From every imaginable point of view, the story of the Cuban revolution is a tragedy. How to make sense of that story is quite another matter. Like all tragedies, Cuba’s is haunted by unanswered questions, fatal mistakes and sliding-doors alternative possibilities. As is customary in the genre, what we think of its protagonists is a subjective question, determined by perspective more than anything else. Every viewer of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” must draw their own conclusions about Brutus and Marc Antony; so too with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
During the decades when “actually existing socialism” (as its defenders called it) held sway over something like a third of the world’s population, Cuba looked, at least sometimes, like an exceptional case. Unlike the forbidding pseudo-socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cuban revolution was not imposed by military force or an ingenious coup engineered by a “vanguard party.” It was a cinematic and charismatic adventure, beginning with a daring band of guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains who swept through the country until the corrupt U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista simply blew away on New Year’s Day of 1959.
By most accounts, Castro was a radical reformer but not a committed Marxist or socialist, at least not until implacable American hostility drove him into an alliance with the expansionist (and slightly liberalized) Soviet Union of Nikita Khrushchev. Cuba became a potent international symbol, no matter which side you were on; in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, “The Cuban revolution had everything: romance, heroism in the mountains, ex-student leaders … a jubilant people, in a tropical tourist paradise pulsing with rumba rhythms.” He doesn’t mention Ernest Hemingway, the most famous American writer of his time, but in its early years Castro’s Cuba had him too.
That symbolic example (far more than the complicated Cuban reality) inspired imitators in post-colonial nations throughout the developing world, not to mention terrorist or insurgent groups within major Western nations, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground to Italy’s Red Brigades to the Irish Republican Army. Those anarchic or revolutionary forces briefly seemed, during the 1970s and ‘80s, on the verge of shaping history. Some of them did so, even if the ultimate results were ambiguous, as with the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa or the PLO in the Israeli-occupied territories. Most were crushed by superior forces, or ultimately succumbed to internal corruption or factional irrelevance.
We may be drawing near the final act of the specific tragedy of post-revolutionary Cuba, although nowhere near the end of the larger melodrama of that island’s tormented relationship with the United States. Donald Trump’s badly wounded administration is now searching for a “second Venezuela,” meaning a weaker, smaller nation it can victimize after the extraordinary humiliation of its botched war with Iran.
For Marco Rubio and others in the right-wing Cuban-American universe of South Florida that birthed and nurtured him, the opportunity to bring down the faltering Cuban government is deeply personal — never a healthy ingredient in international diplomacy.
It appears to be Cuba’s time in the crosshairs, although whether a U.S. military intervention will actually happen, or would be successful on anyone’s terms, remains very much in doubt. There’s no alternative leader or defrocked monarch that American power could install, as was accomplished in Venezuela and hoped for in Iran, at least not short of full-on invasion, conquest and occupation. It is not, of course, a coincidence that Barack Obama, whose presidency now feels like a rumor from a distant galaxy, began to forge more reasonable and humane relations with both Cuba and Iran barely a decade ago.
For Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others in the right-wing Cuban-American universe of South Florida that birthed and nurtured him, the opportunity to bring down the faltering Cuban government is deeply personal — never a healthy ingredient in international diplomacy. Miami-expat monomania remains a curiously powerful force within Republican politics, which has clearly driven the Justice Department’s bizarre decision to indict Raúl Castro — Cuba’s 94-year-old former president, the last survivor of the 1959 revolutionary leadership — over a murky incident three decades in the past.
It’s legitimate to view that 1996 episode, in which Cuban fighters shot down two U.S. private planes, killing four people, as an avoidable tragedy, a dreadful mistake or a war crime, depending on your perspective. But set against the 1,700 civilian deaths caused by the U.S. bombing campaign in Iran, which includes at least 250 children — not to mention the 75,000 civilian deaths of Israel’s war in Gaza — the outrage appears, shall we say, selective.
Rubio is clearly behind this new push for regime change in Havana, since his boss understands the issue, as he understands everything else, only in the vaguest and most vainglorious terms. Asked about Cuba during a brief Oval Office chat with reporters last week, Trump said: “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So I would be happy to do it.” Words to be inscribed alongside those of FDR and Churchill, no doubt.
A few weeks earlier — on the eve of his war with Iran, in fact — Trump blandly suggested that a “friendly takeover of Cuba” might be on the cards. That inane sentiment might belong on the same shelf in the MAGA Library of Oblivion where Trump’s plans for Greenland are gathering dust, but it too probably results from Rubio dripping poison in his ear. I’m confident the secretary knows all about the 1901 Platt Amendment, which granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba anytime it wanted, in order to maintain “a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” Yes, that amendment was removed from the Cuban constitution in 1940, many years before Castro. But do you doubt for a moment that Trump’s legal team, and a Supreme Court majority, could find reasons why it’s somehow still in force?
As Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Andrew Roth of the Guardian last week, now that Trump “spends his days sleeping and worrying only about his ballroom,” he has become “increasingly susceptible” to the “crowd of Cuba hawks who have always wanted us to invade, who may think that they can take advantage of an increasingly checked-out old man.”
Cuba’s revolutionary society under the Castro regime was nowhere near as grim as the police states of the Soviet bloc, but also nowhere near as awesome as it looked during the radical-chic years that drove all those Florida exiles insane.
If this is Rubio’s long-awaited moment, that speaks to the Trump administration’s downward slide into incoherent neocon warmongering — but with far less efficiency than the George W. Bush administration and none of its ideological commitment — and also to the psychic wound that afflicts many Cuban Americans of Rubio’s generation. One important truth about Rubio is that he speaks fluent and idiomatic Cuban-accented Spanish, as evidenced in his recent video message offering “a new path between the U.S. and a new Cuba” — under Trump’s leadership, which may have undercut the appeal slightly. Another is that he’s 55 years old and has never been to Cuba in his life.
Cuba’s revolutionary society under the Castro regime was nowhere near as grim as the police states of the Soviet bloc, but also nowhere near as awesome as it looked during the radical-chic years that drove all those Florida exiles insane. The Cuban state made enormous strides in providing universal education and free healthcare to all citizens, and as recently as the COVID pandemic could still offer a level of social services far above those available to lower-income Americans. Unfortunately, that was never the whole story.
Whether, or why, such an impressive level of egalitarian achievement had to come attached to an autocratic, bureaucratic and increasingly corrupt regime that suppressed free expression and imprisoned or expelled many of its poets, artists and political dissidents is, to put it mildly, a difficult question. But 35 years after the final collapse of Soviet-style Communism, with young people all over the world suffering through the slow decay of capitalism and increasingly curious about the rehabilitated Zohran Mamdani brand of “democratic socialism,” it might be an important question all over again.
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If we could resurrect Karl Marx and show him a highlight reel of the 20th century, he would, first of all, be horrified at the level of carnage conducted in his name and demand to return to the grave. After that, he might tell us that Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959 were spectacularly bad choices for experiments with socialism — two essentially feudal societies with no history of democratic politics and no industrial working class — and there was no way it could possibly have gone well. I don’t imagine for a second that would settle the historical and political disputes.
If we could ask the Cuban people what they want, their answers might not have much to do with abstract debates about capitalism and socialism, and more with not wanting their children to starve under sanctions imposed by American politicians who claim to have their best interests at heart. They find themselves trapped between two fading 20th-century hangovers, mixed with the potentially disastrous collapse of the Trump presidency and served with rum and tepid seawater.
On one hand are the dying remnants of the Reaganite Cuban-American right, dreaming of covert warfare and revenge for the Bay of Pigs. On the other are the dying remnants of old-school revolutionary socialism, stuck to a failing state that once offered so much promise. Nobody in either country voted for any of this, but perhaps the enduring lesson of the Cuban tragedy is that change is always possible, even in the darkest hour, and defeat is not forever.
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from Andrew O’Hehir
