Cuba—A Way Forward

José Goitia/The New York Times/Redux

The Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, Havana, May 2008

by Nik Steinberg, Daniel Wilkinson

In a 1980 interview, Gabriel García Márquez told The New York Times that he had spent three years writing a book about life in Cuba under Fidel Castro. But, he said, “now I realize that the book is so critical that it could be used against Cuba, so I refuse to publish it.”

In view of the Colombian author’s past concern for the victims of Latin America’s authoritarian regimes, it seems likely that what he called a “very harsh, very frank book” addressed Castro’s systematic repression of dissent: the rigged trials behind closed doors, the abysmal “reeducation” camps, the long prison sentences. Castro’s methods may have seemed relatively tame when compared with the mass slaughter of civilians by US-backed regimes throughout the region, for example in Guatemala. Yet as the cold war ended, these dictatorships gradually gave way to civilian rule, and the Castro government was left standing as the only one in the hemisphere that continued to repress virtually all political dissent. García Márquez’s book remained unpublished.

The fact that Latin America’s most renowned writer would censor himself in this way may actually say more about the plight of Cubans under Castro than anything in his manuscript. For the notion that to criticize Cuba is to abet its more powerful enemies was, for Fidel Castro, the key to achieving what his prisons alone could not—ensuring that his critics on the island remained isolated and largely ignored.

For years, many believed that the last thing keeping the region’s democratic tide from sweeping across Cuba was the unique force of Fidel Castro’s character—the extraordinary combination of charisma and cunning with which he inspired and corralled his supporters, provoked and outmaneuvered his enemies, and projected himself onto the big screen of world politics. Under his leadership, Cuba had made impressive gains in health care, education, and the eradication of extreme poverty. But the promise of the Cuban Revolution had been undercut by years of chronic deprivation, exacerbated by the US embargo, and brought to the brink of collapse by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had propped up the island’s economy for decades. Democracy would come to Cuba—the thinking went—as soon as Fidel Castro was no longer standing in its way.

Then in June 2006, his health failing, Castro was forced to step down formally after nearly five decades in power. And nothing happened. No popular uprising in the streets, no Party shake-up, no coup. Instead, his younger brother, Raúl, took up power and, though lacking Fidel’s charisma, was able to keep the country running smoothly. Within months, it seemed clear that Cuba’s single-party system could continue without Fidel at the helm.

Some still held out hope that Raúl Castro would begin a process of political reform, a Cuban perestroika. Those looking for signs of an opening pointed to several of Raúl’s early actions, including state-sponsored public forums ostensibly aimed at encouraging criticism of government policies and the signing of the two major international human rights treaties.

But was Raúl Castro allowing genuine criticism of his government? Was the repressive machinery being eased or even dismantled? A year ago Human Rights Watch set out to answer these questions. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. The Cuban government welcomes tourists to the island, but has for years denied access to international rights monitors. Foreign journalists are followed around by undercover agents: their e-mails are monitored and their phones tapped. Those who publish in-depth stories on controversial issues face expulsion.

Our first step was to write to the Cuban government requesting authorization to visit the island. Human Rights Watch does not normally request permission to do its work, but it seemed like a good way to test whether the government’s attitude had changed. The government never responded.

We then got in touch with several local dissidents. Outside of Cuba, people often refer to “the dissidents” as though they are a single, unified political group. They are not. They do not share a single ideology or objective. Rather, the dissident community is made up of a variety of Cubans scattered across the island, some of whom belong to small groups, and others who work alone. A dissident may be someone who writes articles critical of the government, attempts to form an independent labor union, or simply refuses to attend meetings of a local revolutionary committee. What ties these people together is that they engage in activities that the Cuban government considers contrary to its policies, and therefore “counterrevolutionary.”

We obtained reports of alleged government abuses from several unauthorized human rights groups in Cuba, whose leaders have persevered over the years despite tapped phone lines, restricted mobility, frequent police raids, and periods in jail, relying on a few committed volunteers to compile lists of political prisoners and testimony about violations. But tracking down the alleged victims to corroborate these reports often took weeks. E-mail access on the island is virtually nonexistent, and many families outside of Havana do not have phone lines. When we were able to get through by phone, some people were too frightened to speak. Others spoke cryptically to avoid arousing the suspicion of listening ears. Still others spoke freely until their lines went dead, mid-sentence. While we did manage to conduct some full-length interviews, it became increasingly clear that the only way to get the full story would be to visit the island.

It would prove to be the most difficult research mission Human Rights Watch had undertaken in the region in years. Our team entered on tourist visas and traveled the length of the island by car, telling no one in advance that we were coming and never staying in any town for more than one night.¹ The fear we had sensed over the phone was even more palpable on the ground. Some people became so uneasy talking about government abuses that we cut short the interviews and moved on. Several alerted us to watching neighbors who monitored suspicious activity for the local Revolutionary Defense Committees. A Baptist minister, when asked about human rights, told us quietly that what we were doing was illegal and asked us to produce identification.

Yet many people welcomed us into their homes, where they spoke frankly of their experiences. Small boxes and folders were brought out from beneath beds and inside kitchen cabinets, with official documents that corroborated their stories. Among much else, we were shown a court ruling from a dissident’s trial, which his wife and children were not allowed to attend; a parole order warning a journalist that he could be returned to prison at any time; a letter denying a critic of the government permission to travel.

Piece by piece, the evidence stacked up. The human rights treaties had not been ratified or carried out. The “open” forums to discuss government policies were governed by strict rules that prohibited any talk of reforming the single-party system. More than one hundred political prisoners locked up under Fidel remained behind bars, and Raúl’s government had used sham trials to lock away scores more. These new prisoners included more than forty dissidents whom Raúl had imprisoned for “dangerousness.” The most Orwellian provision of Cuba’s criminal code, this charge allows authorities to imprison individuals before they have committed a crime, on the suspicion that they might commit one in the future. Their “dangerous” activities included failing to attend pro-government rallies, not belonging to official party organizations, and simply being unemployed.

We published our findings on November 18, 2009.² It was only then that we received a response from the Cuban government: a public statement, published that day, declaring our report “illegitimate and illegal.”

If the crime of the political prisoners is essentially voicing their opinions, a main function of imprisoning them is to isolate them from their potential audiences. Ramón Velásquez Toranzo taught theater until his political activities cost him his job. In December 2006, he set out on a silent march across the island to call for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners. On the road he was repeatedly threatened and beaten by civilian Rapid Response Brigades, according to his wife and daughter, who accompanied him. He was twice detained and forcibly returned to his home by police. On his third attempt, he was taken to prison and given a three-year sentence for “dangerousness.” Raymundo Perdigón Brito, who had worked as a security guard before he too was fired for “counterrevolutionary” activities, wrote articles critical of the government for foreign websites until, in 2006, he was sentenced to four years in prison for “dangerousness.” Digzan Saavedra Prat, a shoemaker, documented abuse cases for a local human rights group, an activity that cost him his job and caused him to be convicted of “dangerousness” in 2008. His indictment accused him of “being tied to persons of bad moral and social conduct,” “setting a bad example for the new generation,” and “thinking he is handsome.”

Those who continue to speak out while in prison are isolated even further. One man was arrested and sentenced to four years for “dangerousness” after he tried to hand out copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in public in 2006. In 2008, he attempted to commemorate International Human Rights Day (December 10) by reading the Universal Declaration aloud to fellow inmates. But according to his wife, a guard cut him short, ordering him to eat the text—literally. When he refused, he was beaten, thrown into solitary confinement for weeks, and sentenced in a closed-door hearing to six more years in prison for disrespecting authority.

We heard many similar accounts from former prisoners and the relatives of current ones. Those who refused “reeducation” or questioned prison conditions were thrown into solitary confinement cells measuring three by six feet for weeks, even months, on end. Their visits were cut off, phone calls denied, and letters confiscated. Since Cuba has for years refused to grant human rights monitors access to its prisons, it is difficult to get firsthand general accounts of the conditions inside. The most comprehensive—by the sixty-seven-year-old journalist Héctor Maseda Gutierrez, currently serving a twenty-year sentence for his writing—had to be smuggled out of prison virtually page by page. It is titled “Buried Alive.”

While not all dissidents are locked up, nearly all are effectively imprisoned on the island itself. In clear violation of international law, the Cuban government requires its citizens to obtain permission to leave the country, and those marked as “counterrevolutionaries” are generally denied it. The prominent blogger Yoani Sánchez—whose posts comment on the daily indignities of life in Cuba—has three times been refused permission to leave the country, twice to accept international prizes and once, in March 2010, to attend a conference on the Spanish language.

The emergence of a nascent blogosphere has been heralded as a sign that Cuba is opening up, yet the government systematically blocks critical websites and strictly controls access, forcing bloggers to upload their posts using thumb drives and illegal back channels. Because an hour’s use costs roughly one third of Cubans’ monthly wages, and since there are few connections outside of cities, the average Cuban has no access to the Internet. Although Yoani Sánchez was named one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people, most Cubans on the island have never even heard of her, let alone read her blog.³

Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images

A street peddler, right, watching dissidents Ofelia Acevedo and Oswaldo Paya of the Varela Project, whose grassroots campaign for a democratic referendum in Cuba was squashed by the government, Havana, October 3, 2003

The Cuban government also seeks to isolate dissidents from their communities. They are fired from their jobs and blacklisted from employment. They are subjected to public “acts of repudiation,” in which mobs surround their homes, chant insults, throw stones, and sometimes assault them in plain view of their neighbors. Friends and family members are warned to keep their distance, lest they too be branded counterrevolutionaries and punished. Under the “dangerousness” provision, even spending time with someone who is considered “dangerous” is punishable, a kind of “dangerousness” by association.

“People who come to my house are immediately called by state security and reprimanded,” Eduardo Pacheco Ortíz, a human rights defender and former political prisoner, told us. “Then these people—for fear of losing their jobs, for fear that [the authorities] will take it out on someone in their family—simply stop talking to me.”

After Ramón Velásquez Toranzo was sentenced to four years for his silent march across the island, his son René, who had not marched with his father or considered himself “political,” was fired from his longtime job without explanation, then repeatedly denied work on the grounds that he was not “trustworthy.” Members of the local Revolutionary Defense Committee regularly harassed and threatened him in public. Police warned his friends that they would get in trouble if they kept hanging around him, until he had few friends left. His girlfriend was forbidden by her parents from seeing him. “Some days I wake up and I think: I have nothing. I am nobody. I have no dreams left for my future,” René told us.

Some outside observers contend that the existence of around two hundred political prisoners has little impact on the lives of the 11 million other Cubans. But as the blogger Reinaldo Escobar recently wrote, “Why then does an index finger cross the lips, eyes widen, or a look of horror appear on the faces of my friends when at their houses I commit the indiscretion of making a political comment within earshot of the neighbors?”⁴ The political prisoners may be small in number, but they are a chilling reminder to all Cubans of what has been a basic fact of life for half a century: to criticize the Castros is to condemn oneself to years of enforced solitude.

In addition to declaring our report illegal, the Cuban government also claimed it was part of a broader effort to “trample” Cuba’s “right to free self-determination and sovereign equality.” This charge, while no more credible than the first, warrants serious attention, for it is reflected in the concerns of García Márquez and many others outside of Cuba who have for years been reluctant to criticize the Castros.

Invoking national sovereignty may be the most common tactic used by governments around the globe—and across the political spectrum—to counter criticism of their abusive practices. It is the international equivalent of the “states’ rights” claim that segregationists in the US South used for years to defend their racist laws and policies. The aim is to shift the focus of public concern from the rights of abuse victims to the rights (real and imagined) of the states that abuse them.

What sets the Castro government apart from most others that employ this tactic is the fact that Cuba has indeed, for five decades, faced an explicit threat to its national sovereignty—coming from the United States, a superpower ninety miles off its shores. In the 1960s, the threat took the form of covert military action, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and multiple botched assassination attempts. It continues in the form of the economic embargo established by President Eisenhower in 1960, later expanded by President Kennedy, and eventually locked in place by the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act. Also known as “Helms-Burton,” the law prohibits the president from lifting trade restrictions until Cuba has legalized political activity and made a commitment to free and fair elections. It also prohibits lifting the embargo as long as Fidel and Raúl Castro remain in office. In other words, it requires that Cubans be free to choose their leaders, but bars them from choosing the Castros. It is thus a program to promote not only democracy but also regime change.

It is hard to think of a US policy with a longer track record of failure. The embargo has caused much hardship to the Cuban people but done nothing to loosen the Castros’ hold on power. Instead it has provided the Cuban government an excuse for the country’s problems. Billboards line the roads outside Havana with slogans like “Eight hours of the blockade is equivalent to the materials required to repair 40 infant care centers.” The excuse is effective because it is at least partly true.

The US policy has also served the Castros as a pretext for repressing legitimate efforts to reform Cuba from within. The most notorious example of the past decade came in response to the Varela Project, a grassroots campaign designed to take advantage of a constitutional provision that allows a national referendum on any reform proposal that receives 10,000 signatures. The organizers spent years holding meetings and gathering signatures, enduring repeated harassment by authorities, attacks, and arrests. In May 2002, they delivered more than 11,000 signatures to the National Assembly.

The response was crushing. Rather than put the referendum to a vote (as required by law), the Castro government countered with its own referendum, which proposed amending the constitution to declare the socialist system “irrevocable.” This referendum passed, according to the government, with 99 percent of the public’s support. Not long afterward, the government began its most aggressive crackdown in years, arresting seventy-five “counterrevolutionaries,” including many Varela Project leaders, and sentencing them to an average of nineteen years in prison.

In a news conference immediately following the crackdown, Cuba’s foreign minister claimed that the Varela Project had been “part of a strategy of subversion against Cuba that has been conceived, financed, and directed from abroad with the active participation of the US Interests Section in Havana.” The United States had indeed been supporting civil society groups in Cuba for decades. In 2002, the year prior to the crackdown, the State Department devoted $5 million to “democracy promotion” in Cuba, channeling it through the US Interests Section in Havana and nongovernmental groups based mostly in Miami. For instance, several Cuban journalists received salaries from US-funded Internet publications critical of the Castro government.

Nonetheless, many of the seventy-five were convicted without any evidence of support—direct or indirect—from the US government. And in those cases where the Cuban government did show they received US support, it provided no credible evidence that the recipients were engaged in activities that would be considered illegal in a democratic country.

According to Cuban court documents, the support took the form of supplying, through the US Interests Section in Havana, equipment like fax machines (“used systematically in sending information to counterrevolutionary cells located in Miami”), books (“all with a pronounced subversive content”), and medicine (“with the explicit purpose of winning over addicts to their cause”). In other cases, the prisoners had been paid by the US for filing articles or radio reports for foreign outlets, or visiting the US Interests Section, where they had “access via the Internet to the websites of enemy publications…[and] counterrevolutionary dailies like the Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald, Agence France-Press, Reuters, and the American television channel CNN.”

Many governments require civil society groups to register funding they receive from foreign states. But for Cubans there is a catch: to register funding from the US government is to admit to a crime punishable with a prison sentence of up to twenty years—even when the funding merely supports activities like human rights monitoring, labor organizing, and establishing independent libraries. In fact, these activities are illegal in Cuba even when pursued without US support. The criminal code explicitly outlaws “actions designed to support, facilitate, or collaborate with the objectives of the ‘Helms-Burton Law.’”

Since promoting democratic rule is a central objective of Helms-Burton, any action taken toward that end can therefore be considered a crime. In this way, just as criticism of the Castros is equated with abetting their enemies, promoting democracy is equated with US-sponsored regime change.

But if the pretext for the crackdown was bogus, it nonetheless served a crucial function: to recast the government’s repression of its citizens as the story of a small nation defending itself against a powerful aggressor. It was the same tactic that Fidel Castro had been employing to brilliant effect for decades. By casting himself as a Latin American David besieged by a US Goliath, he usurped the role of victim from his prisoners. The sleight of hand worked because, for many outside of Cuba, the indignation provoked by the US embargo left little room for the revulsion they would otherwise feel for Fidel Castro’s abuses.

Raúl Castro has adopted this same tactic, so that when outsiders hear of Cuba’s political prisoners, many think first of what the US has done to Cuba, not what Cuba has done to its own people. While the prisons, travel restrictions, and information controls make it difficult for Cuban dissidents to get their stories out to the world, the Castros’ portrayal of Cuba as a victim makes audiences abroad less willing to hear these stories. The effect is to seal Cuba’s prisoners off from international sympathy and reinforce their prolonged solitude.

Once a year, for nearly two decades, the UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US embargo. In 2009, the resolution passed 187–3, with only Israel and Palau siding with the United States. While this condemnation is deserved, there is no such UN vote to condemn Cuba’s repressive policies, or comparable outrage about its victims.

This discrepancy is particularly pronounced in Latin America, where the long history of heavy-handed interventions and outright coups has left an abiding aversion to US bullying. Even leaders whom one might expect to be sensitive to the prisoners’ plight choose to remain silent. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was himself imprisoned by a military dictatorship, and former President Michelle Bachelet of Chile is the daughter of a political prisoner (and herself a torture victim). Yet in recent years, both have made state visits to Cuba in which they embraced the Castros and refused to meet with relatives of political prisoners.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of leaders have praised the Castro government as a standard-bearer for the region. President Evo Morales of Bolivia says that Cuba “teaches the entire world how to live with dignity and sovereignty, in its permanent fight against the North American empire.” President Rafael Correa of Ecuador speaks of the “Latin American pride” he feels when witnessing Cuba’s ongoing revolution, which “secured the reestablishment of human rights for all Cuban men and women.” Perhaps the most fervent supporter is President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose government has taken over the role, once filled by the Soviet Union, of keeping the Cuban economy afloat by providing millions of barrels of subsidized petroleum. Chávez calls Cuba’s revolution “the mother” of all Latin American liberation movements, and Fidel Castro “the father of the motherland.”

Over the past decade, a growing number of voices in the United States—including editorial boards, research organizations, and advocacy groups—have called for an end to the embargo. But they are far from winning the policy debate in Washington. Anti-Castro hard-liners within the Cuban-American community continue to wield disproportionate influence, even if their dominance has waned in recent years.

The opponents of the embargo have failed to be persuasive. Many have sought to play down the scope of repression in Cuba out of a concern—similar to García Márquez’s—that criticism of the Cuban government will only strengthen the hand of the anti-Castro hard-liners. But by making this strategic choice, they have undermined their credibility among the very people they need to persuade: those who are justifiably concerned about Cuba’s political prisoners. Moreover, they are unable to offer a politically workable solution to members of Congress, who will never vote to end the embargo if this will have no effect on the regime’s abuses.

The embargo must go. But it is naive to think that a government that has systematically repressed virtually all forms of political dissent for decades will cease to do so simply because the embargo has been lifted. Nor is it realistic, given the effectiveness of the Castros’ repressive machinery, to believe that the pressure needed for progress on human rights can come solely from within Cuba. The embargo needs to be replaced with a policy that will bring genuinely effective pressure on the Castro government to improve human rights.

For this to happen, the United States must make the first move. President Obama should approach allies in Europe and Latin America with an offer to lift the US embargo if the other countries agree to join a coalition to press Cuba to meet a single, concrete demand: the release of all political prisoners.

Some governments are sure to rebuff the offer, especially in Latin America. But for many others, the prospect of ending the embargo will remove what has long been the main obstacle to openly condemning the Cuban government’s abuses. And concentrating this multilateral effort exclusively on the issue of political prisoners will make it far more difficult for leaders who say they respect human rights to remain silent.

The new coalition would give the Cuban government a choice: free its political prisoners or face sanctions. Unlike the current US embargo, these sanctions should directly target the Cuban leaders—by denying them travel visas or freezing their overseas assets, for example—without harming the Cuban population as a whole. Ideally this ultimatum alone would suffice to prompt the government to release its prisoners. But even if it did not, the new approach toward Cuba—multilateral, targeted, and focused on human rights rather than regime change—would fundamentally transform the international dynamic that has long helped the Castros stifle dissent. The Cuban government’s efforts to isolate its critics at home would lead to its own isolation from the international community.

In the absence of such a shift, Cubans seeking reform will continue to face daunting odds. Any hope of drawing attention to their cause will require desperate measures, such as the hunger strike recently carried out by Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a dissident who had been in prison since the 2003 crackdown. For eighty-five days, Zapata Tamayo’s protest went largely unnoticed. It was only when he finally starved to death in February—becoming the first Cuban hunger striker to perish in almost forty years—that the world reacted. The European Parliament passed a resolution condemning his death as “avoidable and cruel” and calling for the release of all political prisoners. The Mexican and Chilean legislatures approved similar declarations.

The Cuban government responded in familiar fashion: it blamed the US. The state news organ claimed that Zapata Tamayo had been “thrust into death” by the “powerful machinery of the empire.” When several other dissidents began hunger strikes in the following days—including Guillermo Fariñas, a journalist who at this writing is reportedly near death—Cuban authorities dismissed them as “mercenaries” of the US. Decrying what he called a “huge smear campaign against Cuba,” Raúl Castro told the Cuban Congress, “We will never yield to blackmail from any country.”

Raúl Castro seems confident that he can defuse this latest challenge with the same sleight of hand his brother used so effectively in the past. And indeed, the flurry of condemnation following Zapata Tamayo’s death appears to have already faded. But more than just a tactical move, Raúl’s response reflects a vision for Cuba’s future that does not bode well for those desiring change. It is the vision he set forth on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in 2009, addressing the nation from the same public square where Fidel had first proclaimed victory:

Today, the Revolution is stronger than ever…. Does it mean the danger has diminished? No, let’s not entertain any illusions. As we commemorate this half-century of victories, it is time to reflect on the future, on the next fifty years, when we shall continue to struggle incessantly.

A story of struggle always needs an adversary, just as a claim to victimhood needs an aggressor. After playing this role for fifty years, the United States is now in a unique position to bring about change in Cuba: when it stops acting like Goliath, the Castro government will stop looking like David. Only then will Cuba’s dissidents be able to rally the international support they need to end their long years of solitude.

—April 28, 2010

1. The research trip was carried out by Nik Steinberg and a Latin American human rights lawyer who preferred to remain anoymous. ↩

2. Human Rights Watch, "New Castro, Same Cuba: Political Prisoners in the Post-Fidel Era." ↩

3. Time magazine has also named Sánchez's blog, Generation Y, one of the twenty-five best in the world; it can be read at www.desdecuba.com/generationy.↩

4. Escobar's blog, Desde Aqui (From Here), can be read at www.desdecuba.com/reinaldoescobar.↩

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An Empire of Vice

By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba...andThen Lost It to the Revolution
by T.J. English

Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos
by Louis A. Perez Jr

Pichon: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba, a Memoir
by Carlos Moore

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause
by Tom Gjelten

That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
by Lars Schoultz

The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution
by Daniel P. Erikson

Three days before Christmas in 1946, Havana's Hotel Nacional was closed for a private meeting. Armed guards blocked entry to its lovely grounds atop a seaside bluff in the plush El Vedado district. Inside the stately cream-colored Art Deco hotel, a group of distinguished foreign visitors tucked into a feast of local delicacies. There were crab and queen conch enchiladas from the southern archipelago; swordfish and oysters from the nearby village of Cojímar; roast breast of flamingo and tortoise stew; grilled manatee, washed down with añejo rum. It is unknown whether the attendees--whose number included about twenty of North America's most notorious gangsters--ended their meal with a cake like the one served at their feast's fictional rendering in The Godfather Part II. But as in the film, the purpose of the gathering was clear: to divvy up shares in the empire of vice they were busy establishing in Havana.

During the next decade, the mafia built a seaside gambling resort, which soon rivaled in profits and glamour its sister project in dusty Las Vegas. Under the canny direction of Meyer Lansky, the Jewish don who'd risen from the streets of New York's Lower East Side, members of the Havana Mob became fabulously wealthy. So too did Cuba's US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, whose stake in the mob's affairs exceeded the sacks of cash delivered weekly to the presidential palace. With Lansky and fellow mobsters like Santo Trafficante employed as "tourism experts" in his government, Batista eliminated taxes on the tourism industry, guaranteed public financing for hotel construction and--as T.J. English shows in Havana Nocturne, an exacting and lively account of the era--even granted responsibility for Cuba's infrastructure development to a new mob-controlled bank, BANDES. In December 1957 the opening of the Riviera, a $14 million mafia show palace just down the seawall from the Nacional, was celebrated by a special episode of The Steve Allen Show on US television and a gala in Havana featuring Ginger Rogers. Three months later, the twenty-five-story Havana Hilton--mortgage holder: BANDES--became Cuba's biggest hotel yet.

The party ended on New Year's 1959, when Batista fled the island as Fidel Castro's barbudos advanced on its capital. Castro and his bearded rebels established their headquarters in the Havana Hilton and loosed a truckload of pigs on the sleek lobby of the Riviera. Castro announced the "socialist nature" of his revolution. Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet missiles. President John F. Kennedy--who, during a visit to Havana the previous year as a senator, had spent an afternoon with three mob-supplied prostitutes under the gaze, from behind a two-way hotel-room mirror, of Santo Trafficante--instituted the embargo that defines US-Cuba relations to this day.

"I couldn't get that little island off of my mind," Lansky remarked after his first visit to Cuba in the 1920s. The gangster was no less covetous of Cuba, and proved no less fixated on controlling it, than a series of US presidents reaching back to the founders. "I have ever looked on Cuba," wrote Thomas Jefferson to President James Monroe when the United States gained control of the Florida peninsula in 1821, "as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States." Monroe's secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was more blunt. "The annexation of Cuba to our federal republic," he wrote, "will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself." After the United States took possession of Texas and California by war in 1848, many in Washington advocated annexing Cuba by force as well. The impulse was quashed for a time. Nevertheless, with Spain's empire sunk in a long decline, the United States' eventual possession of Cuba was viewed as inevitable for most of the nineteenth century. In a political cartoon from 1897, one of a trove of such images Louis A. Pérez Jr. uses to illustrate his brilliant book Cuba in the American Imagination, Uncle Sam stands beneath a fruit tree with a basket of plums, each bearing the name of a foreign territory already attained--Louisiana, Florida, Texas. From an upper branch hangs a "Cuba" plum, upon which Sam gazes keenly, his look distilling the common view: if America refrained from picking Cuba with a forceful hand, the ripe prize would eventually fall to its basket simply by dint of geography and time.

When the warship USS Maine mysteriously exploded while docked at Spanish Havana in February 1898, the United States had a pretext for shaking the tree of its remaining fruit. A few months later, Cuban rebels and invading US forces expelled Spain from the island, and Cuba (along with Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines) was annexed to the United States. "We went to war for civilization and humanity," President William McKinley eulogized, "to relieve our oppressed neighbors in Cuba." Humanity's gains were hazy, but what the United States certainly gained from the war was an empire. Puerto Rico and the Philippines became de facto American colonies; and with the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901, Washington arrogated to itself the right to intervene in Cuba's affairs whenever it wished--providing also for the seizure of Cuban territory at Guantánamo Bay to establish a US naval base purposed "to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba" (and conveniently positioned to protect what would soon be a key sea lane to the Panama Canal).

Gaining control of Cuba fulfilled a long-sought strategic aim. But equally important for the United States was how the invasion of Cuba came to shape its foreign policy and self-image at large. The Spanish-American War--the Union's first large-scale military campaign since Reconstruction--bolstered American unity and inaugurated America's self-conception as a "universal nation" endowed with the moral mission of projecting its power abroad. Before 1898, as Pérez stresses, quoting the historian Norman Graebner, "the foreign policies of the United States were rendered solvent by ample power to cover limited, largely hemispheric, goals." Afterward, those policies became global, their stated aims--universal democracy and freedom for all humanity--abstract in nature and unobtainable in practice. As Pérez writes, the template for US foreign wars, up to the "war on terror," with its crusading aim to "rid the world of evil," was cast in America's war for Cuba.

The argument that the Spanish-American War was a watershed in the United States' fashioning of its national identity isn't new. The value of Pérez's study--the latest in a series of perceptive books on US-Cuba relations by this prolific historian--is to illustrate how an avid US self-interest was transformed into selfless moral enactment. While Cuba in the American Imagination is hampered by confusing chronology, Pérez shows clearly how in the late nineteenth century politicians in the United States and their allies in the press employed language--and a series of figurative metaphors specifically--to nurture in Americans' minds a conception of Cuba as object and stage for fulfilling the United States' imperial destiny. Early on, there was the image of Cuba as ripening fruit that would "naturally" and inevitably one day be Uncle Sam's. Later came references to Cuba as "our Armenia," implying that the United States, by defending Cuba's rebels against Madrid's repression, could prove its humanitarian mettle where Europe's nations had failed to prevent the recent Armenian genocide at their door. And finally, as invasion approached, there were invocations of Cuba as a virtuous lady whose protection against Spain's depredations was a test of American manhood.

This last figure was yanked out of the political funny pages and foisted upon Evangelina Cossío Cisneros, the 18-year-old daughter of a Cuban rebel leader purportedly arrested for sedition in August 1897 who was also, according to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, "the most beautiful girl in the island." Evangelina's picture became a tabloid staple, her ordeal at the hands of her captors the topic of regular lurid updates. The melodrama ended only when Hearst's paper announced, two months before the explosion of the USS Maine, that it had arranged for Evangelina's escape to the United States. To celebrate her arrival as a "Cuban Joan of Arc," Hearst organized a mass rally to which more than 75,000 New Yorkers arrived chanting "Viva Cuba Libre!"

In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the US agenda changed from justifying invasion to legitimating a continued military and economic presence. Accordingly, the representation of Cuba as a comely woman in distress--usually depicted, like Evangelina, as white in complexion (and thus a fair reflection of American virtue)--changed too. The mixed-race isle was now depicted in tabloid cartoons as a pitiable black child holding the hand of a beneficent Uncle Sam on the path to progress. Previously, US opponents of annexing Cuba had often based their arguments in racism. "The white inhabitants form too small a proportion of the whole number," as one diplomat put it in 1825; moreover, explained a Congressman in 1855, "the Spanish-Creole race...are utterly ignorant of the machinery of free institutions." Now the same logic justified a strong imperial hand. The Cubans, the commanding US general in the 1898 war declared, were "no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa."

If once Cuba had figured as a virtuous lady in need of saving by an imperial enterprise cloaked in a mission civilitrice, it soon came to be seen as a different sort of woman, one whose mission was servicing others. "We gave Cuba her liberty," declared a US Army veteran on holiday in Havana in 1925, "and now we are going to enjoy it." The island's bustling main seaport had never been a stranger to prostitution. But as the tourist trade grew, so did Havana's reputation as "the brothel of the New World." The island "was like a woman in love," touted a typical travel writer's account, and "eager to give pleasure, she will be anything you want her to be." Simultaneously overseas and right next door, Cuba became the place where Americans--especially American men--went to escape the stolid mores of wife and home. With the passage of Prohibition in 1919, legal booze fortified Cuba's libertine lure. When It's Cocktail Time in Cuba was the title of a popular US tourist guide, and Havana bartenders concocted new rum-based elixirs like the Cuba Libre and mojito to coax more cash from Northern visitors. A short cruise from Florida--or, after Pan-American Airways launched its first international passenger route with Miami-Havana flights in 1928, an even shorter plane ride--Cuba was, by the 1930s, receiving more US visitors than even Canada.

By the time the US mob launched their Havana plot in earnest in 1946, tourism was already well established as a key portion of Cuba's economy. Mob designs for "the Monte Carlo of the Caribbean" evoked European playgrounds, with hotels named the Riviera, Deauville and Capri. But by the 1950s, "Havana" had acquired its own cachet for American consumers as both brand and idea. On television Desi Arnaz was the all-purpose Latin Lover, and advertisements hawked Havana perfume, Havana soft drinks, Havana lingerie. "Waving palms, a cool island breeze," went the slogan for El Paso brand Cuban Black Bean Dip. "Visit a forbidden paradise of silky black beans, sweet red pepper and an undercurrent of rich gold rum, resulting in a Cuban sensation that may taste mild, but is definitely hot, hot, hot!"

The cold war ended Havana's viability as marketing hook for consumers to the north. That it also made Cuba legally forbidden to American travelers, though, doubtless contributes to a still-thriving trade in Cuba-related books in the United States--volumes that (no matter their particular topic or politics) often find it impossible not to trade in shopworn clichés about pulsing rhythms and caramel skin and crashing waves on the Malecón. Even in a book like T.J. English's authoritative and otherwise sharply written Havana Nocturne, everything from Batista's facial features to the city's jazz scene is described as "exotic." Never mind that the cultures of Cuba and the United States have always been more deeply intertwined than partisans of either nation have sometimes cared to admit. The jazz bands that thrilled American tourists in 1950s Havana borrowed from the inventions of musicians in New York and Chicago; and no less a touchstone of Americana than rock 'n' roll, as the music historian Ned Sublette has convincingly shown, owed as much in its genesis to Cuban rhythms ringing out of Havana as it did to blues riffs busting out of Memphis or New Orleans. Indeed, for two centuries up until 1960, the cultures of New Orleans and Havana were joined and nurtured by the streams of migrants and goods flowing between them.

What the "exotic" label also tends to conceal about Cuba is that to its own people as well as outsiders, the island has long been as much an idea as a country. At least since José Martí, the great poet laureate of Cuban independence, began composing odes to the island's "half-breed" soul in the late 1800s, there has existed in Cuba an obsession with reflecting upon and debating the national character. This tradition is perhaps most memorably manifested in the seminal anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's argument, in Cuban Counterpoint (1940), that all of Cuban identity and culture--from the rumba to the mulata to the cigar--can be understood as outgrowths of an economy based in producing tobacco and sugar for export. The discussion has taken many forms, but perhaps the dominant current in Cuba's politics and intellectual culture has always been the struggle over cubanía, or Cubanness. Fidel's revolution, before it was Marxist-Leninist or Castroist or anything else, has always been framed and experienced in Cuba as a nationalist struggle. Accordingly, it was not solely on the grounds of Marxian virtue but also cubanía that Fidel battled cocaine and prostitution as "un-Cuban" in the 1960s (never mind the Havana Mob's avoidance of the drug trade, or that sex-for-pay held a prominent place in Cuban society long before its exploitation by yanquis) and contended, during the 1970s, that Cuba's military involvement in Angola and Mozambique was driven by Cuba's core identity as an "Afro-Latin" nation.

Fidel's custodianship of cubanía has deep roots in a much longer history of Cuban men of privilege (and usually light skin) defining the nation's identity. Batista was a mulatto cane-cutter's son; Fidel and his brother Raúl were the children of wealthy Spanish landowners--putative members, that is, of a class of Cubans who thought the déclassé rule of an uneducated army colonel a national shame. Not every member of Cuba's elite who came to support Castro against Batista in the 1950s was driven by prejudice; Fidel has always been a strong antiracist, in his way. But the machista worlds of elite Cuban politics and culture have always been paternalistic, whether in José Martí's wishful 1891 declaration that in Cuba "there are no races," or the longstanding tradition--from Nicolás Guillén's iconic 1930 poem "Mulata" to innumerable paintings of the copper-skinned Virgen de la Caridad--of holding up the sexy mulata as embodiment of cubanía, while affording to actual brown-skinned Cuban women little place in that nation beyond its brothels and kitchens.

After racial discrimination was officially banned in 1960 by his revolution, Fidel blithely declared that racism was defeated in Cuba. As in 1891, the actual situation was more complex. The masses of Afro-Cubans who'd lived in illiterate destitution since slavery--and seen 6,000 of their forebears massacred in a horrific 1912 race war--had the most to gain from socialist projects in housing, healthcare and education. That Cuba's 4 million blacks still provide a key base of Communist Party support is a measure of how much their lives have improved under Fidel. But as Carlos Moore writes in a poignant new memoir, Pichón, Castro's blind spots with regard to race have at times also been pernicious. Pichón takes its title from a Cuban slur for Jamaican and Haitian laborers who survived the Depression by scrounging for slaughterhouse scraps in the manner of ugly black buzzards, or pichónes. The book begins with Moore recounting a rural Cuban childhood of being tormented by the fists and epithets of white schoolmates. Then comes the story of his personal epic: leaving for New York City at 16 in the late 1950s and falling into the black radical demimonde of Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, then returning to Cuba as an ardent Fidel admirer in the early 1960s, only to be imprisoned and exiled by Fidel's revolution for daring to protest the race prejudice of certain of its ministers.

Moore renders this tragic tale with frank clarity. He met his mentor Angelou in a Harlem bookshop shortly after his arrival to the cosmopolis in 1958; scarcely two years later, he directed an occupation of the UN General Assembly to protest the US-sponsored killing of the Congolese freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba. It was during Castro's own 1960 visit to the UN--during which Fidel stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem to convey solidarity with those oppressed by the US empire at home--that Moore decided it was his revolutionary duty to join the cause.

Returning to Havana in June 1961, Moore sought to put his skills as an English speaker to work at the Foreign Ministry. He became convinced that the bureaucrat denying his requests for a job was doing so on account of his dark skin, and he took the audacious step of traveling to a provincial army barracks to demand a meeting with the only Afro-Cuban member of Fidel's inner circle, the guerrilla hero Juán Almeida. Almeida indulged the headstrong youth with a warning to "stop talking as you do," but once back in Havana, Moore was "detailed" by the revolutionary police and tossed into a new jail made from a converted mansion on the city's outskirts. He was released a few weeks later with no charge or explanation and eventually found work in another branch of the government. But in late 1962, after some months of increasing disquiet about the revolution's puritanical excesses--with police sending homosexuals to labor camps and forcibly shuttering Afro-Cuban social clubs--Moore encountered his old nemesis in the Foreign Ministry. Furious that the young negrito was still at large, the bureaucrat promised to ensure that Moore was "take[n] care of" for good. That afternoon Moore knocked at the door of the Havana embassy of the new West African nation of Guinea and requested asylum; a few weeks later he left Cuba on a freighter bound for Africa. Eventually settling in Paris, he went on to write Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (1989), a controversial radical critique of the revolution's race mores whose exaggerated animus, given the experiences related in Moore's more personal and worthwhile memoir, is perhaps now clearer at its source.

When Moore went into exile in the early 1960s, most Cubans who fled the island belonged to its white upper classes. The arch-right-wingers among them nurtured a deep anger about Castro's "giving it all away" to the riffraff and pichónes. Their story is perhaps less tragic than that of exile families with more liberal pasts like the Bacardis, owners of the eponymous liquor empire, whose story Tom Gjelten traces in his splendid family chronicle Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba. The tale begins with the penniless Catalan immigrant Facundo Bacardi's discovering, in the 1860s, a new way to distill sugar cane into clear white rum. His son Emilio Bacardi became a key ally of José Martí in the fight for independence in the 1890s, and the Bacardis' 1950s heirs were fervid Fidel supporters--but then left the island and became fervid Castro-haters when he ordered a state takeover of the company they'd spent a century building from scratch. (One of Fidel's great claims to revolutionary virtue is that he did not spare his own parents' latifundio from being nationalized and split up in the first agrarian reform.) Family sagas about seized storehouses and abandoned mansions compose the sacred text of mainstream Cuban-exile politics. But as stories like Carlos Moore's show, belonging to a class of Cubans whose lot the revolution improved granted no exemption from being tyrannized by party discipline and hierarchy.

When Fidel Castro took command of Havana in January 1959, few in or outside Cuba knew much about him beyond his magnetism and rousing oratory; apart from Castro's loathing of Batista and idolizing of Martí, his politics--as the Eisenhower administration's "watch and wait" approach to his government shows--were vague even to close observers. Soon enough, his strident nationalism and messianic bent were clear. But even as Castro's government began seizing lands owned by US companies as part of its first agrarian reform in June 1959--and powerful Washington interests began urging Eisenhower to respond by ending the longstanding US agreement to purchase most of Cuba's sugar--few foresaw the antagonisms and escalation to come.

With Cuba's continued access to the chief market for its main crop looking unsure, and radicals like Che Guevara at Fidel's ear, whatever doubts Castro had about Leninism disappeared. In February 1960 a delegation of Soviet ministers arrived in Havana and signed an agreement to purchase much of Cuba's sugar; Che traveled to Moscow a short while later to secure Havana's ties to the Eastern Bloc. Three years after Khrushchev had promised "we will bury you," the Soviets had established a Communist beachhead in easy range of Florida, on an island, moreover, that the United States had regarded as an amour propre. The trauma was deep. In Washington a flurry of panicked recriminations over how this could have been allowed to happen--traced by Lars Schoultz with insightful verve in That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, a comprehensive history of US-Cuba relations since World War II--was translated into an ill-conceived CIA-sponsored invasion in April 1961. The Bay of Pigs fiasco did Fidel the great favor of allowing him to oversee the defeat of imperialist invaders on Cuba's beaches. In the months following, the Kennedy administration hatched a tragicomic series of attempts to kill Castro with explosive seashells and poisoned cigars (a job for which the CIA contracted the president's old Havana pimp, Santo Trafficante, now in Miami). But no matter. In October 1962, Washington's worst fears were realized when a US spy plane over Cuba's countryside snapped photos of Soviet missile launchers nestled amid royal palms.

Whether or not the Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous and direct confrontation of the cold war, it's clear that Cuba's role was that of pawn or prop. This did not comfort Castro, who harbored deep resentment when Khrushchev failed to consult him before Moscow agreed to remove its nuclear missiles--a reaction that reveals the particularly Cuban pathos of this puffed-up leader of a smallish island driven by the need to be treated and seen as head of a big powerful nation (or at least a sovereign one). The longstanding US irritation with Cuba, Schoultz observes, stems from its leaders' persistent denial of the base precept of political realism distilled in Thucydides' dictum that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Schoultz presents his history as a "case study in the trials and tribulations of realism"--an investigation into how for the past fifty years a weak state has "gotten away" with standing up to its vastly stronger neighbor and how, conversely, the stronger was made to let the weaker do so.

For three decades, of course, a large part of how Cuba "stood up" to the US empire lay also in its becoming the client state of another empire. This truth did not prevent Cuba from becoming a new kind of symbol across a Latin America long frustrated by the condescension of its Northern hegemon. Across the hemisphere, the mythic story of Cuba--a miraculous fable about a merry band of longhairs who went into their country's mountains and a few years later swept into its capital on the shoulders of its poor--was one that women and men who loved justice would seek to re-create from El Salvador to Colombia to Bolivia and Peru. In Washington, conversely, a new guiding metaphor for Cuba emerged: that of a malignant cancer whose spread had to be contained at all costs. And so it was that many thousands of those Latin Americans who went to the continent's jungles during the '60s, '70s and '80s, some toting photos of Che and Fidel in their knapsacks, died awful deaths with those whose cause they raised, too often the "disappeared" victims of US-backed dictatorships and death squads.

Since the cold war's end, US policy mavens have argued over the extent to which those dark decades' abuses were, if not justifiable, understandable given the strategic threat posed by the prospect of another Soviet satellite in its "backyard." What the years since the USSR's fall have also laid bare, however, is the extent to which Washington's approach to Cuba itself has been driven by other than simply rational aims like containment. "Castro is not merely an adversary, but an enemy," a 1993 report from the US Army War College observes, "an embodiment of evil who must be punished for his defiance of the United States.... There is a desire to hurt the enemy that is mirrored in the malevolence that Castro has exhibited towards us." For US politicians in national campaigns, being "tough on Cuba" long ago took its place with being "a friend to Israel" as a sine qua non of victory. As Cuba's potential threat to US security has progressively dwindled to nearly nil, US antagonism toward its government has only deepened. The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 codified the embargo as US law and was toughened in the Helms-Burton Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, which prohibited US companies from dealing with foreign firms engaged in business with Cuban property seized by the revolution, and also mandated that the embargo could not be lifted until such time as Cuba is run by a government "that does not include Fidel Castro or Raúl Castro."

More recently, George W. Bush, who owed his presidency to south Florida, used his office in 2004 to funnel $59 million in new funding to no-bid Miami-Cuban boondoggles like the propaganda networks Radio and TV Martí. He also moved to close one of the embargo's few loopholes by introducing strict limits on remittances Cuban-Americans may send to family members on the island and on the number of trips they may take to visit them. Bush also placed Cuba on the US list of "state sponsors of terror" (based on an alleged chemical weapons program whose existence his own State Department doubted) and, in the long run-up to the 2004 election, established, at the heart of the executive branch and under the chairmanship of Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. It was charged with determining how "to hasten the end" of the Castro dictatorship and in May 2004 produced a report recommending, for example, that in the wake of an anticipated violent transition, Cuban schools be kept open "in order to keep children and teenagers off the streets."

As Daniel Erikson shows in The Cuba Wars, a sharp and deeply reported account of dynamics informing US-Cuba policy since the Clinton administration, Castro's government was concerned that Cuba's involvement in Bush's "war on terror" would go beyond the United States' use of its imperial relic at Guantánamo Bay to hold certain prisoners beyond the jurisdiction of US courts. The Cubans "were really worried," Lawrence Wilkerson, longtime chief of staff to Colin Powell, tells Erikson of a visit he made to Havana just after leaving the State Department in 2005. "They wanted me first of all to assure them that we weren't going to invade." In the spring of 2003, Fidel Castro--practiced in paranoia, always more comfortable on a war footing than not--responded to the new provocations by ordering the trial for treason of some seventy-five "dissidents," some of whom were indeed Cubans being paid by the United States to tweak (if hardly, in practice, to destabilize) their government, but most of whose offenses amounted to writing articles and circulating petitions. Some fifty-odd of "the 75" remain jailed today.

In 2003 I was living in Havana, and as at so many other times when Cuba had become the subject of hyperventilated fits abroad, the arrests and diplomatic volleys were little more than background noise to the struggles of quotidian life. People who sought more food than allotted by their ration card broke the law daily. That spring, an architect I was friendly with began selling stolen shellfish to feed his family, and his cousin had taken to earning new clothes by satisfying the bedroom predilections of Italian sex tourists. More significant to Cubans than Washington's longstanding obsession with upending their government were concerns over what that government might do to repair a broken economy. Such grave ills aside, not a few Cubans remain proud that theirs is a poor country in which "no children sleep in the streets," as a propaganda billboard near my Havana apartment touted truly. The Communist Party enjoys significant support, especially in the provincias--where peasants fifty years ago lived in dirt-floored huts and still do so today, but now regard free healthcare for their parents and good schools for their kids as birthrights. More generally, it's open to debate whether the Cuban state's solicitude toward its young and its aged is "worth" the repression too often endured by everyone else. But from the standpoint of a failed fifty-year attempt by the United States to change the island's government by isolation, the salient facts about Cuba are that it enjoys good relations and strong economic ties to every other country in the hemisphere, including Canada (not to mention China and the European Union), and that it has a stable government, in evidently firm control of its military and police, which has carried off its recent change to a new head of state with apparently minimal fuss.

Raúl Castro--longtime head of Cuba's military, a dour party man--has, with the illness of his brother, been cast in the unlikely role of reformer. Many in Cuba express hope that Raúl's early gestures at reform, like his opening of the grounds of tourist hotels such as the Hotel Nacional to ordinary Cubans, may augur a larger opening of the Cuban economy. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama called Raúl's bluff by suggesting that he'd be willing to sit down with Cuba's new leader with a view toward improving relations. Realists predictably think this prospect, like Raúl's proffering of Cuba's "willingness to discuss on equal footing the prolonged dispute" with the United States, is a nonstarter: Obama's secretary of state, back when she was not his head diplomat but primary rival, called his willingness to meet with "foreign dictators" like Cuba's new leader "irresponsible." But during its first weeks, the Obama administration--no doubt cognizant of polls showing that younger Cuban-Americans voice little support for the hardline stance of the past, and that even a symbolic thaw with Cuba would be an easy way to improve relations with the rest of Latin America--successfully marshaled a bill through Congress overturning Bush-era restrictions on family visits and remittances. All this move does is return the United States' Cuba policy to its 2003 status. But it was a key signal that a larger overhaul of the Cuba policy will be on the table in Obama's Washington. At April's Summit of the Americas, the president observed that Cuba's thousands of doctors dispersed throughout the region were "a reminder for us in the United States that if our only interaction with many of these countries is...military, then we may not be developing the connections that can, over time, increase our influence." Obama also declared that a "new beginning with Cuba" could be near. That initial signal, it seems, has been confirmed.

In 1891, José Martí, the most articulate of Cuban nationalists and also perhaps his generation's most perceptive writer on inter-American relations, wrote in Nuestra América, "One must not attribute, through a provincial antipathy, a fatal and inbred wickedness to the continent's fair-skinned nation simply because it does not speak our language, or see the world as we see it, or resemble us in its political defects, so different from our own." For many Cubans, the election of Obama represents an overcoming of political defects, and in his brown face they see not a "fair-skinned nation" but something of themselves; their hope is that Obama will be a leader free of many of his country's old neuroses. The ultimate test of those hopes will be ending the long-running embargo, which Wilkerson, expressing a widely held but rarely stated Washington view, called, in an interview with GQ, "the dumbest policy on the face of the earth." No less incontestable is a remark made in 1974 by the now-ailing barbudo in Havana, who recently expressed doubt that he'd live to see the end of Obama's first term. "We cannot move, nor can the United States," Fidel Castro observed in an interview. "Speaking realistically, someday some sort of ties will have to be established."


About Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a doctoral student in geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Hello from Havana

by Jorge I. Dominguez

Photograph by Stu Rosner

Scenes from Havana, taken in March 2007

President Raúl Castro’s principal contribution thus far to the lives of ordinary Cubans has been that television soap operas now start on time. He often reminds his fellow citizens of this seemingly impossible accomplishment, after decades during which his elder brother commanded the airwaves and disrupted all public and personal schedules. But he alluded to this achievement most cleverly last December, prompting laughter with the opening sentence of his remarks before a summit meeting of the presidents of the Latin American countries in Bahia, Brazil, hosted by Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. According to Cuba’s official press reports, Castro began, “I hope that our colleague and dear friend Lula will not complain because I give shorter speeches than Chávez’s.”

The presidential summit was one stop on Raúl Castro’s first international trip since becoming Cuba’s acting president in August 2006 (when Fidel Castro was rushed to the hospital), and in that one sentence, he made several points. To most of the Latin American presidents, who did not know him well, and indeed to his fellow Cubans, he demonstrated that even a 78-year-old General of the Army could have a sense of humor. To the same audiences, but also to the incoming Obama administration, he demonstrated some distance and independence from Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, notwithstanding the tight economic and political bonds between their two countries. This was only the most recent and most public instance of Raúl Castro’s reiterated mocking comparison between Chávez’s propensity to speak forever and his own much shorter and self-disciplined speeches. (Of course, all those in the audience also knew that he was poking fun not just at Chávez but at his brother, who never met a time limit he did not despise.) And, finally, he highlighted, especially for his own people, that he honors and respects the time of others.

Raúl Castro’s military style of life cherishes punctuality and efficiency. Schedules, all schedules, even those for TV telenovelas, should be observed. Even during the waning moments of Fidel Castro’s rule, the time of Cubans was frequently occupied by marches, mobilizations, and the need to listen to the logorrheic Maximum Leader. There was even a cabinet minister in charge of what Fidel Castro called the “Battle of Ideas.” Now, marches occur on designated public holidays. And the minister in charge of the Battle of Ideas lost his job in March--and his ministry was disbanded.

Economic Evolution

The nuances in Cuban public life since Raúl became president in his own right in February 2008 are evident as well in the enactment of economic-policy reforms that were rolled out immediately following his formal installation. Consider some examples. Previously, Cubans had not been able to stay at hotels or eat at restaurants designed for international tourists, even if they had the funds to pay, unless they were on official business; now they were given access to all these facilities, so long as they could pay. Cubans had also been prohibited from purchasing cell phones and subscribing to such services unless officially authorized to do so. They were not allowed to purchase computers or DVD players. Now they were able to purchase such products so long as they had the funds.

How the Cuban government adopted these changes is important. It could simply have announced a general deregulation of prohibitions regarding purchases of consumer durables, for example. Instead, the government made each of these announcements separately: one week you could stay at tourist hotels, the next week you could purchase a computer, the following week you could obtain cell-phone services, and so forth. The government even announced that some products would be deregulated for purchase in 2009 (air conditioners) or 2010 (toasters).

This method of deregulating implied a desire to win political support over time, not all at once. It communicated that the government retained the right to micromanage the economy, deregulating product by product and service by service. The government also signaled that it expected to remain in office for years to come, behaving in the same way. Finally, most Cubans knew that they could have been purchasing these same consumer durables all along, albeit only on the black market. Thus the policy of postponed deregulation implied an official tolerance of some current criminality (knowing that some Cubans would buy toasters illegally in 2008, instead of waiting for 2010), because the government valued its economic micromanagement more.

Whom the government sought to benefit was equally newsworthy. In its most revolutionary phase, during the 1960s, the Cuban government adopted strongly egalitarian policies. Many Cubans came to believe in egalitarian values and resented the widening of inequalities in the 1990s. Consider, then, Raúl’s reforms. Hotels and restaurants designed for international tourist markets are expensive; so, too, are computers and DVD players. When these economic changes were announced in 2008, the median monthly salary of Cubans amounted to about $17: that is, the average monthly salary was below the World Bank’s worldwide standard for poverty, which is one dollar per day. To be sure, Cubans had free access to education and healthcare and subsidized access to some other goods and services. Nevertheless, only a small fraction of Cubans could take advantage of these new economic policies, because the purchases of such consumer durables and the access to such tourist services had to be paid for in dollar-equivalent Cuban currency at dollar-equivalent international prices. (Cuba has two currencies; the peso convertible is a close equivalent to the dollar, whereas the peso is worth about $0.04.) Raúl’s government was appealing to the upper-middle-class professionals.

Making Difficult Decisions

I have emphasized Raúl’s penchant for humor and nuance because Washington and Miami have not taken much notice of these traits. At the same time, no one should underestimate his capacity for decisiveness. A salient feature in his biography is his long-standing role as Cuba’s equivalent of a chief operating officer. President Fidel Castro made the decision to dispatch some 300,000 Cuban troops to two wars in Angola and one in Ethiopia from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, but it was Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and General of the Army Raúl Castro whose officers recruited, trained, promoted, equipped, and steeled these armies for battle. The United States lost the war in Vietnam. The Soviet Union lost the war in Afghanistan. Cuban troops won the three African wars in which they fought. Cuba’s was the only communist government during the entire Cold War that successfully deployed its armed forces across the oceans. And the “worker bee” for those victories was Raúl.

Within the first calendar year of his presidency, Raúl gave another example of this decisiveness: the reform of Cuba’s pension laws. Cuban law authorized and funded the retirement of women at age 55 and of men at age 60. In December 2008, the retirement ages were raised to 60 and 65 respectively. The speed of the change signaled as well a key difference between the Castro brothers.

It had long been a matter of public record that Cuban life expectancy had lengthened to reach the levels of the North Atlantic countries. Cuban demographers had also faithfully recorded that Cuba has been below the population replacement rate since 1978. They had developed various forecasts that showed that its population would age rapidly, creating a vast problem of pension liabilities, and then decline. The demographers committed only one error: they expected the demographic decline to set in near the year 2020, but the population has already declined (net of emigration) in two of the last three years.

Notwithstanding this abundance of information, Fidel chose not to act. The fiscal crisis of the state was much less fun than leading street marches to denounce U.S. imperialism. But Raúl’s prompt and effective change of the pension laws, making use of information supplied by social scientists, is yet another illustration of the difference between the brothers as rulers. And, of course, the one obvious change that was not made to the pension laws demonstrates as well that even a powerful government senses some limits to its power: although the life expectancy of women is longer, the pension reform retained the lower retirement age for them. Raúl Castro doesn’t dare take a perk like early retirement away from Cuban women.

Political Authoritarianism

The Castro brothers’ styles of rule of course show important similarities on matters that do and should matter in assessing their political regime. Cuba remains a single-party state that bans opposition political parties and independent associations that may advance political causes. The government owns and operates all television and radio stations, daily newspapers, and publishing houses. The number of candidates equals the number of seats to be filled in elections for the National Assembly. The constraints on civil society remain severe, even if there has been since the early 1990s a somewhat greater margin of autonomy for communities of faith, some of which (including Roman Catholic archdioceses) are permitted to publish magazines.

The two brothers have also demonstrated a strong preference for ruling with a small number of associates whom they have known for many years. For example, when Raúl became president formally in February 2008, he had the right to make wholesale changes in the top leadership. Instead, the president and his seven vice presidents had a median birth year of 1936. Raúl went a step further. He created a small steering committee within the larger Political Bureau of the Communist Party--and the members of the new committee were the exact same seven. Raúl’s buddies are the gerontocrats with whom he chooses to govern.

Yet there are stirrings of change. Although National Assembly elections are uncompetitive, they provide a means to express some opposition to the government. The official candidates are presented in party lists; each voting district elects two to five deputies from those lists and the number of candidates equals the number of posts to be filled in that district. The government urges voters to vote for the entire list, but voters have been free to vote for some but not all candidates on the list, thereby expressing some displeasure. The number of nonconforming voters (voted blank, null, or selectively) exceeded 13.4 percent of the votes cast in the most recent (January 2008) National Assembly elections--1.1 million voters. Both the percentage and the number of nonconforming voters were slightly larger than in the 2003 election, with the largest expression of nonconformity recorded in the province named City of Havana.

Yet another sign of change arises from Raúl’s own family. His daughter, Mariela Castro, has been for some years the director of Cuba’s center for the study of sexuality. This center has been principally known, however, for its advocacy for, and defense of, the rights of homosexuals, including special training for Cuban police officers, formulating changes in regulations, and disseminating information designed to create safer spaces for homosexuals.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Cuban government pursued very harsh policies toward homosexuals. In the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, those who tested HIV-positive were automatically compelled to enter a quarantined facility at the cost of their jobs and family lives. At the time of the Mariel emigration crisis in 1980, the government activated its affiliated mass organizations to make life impossible for homosexuals, fostering their emigration under duress. And in the mid 1960s, the government had established the “military units to aid production” (UMAP). These were concentration camps to which “social deviants,” mainly but not exclusively male homosexuals, were sent to be turned, somehow, into “real men.” The commander in chief of the UMAP was, of course, Armed Forces Minister Raúl Castro.

It is unlikely that Raúl is a closet liberal, though there is evidence that he has been a loving father. It is not impossible, however, that he regrets having served as an architect of repression over the lives of many Cubans--not just homosexuals--especially in the 1960s, but also at other times. His daughter’s work during the current decade may be an instrument for elements of social liberalism.

U.S.-Cuban Relations

Raúl Castro understood earlier than his brother that the collapse of the Soviet Union and European communist regimes implied that Cuba had to change more and faster than Fidel wanted. In 1994, in the most public difference yet between the brothers, Raúl favored liberalizing agricultural markets, allowing producers to sell at market prices, even though Fidel remained opposed. Raúl showed more sustained interest in the economic reforms of China and Vietnam than did Fidel. And by the late 1990s, Raúl began to give the speech that he has now repeated many times, most notably this April in response to the Obama administration’s beginning of changes in U.S.-Cuba policies (authorizing Cuban Americans to travel and send remittances to Cuba): his government is ready to discuss anything on the U.S. government agenda.

In January 2002, Raúl even praised the Bush administration for having given advance notice of the incarceration of Taliban prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. He also praised the professional military-to-military cooperation between the two countries’ officers along the U.S. base’s boundary perimeter, as well as between the coast guards in the Straits of Florida. In August 2006, his first public remarks upon becoming acting president made just two points: he did not much like to speak in public, and he was ready to negotiate with the United States. And this April, he took the time to make it clear that negotiating with the United States about any topic did, indeed, include discussion about political prisoners in Cuban jails. He made a specific proposal to exchange such political prisoners (estimated by Cuban human-rights groups as between 200 and 300 people) for five Cuban spies in U.S. prisons.

The Context for Change

The pace of political and economic change in Cuba has been slow by world standards. But the pace of social change has been very fast. Cuba’s people live long lives, thanks in part to good, albeit frayed, healthcare services--free of charge. Cuban children go to school and many become professionals. Indeed, Cuba’s principal area of export growth is the provision of healthcare services to the people of other countries. Until this most recent development, however, Cuba had exemplified how a half-century of investment in human capital could generate very poor economic-growth returns. Yet Cubans since the early 1990s have demonstrated entrepreneurial capacities in creating small businesses, whenever the government has permitted them, suggesting that with better economic incentives there could be a productive combination that would lead to economic growth. Cubans can talk seemingly endlessly at officially sponsored meetings, yet they demonstrate in other settings a capacity for insight, criticism, and imagination that could readily contribute as well to much faster political transformation.

U.S. policy toward Cuba for the bulk of this past decade has assisted the Castro government’s state security in shutting out information from the outside world: the United States banned the shipment of information-technology products, instead of facilitating Cuban electronic access to the world, and allowed Cuban Americans to visit their relatives only once every three years, instead of enabling cousins from both sides of the Straits of Florida to speak face to face about how a different, better Cuba might be constructed. (The United States has even protected ordinary Cubans from the Harvard Alumni Association, which could not lead tour groups there.) Perhaps the United States will stop being an obstacle to change in Cuba during the century’s second decade.

Jorge I. Domínguez, who most recently visited Cuba in March, is Madero professor of Mexican and Latin American politics and economics, vice provost for international affairs, and special adviser to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for international studies. He shared a previous overview of U.S.-Cuba policy with this magazine’s readers in “Your Friend, Fidel” (July-August 2000, page 35).