How Cuba Survived

[Judi Lynn]

26.07.2020

By
Helen Yaffe

For decades, commentators predicted that Cuba's socialist model couldn't survive without the USSR or Fidel Castro. They were wrong – and even in the face of continued sanctions, its unique system endures.



For sixty years, the Cuban Revolution has defied expectations and flouted the rules. Cuba is a country of contradictions; a poor country with world-leading human development indicators and has mobilised the world’s largest international humanitarian assistance; a weak and dependent economy which has survived economic crisis and the extraterritorial United States blockade; anachronistic but innovative; formally ostracised, but with millions of ardent defenders around the world. Despite meeting most of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015, Cuba’s development strategy is not upheld as an example. These contradictions require explanation. ‘Cuba is a mystery’, Isabel Allende, director of the Higher Institute for International Relations, told me in Havana, ‘it is true, but you have to try to understand that mystery.’

Historians like anniversaries; they help to mark the passage of time and to provide perspective to its passing. 2019 marked sixty years since the Rebel Army seized power from the Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. But at the half-way point was another useful marker: it was thirty years since Fidel Castro publicly declared that were the Soviet Union to disintegrate, the Cuban Revolution would endure. He said that on 26 July 1989, eighteen months before the USSR collapsed and four months prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. For three decades, the survival of Cuban socialism was attributed to Soviet aid. Today, the Revolution has existed in the post-Soviet world for longer than it did under the Soviet sphere of influence. How on earth did Cuban socialism survive?

The Revolution is now older than the new head of state, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who is entirely a product of Cuban socialism. He is the son of a mechanic and a schoolteacher, born in April 1960 in Placetas, a small city in central Cuba founded by Spanish colonists in 1861. In April 2018, with a not-quite unanimous vote from the National Assembly of People’s Power, Díaz-Canel took over from Raul Castro. His ascendency is one of history’s conundrums solved: the end of the Castro reign did not signal the end of the Cuban Revolution.

For years, students of Cuba were conditioned to believe that the Revolution’s trajectory could only be understood by reference to Fidel Castro’s biology or psychology. Then Fidel ailed, he resigned, he died, but the Revolution lived on. Raul Castro took over. He was referred to as the ‘brother’, as if that explained his governance; the ‘reformer’, as if a peaceful transition to capitalism was assured. Raul came, he reformed, he resigned, and the socialist system prevailed.

More:
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/cubas-model-vindicated/

[secondwind]

1. Spent a week there several years ago. We went on a tour disguised as a humanitarian

trip, there were less than 20 of us. We brought all sorts of medicines, used clothing (my husband was so moved by the poverty, he left his suitcase behind).

I was struck by the poverty and lack of food, senior citizens scrounging in garbage. We were told that the old folks didn’t get much help because they were not “productive to the cause “. Our guide had 2 children which was rare, she said Fidel paid her 90 a month, but it was not steady income, sometimes it could be as low as 35.

Beautiful country with very resilient people, all well educated. Your bus driver could have a degree in Physics. Beautiful architecture everywhere.