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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822363842 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2017 |
| Edition description: | 06 Out of stock indefinitely |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
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Exporting Revolution
Cuba's Global Solidarity
By Margaret Randall
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6384-2
CHAPTER 1
HOW THESE IDEAS TOOK SHAPE
Exporting revolution: that was the accusation the United States launched at Cuba for years, the one it used to justify all manner of subterfuge and attack. Exaggerating the threat of "communism at our doorstep" and creating an aura of fear toward the tiny island nation were part of U.S. governmental strategy from the beginning and continued to be for more than half a century — even when many in the corporate community began pleading for policy changes that would facilitate doing business on the island. Yet even with the reestablished relations between our two countries, regime change and nation building clearly remain part of the U.S. agenda.
It's time we claim the old phrase exporting revolution, free it from its cold war aura, and acknowledge its legitimate meaning.
Exporting revolutionary aid — not imposing its way of life on other countries but lending military support to movements fighting for independence in Africa or aiding insurgent groups attempting to defeat cruel dictatorships in Latin America — has always been Cuban revolutionary policy. Unlike powerful nations occupying weaker ones at will for geopolitical gain or in order to take possession of their natural resources, Cuba's international outreach constituted a new and far-reaching model of solidarity. That solidarity continues to be seen in the Revolution's extraordinary humanitarian aid and disaster relief.
The Uruguayan poet and public intellectual Mario Benedetti, writing in 1973, addressed the U.S. accusation that Cuba was exporting revolution by going to the grain: "The truth is ... the revolution has ceased to be an abstract possibility and become a real transformation, a believable image. The imperialists have never tired of accusing Cuba of exporting revolution. But of course the real and unforgivable export for which Cuba is responsible (just like Vietnam) is the example of a small country far from the great powers, that is capable of defeating the empire and even humiliating it in the eyes of the world."
During the Cuban Revolution's first months a group of Nicaraguan rebels were already undergoing rudimentary military training on the island, and a Guatemalan group planned to set sail from its coast and establish a base on home soil. Cuba's leadership denied having anything to do with either (failed) effort, although we now know that wasn't true. It was important to establish a political identity that would ensure the country a respected place in the community of nations, which meant going slowly with both Washington and the Kremlin. At the same time Cuba's increased isolation as well as its rapidly consolidating ideology made its government eager to support guerrilla warfare, especially in Latin America. As U.S. covert and overt attacks intensified, the Revolution also felt justified in defending itself and in countering a policy of ongoing attack with a strategy of supporting liberation struggles throughout the world.
It was logical that a small island nation that had successfully defeated a dictatorial government would be eager to help others do the same. Cuba was the last Latin American or Caribbean country to liberate itself from colonialism and the first to free itself from imperialist control. As such it had tremendous moral support from its neighbors in the region, all of whom endured some degree of exploitation and humiliation from decades of U.S. interference in their internal affairs, unfair economic and trade policies, and their own governments' brutal treatment of dissidents. Domestic national security forces learned many of the techniques employed in that brutal treatment (among them extreme interrogation methods, often tantamount to torture) at U.S. academies in Panama and Georgia.
Following its own victory the Cuban Revolution naturally began to see itself as part of a worldwide movement to extend freedom and the promise of social justice to a number of Third World countries where liberation struggles were under way. Its military aid to these insurgencies took place in the 1970s and 1980s and had pretty much run its course by the end of the latter decade.
But Cuba's internationalism is not limited to battlefield assistance. It includes helping others out of poverty and backwardness, shaping new ideas about the causes of underdevelopment, teaching adult literacy, coming to the aid of nations suffering dramatic natural disasters, and sending teachers and medical personnel to dozens of poor countries. It involves lending its experts in fields ranging from agriculture to fishing and biotechnology. It encompasses bringing tens of thousands of young people to study in Cuba, including hundreds to obtain medical degrees — all tuition-free. This internationalism is ongoing and spectacular.
In fact Cuba's aid to those mired in poverty and underdevelopment has evolved as one of the Revolution's most profound and emblematic characteristics, a quality consciously cultivated in the new human being who emerged in the throes of such profound social change. The Cuban internationalist is the New Man (and Woman) of whom Ernesto "Che" Guevara spoke. As a revolutionary virtue, then, Cuba's internationalism is more complex and multifaceted than simply going elsewhere to fight or heal or teach. It is a quality the Revolution has consciously and systematically instilled in its citizens.
The accusation that Cuba was exporting revolution surged immediately following Fidel Castro's victory at the beginning of 1959. In the Soviet Union in January of that year Khrushchev and others in the Kremlin already had their eyes on Che Guevara and Raul Castro, who, they believed, had Marxist tendencies. Cuba did not yet have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, so the Soviets tried sending a security agent disguised as a journalist to the Caribbean island to find out what kind of a revolution had taken place. They attempted to get information from their embassy in Mexico as well. No one really knew who those bearded rebels were.
In the United States the questions struck closer to home and were even more urgent, and plenty of undercover investigation was also going on. In April 1959 Fidel Castro made his first trip to Cuba's neighbor to the north. Much has been written about his meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon (neither man impressed the other) and his unsuccessful attempts to get the United States to increase its sugar quota or otherwise invest in the new Cuba. In all his U.S. venues Fidel denied that he was a communist. Pride in victory was high, popular participation the name of the game, and free elections were promised.
In fact Fidel may not have been a Marxist at the time, in the strictly academic sense, and he did not belong to his country's Communist Party (the People's Socialist Party, PSP), but this had little effect on what others thought, or on the direction his revolution would take. He certainly believed in the egalitarian nature of socialism, an egalitarianism long suspect in the United States. Despite discussions within his administration about whether to try to control or eliminate Cuba's new leader, President Dwight D. Eisenhower soon authorized the first of many covert programs aimed at destroying the Revolution and bringing the island back into the U.S. fold.
In Cuba Che was also being questioned by representatives of a number of nations and their security agents. He too denied communist affiliation and described a revolution intent upon serving the needs of the Cuban people. As was true of Fidel, Che had never been a member of the Communist Party. It seemed important to emphasize the movement's originality and not make pronouncements of concern to governments whose recognition and support were needed.
The Soviets were courting Cuba's revolutionaries, who just might have pulled off the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. The United States was becoming ever more alarmed. Today, when it is possible to read some of the intelligence from those years, what we find seems uniformly inept when not frankly out of synch with reality (although clues can be gleaned to support several different hypotheses). The relationships of powerful countries with those that suddenly become players and must be taken into account are always beset with intrigue.
Raul and Che had read Marx and Lenin, and Fidel was well read in all the philosophical classics. There were also a number of high-level members of the PSP — Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Juan Marinello, and Blas Roca among them — who possessed a profound knowledge of Marxism-Leninism and were fully integrated into the new government. Like most communist parties of the era, the PSP had opposed armed struggle and had come on board only toward the end of the war, when the July 26 Movement's victory seemed inevitable. In postwar Cuba some of its members began to occupy positions of power. Over the next several decades their influence led the country into more than one economic error. It also did harm in the cultural arena, although this eventually proved easier to reverse. The Revolution's leadership, finally fully concentrated in the men and women who had come to political maturity through the recent struggle, was developing a uniquely Cuban ideological identity. For the first time Cubans themselves were deciding their future and devising ways to bring hundreds of thousands of men and women — most of whom were brought up on a discourse of virulent anticommunism — to understand what socialism could mean for them.
These positions radiated outward. Following the 1959 Revolution, the small Caribbean island country exerted an influence far beyond its size or population and in areas in which it might not have been expected to do so. This is a book about that influence and solidarity. Much of it is a product of the Revolution, though some of its roots can be traced to earlier times. My association with Cuba has been long and close, but my realization of its influence and exceptional world presence in so many different areas came about in an unexpected way.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2015 I was putting the finishing touches on a bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry. The volume covers eight decades and includes the work of fifty-six poets, from the diaspora as well as the island. The selection process wasn't easy. My exploration led me from one poet to another, and I read poems by Nicolás Guillén, Dulce María Loynaz, Virgilio Piñera, José Lezama Lima, Gastón Baquero, Fayad Jamís, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Fina García Marruz, Antón Arrufat, Nancy Morejón, and Reina María Rodríguez, among others. Although I had known many of these poets and their work for years, I can only describe as breathtaking the experience of reading with an eye to translating for this collection.
As I worked I realized that more than a few Cubans had influenced Latin American poetry far beyond the country's borders. I discerned a transition from modernism to conversational mode earlier than when that transition occurred elsewhere, and a leading-edge vernacular. I found an engagement with humanity emblematic of the socially conscious but not bogged down by clichéd or propagandistic images of worker-owned factories or farms. I listened to powerful voices reinventing language and leading in directions not yet explored in Spanish elsewhere — or in English. Younger poets less well known internationally were just as impressive. Other Spanish-speaking countries have had their brilliant voices: Spain's Lorca, Peru's Vallejo, Chile's Neruda, Uruguay's Benedetti, Mexico's Paz. But for its size and population Cuba has produced poets with an inordinate impact.
I immediately intuited that I was looking at a sociocultural phenomenon, and needed to explore it more closely. At any given time intellectuals and artists, perhaps especially poets, are a nation's social conscience. In the most propitious circumstances they are a chorus of its diverse voices, reflecting character and circumstance. In the least their silence speaks for cultures that have been stifled, forced underground, or even decimated by the numbing mentality that so often results from endless war, an impoverished socioeconomic climate, or heavy-handed political control (although when poets strive to escape their suffocating effects such situations themselves have also generated great poetry). Throughout history and across the globe poems smuggled out of prisons have borne truths rarely plumbed in the history books or on what passes for the nightly news.
All revolutions, in the creative convulsions of their immediate aftermath, have given birth to exciting art. In the Soviet Union the years 1917 to 1925 were marked by artistic innovation. The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, poet Osip Mandelstam, and painter Wassily Kandinsky were but three among an explosion of artists who emerged in that place and time. As the Russian Revolution struggled to survive, the work of such luminaries fell victim to a politics of bureaucratic rigidity and censorship. This happened in Cuba as well, but the most powerful voices were eventually able to prevail. I wanted to understand why creativity and freedom of expression survived in Cuba when it suffered more definitive repression in other twentieth-century revolutions.
Poets also create and project a nation's imaginary: glimpses of a future unique to its history and culture and, when endowed with a profound understanding of the intersections of chance, ideas, collective feeling, and praxis, trace fragments of the roadmap by which a people may claim that future. Centuries later we often look to an era's major poets for clues to that era's significance and complexities. The poetic genre, so little appreciated here in the United States, mirrors who we have been and are in ways that invite exploration (think Whitman, Ginsberg, Rich, di Prima, Harjo). So when one nation's poets exert an influence on others, it is noteworthy, especially when that nation is a small and beleaguered island struggling to survive.
Cuba's rich intellectual and artistic history goes back centuries, issuing from diverse cultures even as its people came up against class and racial barriers. In poetry one need think only of José María de Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, or Nicolás Guillén. The U.S. poet, translator, publisher, and editor Mark Weiss writes, "Cuba has had an active literary culture for four hundred years, which since the late nineteenth century has had a disproportionate influence on the literatures of all the Spanish speaking Americas."
Other artistic genres also offer important figures. In music there were such greats as Ernesto Lucuona, Bola de Nieve, Sindo Garay, and those other old men now most commonly referred to as the vieja trova (veteran troubadours). In the visual arts were Víctor Manuel, Wilfredo Lam, René Portocarero, Mariano Rodríguez, and Antonia Eiriz. The work of Amelia Peláez still reflects the island's colors and light, and one can see the luminous media lunas that inspired her unique vision in some of the country's older buildings. Crossover genres unique to the country, such as those in which artists have reproduced those half-moon stained glass windows or preserved the Santería signatures or symbols, also feed a rich ambience. That so much of this ambience has gone to ruin during recent decades of privation makes these glimpses of art all the more precious and magical.
A nineteenth-century novel translated into dozens of languages, which has always remained in print in Spanish, has been reproduced in several genres both before and since the Revolution of 1959. It is Cecilia Valdés by Cirillo Villaverde. The book was first published in Havana in 1839 and, demonstrating its cross-border appeal, came out in an expanded version in New York in 1882. Gonzalo Roig composed a two-act zarzuela based on the novel, which had its Havana premier in 1932 and was staged by New York's Metropolitan Opera Company in 1965. In 1981 the Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solás made Cecilia, the most expensive production launched by Cuba's film industry to that moment. The domestic version was four hours long; the one for international release ran two hours. A six-hour television miniseries of the novel was launched in Spain around the same time.
I mention Cecilia because, in different ways, in its book and film versions, it forefronts issues that remain unresolved in today's Cuba, issues with which Cuban artists in all genres continue to struggle. And when a Cuban work, even one based on a text written a century and a half earlier, goes out into the world, the fact that it comes from a country in revolution changes its impact and meaning: inevitably it is interrogated differently.
The novel Cecilia Valdés tells the story of a young, nineteenth-century mulata woman and her white lover. Race is not their only conflict; unbeknownst to them they are also brother and sister. Their ill-fated love story, a Caribbean version of the myth common to so many different cultures, is set against the beginnings of Cuba's slave rebellions. But when the novel became a film it was panned by every Cuban critic. Almost all were outraged at Solás's reinterpretation of the canonical work. The filmmaker omitted the subtext of incest but foregrounded Santería, an African religious practice that had been impossible to write about in the nineteenth century. His Cecilia is a practitioner, and he portrays that religion as the force that shapes his characters' destinies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exporting Revolution by Margaret Randall. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix1. How These Ideas Took Shape 1
2. Talent and Influence beyond Numbers 22
3. Cuba by Cuba 42
4. The Island 56
5. Cuban Solidarity: Africa 69
6. Cuban Solidarity: Latin America 83
7. Internationalism, Cuban Style 98
8. Emilio in Angoloa 111
9. Nancy in Ethiopia 122
10. Laidi in Zambia 135
11. Educating New Men and Women, Globally 144
12. Cuban Health Care: A Model That Works 159
13. Cuban Health Means World Health 171
14. Sports for Everyone 192
15. What I Learned 205
Notes 223
Bibliography 245
Index 249
What People are Saying About This
"Cuba’s internationalist record since it gained independence is utterly without parallel, a record even more remarkable on the part of a small country under unremitting assault by the global superpower. This highly instructive account by a poet immersed in Cuban culture, and deeply familiar with Cuban society, raises critical issues that all should ponder, Americans in particular."
"In Exporting Revolution, Margaret Randall turns cold war dogma on its head, showing how the small and blockaded country of Cuba was able to marshal its resources and the remarkable solidarity of its people to offer disaster relief, medical care, and literacy classes in countries far beyond its borders. Randall’s deeply moving account gives us hope that an internationalism grounded in generosity could be an alternative to a global order ruled by economic and military might."