Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  To Fidel, showing the film was like exposing Cuba’s dirty underwear to the world. But Guevara shot back publicly, asserting in a television interview, “We Cuban cineastes will be able to prove to the Comandante en Jefe that . . . the language of the cinema is either the language of the cinema or it isn’t cinema.” He added, “we’re on the right road, the road of clarity.”20 Fidel responded by backing down, acknowledging that he had not even viewed the film.

  Gender Rights

  Guevara’s efforts had an even greater impact two years earlier. Journalist Jon Lee Anderson assessed that Guevara “helped usher in an era of gradual sexual glasnost” by producing Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) in 1993.21 Also directed by Gutiérrez Alea and Tabío, the film examines the developing friendship between a gay artist and a committed young communist who is willing to maintain the nonsexual relationship initially in order to spy on the so-called deviant. It not only portrays a gay Cuban sympathetically; Fresa y Chocolate clearly criticizes the ways the government penalized homosexuality in the 1960s and the lame excuses the PCC offered to justify discrimination and repression against homosexuals.

  Fresa y Chocolate was the first Cuban film to receive an Academy Award nomination, and its appearance marked a turning point for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Cubans. Less fearful about acknowledging their orientations, they began to gather openly in clubs, perform as transvestites, and speak out. While subsequent films reinforced their courage, unquestionably the most significant support came from Mariela Castro Espín, a daughter of Raúl Castro and the late Vilma Espín.

  From her position as director of the National Center of Sexual Education (CENESEX), Mariela Castro has carried on a crusade for LGBT rights, which has diminished taboos against discussing the issue, engendered a national conversation, educated Cubans, and empowered the LGBT community (see her leading an LGBT rally in figure 26.2).22 Consider that in 2008 the Ministry of Public Health approved state-funded sex reassignment surgery (which Mariela Castro had first proposed in 2005). Or take the case of Adela Hernández, who was imprisoned “in the 1980s for ‘dangerousness’ after her own family denounced her sexuality.” In 2012, Hernández was the first acknowledged transgender Cuban elected to public office, as a delegate to a city council in Villa Clara Province.23

  Figure 26.2. Mariela Castro Espín leads an LGBT demonstration in Havana as captured in the 2017 documentary, Transit Havana. Photo by Johannes Praus from the film.

  In 2007, Mariela Castro took to the streets to lead a parade on the International Day Against Homophobia. This has grown to be a monthlong educational campaign, and she has prominently led the Gay Pride parades in recent years. As an elected member of the National Assembly, she also has openly challenged the government to approve laws that grant the rights to same-sex couples that heterosexual couples have, and to change labor laws to include rights for LGBT Cubans.

  Increased Access to Information

  The official percentage of Cubans with access to the Internet is one of the lowest in the world. In 2013, less than 4 percent of the population had Internet connections in their homes, and only 25 percent used the Internet.24 However, the reality belies the data—Cubans have greater access to information from the Internet than the numbers suggest—and even the official numbers are improving.

  One reason for the inconsistency between the data and reality is that younger Cubans have tended to use smartphones rather than computers for their connections. A special 2012 report by the Economist magazine estimated there were 1.8 million cell phones in circulation in Cuba that year.25 Cubans also share information readily, passing on news via text messages and email through Cuba’s intranet—a system for communication exclusively within the island. Relying on old telephone lines and with painfully slow connections, the intranet is accessible to more Cubans than the Internet.

  Recently, el paquete semanal has opened the world’s media to most Cubans. Ever inventive, they now watch international films and television programs by ordering a custom bundle from a neighbor who has broadband Internet access and has downloaded virtually every popular program from US and Spanish television stations. Once a week, a Cuban visits the supplier with a USB flash drive to obtain his or her bundle of requests. We learned from interviews in 2015 that the Netflix series House of Cards was especially popular among university and government specialists who study the United States.

  The most recent data does not account for the government’s expansion of broadband Wi-Fi access throughout the country, which began in 2015. By mid-2016, it had created more than forty hotspots in Havana at which users could connect to the web at a cost of about $2 per hour. To be sure, for a worker who earns the equivalent of $25 per month, the cost of access made it a rarely used luxury. But with increasing wealth, more Cubans were able to link in.

  Both political and logistical reasons account for Cubans’ limited Internet access. Some high officials have worried that uncontrolled access would enable enemies to spread lies, foment dissent, and undermine the government’s efforts to maintain political support for the system. The United States continued to reinforce these fears with supposed “democracy promotion” programs. One multimillion-dollar program that the Associated Press exposed in 2014 was a Twitter-like campaign that enrolled about forty thousand unsuspecting Cubans. Named ZunZuneo, it had the potential to incite the kind of flash mobs that were prominent during the Arab Spring.26 Another USAID program attempted to infiltrate “Cuba’s underground hip-hop groups scene to spark a youth movement against the government.”27

  Undoubtedly, there are officials for whom the national security rationale of limiting information has served their own interest in avoiding exposure of incompetence or corruption. And for some, old habits of secrecy and control are difficult to abandon. Yet national security concerns cannot be dismissed out of hand given Cuba’s vulnerabilities.

  Logistical problems emanated from several sources. Technically, the United States would have been the most desirable hub for Cuba’s access because of proximity. But until 2015, when President Obama allowed US telecommunications firms to do business in Cuba, the US embargo blocked Cuba’s connection. Instead, Cuba turned to Venezuela for help in laying a one-thousand-mile-long fiber optic cable under the Caribbean. But the cable malfunctioned shortly before it was scheduled to go online in 2011. There were unconfirmed allegations that Cuban and Venezuelan corruption led to the purchase of low-quality parts, and in 2012, Raúl fired General Medardo Díaz Toledo as head of the information and communication ministry, the agency in charge of the project. The cable began operation in 2013, and in 2016, Verizon and AT&T signed agreements that enable their customers to roam with cell phones in Cuba.

  Consequences of Social Change

  Cuba’s Office of National Statistics and Information (ONEI) has projected that the country’s 2015 population of 11.2 million people will rise gradually for another ten years and then begin to decline. By 2050, it is expected to be 10.8 million. Even more problematic, the percentage of the working age (20–64) population will decline from 63 to 52 percent, and the percentage of Cubans of retirement age will rise from 14 to 27 percent.28 The problem of fewer working adults supporting an increasing number of retirees is not unique to Cuba. Still, it is a demographic change that impacts several other social changes occurring on the island.

  Consider the 2013 removal of travel restrictions, a decision that carried with it potentially costly side effects. Families where the parents previously had counted on the state to provide social security, now looked to their children as a source a support. They began to encourage their adult children to work in other countries so that they could send remittances home, some of which would be saved for retirement.

  Retirement calculations also shaped decisions about homeownership. Until 2013, the common way to move from one home to another was by barter. When a friend of ours remarried several years ago, he and his n
ew wife traded their two modest-sized apartments for a house. The couple who occupied the house wanted to downsize, and the second apartment went to one of their adult children who had recently married. However, in 2014, as our friend edged closer to retirement, he realized that a monthly government pension of 200 CUP (about $8) meant he would live out his days in hardship. His solution was to sell the house, buy a less expensive apartment, and hope the difference will cover the expenses of his retirement years.

  For some Cubans, the new opportunity to buy and sell property—and cars—has been invigorating. They see themselves as entrepreneurs, establishing a bed and breakfast operation or a taxi service that will give them both a good income and some personal independence (figure 26.3 shows one such entrepreneur). Yet thinking about property as a substitute for social security has been jarring for many people. More than 80 percent of the population in 2015 had grown up in a system that was based on the premise that the society, not the individual, had the responsibility to care for the elderly.

  Figure 26.3. A self-employed entrepreneur (cuentapropista) on the left provides a service of refilling cigarette lighters on a Havana street. Photo by David LaFevor, www.davidlafevor.com.

  Another potential side effect of the 2013 travel decision was a “brain drain.” Better educated Cubans were those most likely to obtain good jobs abroad. Their departure could lead to a loss of the country’s base for sustained development and its most attractive resource for foreign investors. One reason the government had maintained the travel restrictions for so long was to avoid such a brain drain.

  For some, the ability to travel legally offered them a way to emigrate from Cuba. The number of Cuban applications for nonimmigrant visas to the United States jumped from 14,000 in 2011 to 35,000 in 2014. The Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that as many as 40 percent may have remained in the United States.29 Recall that the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act provides an incentive for Cuban visitors to violate visa stipulations, because the act grants resident alien status to a Cuban émigré one year and a day after being on US territory.

  Historian Margaret Crahan astutely observed in 2002 that the inequalities produced by the economic reforms in the 1990s reduced “traditional tendencies towards community solidarity . . . fueling societal decomposition.”30 Yet until 2011, many neighborhoods still retained their hold on residents because of a cumbersome process to move from one house to another and severe restrictions on travel. Even when a Cuban’s occupation might have provided the ability to move, such a doctor or engineer continued to live where he or she grew up.31 The freedom to buy and sell houses and to travel reinforced the other forces that were already diminishing the importance of community in Cuban social life. Similarly, without grandparents nearby to take care of children and with a worker’s attention focused on a family’s individual benefit, not the general welfare, Cubans experienced a loss of social cohesion in the 2010 to 2016 period.

  This depiction of the problems resulting from the social changes in Cuba highlights the major obstacle Raúl faced in trying to upgrade the Cuban model. For many Cubans, the changes that occurred did not produce positive consequences, and they resisted further reform, preferring the devil they knew to the devil they didn’t know.

  Yet for other Cubans, reform has created a new social structure in which they are comfortable. In her study of the emerging class divisions in Cuba, Hope Bastian Martinez found a new “middle class” in which some people defined their class in terms of their ability to live in “decent” housing and maintain food security while others defined class in terms of access to the Internet and the ability to travel.32

  Government statistics do not provide the kind of information that would enable researchers to know the size of the new middle class, although scholars at the University of Havana’s Center for Psychological and Sociological Research have done path-breaking work in trying to calculate its size. Economist Richard Feinberg took a different route, deriving estimates from official data on occupation, education, the number of workers who were employed by nonstate entities or were self-employed. He concludes that “Cuba looks very much like a middle-class society.”33 He surmises that it is likely this large part of the population will be influential in shaping Cuba’s future.

  The Future

  Historian Louis Pérez, Jr., opens his masterful study, The Structure of Cuban History, with an apt quote from a 2008 documentary: “How does one tell the story of a country whose history is far larger than its size?”34 Indeed, how does one conclude a history about such a country? We do so by pointing to two constants evident in the Cuban Revolution: adaptation and continuity.

  Adaptation

  The Cuban Revolution has been an ongoing process, not a singular moment. We examined in parts II and III of this book a society in continual flux as it matched its capabilities to the pursuit of its goals. Even when it seemed to be standing still, there was a dynamism about Cuba, reflected at times in its domestic or foreign policies and at times in its cultural achievements.

  A look at Cuba’s leadership offers an example of the paradox about Cuban dynamism. As we noted in chapter 24, when Raúl selected Machado Ventura to be first vice president in 2008, there was widespread expectation that meaningful changes would not be forthcoming. Yet beneath the top layers of the PCC and the government, there was a sea change occurring in the leadership. At the provincial levels in 2014, the average age of officials was about twenty-five years less than for officials at the national level. Party chiefs in the fifteen provinces were on average forty-six years old. Half were between thirty-eight and forty-seven and the oldest was fifty-seven. Similarly, 80 percent of the heads of provincial assemblies were under fifty. Rafael Hernández reasonably argued, in presenting this data, that to the extent to which Cuba’s institutions mirror the population and provide Cubans with a sense of empowerment, they will create new spaces for political action and impact the nature of the “emerging order.”35

  Dynamism was plainly evident in what Raúl Castro has done as president. Cuban economist Jorge Mario Sánchez well summarized the process of updating the Cuban model as “a change in the basis of government, on a new and irreversible scale, so as to eliminate once and for all the complacency, false triumphalism, and social apathy . . . a negation of the culture and thinking that have been years in the making.”36 Stated in these terms, “revolutionary” is a fitting adjective to describe the fundamental changes that updating has entailed.

  Evidently, Raúl saw the reforms this way because in his view they would determine the very survival of the Cuban Revolution. Thus, he asserted that changes had to be carefully planned and implemented, and there had to be a “systematic review and timely rectification of possible missteps.”37 He would not rush the process, but neither would he delay it.

  The Death of Fidel Castro

  Fidel Castro was the central figure of the Cuban Revolution. His death on November 25, 2016, touched a deep sentiment in all Cubans. He was the father of Cuban independence. Just as most people have conflicted emotions about their own father, Cubans had many feelings about Fidel. But when he died, they shared a common grief. We know critics and devotees who waited together in line for hours to pay their respects at Havana’s Revolution Square. As Louis Pérez writes in the accompanying textbox, “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: A Life—and Death—in Context*

  Seemingly implausible outcomes acted to shape much of the history attributed to Fidel Castro: a revolution of uncommon breadth and depth in a country that before January 1959 was thought of as hardly more than a client state, an American playground, a place of license and loose morality; where the United States “was so overwhelmingly influential,” Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith later acknowledged, “the American ambassador was the second most important ma
n in Cuba; sometimes even more important than the President.”

  That the government of Fidel Castro expelled the United States, nationalized U.S. property, and aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union—and also survived decades of U.S. efforts at regime change, including one armed invasion, years of covert operations, scores of assassination attempts, and more than 50 years of withering sanctions. It was precisely this implausibility that so tormented the United States. Fidel Castro cast a dark shadow over the U.S. sense of equanimity, a bad dream that would never go away.

  Notions of injured national pride, of humiliation and embarrassment—all attributed directly to the person of Fidel Castro—shaped the mindset with which the U.S. fashioned policy toward Cuba. Fidel had to be punished, and all Cubans would be punished until they did something about Castro. His mere presence served as a reminder of the inability of the United States to will the world in accordance with its own wishes, a condition made all the more insufferable by the fact that Cuba was a country upon which the United States had routinely imposed its will. The Cuban revolution, personified by and personalized in the figure of Fidel Castro, challenged long-cherished notions about national well-being and upset prevailing notions of the rightful order of things.

  Cultures cope with the demons that torment them in different ways and the practice of exorcism assumes many forms. Castro occupied a place of almost singular distinction in that nether world to which the Americans banish their demons. Even in death, he was reviled and vilified, denounced as a madman, a megalomaniac, a menace, a wicked man with whom honorable men could not negotiate in good faith. Simply put, he was so irredeemably contemptible as to make even being in his company seem akin to consorting with the devil and the prospects of rapprochement appear an accommodation to evil.