Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Fidel Castro was in many ways defined through his confrontation with the United States. His uncompromising defense of Cuban claims to self-determination and national sovereignty was a summons to which millions of Cubans could respond unequivocally, without regard to political affinities. What resonated in 1959 and in the years that followed was the very phenomenon of the Cuban revolution, of a people summoned to heroic purpose. Fidel Castro was the most visible representative of that people.

  The Cuban revolution triumphed in a larger context, at a time of decolonization movements in Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. To confront the United States in the name of national sovereignty and self-determination catapulted Fidel onto the international stage, as a powerful symbol to sustain Third World intransigence against First World domination. That the Cubans could make good on their aspirations resonated across the globe: Cuba as model, Cuba as example, Cubans defeating the U.S.-organized Bay of Pigs invasion which, they boasted, represented the first defeat of imperialism in the Americas. Cuban bravado reverberated across Latin America. The resolve of the people on a small island in the Caribbean served as a symbol of hope to peoples in distant continents.

  It is also necessary to pause in the rush to ascertain Fidel’s “legacy.” The biography of Castro is not the history of Cuba. The life of Fidel Castro was contingent and contextual. The social forces that crashed upon one another in fateful climax in 1959 were set in motion long before Fidel Castro. This is not to suggest that the Cuban revolution was a matter of inevitable outcome, of course. To acknowledge that the revolution was not inevitable should not be understood to mean that it lacked an internal logic, one derived from the very history from which it emerged.

  However large a role Fidel played in shaping the course of Cuban history, it bears emphasizing that the success of his appeal and the source of his authority were very much a function of the degree to which he represented the authenticity of Cuban historical aspirations. Fidel Castro was a historic actor, but he was also acted upon. To explain outcomes of 50 years of Cuban programs and policies as a result of one man’s will is facile. Worse, it is to dismiss the efforts of hundreds of thousands of men and women who contributed to the deliberations, decisions, and actions that moved the history of Cuba since the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada.

  Fidel Castro bestirred the Cuban people to act with sacrifice and selflessness, exhilarated by new possibilities and new promises, but most of all by the prospects of a better future that seemed to be within their reach and through their efforts—in a word, through their own agency. He was uncompromising about relocating power over Cuban life from foreign states to Cubans, and making the purpose of power the improvement of things Cuban and the affirmation of the prerogative of the Cuban in Cuba. He framed the exercise of national sovereignty and self-determination as the defining paradigm of the Cuban revolution which gave Cuba’s leadership a logic to guide everything else.

  In short, the legacy of Fidel Castro? The example of the Cuban people.

  * * *

  * Excerpted with permission from Louis A. Pérez Jr., “Fidel Castro: A Life—and Death—in Context,” NACLA, November 29, 2016, http://nacla.org/news/2016/11/29/fidel-castro-life%E2%80%94-and-death%E2%80%94-context.

  One authoritative source told us in December 2016 that Fidel was lucid until the end, detailing arrangements for what should occur after he died. He extracted a promise from Raúl that there would be no statues of him erected, no small statues sold, and no streets or buildings named to memorialize him. The National Assembly honored the request and passed a law a few days later forbidding the production of statues, though many people sought to buy one. The symbolism of the request was clear: the Cuban people, not Fidel, were responsible for the Revolution.

  Fidel also requested that his ashes be carried to Santiago along the same route he took in January 1959, when he energized Cubans with a weeklong victory march to Havana. Cubans lined the highway to bid him farewell. They understood that the long funeral march was intended to serve the same purpose, a renewal of vows to continue the revolution.

  Continuity

  Amid all the changes taking place in Cuba, there was a remarkable pattern of continuity. Cubans did not set the island ablaze, as some American pundits expected, when Fidel relinquished his authority to Raúl in 2006. Historian Julia Sweig was spot on in characterizing the calm transfer of leadership as “Fidel’s Final Victory.”38 When Raúl steps down as president in 2018 and then as first secretary of the PCC in 2021, the transition is likely to be equally smooth. No one expects the new leaders to abandon the three mainstays of the Revolution: Cuba’s socialist system at home, its commitment to international solidarity, and its determination to be independent.

  To be sure, there has been considerable debate and little consensus about how Cuba’s model of socialism will evolve, and whether it will include political changes that bring it closer to US ideals of democracy. But Raúl was direct in declaring to the Seventh Party Congress, in April 2016, that Cuba will continue with “a single Party . . . which represents and guarantees the unity of the Cuban nation.” Unity, he acknowledged, will be more difficult to achieve in the future, because the new economic model will lead to an “increasing heterogeneity of sectors and groups in our society, originating from differences in their income.” This is a situation Cuba’s enemies will want to use to their advantage “to weaken us,” he warned, which is why they demand that Cuba divide itself “into several parties in the name of sacrosanct bourgeois democracy.”39

  Similarly, there was no indication that Cuba will depart from its global commitment to the poor. International solidarity is likely to continue being a feature of its foreign policy. Yet the fundamental element of Cuba’s foreign policy, former ambassador Carlos Alzugaray explained, is “the maintenance of the sovereignty, the independence, the self-determination, and the security of Cuba.”40 This has been a Cuban quest for five hundred years, not merely a posture adopted since 1959. The revolutionaries who gained victory in 1959, and those who sought to continue the Cuban Revolution in the twenty-first century, looked back not only to José Martí but to Hatuey, the Taino chief who refused to bow to the Spanish. Independence and sovereignty are the sine qua non of Cuba libre, the essential ingredients of a free Cuba.

  Notes

  1. Mariela Castro Espín, “Socialism Cannot Be Homophobic,” La Jiribilla, no. 628 (May 18–24, 2013), Wallace Sillanpoa, trans., http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs3816.html.

  2. Andrew Schneider, “Cuban Drug Could Help Diabetes Patients Avoid Amputations,” Houston Chronicle, December 19, 2014, http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/health/article/Cuban-drug-could-help-diabetes-patients-avoid-5969300.php.

  3. Margaret Crahan, “The Pope in Cuba: What Does It Mean?” Wilson Center Latin American Program, September 21, 2015, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/the-pope-cuba-what-does-it-mean.

  4. Carlos Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Georgette Felix, Elaine Kerrigan, Phyllis Freeman, and Hardie St. Martin (New York: Viking, 1980), ix.

  5. Peter Eisner and Ara Ayer, “Social, Economic Change Is in the Wind in Cuba,” PBS World Focus, March 9, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kr6r1njkYM. We appreciate a note from Dr. Margaret Crahan informing us that in 2016 the Ministry of Higher Education announced it would be creating new degrees aimed at preparing students for the workforce.

  6. González Echevarria, “Exiled by Ike, Saved by America,” New York Times, January 7, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/opinion/07echevarria.html.

  7. Sánchez Egozcue, “Challenges of Economic Restructuring in Cuba,” 125.

  8. Revista Temas, http://temas.cult.cu.

  9. Margaret E. Crahan, “Civil Society and Religion in Cuba: Past, Present and Future,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2007), 331.

  10. Maximiliano F. Trujillo Lemes, “La Iglesia católica, la condición política cubana y Palabra Nueva,” Temas, no. 76 (October–December 2013): 58.

  11. Orlando Márquez Hidalgo, “The Role of the Catholic Church in Cuba Today,” Brookings Institution, July 29, 2013, unedited transcript, https://www.brookings.edu/events/the-role-of-the-catholic-church-in-cuba-today, 6.

  12. Trujillo Lemes, “La Iglesia católica, la condición política cubana y Palabra Nueva,” 59.

  13. Márquez Hidalgo, “The Role of the Catholic Church in Cuba Today,” 12.

  14. Linda Qiu, “Are There Political Prisoners in Cuba?” PolitiFact Global News Service, March 22, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/mar/22/raul-castro/are-there-political-prisoners-cuba.

  15. “Cuba y su Diáspora: Partes Inseparables de una Misma Nacíon,” Espacio Laical, no. 28 (October–December 2011), http://www.espaciolaical.org/contens/28/3247.pdf; “Propuestas para una refundación de las prensa cubana,” Espacio Laical, no. 33 (January–March 2013), http://www.espaciolaical.org/contens/33/3651.pdf.

  16. Cuba Posible, http://cubaposible.net.

  17. Interview with Roberto Veiga González by Philip Brenner, December 16, 2015, Havana.

  18. Jon Lee Anderson, “Cuba’s Film Godfather,” New Yorker, April 24, 2013.

  19. Ann Marie Stock, “Zooming In: Making and Marketing Films in Twenty-First-Century Cuba,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 351–53.

  20. As quoted in Michael Chanan, Cuban Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 3.

  21. Anderson, “Cuba’s Film Godfather.”

  22. Emily J. Kirk, “Setting the Agenda for Cuban Sexuality: The Role of Cuba’s Cenesex,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 36, no. 72 (2011); also see Jon Alpert and Saul Landau, producers, Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution, released November 28, 2016, HBO, http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/mariela-castros-march-cubas-lgbt-revolution.

  23. Associated Press, “Cuban Transsexual Elected to Office,” Guardian (London), November 18, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/18/cuban-transsexual-adela-hernandez-elected.

  24. International Telecommunication Union, “Country Profile: Cuba,” ICT-EYE, August 23, 2016, http://www.itu.int/net4/itu-d/icteye/CountryProfile.aspx?countryID=63.

  25. “With No Sign of a Cuban Spring, Change Will Have to Come from within the Party,” Economist, May 24, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21550422.

  26. David Sanger, “US Says It Tried to Build a Social Media Site in Cuba, but Failed,” New York Times, April 4, 2014.

  27. Desmond Butler, Michael Weissenstein, Laura Wides-Munoz, and Andrea Rodriguez, “US Co-Opted Cuba’s Hip-Hop Scene to Spark Change,” Associated Press, December 11, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20141211/lt-secret-cuban-hip-hop-abridged/?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=world.

  28. ONEI, “Proyecciones de la Población Cubana 2015–2050,” tables 10.1 and 10.2, 2013, http://www.one.cu/proyecciones de la poblacion 2015 2050.htm.

  29. Sally Kestin and Megan O’Matz, “Cubans Assure US They Are Coming as Tourists, Then Stay On,” Sun-Sentinel, December 12, 2015, http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-cuba-tourist-visas-aid-20151211-story.html.

  30. Margaret E. Crahan, “Cuba: Politics and Society,” in US Policy toward Cuba, ed. Dick Clark, Aspen Institute Congressional Program, First Conference (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2002), 26.

  31. Hope Bastian Martinez, “‘Adjusting to the Adjustment’: Difference, Stratification and Social Mobility in Contemporary Havana, Cuba,” Ph.D. diss (Washington, DC: American University, 2016), 190–91.

  32. Bastian Martinez, “‘Adjusting to the Adjustment,’” 217–24.

  33. Feinberg, Open for Business, 168.

  34. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), epigraph.

  35. Rafael Hernández, “Demografía política e institucionalidad. Apuntes sociológicos sobre las estructuras políticas en Cuba,” Espacio Laical, no. 10 (April–June 2014): 33.

  36. Sánchez Egozcue, “Challenges of Economic Restructuring in Cuba,” 125.

  37. Raúl Castro Ruz, “The Revolutionary Cuban People Will Again Rise to the Occasion,” Speech to the Closing Session of the National Assembly, July 8, 2016, http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2016-07-13/the-revolutionary-cuban-people-will-again-rise-to-the-occasion.

  38. Sweig, “Fidel’s Final Victory.”

  39. Raúl Castro Ruz, “The Development of the National Economy, along with the Struggle for Peace, and Our Ideological Resolve, Constitute the Party’s Principal Missions,” April 18, 2016 (Granma International translation), http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2016-04-18/the-development-of-the-national-economy-along-with-the-struggle-for-peace-and-our-ideological-resolve-constitute-the-partys-principal-missions.

  40. Alzugaray, “Cuban Foreign Policy during the ‘Special Period,’” 51.

  Appendix

  Chronology of Key Events

  ca. 100–1492

  The Guanahatabey, Ciboney, and Taino native peoples arrive on the island from the Yucatan, south Florida, and northern South America, respectively, between 100 CE and 500 CE. Estimates about the number of native peoples living in Cuba in 1492 vary between 150,000 and 200,000.

  1492–1595

  October 12, 1492: Christopher Columbus lands in the Bahamas with an expedition of three boats.

  October 28: Columbus sights Cuba for the first time. In November, he leads expeditions to the island, convinced it was actually Cipangu (i.e., Japan).

  September 1493: Columbus sets off on his second voyage to the New World. It is marked by recurrent episodes of violence between the Spanish and the Native population.

  January 1511: Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar begins the conquest and colonization of Cuba, creating seven settlements.

  1511: Velázquez estimates that Cuba’s indigenous population is 112,000. By 1519, it was down to 19,000.

  ca. 1512–1515: The Spanish begin to bring the first Africans to Cuba to provide labor for gold extraction, agriculture, village construction, and domestic service.

  1553: The Spanish governor designates Havana, instead of Santiago, as the capital of Cuba.

  1589: Spain builds the Morro Castle fort at the Havana harbor entrance.

  1592: Construction of the Zanja Real aqueduct, the first European-style water supply system in the Americas, is completed.

  1595: Havana’s first sugar mill is established.

  1600–1800

  1608: Silvestre de Balboa writes Espejo de Paciencia (Mirror of Patience), the foundational piece of Cuban literature. The work realistically represents Cuban life at the time.

  1620: Havana is the Spanish Empire’s fastest growing city

  1717: All tobacco production is placed under a government monopoly.

  1720s: Tobacco growers carry out several unsuccessful revolts against Spanish mercantilism.

  1756–1763: The Seven Years’ War in Europe pits a Spanish-French alliance against England.

  August 1762: A British expeditionary fleet lays siege to western Cuba, seizes Morro Castle, and controls Havana.

  June 1763: The Treaty of Paris ends British occupation.

  1773: The Real Colegio Seminario de San Carlos y San Ambrosio is established in Havana.

  1774: The census records that Cuba has a population of 172,620 inhabitants: 96,440 whites, 31,847 free blacks, and 44,333 black slaves.

  1791: Haitian sugar and coffee estates are destroyed as 500,000 slaves take up arms against their owners. Production shifts to Cuba along with 30,000 fleeing French settlers.

  1790–1805: Cuban sugar p
roduction grows from 14,000 tons to 34,000 tons as Spain removes mercantile trade restrictions and European countries boycott Haitian sugar in response to its 1804 declaration of independence.

  1800–1898

  January 1812: A series of independent slave insurrections erupt throughout the island, inspired by the Haitian revolution. In April, the Spanish capture and hang José Antonio Aponte, whom they mistakenly charge with being the ringleader.

  September 23, 1817: Spain and Britain sign the Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, intended to prevent their colonial “subjects from engaging in any illicit traffic in slaves.” Despite the treaty, the number of Cuban slaves swells from 286,942 in 1827 to 436,495 in 1841.

  1830: With a harvest of more than 100,000 metric tons, Cuba becomes the world’s largest producer of sugar. The growth is facilitated by the construction of new railroad lines.

  1840s: Coffee prices fall, causing a shift in production toward sugar.

  1853: The first telegraph line is established.

  1860: Sugar accounts for 80 percent of Cuba’s exports.

  October 10, 1868: With the Grito de Yara (Cry of Yara), Carlos Manuel de Céspedes del Castillo calls for Cuban independence from Spain, marking the start of the Ten-Year War. The rebels concede defeat in 1878 with the Zanjón Pact.

  March 15, 1878: Antonio Maceo refuses to accept defeat and leads the Protest of Baraguá against capitulation.

  August 24, 1879: The Cuban general Calixto Garcia starts the Guerra Chiquita—the Little War—an attempt to continue the liberation war. It ends after thirteen months.

  October 7, 1886: Spain abolishes slavery in Cuba.

  April 10, 1892: José Martí, along with other Cuban emigrés in the United States, founds the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC).

  February 24, 1895: With the Grito de Baire (Cry of Baire), the PRC begins the “Necessary War.”