Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Cuba’s commitments to the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and Namibia’s South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) were not based on expedient short-term calculations or spontaneous bursts of revolutionary zeal. They developed deliberately and patiently, starting in the 1960s, and were deeply rooted in the Cuban revolutionaries’ belief that internationalism ultimately served Cuba’s long-term goals and interests.35 Cuba’s military contributions to liberation struggles, technical assistance to newly independent states, and education and health care to people from the third world generated goodwill and allies. It also strengthened Cuba by enhancing its “soft power”—the attractiveness of its ideas and culture in other countries and the legitimacy of its approach to global politics.36

  Cuban leaders hoped that as more countries shared Cuba’s views, its internationalism would have helped to build South-South coalitions.37 Internationalism also brought ordinary Cubans into contact with the deep poverty many third world people suffer so that new generations of Cubans who had no memory of the 1950s would gain an appreciation for the achievements of the Revolution. By the mid-1980s, approximately fifteen thousand Cubans—one out of every 625—were working in civilian foreign aid missions in more than thirty countries. At the same time, 24,000 students from 82 countries were enrolled in Cuban high schools and universities. In 1984, three-fourths of them were studying at “internationalist schools” on the Isle of Youth.38

  The Isle or Youth was the location of the infamous prison where Fidel and Raúl Castro served time after the failed 1953 Moncada attack, when the island was named the Isle of Pines. The government changed the name in 1978 when it established a novel education program for third world students, who paid nothing for their schooling, room, board, and transportation. Selected by their governments—in the case of Namibia, by SWAPO—they attended schools designated for their country, taught mostly by instructors from their home country, whom the government also supported. Cuban teachers taught math, science, and Spanish language courses.39

  Corruption

  A distinguishing characteristic of the Cuban Revolution had been the lack of corruption among senior officials. Most ministers and high party officials lived in modest homes, drove rusting Ladas, and did not wear the kind of expensive watches and jewelry that are conspicuous signs of inequality. At times, when either of us wanted to show special appreciation to an official who had provided assistance during one of our trips trip to Cuba, we would buy a $25 bottle of Scotch whisky. The hearty thanks we received made clear that this was a treat not regularly imbibed.

  The military, on the other hand, seemed to be more privileged. In 1987, Philip Brenner met Norberto Fuentes in his apartment, in a building reserved for officers. A journalist, Fuentes had written favorably about the military in a book and several articles, and had become a confidant of several senior officers. He claimed to have access to a secret report that Fidel Castro had written about the missile crisis that Brenner and Scott Armstrong, executive director of the National Security Archive, hoped to obtain. The apartment was filled with high-end consumer electronics, including three different kinds of videotape machines for watching films. In offering Brenner a drink, Fuentes opened a closet filled from top to bottom with imported whiskies. “How can you afford all of this?” Brenner asked. Fuentes avowed that he earned substantial fees for his lectures about Ernest Hemingway. Two years later, he was arrested for serving as a kind of “bag” man for military and intelligence officers engaged in illicit activities. Fidel Castro revealed that $200,000 was found in Fuentes’s apartment.40

  Fuentes was particularly friendly with General Arnaldo Ochoa and Tony de la Guardia. Ochoa had been decorated as a “Hero of the Republic,” led the team of military advisers in Nicaragua, and was a leader of Cuba’s force in Angola in 1987 and 1988. De la Guardia had been a trusted though somewhat irregular official in the Ministry of Interior (MINIT), which houses Cuba’s intelligence service and national police. He headed the security team protecting Fidel Castro during his trip to Chile in 1971, and in 1980 took charge of a unit within MINIT responsible for importing and exporting goods blocked by the US embargo.

  When Cuban troops in Africa were short on necessities, including weapons, Ochoa smuggled items such as diamonds for supplies through de la Guardia’s networks. But Ochoa became too cavalier, and at one point approved one of his aides to work with de la Guardia to help transship drugs through Cuba.41 The aide met with Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel in Colombia.

  Fidel was furious about the contact. “That was a matter of enormous seriousness,” he told Ignacio Ramonet. “It put the country in the position of being accused of being involved in drug trafficking.”42 Indeed, in December 1989 the United States invaded Panama, ostensibly to oust Manuel Noriega because of his alleged involvement in facilitating drug shipments.

  A nationally televised trial in June 1989 exposed Ochoa’s and de la Guardia’s corrupt practices, and a subsequent military tribunal sentenced them and two others to death by firing squad. Another two—including de la Guardia’s brother, Patricio—received thirty-year sentences. Interior Minister General José Abrantes was arrested shortly afterward and received a thirty-year prison term.

  As journalist Richard Gott aptly observed, “Not just the individuals involved but the Revolution itself was on trial.”43 While some US commentators have argued that the real purpose of the executions was to clamp down on an incipient move in the military to oust Fidel Castro and replace him with the supposedly popular Ochoa, only hearsay evidence from some defectors has materialized in nearly thirty years to support those allegations. In fact, Castro attacked the intelligence service, not the military, replacing several interior ministry officials with military officers. Our interviews at the time indicated that the revelations of corruption actually shocked and angered Cuban leaders because they believed that the corrosive petty criminality that was beginning to proliferate, due to economic problems, could not be halted unless the leadership remained uncorrupted.

  Notes

  1. Medea Benjamin, Joseph Collins, and Michael Scott, No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1984), 61.

  2. Benjamin et al., No Free Lunch, 167.

  3. Benjamin et al., No Free Lunch, 69.

  4. Eckstein, Back to the Future, 54.

  5. Benjamin et al., No Free Lunch, 72–73.

  6. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Closing of the Fourth Congress of the UJC,” April 4, 1982, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1982/esp/f040482e.html.

  7. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Delivered on the 25th Anniversary of the Girón Victory,” April 19, 1986, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1986/esp/f190486e.html.

  8. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en la Clausura de la Sesion Diferida del Tercer Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba,” December 2, 1986, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1986/esp/f021286e.html; Partido Comunista de Cuba, Informe Central Tercer Congreso, 1986, http://congresopcc.cip.cu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Informe-Central.pdf.

  9. Max Azicri, Cuba Today and Tomorrow: Reinventing Socialism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 24–26, 55–59.

  10. Mervyn J. Bain, “Cuba-Soviet Relations in the Gorbachev Era,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 773–77.

  11. Alexander M. Haig, “Excerpts from Haig’s Briefing about El Salvador,” New York Times, February 21, 1981.

  12. William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 82–83.

  13. John M. Goshko, “US Acts to Tighten Cuban Embargo,” Washington Post, April 20, 1982.

  14. Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in US Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban American National Foundation,” International Studies Quarterly 43 (June 1999): 346–50; Elizabeth A
. Palmer, “Exiles Talk of PACs and Power, Not Another Bay of Pigs,” CQ Weekly, June 23, 1990, 1929–33.

  15. Philip Brenner and Saul Landau, “Passive Aggressive,” NACLA Report on the Americas 24, no. 3 (November 1990): 18.

  16. Lewis Tambs, ed., “A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties” (Washington, DC: Council for Inter-American Security, 1980), 46.

  17. US Government Accountability Office, “Broadcasting to Cuba: Actions Are Needed to Improve Strategy and Operations,” Report #GAO-09-127, January 2009, 22.

  18. Smith, Closest of Enemies, 249–56; quotation is on p. 256.

  19. James G. Hershberg, ed., “Conference of Deputy Chairman of the State Council of the Republic of Cuba Carlos Rafael Rodriguez with US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, in Mexico, 23 November 1981,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 8–9 (Winter 1996–1997): 207–15.

  20. Peter Kornbluh, “A ‘Moment of Rapprochement’: The Haig-Rodriguez Secret Talks,” in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 8–9 (Winter 1996–1997): 219.

  21. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 233.

  22. Carlos Alzugaray and Anthony C. E. Quainton, “Cuban-US Relations: The Terrorism Dimension,” Pensamiento Propio, no. 34 (July–December 2011): 75.

  23. US Department of State, “Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America” (Washington, DC: January 1984), 88–91.

  24. Thomas Blanton, ed., “Public Diplomacy and Covert Propaganda: The Declassified Record of Ambassador Otto Juan Reich,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 40, March 2, 2001, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB40.

  25. Lewis H. Diuguid, “Spy Charges Strain US-Cuban Ties,” Washington Post, July 25, 1987, A17.

  26. Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 398–99.

  27. As quoted in LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 257.

  28. Mario Vázquez Raña, “Interview with Raúl Castro,” El Sol de Mexico, April 21, 1993, excerpted in García Luis, Cuban Revolution Reader: A Documentary History of 40 Key Moments of the Cuban Revolution (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2001), 226–33.

  29. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 60.

  30. Leonard Downie Jr. and Karen DeYoung, “Cuban Leader Sees Positive Signs for Ties in Second Reagan Term,” Washington Post, February 3, 1985.

  31. Phyllis Greene Walker, “National Security,” in Cuba: A Country Study, ed. James Rudolph (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985), 267.

  32. William M. LeoGrande, “Cuba,” in Confronting Revolution: Security through Diplomacy in Central America, ed. Morris Blachman, William M. LeoGrande, and Kenneth Sharpe (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 253.

  33. Center for Cuban Studies, “Fidel Castro on Central America,” Cuba Update 4, no. 4 (August 1983).

  34. Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuban Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 57, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 83.

  35. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 93–99.

  36. Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Cuban Foreign Policy during the ‘Special Period,’” in Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the “Special Period,” ed. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 62–63.

  37. H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-Soviet World (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 42–45.

  38. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 171.

  39. Donna Rich, “Cuban Internationalism: A Humanitarian Foreign Policy,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988), 607; Anne Hickling-Hudson, Jorge Corona Gonzalez, and Rosemary Preston, eds., The Capacity to Share: A Study of Cuba’s International Cooperation in Educational Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), chapters 2, 5, 7, 12.

  40. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 372.

  41. Julia Preston, “The Trial That Shook Cuba,” New York Review of Books, December 7, 1989.

  42. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 371.

  43. Gott, Cuba, 281.

  Part III

  1990–2016

  Chapter 18

  The “Special Period” in a Time of Peace, 1990–2000

  I met the joyful young Cuban boy with bilateral retinoblastoma on a ward round at the National Institute of Oncology and Radiology in Havana. Although he had already lost his sight in one eye, he was a candidate for an implant of radioactive iodine to treat the other eye. The medical skills were available in Cuba, but the U.S. government had denied the pediatric oncologist a license to import the iodine because “the radioactive medication was a threat to U.S. security.”

  —Robin C. Williams1

  Resolver

  Imagine your reaction if you had to substitute sugar water for food every third day for a year, and as a result you lost your eyesight because of a vitamin deficiency (as happened to 50,000 Cubans temporarily), and 20–25 pounds (the average for Cubans in 1993–1994). Imagine oil imports dropping by 70 percent over a four-year period (1989–1993) so that you could not drive your car and buses ran infrequently because of gasoline shortages. Picture yourself undergoing an operation at a formerly reliable hospital, where now several doctors and nurses were absent because of transportation problems, and there were hardly any anesthetics, medicines, or bandages. In 1990, few Cubans imagined they would ever live this kind of life, even when Cuban president Fidel Castro announced that the country was entering a “Special Period in a Time of Peace,” which he said meant that “our country has to face an extremely difficult situation in supplying basic necessities.”2

  By 1990, Cuba had developed to the point where infectious diseases had been eradicated and its rate of infant mortality was comparable to that of advanced industrial nations; where there were more doctors per capita than in any other country in the world and free universal health care was available throughout the island; where universities had been established in every province, education through graduate school was free, and racial and gender disparities were disappearing because of educational opportunities. Though Cuba was still a poor country by standard measures of GDP, it was an egalitarian society where most people considered themselves to be middle class and could reasonably hope that their children’s lives would be better than their own.

  Cuban planners had long nurtured an ambition to transform the economy into a vibrant engine of self-sufficiency that would enable the country to reduce its reliance on imports.3 That dream had been stymied by Cuba’s ties to the Soviet Union and the Soviet trading group, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), which designated Cuba as a supplier of sugar, citrus, and tobacco in return for oil, steel, and manufactured goods. As a result, Cuba focused much of its internal investment on producing goods for the Eastern bloc instead of on diversifying its economy.

  Still, the government did manage to develop some new industries—pharmaceuticals and genetic engineering—based on its increasingly well-educated population. It also was able to expand dairy production and create light industries that produced items for domestic use, such as toilets. However, Cuba’s ability to diversify even to this minimal extent depended on Soviet subsidies.

  As the Soviet Union hurtled toward its ultimate demise, its economy could no longer sustain losses on the products that it sold to Cuba at subsidized prices. The overthrow of communist party–ruled regimes in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the CMEA also forced the island to find new trading partners. Eighty-five percent of Cuba’s international commerce had been conducted with CMEA countries on the basis of long-term barter-like contracts. The terms of trade in these exchanges, especially with the Soviet Union, tended to favor Cuba and function like subsidies.

  The CIA estimated that in 1989 Cuba re
ceived $4.5 billion in trade subsidies and $1.4 billion in other development aid.4 It also had accumulated low interest rate loans from CMEA countries worth $10 billion.5 The actual subsidies were less than the CIA estimates because it valued CMEA products such as tractors as if their prices on the world market were the same as seemingly equivalent US products. But CMEA tractors, refrigerators, and so on were inferior and attracted little demand beyond the socialist countries themselves. Economists Andrew Zimbalist and Howard J. Sherman note that the CIA calculations also did not take into account the millions of pesos Cuba wasted on Soviet “mechanical cane harvesters, which didn’t work.”6

  Despite these limitations, the subsidies did enable Cuba to ride out economic problems in the 1980s, and to use its scant hard currency earnings to buy food and medicines that were distributed in an egalitarian way. Recall that President Gerald Ford relaxed the US embargo in 1975 by permitting US subsidiaries in third countries to sell products to Cuba. In 1990, food and medicine made up 90 percent of Cuba’s purchases from these subsidiaries.7 Without the Soviet subsidies and CMEA barter arrangements, Cuba’s hard currency earnings had to be apportioned among other necessities besides food and medicine, such as oil. And Cuba had limited ways to obtain international convertible currency. The global market prices for its commodities in the early 1990s were falling—sugar had dropped to ten cents per pound, which barely covered the cost of production.

  As its international trade plummeted between 1990 and 1993, Cuba’s gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 30 percent.8 Cubans experienced the decline in the first instance by suffering hunger and then shortages of everything, especially health care. By 1993, average daily caloric intake had fallen below the basic level established by the World Health Organization. The insufficiency of vitamins and minerals in the daily diet led to outbreaks of medical disorders that had long vanished from Cuba. Even high Communist Party officials experienced neuropathy—nerve damage—which can produce sharp pains in fingers and feet, loss of a sense of touch, inability to control muscle movement, and even temporary blindness.9 While the government did establish a special food program to protect the health of the elderly, children, and women who were pregnant or lactating, and maintained subsidies for some basic items, most Cubans found the rations insufficient.