented their plans, disaffected Cubans voted with their feet and left Cuba. The first wave of émigrés (1959–1962) consisted largely of landowners, wealthy business people, former Batista government officials, managers, small proprietors, and professionals, such as doctors, engineers, and skilled technicians. Many went to the United States, where those with professional training were especially welcomed as part of a U.S. strategy to undermine the Cuban Revolution by depleting the island of people who had technical expertise. By November 1965, when Castro opened the door to unrestricted emigration, 211,000 Cubans had departed. In the next six years, an additional 277,000 emigrated from Cuba.^[31]

Debate over the “New” Cuban Man (Material versus Moral Incentives)

At its core, the Cuban Revolution included a socialist humanist vision that contributed to its international appeal. The vision was based on an Enlightenment belief that human beings are “perfectible” and that their institutions make them imperfect. Simply stated, socialist humanists contend that people become alienated from their full potential when a society’s institutions—and its consequent relationships—lead them to pursue self-gratification and individual survival. They assert that humans are capable of transcending individualism and selfishness and of acting with a social conscience for the benefit of the whole society.

Scholars have tended to identify Ernesto Che Guevara as the main proponent of the socialist humanist vision among the founding leaders of the Revolution. Indeed, Guevara did call for the development of new Cuban citizens—the term he used was “new man”—who would eschew “the satisfaction of their personal ambitions” and “become more aware every day of the need to incorporate themselves into society.”^[32] Guevara’s “ultimate aim,” economist Bertram Silverman explains, was “to consciously use the process of socialist development as a force to create a new morality.”^[33] The transition, Guevara asserted, involved reeducation that should take place not only in schools but also through extensive processes of socialization, politicization, and acculturation, implemented by revolutionary leadership and sustained by nationwide citizen participation. People needed to learn the meaning and practice of the new morality gradually through their daily activities and relationships. This would require, in Guevara’s view, the use of “moral incentives” to motivate people rather than “material incentives,” which would tend to reinforce individualism.

In practice, the use of moral incentives is usually accompanied by inefficiency. Appeals to a common purpose are less likely to engender consistent hard work than differentiated rewards to individuals. For a poor country like Cuba, reduced production affects the availability of basic necessities, so it could tend to undermine popular support for the Revolution itself. The dilemma—posed by the debate over the reliance on material or moral incentives—is one that continues to frame Cuban development decisions even today.

Those on one side of the debate focus on the goal of meeting Cubans’ basic needs. They argue that the use of material incentives is necessary in order to produce enough wealth so that all Cubans receive adequate food, health care, education, transportation, and social services. Those on the other side emphasize the goal of instilling Cubans with a new morality based on egalitarianism and social consciousness. They argue that cradle-to-grave welfare socialism, without the concurrent or prior development of the new morality, reinforces individualism and inevitably generates inequalities that make realization of the egalitarian goal impossible.

Notably, the latter position did not lose its potency when Guevara left Cuba in 1965. Fidel Castro continued to be a forceful advocate for a new Cuban morality, often invoking Guevara’s name to rail against evidence of greed and selfishness. Indeed, at key junctures, he implemented significant changes in Cuba’s economy in order to restore what he viewed as a balance between material and moral incentives. In March 1968, following a January purge of “old” Communist Party members who favored material incentives, he nationalized 55,000 small businesses and called for a “revolutionary offensive” to “complete the job of making our people fully revolutionary.” Cubans had to learn to develop their revolutionary consciousness from “each event . . . each new experience.”^[34]

The experiment with moral incentives in the late 1960s contributed to serious economic problems and the failure of Castro’s heralded plan to produce 10 million tons of sugar in the 1970s. For the next decade and a half, under pressure from the Soviet Union and dependent on Soviet aid, Cuba returned to a reliance on material incentives. In 1986, however, Castro once again reacted against what he regarded as the evils of the market. He shut down private farmers’ markets and denounced the distributors of agricultural produce who earned sums far greater than those of ordinary workers. At the same time, he criticized managers of state enterprises for applying capitalist principles—favoring the production of higher-priced goods that earned more money for their firms over the production of goods needed for social projects—and “people who confuse income earned through work with what can be got through speculation.” These practices had to be “rectified,” Castro asserted, by returning to the fundamental principles of the Cuban Revolution. “There are some,” he said, “who think that socialism can be brought about without political work. . . . I believe that the problems must be resolved morally, honorably and with principles.”^[35]

To some extent, Cuba was able to reconcile the first goal—providing universal and quality health care and education, food for everyone, and universal access to basic necessities, such as electricity and clean water—with the second goal—developing a new Cuban morality when its economy was productive and the Soviet Union provided large subsidies. Within twenty years of overthrowing the Batista regime, the revolutionary government had eradicated epidemic diseases and lowered the rate of infant mortality to the level in the United States. Rural poverty essentially had been eliminated, in part because of a conscious effort to locate new production facilities in previously downtrodden areas and to increase wages of agrarian workers and provide them with housing, roads, schools, health clinics, and electricity.^[36] At the same time, in what was ultimately a failed project, the government attempted to instill a new morality by creating free boarding schools in the countryside. Students at these schools spent part of each day cultivating and harvesting crops. The intention was twofold: to break down urban prejudices about campesinos by integrating urban children into rural locales and by inducing a sense of responsibility for the common good through engagement in nonremuner-
ated “social labor.”^[37]

The 1986 rectification campaign began as the Soviet Union introduced perestroika, a restructuring of its economic planning process to place greater reliance on market mechanisms. Rectification was a pointed rejection of the Soviet model and implicitly of Soviet leadership. Cuba’s Communist Party leaders blamed the stagnation of Cuba’s economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s on their own blind adherence to Soviet practices.^[38]

Four factors mainly accounted for the early 1970s growth spurt. First, a new generation of Cuban specialists had graduated from universities and were able to do the work of the professionals who departed in the early 1960s. Second, the world price for sugar jumped to historic levels—$0.70 per pound briefly in 1974—enabling Cuba to earn hard currency from surplus sugar and to buy modern technology from European firms. Third, material incentives were introduced to spur productivity. Workers could increase their salaries by working overtime at higher wage rates, and more productive workers could earn the right to buy refrigerators, air conditioners, and other consumer durables. Fourth, in 1972, Cuba joined the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the socialist trading bloc headed by the Soviet Union. Cuba was designated as a commodity producer for the CMEA countries, providing sugar, citrus, nickel, and cobalt to its new partners. In turn, it was able to import petroleum, machinery, and manufactured goods from them at subsidized prices, defer loan repayments, and obtain new loans with low rates. Although the products from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries tended to be of low quality, they provided Cuban leaders with the means to begin an effort at diversifying the economy.

In both the 1968 and the 1986 cases, Cuba’s economic decisions were in part a reaction to pressures from the Soviet Union, and they reflected Castro’s determination to maintain as much independence for Cuba as possible. But just as Cuba’s special relationship with the United States from 1903 to 1959 created conditions that influenced the course of the Cuban Revolution, so its relationship with the Soviet Union from 1960 to 1991 reduced Castro’s options.

Foreign Relations after 1959

Testing the Limits of Soviet Tolerance

Despite his reputation for rashness and braggadocio, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was quite wary about disturbing the United States in the Western Hemisphere. In the 1950s, the Soviet Communist Party had ordered its affiliated parties in Latin America to distance themselves from any attempts to forcibly overthrow or destabilize their governments. Most Cuban communists, who were organized as the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), also followed this Moscow line and had little if any contact with the revolutionaries during the struggle against Batista. The Soviets thus did not know much about Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement, and they were not anxious to support rebels who neither would take orders from Moscow nor were likely to survive U.S. hostility. It took until February 1960 for a Soviet trade delegation to arrive in Havana, though it was a prominent one, headed by Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan. Shortly afterward, the two countries reestablished diplomatic relations, which had been broken in 1952.

In the spring of 1960, the Soviets began to supply Cuba with a few light arms, artillery and mortars, tanks, antiaircraft rockets, and technical assistance. But only after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, when it was clear that the revolutionary government had popular support and staying power, did the Soviets promise to send more sophisticated weapons.^[39] Of greater importance, when President Dwight Eisenhower barred any further U.S. importation of Cuban sugar in July 1960, the Soviet Union purchased the sugar that Cuba had expected to export to the United States. This began a trading relationship in which Cuba remained dependent largely on its production of sugar. By the 1980s, sugar export earnings from sales to the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries accounted for a larger percentage of total exports than sugar exports to the United States in the 1950s.^[40] In addition, Soviet sales of petroleum to Cuba at below-market prices were a form of foreign assistance on which Cuba came to depend.

Still, Cuba’s relations with the Soviet Union were never as congenial as U.S. officials and the Western media portrayed them. In fact, tension between the two countries was so great in 1968 that Raúl Castro publicly charged Aníbal Escalante with treason for conspiring with Soviet officials to replace Fidel Castro as first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party. Escalante had been in the PSP leadership prior to 1959 and had maintained close ties to Moscow party officials in the 1960s.

The bitterness that Cuba’s leaders felt toward the Soviet Union can be traced to October 28, 1962, the day on which the Cuban missile crisis is commonly said to have ended with an understanding between the U.S. and Soviet heads of state. (The so-called Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement stipulated that the Soviets would withdraw all offensive weapons from Cuba, and the United States would pledge not to invade or support an invasion of Cuba.) The Cubans interpreted the agreement as a Soviet capitulation to U.S. threats and judged that the Soviet Union would be unwilling in the future to put itself at risk to protect Cuba. “We realized how alone we would be in the event of a war,” Castro remarked in a speech to the first full meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in January 1968. From the Cuban perspective, the Soviet Union had made Cuba even more vulnerable than before the missile crisis. Not only had the Soviets signaled to the United States that its guarantee of protecting Cuba was hollow, but Khrushchev also was asking Cuba to return weapons to the Soviets that the Cubans believed were necessary for their defense. Castro’s palpable contempt was evident in 1968 as he characterized the Soviet leaders as “feeble-minded bureaucrats.”^[41]

After the missile crisis, the two countries locked horns on several issues as Castro tried to demonstrate that Cuba could not be controlled by a domineering Soviet Union. In 1963, despite Soviet requests, Cuba refused to sign both the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Tlatelolco Treaty, which declared Latin America as a nuclear-free zone. Guevara, speaking on behalf of the Cuban government at a 1965 conference in Algeria, castigated the Soviets for their regressive ideological views and for their immorality in not adequately supporting liberation movements.^[42] In January 1966, Cuba frontally challenged the Soviet Union’s claim to be the natural leader of the Third World. It brought together 500 delegates from Africa, Asia, and Latin America at the first Tricontinental Conference to initiate an organization that would be dedicated to promoting and supporting armed liberation struggles on the three continents. Soviet leaders had repeatedly admonished Castro to back away from supporting armed struggle. As retribution for the imperious Soviet warning, Castro did not invite any communist parties to be represented at the conference. Then in October 1967, Guevara was killed fighting against the Bolivian government. It was a terrible blow to Castro, who blamed his comrade’s death on the Bolivian Communist Party and, by implication, on their Soviet puppet masters.^[43]

Cuba Joins the Socialist Camp

Cuba and the Soviet Union had come close to a breaking point. Castro knew he had no other options but to reduce the tension and cease his open challenges to Soviet leadership. This was underscored by a Soviet decision to provide Cuba with less oil in 1968 than it was expecting to receive. On January 2, 1968, Castro reported that troublesome news to the Cuban people. In the first instance, he said, the shortfall would require new controls on the use of gasoline, great efforts to conserve oil, and a reliance on alternative sources of fuel to run sugar mills. But he held out the hope that the hardships would be temporary, lasting for at most three years. By achieving the goal of a 10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970, he asserted, Cuba would earn enough hard currency to be self-reliant. It would no longer need to make undignified, “incessant requests” for advance shipments of oil. The 10-million-ton harvest thus embodied a political goal as well as an economic one. Cuba could truly be independent if the plan were successful.^[44]

As a consequence, virtually the entire economy was subordinated to the task of meeting this unprecedented target. Ultimately, some 8.5 million tons were gathered. Although that set a record, it represented a pyrrhic victory. Other sectors of the economy suffered major losses because so many resources and so many workers had been diverted to the sugar harvest. The failure of the 10-million-ton campaign led directly to Cuba’s decision to become a junior partner in the CMEA.

As Cuba tied its economic planning more closely to the Soviet Union, it also began to link its armed forces and intelligence services to the corresponding Soviet agencies. Despite such integration, though, Cuba took its own counsel on foreign policy. Most scholars have concluded that Cuba was neither a puppet of nor a stalking horse for the Soviet Union. While Cuba’s choices often coincided with Soviet interests, there were several notable disagreements in the 1970s. In early November 1975, Cuba sent the first contingent of what would be a 35,000-soldier deployment to Angola to support the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), one of the three parties already engaged in a civil war to determine who would rule the country after independence. Castro did not inform Soviet leaders about the Cuban troop movement, fearing that they were likely to oppose it. Indeed, the Soviets were not pleased because their first priority was advancing détente with the United States. Soviet-Cuban engagement in the Angolan civil war was likely to upend delicate negotiations with the United States, which was backing the forces opposed to the MPLA. Nevertheless, Moscow agreed to provide Cuban troops with the military equipment they needed to turn back a South African invasion of Angola.^[45]

In contrast, Third World countries—especially those in Africa—lavished praise on the Cubans. Cuba’s support for the MPLA and its willingness to fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa was a key reason that the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) selected Cuba to be the location for its 1979 summit. The host country also serves as chair of the NAM until the next summit, and Castro saw this as an opportunity to forge unity among poorer countries of the world. He planned to encourage oil-rich countries in the “South” to use their resources for South-South cooperative programs, which he viewed as an essential step to reduce their dependency on the advanced industrial nations.

Cuba’s Internationalism

The divergent Soviet and Cuban perspectives—one from the vantage point of a small nation and the other from the vantage point of a superpower—were painfully evident to Castro in December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The invasion vitiated Cuba’s ability to serve as an effective NAM leader because Afghanistan was a NAM member and nonintervention was a core NAM principle. Castro had not even been informed in advance about the intervention. But he felt constrained to support the Soviet action by not condemning it, which was a position exactly opposite the one that NAM countries expected their chair to take. The asymmetry between Cuba and the Soviet Union, which had contributed to their friction in the 1960s, continued to generate tension for the next twelve years until the Soviet Union collapsed.^[46] In particular, disagreements over support for liberation struggles in Central America and southern Africa during the 1980s led to public displays of hostility. For example, Castro did not attend the 1985 funeral of Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko to show his displeasure with the low level of support the Soviet Union was providing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.^[47]

Cuba’s commitments to the MPLA’s victory in Angola, to the success of the Southwest Africa People’s Organization in its struggle for Namibia’s independence, and to the consolidation of Sandinista rule in Nicaragua were not based on expedient short-term calculations or spontaneous bursts of revolutionary zeal.^[48] They developed slowly, starting in the 1960s, and were deeply rooted in the Cuban revolutionaries’ belief that internationalism served Cuba’s immediate and long-term interests. In the short term, Cuba’s military contributions to liberation struggles, technical assistance to newly independent states, and education and health care to people from the Third World would generate goodwill and needed allies. Ultimately, as more countries shared Cuba’s views, its internationalism would have contributed to their ability to forge South-South coalitions.

Internationalism also brought ordinary Cubans into contact with the deep poverty many Third World people suffer, and new generations of Cubans who had no memory of the 1950s could gain an appreciation for the achievements of the Revolution. By the mid-1980s, approximately 15,000 Cubans—one out of every 625—were working in civilian foreign aid missions in more than thirty countries. At the same time, 24,000 students from eighty-two countries were enrolled in Cuban high schools and universities.^[49]

Challenging the United States

It may be impossible now to disentangle the different ideological underpinnings of U.S. policy toward the Cuban Revolution in the early years. One strand hearkened to the U.S. patronizing attitude evidenced by General Wood in 1899. At a February 1959 meeting of the National Security Council, CIA Director Allen Dulles counseled that “the new Cuban officials had to be treated more or less like children.”^[50] Similarly, Secretary of State Christian Herter described Fidel Castro as “immature and irrational,” and labor attaché John Correll remarked that “everybody thought he [Castro] was going to be a very good boy,” but “he wasn’t a good boy at all.”^[51]

Alternately, conventional wisdom holds that Cold War ideology shaped U.S. policy. Washington was in the grip of a mind-set that framed foreign policy decisions in terms of a bipolar, zero-sum view of the world: a country was either for the United States or for its enemy, the Soviet Union. There was no room for an independent country of the sort Cuba hoped to be. Cuba did not even establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union during the first year after the Revolution. But U.S. policymakers still were worried about the revolutionary government, in part because of its charismatic chief, Fidel Castro. Vice President Richard Nixon reported in a confidential memo, after his April 1959 meeting with Castro, that the Cuban leader “has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally.”^[52]

By the end of the year, the CIA was developing schemes to assassinate Castro and overthrow the Cuban government.^[53] In a November 1959 memo to President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State Herter provided the justification for the subversive plans. Cuba threatened the United States, he observed, because Castro “has veered towards a ‘neutralist’ anti-American foreign policy for Cuba which, if emulated by other Latin American countries, would have serious adverse effects on Free World support of our leadership.”^[54]

In effect, Cuba’s stance challenged the legitimacy of what Abraham Lowenthal has called the U.S. hegemonic presumption in the Western Hemisphere—a third ideological strand.^[55] Castro made his opposition to U.S. “leadership” explicit in September 1960, openly proclaiming Cuba’s duty to make revolution in the hemisphere. But his “First Declaration of Havana” came four days after the Organization of American States (OAS) approved the Declaration of San Jose (August 28, 1960), in which the hemisphere’s foreign ministers implicitly condemned Cuba for permitting Soviet and Chinese “extra-continental intervention” that “endangers American solidarity and security.”^[56]

Whether the initial U.S. concern was over the apparent threat to U.S. hemispheric hegemony or was in fact the so-called Soviet threat, Cold War assumptions had gained full rein over U.S. policy by mid-1960. There was no longer any question as to whether Cuba was in the Soviet camp because the two countries had negotiated a trade agreement in February and reestablished diplomatic relations in the spring. At this point, Cuba was not yet ruled by a Communist Party. Castro first declared the character of the Cuban Revolution to be “socialist” only on the eve of the April 17, 1961, Bay of Pigs invasion.

Within months of the failed U.S.-sponsored attack, Kennedy authorized the CIA to undertake a more ambitious effort to overthrow the revolutionary regime. Code-named Operation Mongoose, the project had four components: (1) terrorism—CIA agents and assets based in Florida conducted raids in Cuba to sabotage factory equipment, burned sugarcane fields, contaminated processed sugar, and provided weapons to counterrevolutionaries who undertook their own “military” actions; (2) political isolation—the United States was able to pressure enough OAS members in January 1962 to gain the necessary votes to suspend Cuba from the organization; (3) economic strangulation—in February 1962, Kennedy instituted a full embargo on all transactions between Cuba and the United States, including food and medicine; (4) military intimidation—the U.S. Navy conducted several unusually large exercises in the Caribbean in 1962, including one that involved the practice invasion of an island named “Ortsac,” that is, “Castro” spelled backward. There was also an associated project that ran concurrently with Mongoose to assassinate Castro and the other Cuban leaders.^[57] Castro interpreted all of this activity as prelude to a U.S. invasion. He sought Soviet assistance to defend Cuba, and Khrushchev offered ballistic missiles. The October 1962 missile crisis confirmed the Kennedy administration’s worst fears about how the Soviet-Cuban connection could undermine U.S. security. Subsequently, Cuba’s supposed threat to the United States, because of its close ties to the other superpower, remained a core assumption of U.S. policy until the Soviet Union imploded in 1991.^[58]

Still, there were three brief periods during the Cold War when the glimmerings of a U.S.-Cuban modus vivendi surfaced. In 1963, Kennedy used unofficial emissaries to probe the possibility of restoring relations between the two countries. But these efforts ended shortly after Johnson became president. In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initiated secret negotiations between U.S. and Cuban officials aimed at normalizing relations. The next year, as a signal of good faith, the United States voted with a majority of members in the OAS to lift the 1964 hemisphere-wide embargo against Cuba. President Gerald Ford then relaxed the U.S. embargo to permit subsidiaries of U.S. corporations in third countries to trade with Cuba.^[59] Cuba’s response to the conciliatory U.S. moves, Kissinger believed, was decidedly hostile. He viewed its support for the MPLA in Angola later that year as an assault on U.S.-Soviet détente. In December 1975, President Gerald Ford announced that Cuba’s Angola operation “destroys any opportunity for improvement of relations with the United States.”^[60]

The third opening occurred during the first two years of the Carter administration. Shortly after his inauguration, President Jimmy Carter expressed a hope to alleviate tensions between Cuba and the United States.^[61] A few weeks later, Carter announced that he would not renew the ban on travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens and that U.S. citizens would be permitted to spend money in Cuba related to their travel. He also approved negotiations with Cuba over maritime boundaries and fishing rights, and an agreement was finalized in April 1977. In September, the two countries opened diplomatic missions in each other’s capitals.

However, by 1978, the Cold War had intruded once again. Cuba had deployed more than 20,000 troops to Ethiopia to support its conflict with Somalia over the Ogaden Desert. While not enamored of Somalia, U.S. officials were concerned that the Cuban presence in Ethiopia would provide a foothold for the Soviet Union on the horn of Africa. Moreover, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, relentlessly urged the president to interpret Cuban behavior in terms of the Cold War because he believed that the Soviets were using the Cubans as a “military proxy” in Africa to serve their own expansionist aims.^[62] Carter acknowledged in his memoir the influence Brzezinski had on his thinking: “Originally from Poland, he [Brzezinski] had made a special study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. . . . I was an eager student, and took full advantage of what Brzezinski had to offer.”^[63]

As the president began to adopt Brzezinski’s worldview, he painted himself into rhetorical corners, quickly responding to each new Cuban “challenge” with a tough stance even when the reality turned out to contradict his allegations. Wayne Smith, who was in charge of the State Department’s Cuba desk at the time, recalls that in 1978 and 1979, Cuba made sincere efforts to be cooperative, but these were rebuffed.^[64] On October 4, 1979, Carter issued PD-52, a presidential directive that ordered key national security agencies to devise ways “to contain Cuba as a source of violent revolutionary change.”

Thus, when President Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. hostility toward Cuba that already was in place provided firm ground from which to launch a more threatening policy. Secretary of State Alexander Haig established the tougher orientation in February 1981, asserting that the United States must “deal with the immediate source of the problem [in El Salvador]—and that is Cuba.”^[65] Cuba took the threat seriously. It responded by creating a 1.5-million-person “Territorial Troop Militia” to defend the island with a Swiss-like strategy of a “people in arms.”^[66] In fact, the Reagan policy offered more continuity than change. The U.S. president tightened the embargo; launched Radio Martí, a station that transmitted propaganda broadcasts to the island; and generally closed the door to any discussions with Cuban officials. However, the United States did engage in negotiations with Cuba about migration issues in 1984, and it acceded to Cuba’s presence at multiparty talks in 1988 that ended the fighting in Namibia.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s threat to U.S. national security largely disappeared. With the danger gone, the rationale for U.S. policy toward Cuba evaporated. To President George H. W. Bush, the change meant that Cuba was no longer a significant foreign policy issue. Instead, domestic political considerations took center stage. Before the 1980s, the Cuban exile community played only a small role in shaping U.S. policy. Anti-Castro Cubans did not have an organization that operated in the commonly accepted manner of other ethnic lobbies until 1981, when the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was founded with the assistance and encouragement of Reagan administration officials.^[67] Structured much like the effective American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), CANF received guidance from AIPAC to broaden its focus beyond Cuba. At the time, there were just over 1 million people in the United States who were born in Cuba or were of Cuban descent. Concentrated largely in South Florida and northern New Jersey, they could not hope to influence policy merely by the power of their votes in a few congressional districts. Moreover, even then the Cuban American community did not have a monolithic position on U.S. policy toward Cuba. Notably, in 1978, a group of Cuban Americans formed the Committee of 75 to engage in a “dialogue” with Cuban officials on behalf of Cubans in exile. The committee focused on humanitarian issues, such as the release of political prisoners and the right of Cubans outside of the country to return for family visits. Beginning in 1979, the Cuban government granted visas to people entering Cuba to see families; more than 100,000 Cuban Americans visited the island in 1979–1980.^[68]

Beyond Cuban Americans’ votes, CANF relied on campaign contributions shrewdly spent by its political action committee and the power of a few well-placed senators and representatives who valued CANF’s support to influence Congress. As the “Special Period” in Cuba started, CANF had effectively gained control of U.S. policy and was determined to restructure the policy in order to push the revolutionary regime into the abyss toward which it seemed to be tipping.

Reinventing the Cuban Revolution

By 1990, Cuba had developed to the point where infectious diseases had been eradicated and its rate of infant mortality was comparable to that of advanced industrial nations, where there were more doctors per capita than in any other country and free universal health care was available throughout the island, and where universities had been established in every province, education through graduate school was free, and racial and gender disparities were disappearing because of educational opportunities. Although Cuba was still a poor country by standard measures of gross domestic product (GDP), it was an egalitarian society where most people considered themselves to be middle class and could reasonably hope that their children’s lives would be better than their own. In the first thirty-two years of the Revolution, the great majority of Cubans also had gained an intangible but discernible sense of dignity, in part because of Cuba’s prowess in international sports competitions; the worldwide recognition of Cuban artists, writers, dancers, and filmmakers; and the respect that other Third World countries accorded to this small nation that had repeatedly and successfully defied the hovering giant ninety miles away.

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 made clear the continuing weakness of Cuba’s monocultural export economy and its vulnerability to the United States. Cuba’s adaptation to its new circumstances altered the very nature of the Cuban Revolution, significantly impacting the economic and political organization of the country, Cuba’s culture and daily life, and its foreign relations. In effect, Cuba had to abandon the former revolutionary order and invent a new one.

Economics and Politics during the Special Period

Imagine your reaction if you had to substitute sugar water for food every third day for a year and as a result you lost your eyesight because of a vitamin deficiency (as happened to 50,000 Cubans temporarily) and twenty to twenty-five pounds (the average for Cubans in 1993–1994).^[69] Suppose that you could not drive your car, buses ran infrequently because of gasoline shortages, and blackouts meant that food you hoped to preserve in your refrigerator was rotting because oil imports dropped by 70 percent over a four-year period as they did in Cuba from 1989 to 1993. Picture yourself undergoing an operation at a formerly reliable hospital where now several doctors and nurses were absent because of transportation problems and there were hardly any anesthetics, medicines, or bandages. In 1990, few Cubans believed that they would ever live this kind of life, even when Cuban President Fidel Castro announced that the country was entering a “Special Period in a Time of Peace.”

The collapse of the CMEA, the Eastern bloc’s trading system through which Cuba had conducted 85 percent of its international commerce, forced it to find new trading partners who demanded that Cuba pay market prices in an internationally convertible (i.e., “hard”) currency for the goods it imported. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion in annual economic aid. As its international trade plummeted between 1990 and 1993, Cuba’s GDP declined by 30 percent.^[70] A further blow came in 1993, when the United States began to implement the Cuban Democracy Act, which banned sales to Cuba by subsidiaries of U.S. corporations abroad, thereby increasing the cost of food and medicine that Cuba imported.^[71]

The Search for Hard Currency

Cuban leaders understood that the economic crisis was also “a crisis in the way of conceiving of socialism, a crisis of values, a moral crisis, a crisis of society,” as political scientist Rafael Hernández observes.^[72] They believed that solving the economic crisis was essential to the political survival of the Revolution. While they gave some attention to long-term implications of their decisions, they focused on “a relatively narrow agenda” of immediate solutions.^[73] In practical terms, the new reality meant that Cuba had to abandon its economic model of import-substitution industrialization and to insert itself into the international capitalist economy. It had to find new ways quickly to earn hard currency, though there were few options available. The export of sugar and nickel had been Cuba’s main source of convertible funds. But production in both industries was inefficient and depended on imported oil that Cuba could no longer afford. Backed into a corner, Cuba’s leaders opted for three strategies they had eschewed previously.

First, they sought to attract large amounts of foreign investment capital. This required removing bureaucratic obstacles, creating new Cuban companies to interact with foreigners, and approving new laws that would enable foreign enterprises to own more than 49 percent of a joint venture with a Cuban entity. The new quasi-private enterprises became staffed largely by former members of the Cuban armed forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias [FAR]).^[74] In 1995, the government permitted 100 percent foreign ownership in a few specified industries. There were 392 foreign joint ventures in Cuba by 2001.^[75]

Hotels became the largest kind of foreign investment, coinciding with Cuba’s second strategy for acquiring hard currency: building up its tourist industry. But the decision was not taken lightly. As Marguerite Jiménez explains, “Fidel Castro’s reluctance to promote tourism was rooted in memories of pre-1959 Cuba, as an all-inclusive hedonist playground for affluent North American tourists, accompanied by prostitution, corruption, and gambling casinos run by organized crime syndicates.”^[76] By 2005, more than 2 million visitors were arriving on the island annually, and Cuba had become one of the top ten tourist locations in the Western Hemisphere. Tourism replaced sugar as the country’s most important source of hard currency.

The government turned to its third strategy in 1993, legalizing the use of U.S. dollars on the island and opening dollar stores (Tiendas de Recuperación de Divisas) at which Cubans could purchase imported goods. The goal was to discourage the illegal black market, to capture dollars that could be used for the importation of necessities, and to encourage Cubans abroad to send even more money to their families. The policy succeeded; over the next decade, remittances sent by relatives rose to over $1 billion annually. At the same time, however, the purchasing power of the Cuban peso receded, exacerbating inequality among Cubans by creating a two-class system of consumption: one for those with access to dollars (e.g., from remittances or tips in the tourist sector) and one for those without.

Cuban officials also sought to reduce the need for hard currency by reorganizing the system of food production. Large state farms had required imported equipment, fertilizer, and petroleum. They were replaced by small producer cooperatives called Basic Units of Cooperative Production (Unidades Básicas de Produccíon [UBPC]), in which individual families had land use rights. The government also reintroduced free farmers’ markets, in which both private farmers and UBPCs could sell produce to the public at market prices. These reforms only marginally increased food production; at the turn of the century, Cuba still had to import 70 percent of its food.

Perhaps the most difficult decision concerned sugar. Cuban identity had been entwined with sugar for nearly two centuries, and Cuba had long been the world’s leading producer of the sweetener. But the production of sugar became unsustainable by the end of the twentieth century.^[77] At times, Cuba spent more to harvest and process the cane than it earned in hard currency. For several years, the government subsidized sugar production for political, not economic, reasons to avoid dislocations in rural areas where sugar constituted the only source of employment. The day of reckoning arrived in May 2002, when the government announced that half the island’s mills would be closed down.

Rafter Exodus

In 1994, the economic calamity clearly had become a political one as emigration pressures mounted. The number of people trying to leave the island illegally every month rose from dozens to hundreds and then thousands. The deep impact of the economy’s decline was evident in the desperation of those who used makeshift rafts—inner tubes, wood slats, anything that would float—to traverse the Florida Straits, one of the world’s most dangerous waterways. By some estimates, three-fourths of those who attempted the trip did not survive.^[78]

In 1984, as a result of the 1980 Mariel exodus, the United States and Cuba signed an immigration accord under which “up to” 20,000 would be granted immigrant visas. However, just as economic conditions got worse, the United States issued fewer and fewer visas—only 2,003 in 1993 despite more than ten times that number of applicants—leaving illegal departure as the only way out. In 1990, the US Coast Guard rescued 467 rafters; the number grew to 2,565 and 3,656 in 1992 and 1993, respectively. The 1993 yearly total was surpassed by June 1994, a month when 1,173 rafters arrived safely in the United States.^[79] In July, as one group attempted to hijack a ferry, the Cuban coast guard attacked the boat with high-pressure fire hoses and sank it; forty-one people died. The ferry incident set off a series of spontaneous street riots not seen in Havana since 1959. Fidel Castro charged that the United States was encouraging the exodus by granting asylum to rafters, and early in August he announced that Cuba would not constrain anyone from trying to leave Cuba.^[80] Thousands began flocking to the shore.

Significantly, most of these emigrants were Cubans who had grown up during the Revolution. They were younger than the wave in the 1960s. Two-thirds of those whose occupations could be identified had been in low-skilled jobs.^[81] While it was evident that their principal motive for leaving Cuba was economic, there also was some evidence that they had become alienated from a system that seemed unresponsive to their needs, had given them little possibility for engagement in shaping their lives, and had offered little hope for the future. The exodus ended with a U.S.-Cuban accord under which the United States would grant at least 20,000 visas annually to Cubans and would house rafters whom it picked up on the high seas at the Guantánamo naval base. In 1995, the agreement was amended: the United States allowed the 23,000 Guantánamo detainees to apply for visas and committed itself to return to Cuba any illegal émigrés found on the high seas. This became known as the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy; Cubans picked up at sea were returned to Cuba, but those who made it to the United States or a U.S. territory such as Puerto Rico were allowed to stay.

In a sense the rafter exodus represented a failure of the most important political institution in the Cuban political system, the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Cuba [PCC]). In the early 1990s, the PCC was the principal venue for elite debate over strategies to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and the CMEA, as William LeoGrande’s chapter in this volume explains. However, Fidel Castro soon opted for maintaining political control. As the decade wore on, he allowed the PCC to atrophy, preferring to govern through directives conveyed by the Grupo de Apoyo, a small team of his intimate advisers. This group also was seen as the source of Cuba’s future leaders. For example, Carlos Lage Dávila had become the Cuban vice president responsible for economic affairs and the executive secretary of the Council of Ministers; Felipe Pérez Roque had been Castro’s chief of staff for a decade when the president named the thirty-four-year-old as foreign minister in 1999.

Civil Society

As the government’s ability to provide employment and a social safety net for everyone diminished, it became more tolerant of religious institutions and allowed nongovernmental organizations to form. While some of the organizations continued to have links to the state and thus might not be indicative of an truly emergent civil society, there is little doubt that conditions during the Special Period fostered new networks and groups that provided some opening for the expression of independent views. The churches were the most significant element of the new Cuban civil society, in part because they had an islandwide organizational infrastructure and a mass base of members. They have had an important role at the community level delivering relief supplies from sister churches abroad. The Catholic Church, in particular, developed magazines and newsletters that circulate widely.

The Catholic Church had opposed the Revolution in the 1960s, and until the Special Period, active participation as a congregant was an obstacle for anyone who wanted to move ahead professionally or politically. But as the Church accommodated itself to the Revolution, the state softened its stance against religion. In 1991, the Fourth PCC Congress voted to allow members of any religious group to gain Communist Party membership. Three years later, the Vatican named Havana Archbishop Jaime Ortega y Alamino as a cardinal. Historian Margaret Crahan highlights his statement in which he affirmed the Catholic Church’s support for the Revolution’s social justice accomplishments. But she notes that he also stipulated that “the Church had an obligation to help the Cuban people transcend the revolution’s limitations . . . through intensifying evangelization so that the laity would be better prepared to act through a mobilized civil society.”^[82]

The church’s potential for expanding civil society received a boost in January 1998, when Pope John Paul II made the first papal visit ever to the island. Tumultuous crowds welcomed him, and throughout the country, Cubans placed signs in their windows proclaiming “No tengo miedo” (I have no fear). During the five-day trip across Cuba, the pope called both for more freedom of speech and religious education and for an end to the U.S. embargo. Still, the church’s attempts to strengthen faith-based communities and to encourage civic engagement were hampered in the 1990s by insufficient resources and limited popular support.

One of the most prominent examples of civic engagement emerged from the work of a lay Catholic activist, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas. In the late 1990s, he organized the Varela Project, which had the goal of collecting a sufficient number of signatures on a petition to trigger a national referendum to promote freedom of speech and assembly, the right to own a business, and the end of one-party rule. Although the 11,000 signatures he submitted to the National Assembly in 2002 exceeded constitutional requirements, the petition was denied.

While the success of the petition drive was not anticipated, the Varela Project also lacked the resources and critical mass to sustain a serious challenge to the government. Indeed, none of the small groups of “dissidents” who had been supported and/or promoted by U.S. governmental and nongovernmental organizations were able to build an effective network of opposition during the Special Period. In part, this was a consequence of state repression.^[83] They also were discredited by working too closely with the U.S. government. In addition, Cubans found nontraditional ways to express their views through media such as film, the plastic arts, and music.

Culture and Society during the Special Period

Shortages during the Special Period initially took a heavy toll on all forms of Cuban culture. Money for films was scarce, as was paper for newspapers and books. Baseball games were played only during the daytime in order to avoid using stadium lights. To survive, Cuban writers and artists turned abroad to publish their works, host dance performances, curate art exhibits, and coproduce films. For example, the Academy Award–nominated 1993 film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), was produced as a Cuban-Spanish-Mexican venture. The film is also an example of how the new forms of financing for the arts broadened the possibilities for expression. Fresa y chocolate probes several previously taboo subjects: homosexuality, ideological rigidity, and even patriotism.

The 1984 Havana Art Biennial was one of the first of its kind. As it grew in popularity and drew international crowds to purchase the works on display, artists pushed the boundaries of what had been acceptable.^[84] In part, this was possible because they were backed by Abel Prieto Jiménez, the creative and iconoclastic minister of culture from 1997 to 2012. (Prieto had shoulder-length hair and was an avowed Beatles fan even in the days when the band was regarded as an example of bourgeois decadence.) But Cuban leaders also bowed to the inevitable as the international market gave Cuban artists new sources of financial support.

As the Special Period persisted, musicians found ever-greater freedom to criticize not only shortages but also the shortcomings of the Revolution. Carlos Varela, a popular folksinger, carried on the nueva trova tradition made famous by Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés. But his songs went right to the edge, in effect calling for major reforms. For example, in “William Tell,” he sings that the archer

Resolver (to find a solution) was the catchword of the Special Period for coping with shortages in order to handle mundane tasks of daily life or carry on a profession. For musicians, the cost of equipment that could replicate the kind of rap music they wanted to play was prohibitive. “Rap was originally an import,” sociologist Sujatha Fernandes explains, but “Cuban rap soon took on a life of its own.” Without samplers, mixers, and albums, she notes, Cuban rappers by the mid-1990s re-created

As Cuban hip-hop evolved independently of U.S. influence, its lyrics and themes became a distinctive contrast to the American genre. Instead of promoting sexual exploitation and consumption, Cuban artists focused on the problems of daily life and the way that governmental decisions during the Special Period undermined achievements of the Revolution, such as racial equality.

As noted earlier, overcoming the racial discrimination that had been entrenched in Cuban institutions prior to 1959 was one of the Revolution’s goals and successes. Historian Alejandro de la Fuente reports that “by the early 1980s Cuban society had made remarkable progress in the reduction of racial inequality in a number of crucial areas, including education, indicators of health care, and the occupational structure. Racial inequality persisted in some areas, but the trend was unequivocally towards equality.”^[87] He adds that even in leadership positions, “inequality had decreased significantly.”^[88]

But the Special Period undermined these advances, many of which depended on government spending that declined after 1990. While several market reforms engendered inequalities across the races, some had their greatest negative impact on blacks, who had less access to hard currency from remittances because whites constituted the largest portion of exiles abroad.^[89] Moreover, discrimination against darker-skinned Cubans in the tourist sector limited their access to the second source of hard currency. The consequence was that while “all Cubans were equal before the law,” those able to resolver more successfully during the Special Period tended to be lighter-skinned Cubans.^[90]

Not surprisingly, Cubans’ health and the quality of their education suffered during the first years of the Special Period. As noted earlier, this was due largely to an inadequate diet and the increased cost of food and medicine as a result of the U.S. embargo. Many old problems began to reappear. For example, as Robin Williams reports, diarrhea became the second most frequent condition that sent Cubans to a doctor, largely because the incidence of waterborne diseases doubled. In addition, he notes, “The country’s mammography program [was] crippled by a shortage of film and spare parts.”^[91]

Similarly, basic teaching materials were no longer available, though the greatest impact on education came from two different effects of the Special Period. First, teachers’ salaries were so low that many left the profession, and there were few replacements. Second, young people began to devalue education, as it no longer was “the main route to a higher standard of living, nor an essential mechanism for achieving social status.”^[92] A taxi driver could earn in three days what a teacher earned in a month.

Still, the negative impact of the economic crisis on Cubans’ health and education was less than expected. The rate of infant mortality did not rise, and life expectancy did not decrease. Illiteracy did not return. Despite the economic conditions, throughout the 1990s the Cuban government continued to allocate scarce funds to health care, education, social security, and assistance to the poor at a relatively constant percentage of GDP—and at times at a higher percentage. By the end of the decade, teachers gained a 30 percent increase in their wages. Cuban inventiveness led to new forms of volunteerism in staffing day care centers, much as Cuba had relied on volunteers to work in the 1961 literacy campaign. Indeed, Cuba looked to the new millennium with a renewed confidence, in part because changing international circumstances gave it several new allies.

Foreign Policy during the Special Period

Throughout 1991, Fidel Castro repeatedly invoked the 1962 missile crisis, reminding Cubans that they had faced seemingly insurmountable challenges before without flinching and that they had successfully fought enemies with valor, salvaging “the honor of Latin America.”^[93] Indeed, the Cuban leader perceived that his country was utterly “alone” in the world, much as he did at the end of the missile crisis when it seemed that the Soviet Union had abandoned Cuba and that the United States remained an even greater threat.^[94] On December 27, 1991, two days after the Soviet Union formally “dissolved” itself, he declared that Cuba was unique in the Western Hemisphere. “What is Latin America today?” Castro asked contemptuously. “A collection of balkanized and underdeveloped states. . . . In Latin America we have the fragmentation of Latin Americans and, within each country . . . fragmentation, ideal conditions for imperialist domination over all these countries.”^[95]

As in the 1960s, Cuba was not content merely to react to the isolating circumstances in which it found itself. After the missile crisis, it pursued a policy of trying to create Third World allies by supporting liberation movements in Asia and Africa and insurgencies in Latin America. Although Cuba’s strategy changed in the 1990s, survival remained the leaders’ primary foreign policy goal. In pursuing it, political scientist Jorge Domínguez explains, they were characteristically proactive and relied on “some pre-1990 legacies” to achieve their objective, including intense engagement in multilateral institutions and the development of new defensive economic ties with emerging powers, such as China.^[96]

Building New Alliances

Cuba had built a deep well of appreciation in the Third World because of its assistance programs and sustained military commitment in Angola against the apartheid South African regime. This was highlighted by Nelson Mandela during a 1991 trip to Cuba, the year after he was released from prison. In a speech on July 26, with Fidel Castro at his side, Mandela declared,

After President George H. W. Bush signed the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act into law, tightening the U.S. embargo and including extraterritorial provisions that affected how other countries might trade with Cuba, the UN General Assembly voted to condemn the U.S. sanctions. While initially more countries abstained than approved the measure, in subsequent years the number of yeas grew so that by 2005 more than 180 countries voted affirmatively. (In 2013, the vote was 188–2–3; only Israel voted with the United States against the resolution, and the Marshall Islands, Palau and Micronesia abstained.)

In its search for foreign investment, Cuba turned to Europe at the start of the Special Period. The initial response was tepid, but European investors saw new opportunities when Cuba revised its laws on foreign ownership. In part, the 1996 Helms-Burton Act was intended to scare these Europeans away by targeting investment capital for penalties. But the law had only a limited effect, as U.S. allies demanded that President Bill Clinton waive a key provision that could have been costly to several European corporations. It was the emergence of the conservative José María Aznar government in Spain, which had a greater impact on Cuba’s relations with Europe. Spain’s efforts to condition loans and aid to Cuba on human rights criteria led to a series of angry exchanges that reduced aid that Cuba received from the European Union (EU) and curtailed some trade. Castro viewed the EU demands as a renewed form of neocolonial intervention and bluntly asserted in 2003 that “Cuba does not need the aid of the European Union to survive.”^[98]

While tinged with bravado, his statement also marked a turning point in Cuban foreign policy. Cuba would no longer concentrate on its relations with the United States, Russia, or Europe. It would devote its foreign policy more intently toward the Third World, toward countries with which it could relate on the basis of mutual respect, not asymmetric requirements. Notably, in 2003, Third World countries again acknowledged Cuba as a global leader by naming it as the host of the 2006 Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and consequently the organization’s chair for the following three years. The NAM’s 118-member states include most of the Third World, and its selection was a striking indication of Cuba’s standing because Havana had been the venue of a summit once before, in 1979.

In this regard, Cuban leaders have tended to view China—despite its size, wealth, military power, and potential for domination—differently than countries that previously had dominated Cuba. To be sure, until the late 1980s, China had little capacity to provide much support to Cuba, and it had little incentive to do so given Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union. But as the Soviet Union dissolved, China began a historic spurt in the growth of its economy. In the 1990s, China also started to invest in Latin America as it searched for raw materials to fuel its fast-growing industries.

Cuba was not high on China’s target list. China did ship 500,000 bicycles to Cuba in 1992 and 1993, and in 1997 it funded and provided technical assistance for the start of a small Cuban bicycle industry. But it was not until 2001 that China began to allocate large sums to Cuba. That year, it provided nearly $400 million in long-term loans and credits to upgrade Cuba’s telecommunication infrastructure and to enable Cuba to purchase Chinese televisions, washing machines, and air conditioners. In 2006, Cuba signed contracts worth more than $2 billion, using Chinese lines of credit, for transportation infrastructure development.^[99]

The most important international development for Cuba occurred in 1998, when Hugo Chávez was elected Venezuela’s president. Chávez looked to Fidel Castro as his spiritual mentor and once in office turned to the Cuba leader for advice. Together, they began to implement an ambitious project, as Castro described it in October 2000, “to unite the Latin American and Caribbean nations and to struggle for a world economic order that brings more justice to all peoples.”^[100] That month, Venezuela began to sell oil to some South American countries and Cuba at a price that was not only one-third less than the world market price but also could be purchased with a loan payable after fifteen years at a 2 percent interest rate.

By 2001, Cuba was importing more oil from Venezuela than it had imported from the Soviet Union in 1990. Cuba paid for oil by sending teachers and doctors to Venezuela. The teachers contributed to the eradication of illiteracy in Venezuela, and the doctors helped Venezuela establish a medical program for the poor, Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood). By 2006, more than 20,000 Cuban doctors were serving in Venezuela. In 2013, 30,000 Cuban doctors were there, and Venezuela had become Cuba’s major trading partner, accounting for nearly 22 percent of Cuba’s imports and exports.^[101]

Late in 2004, Cuba and Venezuela launched a new organization intended to achieve their common hemispheric goals: the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA in the Spanish acronym).^[102] Initially aimed at economically integrating Latin American and Caribbean countries, in competition with the U.S.-proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, ALBA also created a development bank and served as a coordinating mechanism for development projects. In January 2006, following the inauguration of Evo Morales as president, Bolivia joined ALBA.

Engagement and Disengagement with the United States

In 1991, Cuba ceased being an important foreign policy issue for the United States. The small country no longer supported revolutionary movements in Latin America and had withdrawn its forces from Africa. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had pulled its troops out of Cuba, the Sandinistas lost the 1990 presidential election in Nicaragua, and the civil war in El Salvador ended with a conservative government in power. In this context, President Bush turned the policy over to Congress, where Cuban American legislators and others whom the CANF supported were eager to push the Cuban government over the brink. In 1992, the House and Senate approved the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA), and when presidential candidate Bill Clinton endorsed the bill, President Bush felt compelled to sign it despite his misgivings. Cuba had become a U.S. domestic political issue. As noted earlier, the CDA prohibited foreign subsidiaries of U.S. firms from trading with Cuba, and it stipulated that vessels entering Cuban ports would not be able to enter a U.S. port for the purpose of trade during the subsequent 180 days, which raised shipping costs for Cuban imports.

Cuba’s tactical response was to go beyond trade by attracting new foreign investors. As the plan began to work, hard-liners in Congress sought to scare off investors with legislation that would enable former Cuban property owners, such as Bacardi, to sue the investors in a U.S. court and obtain compensation by seizing their U.S.-based properties. Officially titled the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act, the bill became popularly known as Helms-Burton after its two principal sponsors, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Representative Dan Burton (R-IN). Cubans viewed the act as a challenge to its national sovereignty, much like the Platt Amendment.^[103] They argued that it arrogated to the United States the right to determine whether there has been an appropriate transition to democracy, that is, whether the Cubans have established a government that the United States can trust to rule the island.^[104]

Attorney General Janet Reno reportedly recommended that President Clinton veto the Helms-Burton bill because it undermined supposed constitutional prerogatives of the president. But Clinton’s political advisers were more concerned about the effect that a veto would have on the president’s reelection after Cuba shot down two civilian aircraft manned by Brothers-to-the-Rescue pilots in February 1996.^[105] However, despite the seeming restrictions that Helms-Burton seemed to pose on a president’s authority, President Clinton relaxed the embargo in 1999. His executive orders permitted an increase in cultural exchanges (including two baseball games between the Baltimore Orioles and Cuba’s national team) and eased travel regulations, stimulating several new “people-to-people” educational programs by universities and organizations such as the National Geographic Society.

Meanwhile, the weakening of the anti-Castro lobby and the growing interest by U.S. agricultural interests in selling products to Cuba led to the 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act (TSRA), which authorized the direct commercial export of food and agricultural products from the United States to Cuban government-operated entities on a cash basis. Despite its financing hurdles, the TSRA provided the mechanism to open trade significantly. In 2008 U.S. sales of agricultural goods reached a high point of $711.5 million, though they declined to half that annual level by the end of 2013.^[106]

But Bush owed right-wing Cuban Americans for the various kinds of contributions they made to his election in 2000. Based on the report of his presidential Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba (CAFC), in May 2004, Bush issued a series of harsh regulations intended to hasten “Cuba’s transition from Stalinist rule.”^[107] Fidel Castro responded by asserting that Cuba viewed the new U.S. policy as an attempt “to intimidate, to terrorize this country and eventually to destroy its socio-economic system and independence.”^[108] On the eve of Fidel Castro’s illness, in July 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Cuban American Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutiérrez released the commission’s second report, which proposed new regulations to ensure that “the Castro regime’s succession strategy does not succeed.”^[109] The report included detailed plans for a U.S. occupation, from reorganizing the economy and the educational system to the holding of multiparty elections.

In short, as Raúl Castro took over the reins of leadership, Cuba was at a high point in its relations with the rest of the world and at a nadir in its relations with United States. The Cuban government had weathered a Special Period that might have destabilized most other countries, but it was clear that political and economic reforms were necessary if the Cuban Revolution was going to be sustainable. The Cuban people had demonstrated a remarkable resilience and ability to adapt, but in 2006 no one could be certain how much longer they would be patient.

Notes

Pablo Bachelet, “U.S. Policy Gives the Bush Administration Few Options in Cuba, Critics Say,” McClatchy Newspapers, August 2, 2006.

Julia E. Sweig, “Fidel’s Final Victory,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007.

Nelson P. Valdés, “The Revolutionary and Political Content of Fidel Castro’s Charismatic Authority,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 27.

Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 328ff.

The period from 1829 to 1860 also experienced significant political turmoil, especially around the question of how much authority the national government had in relation to the states. In effect, the national government’s legal-institutional legitimacy—as a replacement for legitimacy based on tradition—was solidified only by the North’s victory in the Civil War and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945); David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Continuity and Change in Cuba at Fifty: The Revolution at a Crossroads,” in this volume. See also “Speech Delivered by Raúl Castro Ruz, President of the Councils of State and Ministers, at the Close of the Inaugural Session of the Seventh Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power,” Havana, February 24, 2008, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/rauldiscursos/2008/esp/r240208e.html (accessed August 20, 2013).

There were an estimated 112,000 Indians on the island in 1492 and fewer than 3,000 by the mid-1550s. See Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Oscar Loyala Vega, Historia de Cuba 1492–1898, 3rd ed. (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 2006), 25, 50–58; Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 157.

^{For example, see “Discursos pronunciados en el Acto Solemne, el 20 de junio del 2002
Intervención de Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, Presidente de la Asamblea Nacional del
Poder Popular,” June 20, 2002, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/documentos/2002/esp/a200602e.html (accessed August 18, 2013).}

Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 80–81.

10.

Jules Robert Benjamin, The United States and Cuba: Hegemony and Dependent Development, 1880–1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 4–5; Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 61.

11.

^{Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 22.}

12.

Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137–38.

13.

Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 145.

14.

Schoultz, Beneath the United States, 148.

15.

Leland Hamilton Jenks, Our Cuban Colony: A Study in Sugar (New York: Vanguard Press, 1928), 286.

16.

Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 35; Leland Johnson, “U.S. Business Interests in Cuba and the Rise of Castro,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (1965): 443, 453; Robin Blackburn, “Prologue to the Cuban Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 21, October 1963, 59–60.

17.

^{Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7, 157.}

18.

As quoted in Luis E. Aguilar, Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution (New York: Norton, 1972), 163–64.

19.

^{Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 165–82.}

20.

“Program Manifesto of the 26th of July Movement,” in Cuba in Revolution, ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 113–40.

21.

Lourdes Casal, “Race Relations in Contemporary Cuba,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner, William M. LeoGrande, Donna Rich, and Daniel Siegel (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 475; Alejandro de la Fuente, “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba’s Special Period,” Socialism and Democracy 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001).

22.

Casal, “Race Relations in Contemporary Cuba,” 477.

23.

^{Saul Landau, “Asking the Right Questions about Cuba,” in Brenner et al., The Cuba Reader, xxiii.}

24.

^{Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 482.}

25.

James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 10–13; Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 345–46.

26.

Brig. Gen. Lansdale, “Review of Operation Mongoose,” memorandum for the Special Group (Augmented), July 25, 1962, Office of the Secretary of Defense, declassified January 5, 1989, 8, in The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader, ed. Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh (New York: New Press, 1992), 47.

27.

Domínguez, Cuba, 253.

28.

Domínguez, Cuba, 356–57.

29.

William Luis, “Exhuming Lunes de Revolución,” CR: The New Centennial Review 2, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 254–57.

30.

^{“Discurso Pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Ministro del Gobierno
Revolucionario y Secretario del PURSC, Como Conclusion de las Reuniones con los Intelectuales
Cubanos, Efectuadas en la Biblioteca Nacional el 16, 23 y 30 de Junio de 1961,” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f300661e.html (accessed August 18, 2013).}

31.

^{Susan Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2009), 10–12; Felix Roberto Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the U.S., 1959–1995 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 58–59.}

32.

Ernesto Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” in Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate, ed. Bertram Silverman (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 343–44.

33.

Bertram Silverman, “Introduction: The Great Debate in Retrospect: Economic Rationality and the Ethics of Revolution,” in Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba, 15.

34.

^{Fidel Castro, “Speech Delivered on March 13, 1968, at Ceremonies Marking the 11th
Anniversary of the Attack on the Presidential Palace, at the University of Havana,”
in Fidel Castro Speaks, ed. Martin Kenner and James Petras (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 271, 283.}

35.

^{Fidel Castro, “Speech Delivered on the 25th Anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Victory,
April 19, 1986,” in Cuban Revolution Reader: A Documentary History, ed. Julio García Luis (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2001), 243–45.}

36.

Susan Eva Eckstein, Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 129–37, 151–54.

37.

Marvin Leiner, “Cuba’s Schools: Twenty-Five Years Later,” in Cuba: Twenty-Five Years of Revolution, 1959–1984, ed. Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk (New York: Praeger, 1985), 28–29, 32–36.

38.

Max Azicri, Cuba Today and Tomorrow: Reinventing Socialism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 24–31, 55–59; Eckstein, Back from the Future, 41–47.

39.

^{Carlos Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev, Kennedy and the Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), 18; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy
Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 146.}

40.

^{Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 88.}

41.

James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 36, 60.

42.

Ernesto (Che) Guevara, “Speech in Algiers to the Second Seminar of the Organization of Afro-Asian Solidarity, February 25, 1965,” in Che Guevara Speaks, ed. George Lavan (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1967), 107–8.

43.

Fidel Castro, “A Necessary Introduction,” in El Diario del Che en Bolivia (Havana: Editora Política, 1987), xvii–xviii.

44.

^{“Discurso Pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, al Conmemorarse el IX Aniversario
del Triunfo de la Revoluciόn, en la Plaza de la Revoluciόn, el 2 de Enero de 1968,”
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1968/esp/f020168e.html (accessed August 18, 2013).}

45.

^{Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 260, 305–7.}

46.

^{Mervyn J. Bain, “Cuba-Soviet Relations in the Gorbachev Era,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 773–76.}

47.

William M. LeoGrande, “Cuba,” in Confronting Revolution: Security through Diplomacy in Central America, ed. Morris Blachman, William M. LeoGrande, and Kenneth Sharpe (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 253.

48.

William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 15, 24–25; Eckstein, Back from the Future, 186–88.

49.

H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-Soviet World (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 98–99; Jorge I. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuban Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 171–75.

50.

As quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Republic, 90.

51.

Quoted in Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 241.

52.

^{Richard M. Nixon, “Rough Draft of Summary of Conversation between the Vice-President
and Fidel Castro,” April 25, 1959, reprinted in Jeffrey J. Safford, “The Nixon-Castro
Meeting of 19 April 1959,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 431.}

53.

Peter Kornbluh, “Introduction: History Held Hostage,” in Bay of Pigs Declassified, ed. Peter Kornbluh (New York: New Press, 1998), 9; Paterson, Contesting Castro, 258.

54.

“Memorandum from the Secretary of State to the President: Current Basic United States Policy toward Cuba,” in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. 6, Cuba (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), doc. no. 387, 657.

55.

Abraham F. Lowenthal, “The United States and Latin America: Ending the Hegemonic Presumption,” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (October 1976).

56.

“First Declaration of Havana,” September 2, 1960, in Cuban Revolution Reader: A Documentary History of 40 Key Moments of the Cuban Revolution, ed. Julio García Luis (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2001), 45–51.

57.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Inspector General, “Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” May 23, 1967, National Archives and Records Administration, JFK Assassination System, Record Series: JFK, record no. 104-10213-10101, agency file no. 80TO1357A (released June 23, 1998).

58.

^{McGeorge Bundy, “Memorandum for the Record,” November 12, 1963, in U.S. Department
of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 11, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997), doc. no. 377, 889; Gregory F.
Treverton, “Cuba in U.S. Security Perspective,” in U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 1990s, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez and Rafael Hernández (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989),
71.}

59.

^{Peter Kornbluh and William M. LeoGrande, “Talking with Castro,” Cigar Aficionado, January/February 2009, 6–7; Peter Kornbluh and James G. Blight, “Dialogue with Castro:
A Hidden History,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994; William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).}

60.

^{Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 785–87; “Ford Says Angola Acts Hurt Detente,
Cuba Tie,” New York Times, December 21, 1975, 3.}

61.

Austin Scott, “Carter Outlines Basis for Better Ties with Cuba,” Washington Post, February 17, 1977.

62.

Zbigniew Brzezinksi, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 180–90.

63.

^{Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 51.}

64.

Wayne S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of U.S.-Cuban Relations since 1957 (New York: Norton, 1987), 128–40, 141–42.

65.

Richard Halloran, “From Washington and El Salvador, Differing Views on Fighting Rebels,” New York Times, February 21, 1981.

66.

^{Philip Brenner, “Change and Continuity in Cuban Foreign Policy,” in Brenner et al.,
The Cuban Reader, 263–65.}

67.

Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 32–36.

68.

Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 73–78.

69.

Diane Kuntz, “The Politics of Suffering: The Impact of the U.S. Embargo on the Health of the Cuban People” (report to the American Public Health Association of a fact-finding trip to Cuba, June 6–11, 1993), Journal of Public Health Policy 15, no. 1 (Spring 1994); Katherine Tucker and Thomas R. Hedges, “Food Shortages and an Epidemic of Optic and Peripheral Neuropathy in Cuba,” Nutrition Reviews 51, no. 12 (1993): 349–57. By 1993, the average daily caloric intake in Cuba had fallen below the World Health Organization standard. Diet insufficiency led to outbreaks of disorders that had long vanished from Cuba, such as neuropathy (damage to nerves that can produce sharp pains in the fingers and feet), loss of a sense of touch, an inability to control muscle movement, and even temporary blindness.

70.

Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuba’s Economic Transition: Successes, Deficiencies, and Challenges,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, and Lorena Barberia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19.

71.

The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act bars subsidiaries of U.S. corporations in third countries from selling goods to Cuba. Food and medicine made up more than 90 percent of Cuba’s imports from these subsidiaries in 1991. Donna Rich Kaplowitz and Michael Kaplowitz, New Opportunities for U.S.-Cuban Trade (Washington, DC: Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 57–64.

72.

Rafael Hernández, “The Collapse of Socialism Is beyond the Present Horizon,” in this volume.

73.

Pedro Monreal, “Development as an Unfinished Affair: Cuba after the ‘Great Adjustment’ of the 1990s,” in Brenner et al., A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 117–18.

74.

Hal Klepak, “The Revolutionary Armed Forces: Loyalty and Efficiency in the Face of Old and New Challenges,” in this volume. The military’s involvement in the economy served two purposes. First, it provided jobs to the FAR, which suffered a reduction in its size from 300,000 to 100,000 members during the Special Period. Without work, the newly unemployed soldiers and officers might have been a source of instability. Second, the discipline instilled in the FAR reduced the possibility for corruption by those working in the new companies.

75.

William M. LeoGrande, “The United States and Cuba: Strained Engagement,” in Cuba, the United States, and the Post-Cold War World: The International Dimension of the Washington-Havana Relationship, ed. Morris Morley and Chris McGillion (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 18.

76.

Marguerite Rose Jiménez, “The Political Economy of Leisure,” in this volume.

77.

Philip Peters, “Cutting Losses: Cuba Downsizes Its Sugar Industry” (Arlington, VA: Lexington Institute, December 2003), 3. In 1989, the price of sugar on the world market was $0.13 per pound and barely $0.06 per pound in 2002, while Cuba’s rank in world production dropped from third to tenth.

78.

Holly Ackerman, “The ‘Balsero’ Phenomenon, 1991–1994,” Cuban Studies 26 (1996): 173.

79.

Schoultz, That Infernal Little Republic, 466–67; “137 Cubans Land in Florida; Largest Boatload since 1980,” New York Times, July 2, 1994, 6.

80.

Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, a Cuban who remained on U.S. territory for one year and one day could become a U.S. permanent legal resident, receiving enhanced benefits not available to refugees from any other country. Until 1994, the United States also had the practice of nearly automatically allowing Cubans who arrived on U.S. territory to claim asylum and to stay in the United States while their claims were investigated, a process that invariably took more than one year. In addition, Radio Martí regularly broadcast detailed weather conditions for the Florida Straits as a guide for rafters.

81.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1996 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, October 1997), table 21, http://www.dhs.gov/archives (accessed August 20, 2013). See also Susan Eckstein and Lorena Barberia, “Cuban Americans and Their Transnational Ties,” in Brenner et al., A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 269.

82.

Margaret E. Crahan, “Civil Society and Religion in Cuba: Past, Present, and Future,” in Brenner et al., A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 331–32.

83.

In 2003, seventy-five so-called dissidents were arrested, tried, and sentenced (some to long prison terms) for accepting U.S. assistance in violation of Cuban law. However, more than one dozen turned out to be double agents working for state security agencies.

84.

Sandra Levinson, “Nationhood and Identity in Contemporary Cuban Art,” in this volume.

85.

Carlos Varela, “William Tell,” in this volume.

86.

Sujatha Fernandes, “Straight Outta Havana,” New York Times, August 6, 2011.

87.

de la Fuente, “Recreating Racism,” 68.

88.

de la Fuente, “Recreating Racism,” 69–71.

89.

According to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, about 86 percent of Cubans in the United States self-identified as “white” in 2004. “Cubans in the United States,” Pew Hispanic Center Fact Sheet no. 23 (accessed August 22, 2013).

90.

Esteban Morales, “Notes on the Race Question in Cuba Today,” in this volume.

91.

Robin C. Williams, “In the Shadow of Plenty, Cuba Copes with a Crippled Health Care System,” in Brenner et al., A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 282.

92.

María Isabel Domínguez, “Cuban Youth: Aspirations, Social Perceptions, and Identity,” in Brenner et al., A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 294.

93.

Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en el acto central conmemorativo del XXX aniversario de la victoria de Playa Girón, efectuado en el teatro ‘Carlos Marx,’ el 19 de abril de 1991,” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1991/esp/f190491e.html (accessed August 24, 2013). See also Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en el acto estudiantil con motivo del xxxiv aniversario del asalto al Palacio Presidencial y a Radio Reloj, efectuado en el antiguo Palacio Presidencial, el 13 de marzo de 1991,” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1991/esp/f130391e.html (accessed August 24, 2013).

94.

Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 60.

95.

Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en la clausura del x período ordinario de sesiones de la tercera legislatura de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, efectuada en el Palacio de las Convenciones, el 27 de diciembre de 1991,” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1991/esp/f271291e.html (accessed August 24, 2013).

96.

Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuba and the Pax Americana,” in Brenner et al., A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 205.

97.

Nelson Mandela, “Speech at the Rally in Cuba,” July 26, 1991, http://db.nelsonmandela.org/speeches/pub_view.asp?pg=item&ItemID=NMS1526&txtstr=Matanzas (accessed August 24, 2013); Richard Boudreaux, “Mandela Lauds Castro as Visit to Cuba Ends,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1991.

98.

Fidel Castro, “Speech at the Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Attack on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Garrisons,” Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 2003, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2003/ing/f260703i.html (accessed August 24, 2013).

99.

Adrian H. Hearn, “China and the Future of Cuba,” in this volume.

100.

Fidel Castro Ruz, “Key Address to a Solemn Session of the National Assembly,” Caraças, Venezuela, October 27, 2000, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2000/ing/f271000i.html (accessed August 25, 2013).

101.

John M. Kirk, “Cuban Medical Internationalism under Raúl Castro,” in this volume; Cory Fischer-Hoffman and Greg Rosenthal, “ Cuba and Venezuela: A Bolivarian Partnership,” Monthly Review, January 13, 2006, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/fhr130106.html (accessed August 25, 2013); Anuario Estadístico de Cuba 2011, http://www.one.cu/aec2011/esp/08_tabla_cuadro.htm (accessed August 25, 2013).

102.

In 2009, the name was changed to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America.

103.

Jorge I. Domínguez, “U.S. Cuban Relations: From the Cold War to the Colder War,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 39, no. 3 (1997): 58.

104.

Philip Brenner and Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “David and Gulliver: Fifty Years of Competing Metaphors in the Cuban-U.S. Relationship,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, no. 20, 2009, 247.

105.

Richard A. Nuccio, “Cuba: A U.S. Perspective,” in Transatlantic Tension: The United States, Europe, and Problem Countries, ed. Richard N. Haass (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press), 27 n. 9. Brothers-to-the-Rescue was created in 1991 by José Basulto, a self-described terrorist against Cuba in the 1960s, to provide search and rescue for Cubans fleeing on rafts. The 1994 and 1995 immigration accords angered Basulto, and he reportedly believed that the Clinton administration intended to normalize relations with Cuba. To prevent a rapprochement, he sought to provoke Cuba into a hostile act and did so by repeatedly flying small planes over Havana, dropping leaflets and trinkets. After repeated warnings by the United States were ignored, the Cuban military believed that the provocations presented a real threat, though the Cuban air force mistakenly shot down the planes while they were over international waters, after having left Cuban airspace.

106.

U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Statistics, “Trade in Goods with Cuba,” http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2390.html (accessed April 10, 2014).

107.

U.S. Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, Report to the President, May 2004 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2004), xi, http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB192.pdf (accessed August 25, 2013). The new measures included a reduction in trips to the island by Cuban Americans from once a year to once in three years and a requirement that university programs in Cuba be a minimum of ten weeks. The number of programs dropped within months from more than 300 to six.

108.

Fidel Castro Ruz, “Proclamation by an Adversary of the U.S. Government,” May 14, 2004, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2004/ing/f140504i.html (accessed August 25, 2013).

109.

Condoleezza Rice and Carlos Gutiérrez, Report to the President: Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, July 2006, http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/68166.pdf (accessed August 25, 2013).