Castro's Cuba Research Articles

Mediapolitik: how the mass media have transformed world politics

Drawing upon his lifelong study of politics and journalism, political historian Lee Edwards offers a scholarly examination of a powerful new phenomenon in world politics-the mass media. Edwards argues in his work that the media have become as important a factor in determining the course of international affairs and the future of nations as economic prosperity, military strength, natural resources, and national will. The author calls this vital new component of world politics mediapolitik. He uses case studies from around the world to show how the mass media have influenced and even determined the outcome of major political acts. The author argues that these case studies show that the mass media can either enrich or enslave the human spirit, depending upon their moral foundation. If the media follow a liberal democratic model, as in the United States and Western Europe, they contribute to a free and just society. If they follow an authoritarian model, as in South Africa before Mandela, or a totalitarian model as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Fidel Castro's Cuba, they perpetuate the regime in power and deny the fruits of freedom and democracy to the people. Edwards addresses the question of how responsibly the American media, the most influential media in the world, handle their enormous power. Using the results obtained from his survey of 100 leading journalists as well as close analysis of major news stories of the last decade, the author confirms the cynicism of the American media and its deleterious effect on American politics and government. The solution, he suggests, is that American journalists must practice moral responsibility and strengthen the liberal democratic model of mediapolitik around the world.

Real Life in Castro's Cuba

Real Life in Castro's Cuba

Exit, Voice, and Hostility in Cuba

Albert Hirschman's categories of ‘exit,’ Voice,’ and ‘loyalty,’ which were previously applied to the analysis of emigration and protests in East Germany, are discussed and applied to the case of Cuba. Incentives for different types of action which may be derived from policy decisions regarding migration, as well as information and repression, are placed in the context of the strategic interaction between the United States and Cuban governments. A game-theoretic model of the typical Cold War conflict between the two former German regimes is compared with the US-Cuba interaction regarding migration policy. In spite of some coincidence between the two governments to prefer ‘exit,’ successive waves of emigration of people from Castro's Cuba to the United States in the period 1959–1995 have induced an increasing degree of cooperation between the two governments over time to close off borders. “Latin American powerholders have long encouraged their potential enemies and potential critics to remove themselves from the scene through voluntary exile.” Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 1970:60.

Comedia Texts as Political Propaganda in Castro's Cuba

This essay documents and explicates an interesting case of the propagandistic use of a little-known anthology of Lope de Vega's plays published in Cuba in 1977. The selection of works included reveals a constant preoccupation with a strong leader who pays benevolent attention to the problems of his subjects. The analogy between the conduct of the monarchs in Lope's dramas and that of Castro in Cuba cannot be accidental, we believe. Given that the six plays included in the anthology do not constitute a truly representative sample of Lope's dramatic output, we believe that we have shown that this anthological work starts from a clearly propagandistic premise. We cite pertinent bibliography in support of our argument. (CBK and SDK)

Improper Conduct. Castro's Cuba

Improper Conduct. Castro's Cuba

Caught in a Contradiction: Cuban Socialism between Mobilization and Normalization

Since 1989, when the Communist regimes of eastern Europe fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the United States tightened its economic embargo, the world has been awaiting the downfall of Fidel Castro. So far he has failed to oblige. It is not entirely surprising that Cuban state socialism has not yet suffered the same fate as its erstwhile eastern European allies since, unlike them, its political vitality never depended on the Soviet Union. The Cuban revolution rode to power on the crest of a national insurgency against a U.S.-supported and widely unpopular dictatorship, and Cuban leaders have successfully defied nine U.S. presidents. That in the 1990s the Cuban government has reconstituted itself in the face of inordinate adversity and managed, like China, Vietnam, and North Korea, to persist in a post-cold-war environment can in part be attributed to the virtually inexhaustible fount of nationalism. However, Cuba, unlike China and Vietnam, has not initiated economic reforms and, unlike North Korea, does not subsist in hermetic isolation. What accounts for its resilience? Though the dramatic events of 1989 temporarily led social scientists to recast the analysis of state socialism in terms of its collapse, they quickly returned their attention to the more salient intellectual charge of determining how this social formation actually functioned over decades.1 Since the mid 1980s studies of the institutional dynamics of state socialism have focused on a master process of social change involving three types of interactions: between central planning and incipient markets, between state institutions and civil society, and within the regime's own institutions.2 State socialist transformations and market transitions are the often unintended consequences of the efforts by Communist parties to modify the operation of the central plan; these modifications in turn create new opportunity structures and centers of power largely but not exclusively outside party-state institutions. The reform experiences of post-1956 eastern Europe and post-1978 China have provided the empirical basis for the institutionalist paradigm. State socialism in Cuba, however, suggests a more politically centered drive. The Cuban regime never completely implemented old-fashioned market socialism, nor has it presently embarked upon far-reaching market reforms. While the forces of the master process of institutional interactions are partially at work in the economy and the regime, Castro's Cuba, like Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao Zedong's

The sword of justice: ethics and coercion in international politics

Preface Ethics and Coercion: A Framework for Evaluation The Ethics of Nuclear Deterrence: The Reagan Administration versus the American Catholic Bishops Ethics and Military Force: George Bush and the Persian Gulf War The Limits of Humanitarian Obligation: The International Community and the Crisis in Burundi Can Covert Action Be Just? Lessons from U.S. Intervention in Chile The Ethics of Economic Warfare: The United States and Castro's Cuba Coercion and Conciliation: The United States and the North Korean Nuclear Program Sheathing the Sword of Justice Selected Bibliography Index

Castro's Cuba

The Clinton administration's announcement on 5 January 1999 of the limited relaxation of America's economic embargo against Cuba has, if anything, only increased Cuban defiance. President Fidel Castro's government correctly perceived this change to be not an attempt at détente, but a shift towards a different strategy for trying to undermine communist power through economic and social contacts. However, the US approach seems unlikely to have much success, and communist rule appears firm. Cuba has to some degree already opened up its economy – especially to tourism – and has attracted significant investment from countries other than the US. The US-based Cuban émigré leadership's anti-communist rhetoric and unconcealed ambition for a leading role in a post-communist Cuba contributes to the communists' determination to maintain power. When change does occur after Castro's death, the role of the émigré élite and of Washington may be dangerous, and could cause a strong anti-US backlash on the island.

Hunters in the backyard? The UK, the us and the question of arms sales to Castro's Cuba, 1959

The UK supplied arms to the Batista government in Cuba right up to the time of Batista's dramatic flight in December 1958. The new Castro government's request that the balance of an order for Sea Fury aircraft ‐ paid for by Batista ‐ be delivered, created a marked dilemma for the British government. Supply was economically desirable and would also bring political benefits. However, supply would also run counter to US interests. Later in 1959 the dilemma was heightened when the Cubans suggested exchanging the Sea Furies for more advanced Hunter aircraft. This case represents an intriguing example of the politics of British arms sales in the immediate post‐Suez era, and also a modest contribution to the ongoing debate which seeks to explain US reactions to the Cuban Revolution, and the question of whether or to what extent the US ‘pushed’ Castro into the arms of the USSR.

Der Kalte Krieg und ich

A personal trajectory is described, which took Frank as a child from Nazi Germany to dependency theory and global historical studies. This trajectory led him at various times to Castro's Cuba, Allende's Chile, and Breshnew's Russia Cold. On every station it was deeply influenced by the Cold War - as well in the West as in the East.

An autopsy of marxist socialism

Is socialism dead? Common sense at the close of the 20th century suggests the answer is yes. The Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe has long disappeared, the Soviet Union has dissolved, Castro's Cuba is on the brink of collapse, and Chinese communism looks more and more like Singapore‐style authoritarianism with a decidedly capitalist face. The admired Third Way of Scandinavian social democracy has hit a dead end, abandoning its commendable goals of full employment, rising real wages, and large welfare transfers. Caught in a world‐wide transition from nationally organized to globally integrated capitalism, the nation state‐based “Keynesian socialism” of 20 years ago has found itself in a losing battle with the new internationalism of multinational corporations and expanding stock exchanges. The Western democratic Left of the 1990s has appropriated campaign slogans that barely differ from those of market liberals and conservatives.

El mundo alucinante: History and Ideology

Reinaldo Arenas's novels have been considered primarily self-referential rather than correspond- ing to an external historical reality. Yet, even when they seem to be escaping from history, they are recap- tured by it, as the narrative structures that comprise these become meaningful within the context of history. In El mundo alucinante the relationship of Servando to what is represented as reality takes place within circumscribed ideological limits, undermining an interpretation of the text from the point of view of historical relativism. No matter how many times Servando escapes from prison, he continues to find his im- age in the mirror of a dominant ideology in the imaginary dimension of his being. El mundo alucinante thus can be read as a symbolic structure that refers to the interrelationship between ideology, society, and the bour- geois revolutionary subject in Castro's Cuba.

Cuba and the United States: A Personal Reflection on Thirty-five Years of Conflict

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites it was widely assumed that Cuba would soon go the same way; that Fidel Castro's downfall and Cuba's "return" to the "free world" was simply a matter of time, and in all likelihood the time would be sooner rather than later. But, six years after the fall of the Berlin wall and despite the severance of all aid from its former Eastern Bloc allies and the tightening of the punitive U.S. trade embargo, the Cuban regime stubbornly refuses to collapse.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Baseball and society in the Caribbean

[First paragraph]The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic. Rob Ruck. Westport CT: Meckler, 1991. x + 205 pp. (Cloth n.p.)Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba. TomMiller. New York: Atheneum, 1992. x + 338 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.00)Read Bart Giamatti's Take Time for Paradise (1989) or any of the other grand old game sentimentalists and you'11 discover that baseball somehow perfectly reflects the temperament of U.S. culture. This match, in turn, accounts for basebali's enduring and penetrating popularity in the United States. Read Ruck and Miller and you'11 learn that baseball is more popular and culturally dominant in the Dominican Republic and Cuba than it is to the north. The suppressed syllogism affirms that U.S. and Caribbean cultures hold intimate similarities. If that is true, this Caribbeanist has been out to lunch; then again, no one ever accused economists of having acute cultural sensibilities.

Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro

This study describes why Cuban communism has been misperceived and misunderstood abroad. Concealed behind Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and Castro's autocratic single-party rule has been a government promoting a cradle-to-grave welfare state, tolerating market reforms, foreign investment, Western trade and hard currency internationalism. Not only has Castro's Cuba been less ideologically driven by Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy than has heretofore been believed, it also has been less omnipotent. Drawing on interviews, personal observations, and primary sources, this book demonstrates the need for a revisionist view of Cuba and, by implication, other Communist regimes.

Kathleen Gough's Fight against the Consequences of Class and Imperialism on Campus

In 1961 the Kennedy Administration gave the green light to the CIA to reclaim Cuba by force for democratic capitalism's interests. The Bay of Pigs invasion which followed was a flop that subsequent administrations and the CIA could never abide. In October of 1962 the Kennedy Administration, smarting from its defeat at the Bay of Pigs, revealed that Soviet missiles were destined to be installed on launch pads in Cuba and effected a blockade of traffic destined for that island. The Missile Crisis, as it is known, generated small protests on several campuses, including Brandeis University where Kathleen Gough, an assistant professor there, was asked by students to give a speech at an open forum on campus. Whereas the toppling of Arbenz's government in Guatemala and Mossadegh's government in Iran in the mid - 1950s had created mild protests here and there in American universities, the Cuban missile blockade signalled a change in the size and number of political protests on several American campuses against the United States' imperialist military adventures. Even free speech platforms, so common on campuses today, and professors willing to speak on controversial issues were few and far between three decades ago. Kathleen Gough was sought out by students because of a speech she had given the previous year denouncing the above - ground testing of nuclear devices at the Nevada test site. Kathleen complied and gave a speech lambasting the United States' government, expressing a hope that Cuba would successfully defend itself against an attack from the United States. She insisted that the United States was in violation of international law, and of Cuba's sovereignty, and threatened the world with a nuclear confrontation with the U.S.S.R. Kathleen Gough's protests of the blockade were based on scholarly critiques of Cuban political economic history and of the dictatorial regimes which had received succour and support from the United States. She sought fair treatment for Castro's socialist regime which had toppled Batista's dictatorship. By 1962 it was apparent that United States policies in Latin America favoured oligarchies and dictatorships(f.2) over socialist governments or governments which raised the spectre of socialism. Thus, from 1959 the United States had sought to undermine Castro's Cuba by refusing to grant it aid, to grant it trade status or to recognize its legitimacy. The U.S.A's second big moment for the toppling ofCastro's regime, the blockade, was not left to the CIA, but was delegated to the U.S. military and foreign affairs apparatus. The protest of U.S. practices toward Cuba during the missile crisis must be put into perspective: it was small, but noticed. It preceded the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley by over a year,(f.3) and it preceded the electrifying University of Michigan teach - in on the Vietnam War by two years.(f.4) Protests of the Cuban blockade in 1962 were in step with civil rights demonstrations in the deep south, and were harbingers of campus protests of U.S. imperialist foreign policies for the next three decades. Kathleen Gough's protests of United States' nuclear testing policies and its actions toward Cuba were regarded with repugnance by the Brandeis administration. She was called into the university president's office and upbraided. Kathleen was later given to understand that she had no future at Brandeis, but the president did not so inform her. Kathleen and her husband and colleague, David Aberle, decided to move from Brandeis. David was offered a position at the University of Oregon, which he accepted. There was no permanent ladder position available for Kathleen so she was made an Honorary Research Associate. Within a year after their arrival at Oregon, the United States, in violation of the Geneva Agreements and Accords, was hip - deep in open warfare against the revolutionary National Liberation Front insurgents and North Vietnamese troops. …

Cuba in Transition: Socialist Order Under Siege

This article examines the current crisis in socialist Cuba as it attempts to grapple with the new realities of the post-Cold War era. It provides an outline of the context of Cuba's current predicament; the diverse and explosive nature of the problems within the country; the main policy initiatives now being pursued to resolve the problems; and the imperative need for the U.S. to re-examine U.S. confrontationist policy to Cuba in an attempt to avoid bloodshed in a country which inevitably will have to be reintegrated into the new world order. The article makes the case that Castro's Cuba has limited options, her economy is under siege and that a new policy orientation is necessary and urgent to resolve the problems created by economic and political isolation. It concludes by advocating a ‘soft-landing’ for Cuba as it dismantles its socialist state apparatus.

Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 213 conclusions are quasi-mathematical, quasi-scientific statements ofrelationships among variables. Texts on such subject matters almost always accompany their verbal explanation of factor relationships by graphical representations. Doing so greatly facilitates reader comprehension. As Liska's work relies heavily on the statement of factor relationships, I would have urged him to carry the scientific method analogy a bit further through the effective use of charts and graphs. Similarly, as his theoretical conclusions and historical examples can only be truly appreciated by those readers with a sound grasp of modern and ancient geography, I would have urged George Liska to incorporate maps of the ancient world, 19th-century Europe, and present-day national boundaries into The Ways ofPower. George Liska has obviously poured his soul into The Ways ofPower. To ask him to recast it would be impracticable and an unreasonable demand on his time, which he suggests is already too short to satisfy his eternal quest for knowledge and understanding. Should the book go into a second printing, however, I would hope that Liska might pay heed to some of the suggestions made above; this could even be accomplished through a supplement. I would hate to see this work not receive the scholastic acclaim it merits. For this reason above all, I would urge Professor Liska to take the steps necessary to make TAe Ways ofPower, his masterwork, more accessible to the reading public. If he were to do so, his theories' practical implications for the conduct of foreign relations could be explored—to the benefit of humankind. Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel. By Lee Lockwood. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1990. 379 pp. $49.50/Hardcover. Reviewed by Bryna Brennan, M.I.P.P. Candidate, SAISIJournalist. Lee Lockwood's Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel, republished for the third time since 1967, is almost as timely today as it was when it came out in the first decade of communist revolution on that Caribbean island. When the author's 1965 interviews with Castro were originally printed, they offered a glimpse into a closed society run by a fatigue-clad, vibrant leader who said he sought a better life for an exploited people. The fact that he was public enemy No. 1 in the United States, viewed by some as the man who saw red in the region, made him all the more curious. Spawned by similar ideas and ideals, Latin American attempts to duplicate Castro's experiment, most notably in Nicaragua, went down in failure. That, coupled with communism's collapse in Eastern Europe, makes Lockwood's book valuable today as an anthropological study. It reveals a fading breed of revolutionary warrior and an aged lone fighter who, despite his paunch and gray beard, still refers to himself as a guerrilla. The book starts slowly, with an exhaustive tick-tock diary approach. A description of one day, which begins before dawn and ends at sunset with a crowd chanting "Fi-del! Fi-del!" drags on for pages. Like other Castro chroniclers, Lockwood points out that the Cuban leader was indefatigable, once 214 SAISREVIEW awakening the author to get back to an interview, which Castro himselfapproved before publication. Some of the writing is overblown, especially the all-too-frequent weather reports. And some of the prose sets up some unlikely scenes. For example, Lockwood describes a country scene in which Fidel's tent is compared to "an all-male hunting camp anywhere." Then he notes without further comment that among the litter ofcigarette butts and unmade cots were two bottles ofArmenian brandy and a half-dozen "exquisite cut-glass brandy glasses." When Lockwood turns to his interviews with Castro, the story takes on a rhythm of its own. It is then that Lockwood, primarily a photographer, captures his larger-than-life subject in writing in much the same way that he frames his photographs. He serves up slices of life that are filled with texture and color, mostly because Castro's words are presented in interview form. In contrast to most of his commentary, however, Lockwood's rich photos scattered throughout the book do not make any political statements. The author in 1967 described the Cuban revolution...

Resource Mobilization and Political Opportunity in the Nicaraguan Revolution:

Abstract. A previous paper in this Journal presented a resource mobilization‐political opportunities paradigm about violent revolution in the Third World. Key propositions put forward in the previous paper find empirical support in a study of the Nicaraguan revolution. In keeping with the paradigm, the Nicaraguan revolution occurred after a period of economic growth during which urbanization, school enrollments, and the size of the middle class increased. Also consistent with the paradigm was the existence of an organization of professional revolutionaries espousing a Marxist‐Leninist ideology which received resources from abroad, especially from Castro's Cuba. The Sandinista National Liberation Front put into practice a number of strategems which the paradigm considers to be promising in a revolution, including staging paralyzing acts of institutional disruption, enlisting the aid of social and economic elites, and deceiving the public and its allies about the true goals of the organization. Also, the FSLN was adept at exploiting political opportunities and realignments which left the Somoza regime weakened and vulnerable.

Ida Kar: photographer, 1908-1974

When Ida Kar came to London in 1945, she left behind her in Cairo a reputation as a stylish avant-garde photographer. With ebullience and determination, she found in London a new Bohemia and spent the next 15 years portraying it. She photographed tirelessly, almost every new and important writer and artist from Doris Lessing to T.S.Eliot, David Hockney to Margot Fonteyn. Her documentary studies of London street life and her explorations of her homeland Armenia and Castro's Cuba exploded on the British cultural scene at a time when phtotography was excluded from the domain of high art. This study deals with Ida Kar's life and work in both biographical and aesthetic terms, making extensive use of correspondence and interviews from her recent but strangely obscure past and brings together her most haunting and evocative pictures - a statement and testimony of her life and times. Val Williams is the author of Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present.