LISTEN, YANKEE!

There is another explanation for how long it has taken which requires returning to C. Wright Mills’s early exhortation: Listen, Yankee. The title was a complaint that Cubans could not receive a fair hearing as long as the United States officials assumed themselves superior in the relationship, able to bend Cuba to America’s will. But wasn’t that the basic cry of the Cubans and other small countries from the beginning? When Brzezinski told historians in a 2014 book that “the whole business of Castro seemed to be a piddling affair,” he was reflecting a long-standing superiority complex.² Brzezinski also referred to Cuba as “an erogenous zone” of foreign policy, according to a colleague, causing a lot of excitement but not mattering very much.³

Obama inherits the legacy of the superpower superiority complex that made us blind to the Cuban quest for respect, what the Irish call “parity of esteem.”

RICARDO: Obama has an advantage in being the first president since Carter to take a different approach to the Miami connection, knowing that the Cuban American community is not the same as it once was, that the previous US policy was grounded in the 1960s.

According to tradition, presidents take bold initiatives at the end of their second term. That’s why Max Lesnik’s ⁴ theory is that a solution has to be now, before another president—Hillary, or Jeb Bush, whomever—starts their first term.

The current US policy is biological.⁵ Their thinking is that the day we in Cuba don’t have a Castro in power, we will be in trouble. But there is also a Helms-Burton problem requiring regime change, so—it may be most comfortable politically for you to keep advancing the same policy of embargo. I do not think the passing of the Castros will create an immediate process toward normalization. The reasons and force behind the current policy are stronger than that. They still have the catastrophic scenario in mind [regime change]. Even with other Cubans in offer with other last names—Díaz-Canel or whomever—you will still say you oppose the system. Díaz-Canel was a baby or not even born in 1960.⁶ So the change from Castro will weaken the US argument a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a change from the Right’s catastrophe scenario.⁷

Ricardo was proven wrong when Obama reversed policy in December 2014, but not altogether wrong. Obama could not end the Helms-Burton sanctions and goal of regime change. The Cuban Right and most Republicans will fight him in Congress. Where the Cuban Right and Obama Democrats tend to overlap is in their opposition to the one-party Cuban state with its control over the economy and civic society. The great difference is that Obama sees an evolutionary path to a freer system while the Cuban Right pushes for the Cuban regime’s fall.

The common argument is that persistent, principled pressure for human rights and democracy will empower dissidents and Cubans in general to someday flood the streets and bring down the Cuban regime. The models are the fall of former Communist regimes and the Arab Spring. Anything is possible in the future, but this scenario has failed to materialize in the past. Despite brief and occasional street outbursts, there have been virtually no sustained mass protests against the Castro regime for fifty years.⁸ If such an uprising were to occur, the Cuban security forces would quell it. If it still spread, a majority of Cubans would be likely to defend their regime against the prospect of either chaos or a Yankee restoration. So too would Latin America and the United Nations. Most analysts, supported by limited public opinion polling, believe that the majority of Cubans prefer gradual and peaceful change over a polarizing bloodbath with a foreseeable outcome.⁹

RICARDO: Raúl has already said [in 2013] he’s getting out in five years. When Raúl announced that, nobody here said, well, that’s the end of us. The US misperception is that the Cuban system has been the same from the very first day, that the people who attacked Moncada are still around. Yes, there are a few of them, but they are octogenarians.

And if the [enemies] didn’t succeed in the past, why should we grant them what they couldn’t achieve with their plots?

No doubt internal problems will accompany a transition to a post-Castro future. Simmering rivalries could rise to the surface, based on ideological and personality differences. But the Cuban Communist Party is not simply an aging clique sporting red stars and ready for the morgue of Marxism. It is true that nine of the fifteen-member Politburo are military veterans in their seventies and eighties,¹⁰ but according to a recent analysis by Marc Frank, many young members started filling the ranks of the National Assembly and Council of State in recent years.¹¹ The 115-member Central Committee is 41.7 percent women, a threefold increase since the previous party congress; 31.3 percent are black or mestizo, a 10 percent growth.¹² A 2008 survey of National Assembly deputies showed 43 percent to be women, 19 percent to be black, 16 percent mestizo, and 6 percent under thirty.¹³ These measures of diversity indicate a regime, however authoritarian, that can be flexible and elastic in response to serious grievances. For example, while tightly holding ultimate power, the regime often launches nationwide “consultations”¹⁴ involving millions of Cubans in sometimes-heated discussion of proposed policy changes.

Cuba nevertheless remains a one-party state with significant racial stratification, and a long history of exclusion and persecution of political dissidents and minorities like its LGBT community. In recent years, some of those negative indicators have declined. For example, according to Cuban human rights sources, the number of political prisoners declined from three hundred to 167 between 2006 and 2010.¹⁵ Amnesty International puts the figure at fifty-three prisoners of conscience.¹⁶ In his dying days, my friend Saul Landau, a close friend of Cuba for fifty years, remarked to me that “too many [Americans] think it’s supposed to be a paradise. It’s not. Cuba just wants to be treated like a regular country.” By that he meant that the Cuban revolutionaries, and especially their foreign supporters, were being held to an unrealistic romantic standard. The defensiveness of Cuban society contributes to the tendency to deny admission of flaws deemed to undermine the country’s united front and serve the propaganda purposes of the counterrevolution. For example, tolerating or promoting an independent Black Power movement has long been considered divisive, which impedes a full confrontation with the issue. Acceptance of homosexuality in a macho and militarist nation has been seen as weakening national security. A doctrine of “speaking truth to power” would imply that the powerful were lying. Not acknowledging complex contradictions meant not confronting them. Most of these undemocratic features of the Cuban state can be traced to a one-party system with a rigid ideology which insists on the preeminence of class analysis, as if autonomous movements for Afro-Cuban rights, a competitive free press, independent art, or gay liberation would be threatening or diversionary.

The double standards are obvious. The US, for example, exhibits a high tolerance for our own inbred dynasties, the embedded discrimination against women and ethnic minorities, suppression of whistleblowers, and tolerance of torture when practiced by strategic allies like Saudi Arabia. US officials also are frozen in the Cold War belief that reform is possible within our own allied one-party states but apparently never within our one-party opponents. This Cold War formulation, articulated by Reagan’s UN representative Jeane Kirkpatrick, fell apart when the Soviet bloc collapsed largely due to Gorbachev’s domestic reforms, but the dogma continued to apply toward Cuba. The rigid US view about one-party “totalitarianism” doesn’t account, for example, for the evolution of Cuba’s policies toward its LGBT community, led by the daughter of Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín, Mariela, born in 1962 not long after her parents emerged from the Sierra Maestra. Mariela, who directs the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), has successfully challenged traditional Cuba thinking on gender orientation, and builds alliances globally with LGBT communities.

It is a serious contradiction to insist on foreign intervention to impose a two-party or multiparty system in Cuba as a pre-condition to democracy. Any such “new” parties would be portrayed as merely the stalking horses for casino-era capitalism or tropical neoliberalism. Scheer and Zeitlin had it right from the beginning: “Because the United States continues to be publicly committed to the overthrow of the revolution, dissent and criticism in Cuba assume counterrevolutionary implications.”¹⁷

One sign came in July 2013 when a North Korean vessel was intercepted by Panamanian marines after leaving Cuba with military jet engines, small arms, surface-to-air missiles, and night-vision goggles on board, all in violation of UN sanctions on North Korea. Cuba claimed the parts were antiquated and being sent to Pyongyang for repair and return to Cuba. The contraband was hidden under more than two hundred thousand bags of sugar. Imagine the potential American uproar about Cuba illegally shipping weapons to the nuclear-armed family dictatorship of North Korea! It’s not at all clear what the Cubans were up to. But amazingly, the Obama administration made the issue simply go away, without any consequences. The North Korean ship incident was not going to be an impediment to the quiet rapprochement.

A second 2013 example came amidst the controversy over the young American whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who distributed classified documents from the US National Security Agency. On the run, Snowden took refuge in Russia while trying to reach Ecuador. The only flight from Moscow to Quito, however, went through Havana. An unknown party booked Snowden a seat on a June 24, 2013, flight from Moscow to Havana. Snowden didn’t show, and instead spent six weeks in the Moscow airport before gaining temporary asylum there. In earlier times, the Cubans might well have expedited Snowden’s journey as an act of solidarity. But they didn’t. However worthy the whistleblower’s cause, it wasn’t going to interrupt any below-the-surface plans to patch up the normalization process. Instead of Cuba, Russia gave temporary sancturary to Snowden.

More such incidents lie ahead that could still derail the normalization process, the most dangerous being a crisis over Venezuela. On the positive front, however, besides the many sequential steps that Cuba and the United States have taken, the December 17 annoucements will create irresistible momentum that will be hard to stop.

In 2009, Obama lifted restrictions on US-based Cubans traveling to Cuba to see their families, and allowed unlimited remittances,¹⁸ huge changes from the previous Bush policies. Under Bush, family visits were limited to only fourteen days during a three-year period, and remittances were capped at just $100. Obama’s policy shift, promised during the 2008 campaign, did not prevent him from carrying Florida in the presidential election and indeed may have helped him. Politically, the Obama policies divided and diminished the clout of the traditional Cuban exile community, whose right-wing leaders attacked the family remittances as billion-dollar annual subsidies keeping the Castro regime afloat. Obama also re-opened people-to-people licenses for any Americans wishing to visit Cuba, testing the waters for a greater opening.

Meanwhile, the United States and Cuba engaged in practical negotiations on the sorts of issues that nation-states routinely discuss: hemispheric drug enforcement, maritime rescue, reestablishing direct mail service, oil-spill protections, and behind-the-scenes consultation about ending the long war in Colombia. The Associated Press reported from Havana in 2013 that while these were “baby steps toward rapprochement,” that “under the radar, diplomats on both sides describe a sea change in the tone of their dealings,” leaving many in Washington and Havana “wondering if a breakthrough in relations could be just over the horizon.”¹⁹

Cuba lifted its own travel restrictions significantly too, with a record 184,787 Cubans traveling to the United States on 257,518 separate trips in 2013.²⁰ Over twenty thousand Cubans will be able to legally visit the United States annually, acquire green cards, and keep their Cuban citizenship, homes, and businesses.²¹

Cuba also gradually opened space for a new generation of private entrepreneurs, according to a 2013 report by Richard Feinberg, former NSC Latin American adviser under Clinton.²² Raúl Castro is implementing state budget cuts that laid off 137,000 Cubans during his first year in office; his goal is to shift one-third of the state payroll to independent sectors.²³ In Foreign Affairs, the journal of the foreign policy elite, Julia Sweig, a protégé of Saul Landau’s, published a long essay entitled “Cuba After Communism.”²⁴ (She suggested to me she didn’t write the headline.)

In another sign, the European Union moved ahead of Obama toward full normalization of relations. “It is to some extent a vote of confidence in [Cuba’s] reforms and [proof] that the new realities in Cuban society are irreversible, and that we want to be on board,” EU ambassador to Havana Herman Portocarero told BBC in February 2014.²⁵ The new EU policy both anticipated the later US path and attempted to position European companies favorably in economic relations with the island.

In terms of global diplomacy, the emergence of a Latin American pope, Francis, was certain to be a helpful factor in swaying American and global opinion toward diplomatic recognition and ending the embargo. The Vatican maintains proper relations with the Cuban government as well as close ties with Cuba’s dissidents, seeing itself as mediating the political divide.

RICARDO: So people will organize a private business here because they got money from Miami. Or they paint their house. Is that bad? Of course you are strengthening the nonsocialist private sector. But should you never have a private barbershop?²⁶

And of course the kind of socialism we are talking about is not what we had in the eighties. This week on Cuban television, for example, they had a story about the neighborhood of La Rampa just around the corner at 23rd between N and O.²⁷ On the sidewalk there they have art from the best artists in the sixties, pieces of mosaic, you walk over them because they are encrusted in sidewalk. What happened is that some state enterprise came to do some installation and broke part of the sidewalk, and now a private individual with employees was contracted by the state to solve the problem. A private guy trying to solve a mess caused by the state.

Concerning the tourists, I don’t have a bad view. For decades we’ve had millions of tourists from Western Europe and Canada. So what!! They haven’t changed the country, they mainly come to enjoy life and relax.

These changes, or concessions to the market, are difficult for some Cubans to accept. One with occasional ties to the leadership told me:

Although I am heartened by some of the economic changes that would incentivize people to produce more, I am worried about some of the negative consequences of this newfound Cuban capitalism: older people who can’t make ends meet with their paltry earnings and the reduction of items that were previously available through the “libreta” that allowed them to modestly make ends meet.

The skyrocketing prices at the agros are far outstripping the meager salaries that folks are earning. There seems to be a deepening tension between the new “prosperous socialism” that is being preached with the inevitable social inequalities that come with it. If the inequalities come without an adequate safety net for those less fortunate, then many of the gains of the revolution may be lost. Another thing I´ve noticed is the absence of ideology in the official speech (Raúl’s talk on January 1, 2014, being the only exception to that). I was reminded of Quevedo’s poem: “Poderoso caballero es Don Dinero.”

It is a long history. I was banned on many occasions. The Inter-Parliamentary Union [IPU] organized a number of parliamentary presidents’ meetings in New York on the occasion of the UN anniversary, and I never got a visa. The IPUprotested and decided not to meet again in New York and moved their meetings to Geneva, where I attended them.

The Congressional Black Caucus, on the other hand, invited me [regularly] to participate in their annual conferences but I never got a visa or the authorization to travel from New York to DC. I remember having been invited by [Rep. Mervyn] Dymally when he chaired the caucus, and later. The occasion you mention was rather funny; I was not permitted to attend, but a Cuban delegation led by Pedro Saez got their visas and went to Washington invited by US congresswoman Barbara Lee.

“Democracy-promotion programs” have not been entirely curtailed thus far. The latest to be revealed, a covert program called ZunZuneo, was a Twittter feed directed to Cuban bloggers in 2012, meant to incite “smart mobs” against the regime.²⁸ Amazingly, the project was launched after the arrest of Gross. Sen. Patrick Leahy denounced the project, which was not disclosed to congressional leadership, as “dumb, dumb, dumb.” State Department spokesperson Marie Harf said it was meant to be “discreet.”

Obama not only believes in “democracy programs” and especially Internet expansion in Cuba, but has a penchant for achieving reform goals wherever possible by masking them in conservative arguments. For example, he implemented his Obamacare initiative by repeatedly noting that it was based on RomneyCare, the Massachusetts health policy signed by Republican Mitt Romney. In the case of his Cuba diplomacy, the president often links it to the aspirations for liberty of the Cuban Right, as if he is ushering in a free-market and Internet revolution. He describes his diplomatic success as a victory for democracy, especially for dissidents and bloggers in Cuba, most of whom, by the way, feel betrayed by Obama’s initiative.²⁹

Obama has glorified, for example, Cuban’s most famous dissident blogger, Yoani Sánchez, whose Generation Y blog depict a drab, paranoid, repressive, frustrating everyday life in Cuba for someone growing up long after the revolution. Time magazine proclaimed Sánchez one of the world’s one hundred most influential people in 2008. She sometimes seems to receive more Western acclaim than all of Latin America’s leading writers put together. According to Wikileaks documents and the Havana-based journalist Marc Frank, Obama even entered into a charade of an interview to promote Sánchez in 2009. The online “answers” that Obama sent in response to several Sánchez questions were actually written by the US Interests Section in Havana, as revealed in a classified US memo disclosed by Wikileaks.³⁰

When I was in Havana, Ricardo noticed a Yoani Sánchez book in the pile at my feet. I told him I was reading everything I could about Cuba. When I asked him what he thought of her, he shrugged.

RICARDO: She’s not Pasternak. The Americans are using her.

The paradox is that Yoani Sánchez and her husband Reinaldo Escobar are critical of the embargo and diplomatic isolation of Cuba by the United States, because they say the US policies are used as a “foreign threat” which Fidel has used to prop up the Cuban regime. Yoani doesn’t mention these views in Miami, but seems to have said so in a 2010 interview, according to Salim Lamrani.³¹ Her journalist husband has said:

The United States has made huge mistakes in its policy toward Cuba. The so-called blockade or embargo, the so-called Helms-Burton Act, all have a typically interventionist nature, of a very strong pressure. The main mistake that the United States has committed regarding Cuba is to stubbornly refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the government of Cuba. That’s everything.³²

Obama believes that the Internet will be a liberating instrument for Yoani Sánchez’s Generation Y to pierce the closed structures of Cuban society. An information war, in this view, is more likely to succeed where invasions, spying and diplomatic isolation have failed. There is no doubt that Cuban officials are concerned about the potential impact of Internet freedom, but more as a crisis to be managed, not as a fatal threat. As Internet access inevitably spreads on the island, the Cubans will have to accommodate a blogosphere more or less independent of the state. The pressure for access to information and greater democracy will grow. That could be benign and very useful for Cuba, if it is distinctly separated from CIA covert operations. Unfortunately, America’s National Security Agency policy often blurs any line between democratic exchange and intelligence gathering, perpetuating the widespread Cuban belief that any criticism voiced in the blogosphere should be discounted as serving the interests of Yankee Big Brother.

Shifting immigrant tides are fundamental to encouraging normalization. Many excellent studies, including those by Susan Eva Eckstein (2009), Louis Pérez Jr. (1999), and Ruth Behar (1995), point to the same conclusion, that recent generations of Cuban immigrants to America come for economic reasons like most other immigrants, not to join an army led by Batista’s ghost.³³ While the first generation was overwhelmingly white, the later groups tend to be brown or black. While the first generation proclaimed, “We shall return,” like Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, the new generations expect to return often and freely. In 2013 alone, nearly six hundred thousand Americans travelled there, most of them Cuban Americans.³⁴ In Eckstein’s summary, “the New Cubans have done more to change Cuba through their cross-border bonding and income sharing than the rich, powerful exiles who used their clout to make the wall across the Straits as impermeable as possible.” She adds that the new ties with the diaspora also have “the unintended effect of undermining the state socialist economy, the socialist system of stratification, socialist precepts, and the socialist normative and socialist order.”³⁵

RICARDO: In terms of changing Cuban society, the most effective instruments will be the Cubans coming back. They have been doing this for years. So what? It is a two-way influence. For Cubans here, they get a broader view of Miami and the United States. It changes the mentality of Cuban Americans too, because they see that not everyone here is some kind of terrorist. What freer travel permits is a better understanding of Cuba’s realities, and some benefits for the visitors, much cheaper medicines, for example.

The most effective ambassadors are the Cubans, someone on the corner bringing gadgets back from Miami. When they are in their dining rooms they probably are not pretending to mislead. They will say work is harder in the United States. And they can bring some different elements into the mix here. Maybe some fashion, or music.

Pay attention to this. [Sen. Marco] Rubio and others strongly oppose normalization for a simple reason that Obama’s policy plus our policy of eliminating our travel restrictions may lead to their biggest nightmare. You have a growing segment of Cuban Americans who left Cuba or will want to leave in the future but who want to return to Cuba any time they wish. It’s different than the old antagonism of the sixties, when a Cuban was the only person on earth who had to make a decision either to stay in the land of their birth or live forever in another country.

Cuba was never a minor player in immigration matters. It was second only to Mexico as a source of [legal] immigrants to the United States. In addition, thousands of Cubans went to the United States, overstayed their visas, and worked. When the revolution happened, the US passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which was meant to benefit the Batista people, covering all Cubans who left on January 1, 1959, or thereafter. It was the only adjustment act that excluded benefits from those who were there at the time of its passing. They were discriminating against undocumented Cubans who already were there. Now Cuba is eliminating restrictions on our side, and so if the US grants a visa now to any Cuban to go to visit a family member in the United States, if that person remains there, we don’t care. This will lead us back to the fifties era with people just going back and forth.

Ninety-five percent of those who go to the States, come back. No other country is like that. It’s not by chance that the Cuban Adjustment Act was adopted in 1966. If a Nicaraguan went to Miami in that time they didn’t get a Cuba Adjustment Act.

As a result, the construction of a Cuban anti-Castro community is more and more dissolving. If you were to repeal the law, then Cubans would be more like the other Latinos—hey, they should have a Cuban Adjustment Act! Seriously, now they need alliances. The best position for them will be maybe to advocate for the inclusion of every other Latino living in the United States. It’s uncomfortable to see our brothers and sisters facing hostilities from other Latinos in the States now.

What has been the problem is that those elderly Cubans became more American than Cuban. Max Lesnik moved to Miami but retained his Cuban citizenship. Those who were supposed to be fighting to return to Cuba very interestingly became US citizens with a lot of privileges.

The younger Cubans in Florida are Obama voters. He won Florida statewide in 2008 with only 35 percent of the Cuban vote, though taking a majority of young Cuban Americans, and won again in 2012 with 49 percent of the overall Cuban American vote.³⁶ They were far from isolated. In CNN and Gallup polls, a robust 64 percent of Americans opposed economic sanctions against Cuba as early as 2009, Obama’s first year in office.³⁷ Those majorities prevailed through the December 17 policy changes.

The shift in American public opinion should facilitate the US removal in 2015 of Cuba from the State Department list of states sponsoring terrorism. The desgnation, first made in 1982, is not only false but costs Cuba hundreds of millions of dollars in lost trade annually.³⁸ Only three other countries are on the terrorism list: Syria and Sudan, where civil wars are killing tens of thousands of people, and Iran, which is engaged in multiple covert operations amidst sectarian conflicts. According to the State Department’s own 2012 report, there was “no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups.”³⁹ Cuba has opposed the Al Qaeda worldview and politics from the beginning. Where Cuba has supported guerrillas in the past, especially across the Americas, it now enjoys peaceful diplomatic, political, and trade relationships. Cuba provides counsel and diplomatic mediation to Colombia’s long-standing guerrilla movement in its efforts at a political settlement. That leaves in Cuba a small number of exiles from the Basque separatist movement, the Black Panthers, and a few others. The most controversial to American authorities is Assata Shakur, a former Panther now residing quietly in Havana. I have known her since the sixties, and visited her at a Havana restaurant in 1999. She does some translating, sees occasional American friends, stays in contact with her daughter in America, and is known to push her aged Volkswagen up the steep Havana streets when her engine sputters out. Since 2005, the FBI has classified her as a “domestic terrorist” and offered a one million dollar reward for her capture. In 2013, the FBI named her a “Most Wanted Terrorist.” She lives a guarded life because of the threat of bounty hunters, perhaps from El Salvador or the Cuban exile groups.

Assata’s story is not that of a terrorist in any conventional sense, but more a matter of law enforcement rhetoric gone wild. She presumably was involved in criminal acts to gain funds for a black underground network in the early seventies. In 1973, she was pulled over by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike, where a violent confrontation broke out. Her comrade and lover, Zayd Malik Shakur, was shot and killed. Assata was grievously wounded. One state trooper was killed, and another badly wounded. Assata was taken to the state’s highest security prison where she gradually healed from her wounds. Next, the state authorities indicted her for six other crimes, which resulted in three acquittals and three dismissals of charges. She remained under tight security until 1979 when an underground cell broke her free and arranged her passage to Havana.

Immediately following the December 17 announcement, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Robert Menendez, and state police called for the Cubans to return Shakur to the United States. Cuba immediately rejected the notion, calling her a political prisoner. Why a shootout with New Jersey state troopers in 1973 qualified her as a “most wanted terrorist” can only be explained by New Jersey’s Cuban exile politics. The state troopers understandably want revenge for the killing of one of their own, and for their embarrassment at her escape.

RICARDO: Regarding Cuba it is unnecessary [to say the least] to repeat what has been reiterated—at the highest level—by the Spanish government [on granting asylum at their request to some Basque militants] and by the Colombian government [about the guerrillas that have been meeting with them in Havana seeking a peaceful resolution of their conflict]. Giving refuge to some Americans—such as Assata—has also been used by Washington in a preposterous manner. Assata is not a terrorist but an intellectual and a symbol of Afro-American resistance.

On the other hand, since January 1, 1959, the United States has been home to the worst criminals of the Batista era and after. All of them protected and employed by the US as active terrorists whose actions have also involved killing people in US territory. Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch are just two examples of such a systematic policy of terrorism promotion.⁴⁰

For several decades, until 2008, Nelson Mandela and the ANC, were on that terrorist list and were kept there by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Mandela was classified as a terrorist when he was incarcerated—after having been captured by the apartheid regime with the direct participation of the CIA—and was still considered a terrorist after having been freed and remained on that list when he was president and after having received the Nobel Peace Prize and was kept in that list when he was well into retirement from public life. Do you want a better joke?

The reader will have noticed by now that this is not another of countless books on Cuba that begin with a denunciation of dictatorship and a long listing of political prisoners. To be taken seriously in mainstream publishing, an American writer must make clear that he or she harbors no sentimentalism toward Fidel Castro and his revolution. Such concerns have merit, but the premise clouds any deeper or more expansive portrait of Cuba. It is like reducing all of American society and politics to the fact that a young black man is killed by police every twenty-four hours and our prisons hold one-fourth of all the world’s inmates. There is no question that Cuba suffers what can be politely called a deficit of democracy. C. Wright Mills worried about this prospect in Listen, Yankee over forty years ago. Numerous books have been written on the subject over the years by many persuasive authors including Jacobo Timerman and Alma Guillermoprieto.⁴¹

At present Cuba may be headed for the same trouble that has hobbled the USSR and China, by limiting criticism to certain prescribed channels.” He went on to make a trenchant observation: socialism “rarely produces people ambitious for money or prestige, but it almost never seems to produce the brilliant nonconformist.⁴²

But the criticisms miss the central point. After more than fifty years of pressure that would have caused virtually any other one-party state to fall, Cuba still stands. After fifty-years of failed “democracy promotion,” another perspective is needed.

Where does Ricardo Alarcón fit in the debate over democracy in Cuba? As a leading Cuban official for many decades, he shares some responsibility for many policies for which Cuba is legitimately criticized. The Cuban archives in time may reveal his dissents on given policies; for his institutional loyalty he absorbs a drumbeat of criticism. In 2008 in Havana, he was put on the defensive by student questioners with complaints about Internet access and everyday economic frustrations; the videoed exchange went viral, cementing an impression among critics that Alarcón was something between an apologist and a dinosaur. Yet Alarcón has survived many shakeups and purges to the consternation of critics like Ann Louise Bardach, who can’t explain his survival, especially since she considers him to have “a dicey personal relationship with the Castros.”⁴³

Ricardo is hardly going to denounce the revolution or the party to which he has devoted his life. But it would be a terrible mistake to fail to see that he has been a powerful, pragmatic reformer working from within the Cuban Revolution to reform and modernize the structures he fought to build. He could not very well represent the Cuban government in its long quarrel with the United States and at the same time be a domestic critic.

In 1993, according to Gott, he was chosen to “bring back life to the National Assembly . . . as its new president . . . [h]is task was to preside over what were, in effect, Cuba’s fledgling attempts to install a new kind of ‘participatory democracy’ . . . [and he] soon articulated an intelligent defense.”⁴⁴

Having said that, poder popular rested on a different vision than the American version of participatory democracy. But we in the States never faced the full wrath of the Pentagon, the CIA, and a blockade. Even in a more open and democratic atmosphere, the FBI’s COINTELPRO programs were crucial in splintering, disrupting, and damaging our American social movements. The repression by our own government contributed directly to many of us becoming sectarian, factional, pushed toward violence. The style of the mainstream mass media gave rise to cults of personality with all the corollary damage to grassroots democracy. Given the greater pressure it was under, it’s hard to imagine how the Cuban Revolution survived in any form, much less how it earned respect in most of the world.

Cuba took the path of Marxism-Leninism when it appeared to the leadership that the Soviet Union was their only protection against the United States. The original revolutionaries were hunted men and women who learned to live and struggle in shadowy spaces far from an open society. They brought those habits of clandestinity from the days of the 26th of July movement to the consolidation of the Cuban Communist Party in 1965, four years after the Bay of Pigs. In another decade, they evolved further, establishing the National Assembly, a parliamentary structure representing domestic constituencies, and brought back Ricardo from his foreign service to head the new institution. (For a rough comparison, the United States Senate didn’t become a directly elected body until 1913.)

It was after the Soviet collapse that Ricardo assumed leadership of the National Assembly. In 1992, the 1976 Constitution was amended, providing for the direct election of deputies. The transfer of state-owned property to new joint ventures was permitted, with the number rising from two in 1990 to 112 by 1993. The US dollar was legalized as the principal currency for traded goods and services for the first time since being introduced in the US occupation. Also in 1993, self-employment opportunities were restored in principle for private businesses after being banned since 1968. Agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ markets began to replace state-owned farms. These were evolutionary reforms, although the monopoly of political power in the hands of the Communist Party remained intact.

A forgotten reason for the Cuban government’s lingering resilience is that Cuba actually progressed in many areas over the course of the last fifty years in its overall quality of life and economic achievements, despite the embargo. It is no paradise. But how many countries would have stabilized and improved at all after a revolution, an invasion, constant covert attacks, an economic embargo, and the fall of its most powerful ally? As a November 2012 Congressional Research Service report noted, Cuba’s real GDP went from 5.8 percent (2004) to 11.2 percent (2005), 12.1 percent (2006), 7.3 percent (2007), and then cratered to 1.4 percent in 2009 partly due to the Wall Street economic crisis before crawling back toward 3 percent in 2013.⁴⁵ More important, for decades Cuba has ranked among the countries in the High Human Development category defined by the United Nations, for its achievements in health care, literacy, and education.⁴⁶ At over seventy-nine years, Cuba’s life expectancy is competitive with or slightly above that of the United States.⁴⁷ It has one of the highest per capita numbers of doctors of any country in the world. Its classical ballet is known everywhere. Cuba was fifty-ninth out of 186 countries in the UN development index in 2012, higher than nearly every Latin American and Caribbean nation. Though lying in a deadly hurricane corridor, Cuba’s disaster preparedness is unmatched. Cuban athletes have collected 196 gold, silver, and bronze medals at the Olympics since the revolution, as opposed to only twelve before 1959.⁴⁸

These achievements occurred while Ricardo presided over the National Assembly under the domination of the Communist Party, and go far toward explaining why the Cuban system, for all its flaws, retains a core legitimacy in the eyes of most Cubans.

How many Cubans? To estimate a percentage, the Cuban-based journalist Marc Frank borrows terminology from Eastern Europe during the Cold War, using the category of “grey zone” to describe citizens who are dissatisfied but unwilling to rebel against the system. By this standard, he estimated in 2013 that a majority of Cubans fell in the grey zone—“increasingly rest less for change”—and wrote that Raúl Castro was trying to win them back.⁴⁹ A 1995 Nuevo Herald/Gallup underground poll showed 31 percent significantly dissatisfied, while 76 percent were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with their lives, and 58 percent felt the revolution had more successes than failures.⁵⁰ That’s a popular base for regime reform, not regime change.

RICARDO: What is going on now in Latin America, among the ALBA countries, is a pattern composed of a “diversity which is multi-colored but not yet rainbow” [quoting his 2006 article]. And with the help of the neoliberal trend backfiring, for the first time in Latin America, we are having a real social movement that would have been condemned by the old guard. It was very difficult for them to understand it was not “the end of history” but we were entering a new period of history. Ironically, it gave more opportunity to the revolutionary movement. Why? Because the concept of a centralized [revolutionary] leadership across boundaries disappeared, and because of the new way in which information goes around in the present world.

The future of Latin America is far from settled. But obviously, if Cuba intends to bond and integrate with Latin America there is no possibility of their exporting the current single-party model of the Cuban Communist Party. The Cuban Revolution will have to accept the fruits of its long advocacy of an independent region of the Americas, which for now includes a democratic electoral path enabling the advancement of social equality, regulated economies including corporations, cooperatives and worker-run enterprises, and regional integration in defense, diplomacy, and development. That’s not communism, nor does it mean capitulation to Wall Street and the unregulated market. It means a permanent process in which to struggle toward an economy and politics under popular control. It’s a future that Ricardo Alarcón has helped to shape.

CHAPTER 16

Listen, Yankee!