Cuban Revolution Research Articles

Political and Legal Transformations of the Economy in the Concept of Cuban Socialism

The paper is devoted to the main principles of the political and legal transformation of the economy in the doctrine of Cuban socialism. Cuban socialism itself is threefold: a socio-political system, a social movement, and a political and legal doctrine. The paper highlights the backbone importance of the economy as an object of political and legal transformations, focuses on the special flexibility of the corresponding concept, which made it possible, in a situation of limited natural resources and a large-scale economic blockade, to find many correct solutions to the tasks set. The author describes modern fundamental principles of economic construction that serve as a guideline for making both today’s political and economic decisions, and for determining the economic strategy of the future.An economic agenda in the political and legal doctrine of Cuban socialism at all times was of a system-forming nature, being one of the main components, relying on which this doctrine could explain the most complex political and legal processes of the present and illuminate the horizons of the future. The flexibility of economic thought inherent to the Cuban revolutionaries in synthesis with its deep value orientation, made it possible in the most difficult conditions of the economic blockade to make right decisions and confidently move forward. Due to this circumstance, Cuban socialism as a social system has shown amazing stability for more than six decades, changing and transforming in accordance with the requirements of the time and a rapidly changing world reality. At present, the economic doctrine of the Island of Freedom continues its modification and enrichment, finding more and more effective, comprehensive and systemic solutions in response to the global challenges of our time generated by the stormy waves of the 21st century.

Internal and External Factors to the Success of the Cuban Revolution

Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader of Cuba, gave a speech on the fourth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, mainly focus- ing on how to solidify the pueblo cubano under the revolutionary flag against the U.S. intervention. This paper aims to examine the Cuban revolution stand on the view from four years after Castro has died, to prove that what Castro has mentioned during his Fourth Anniversary Speech has been accomplished, as well as compare the revolutionary movements of its neighbours like Grenada, to see why Cuba could be the only successful example of socialism in the Western Hemisphere. The paper will focus on the social changes during the post-revolution Cuba based on the scholar research of Louis A. Pérez and John Walton’s comparison article between Grenada and Cuba.

The CIA in Ecuador

The CIA in Ecuador

Geographies of revolution: Prefiguration and spaces of alterity in Latin American radicalism

This paper discusses geographies of revolution and their potentialities for providing new notions of space to critical, subaltern and decolonial geopolitics. It does so by addressing a virtually unknown case, that is works of Cuban revolutionary and geographer Antonio Nuñez–Jiménez (1923–1998), especially his 1959 Geografía de Cuba. This book was published during the revolutionary period, after the fall of dictator Fulgencio Batista and before the 1961 official ‘socialist’ turn of the new (authoritarian) Castroist regime. According to respected scholarship, the original inspiration of the Cuban revolution was democratic and anticolonialist, and its initial components quite heterogeneous. My argument is twofold. Firstly, I contend that revolutions occur independently from narrow ideological labels that were imposed later, and geographies of revolution express their performative potentialities for prefiguring new worlds independently from the (re)establishment of post-revolutionary states. Secondly, I suggest that Jiménez’s elaborations on the Cuban Monte as a (revolutionary) space of alterity can nourish decolonial geopolitics which are alternative to European ideas of bounded territoriality. Corresponding to the rough and ‘uncivilised’ hinterland where historical experiences of Indio and Afro-Cuban insurgences took place, the Monte became a concept defining subversion and alterity through Jiménez’s claims that these early insurgences found their continuators in the nineteenth-century anticolonial fighters and in the 1950s guerrillas. By addressing Jiménez’s original writings, which were mostly never translated into English, I also extend current literature rediscovering critical and radical geographies beyond their Northern and Anglo-American ‘core’.

Preface

We are grateful to present this special issue of Monthly Review, carrying forward a tradition established six decades ago. The stance of the magazine reflects Castro’s assertion that criticism should be from within the revolution, mirroring the view of C. Wright Mills. In his Listen, Yankee, Mills wrote that we don’t worry about the Cuban Revolution, we worry with it. This volume is put together in that spirit.

We Must Return to the Future

The Cuban Revolution cannot disintegrate because it was never made of meringue. Not because it has not been sweet, but because the revolution has also tasted bitter fruits that, to date, we have known how to turn into strengths.

The Blockade as a Double-Edged Sword

Not a day has gone by that the United States has not tried to overturn the Cuban Revolution, through the assassination of its leaders, invasions by proxy forces, preventing it from normal commercial and diplomatic relations, and encouraging social distress in the island to become a counterrevolutionary force.

Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba by Anna Veltfort

Reviewed by: Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba by Anna Veltfort Ruth Behar Anna Veltfort, Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba. Stanford, CA: Redwood Press / Stanford University Press, 2019. 240 pp. (Originally published as Anna Veltfort, Adiós, mi Habana: Las memorias de una gringa y su tiempo en los años revolucionarios de la década de los 60. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2017. 234 pp. English translation by the author.) Recommended background reading: Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Yolando Martínez-San Miguel, "In Search of Lourdes Casal's 'Ana Veldford'" Social Text 25, no. 3 (2007): 57–84. Anna Veltfort's Goodbye, My Havana is one of the most important and innovative books about Cuba to be published recently. A graphic designer and illustrator, Anna Veltfort has produced a graphic memoir that is riveting and visually enticing. Originally published in Spanish in 2017, the book is now available in an English paperback edition with Redwood Press, a new trade imprint of Stanford University Press. This story of a German American woman, a "gringa," coming of age as a lesbian in Cuba during the tumultuous years of revolutionary fervor fills a huge blank in our understanding of Cuban history. For years, when I taught the work of Reinaldo Arenas and discussed the harassment and persecution of gay men in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, students would ask me what the situation had been like for lesbians. There wasn't a parallel experiential account that I could recommend—until now. With Veltfort's book in the world, I can finally say, to know what it was like to be a lesbian during the height of the revolution in Cuba, read Goodbye, My Havana. Readers in the Cuban studies community have heard of Anna Veltfort (also variously spelled Ana Veltfort and Ana Veldford) through the famed poem dedicated to her by writer, scholar, and activist Lourdes Casal, who led the Antonio Maceo Brigade and advocated for reconciliation between the diaspora and the island. First published in Areíto in 1976, and reprinted in 1981 in Palabras juntan revolución, following Casal's death and burial in Cuba, the poem's much-quoted closing lines became a canonical expression of the angst felt by the Cuban American children of exiles: "I carry this marginality, immune to all [End Page 312] turning back / too habanera to be newyorkina, / too newyorkina to be /—even to become again—anything else." Yet for years, no one seemed to know who Anna Veltfort was, or why Lourdes Casal had chosen to dedicate the poem to her. This "mystery," as described by Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel in a superb article in Social Text (2007), led them to go in search of Anna Veltfort, "a lesbian legend in Havana," engaging in an interview with Veltfort in which she shared many of the stories about her life in revolutionary Cuba that would eventually find their way into her book. Casal, also a lesbian, felt a bond with Veltfort after meeting her in New York. Though they weren't close friends, and Veltfort wasn't born in Cuba, they shared the feeling of being foreigners wherever they went. But in regard to sexuality in Cuba, their lives led them in vastly different directions. Casal chose queer invisibility to carry out her political work and be accepted as a revolutionary. In turn, Veltfort, arriving in Havana at the age of sixteen in 1962 and entangled in intimate relationships during the decade she lived there, couldn't hide her lesbianism in a surveilled society. Casal, in dedicating her poem to the visibly queer Veltfort, left a secret (or not so secret) inscription of her lesbian self. With Goodbye, My Havana, Veltfort finally comes out of the closet of Casal's poem. After such a long literary silence, she gets to tell her own story. And what a story it is. Veltfort settles in Cuba, not through her own volition but because her stepfather, Ted Veltfort, a fervent communist who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and was...

Cuban Emigration to the United States, Part II, from 1990 to 2019: A Statistical and Comparative Analysis

Since 1959, Cuban emigration seems to have been the subject of two consensuses. First, the Cuban Revolution would have resulted in a significant migratory movement towards the United States. Second, that this would reflect the rejection of the process of social transformation structured around a one-party political system put in place by Fidel Castro. The migration statistics of the US authorities, available for the period from 1860 to 2019, will shed light on this question by comparing the various flows from Cuba at different times (1860–1959, 1960–89, 1990–2019). Likewise, a comparative analysis of migratory flows emitted by the countries of the region will assess the relevance of these two hypotheses.

An answer that raises new questions

This review analyzes recently translated into Russian the former leader of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. The author's views on the Cuban revolution are critically compared with a number of facts known from the literature.

La emigración cubana hacia los Estados Unidos, Parte 2, de 1990 a 2019: un análisis estadístico y comparativo

In the United States in particular, but also in Western countries, since 1959, Cuban emigration has been the subject of two consensuses. First, the Cuban Revolution would have resulted in a significant migratory movement towards the United States. Then, this would reflect the rejection of the process of social transformation structured around a one-party political system put in place by Fidel Castro. The migration statistics of the US authorities, available for the period from 1860 to 2019, will shed light on this question by comparing the various flows from Cuba at different times (1860–1959, 1960–1989, 1990–2019). Likewise, a comparative analysis of migratory flows emitted by the countries of the region will assess the relevance of these two hypotheses.

Gendering the revolution: Bohemia, power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, 1960–85

This article presents a gender analysis of power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, using Bohemia magazine as a source. It argues that despite the relative paucity of historical research on the subject, gender was integral to the identity, legitimacy and popularity of the Cuban Revolution. This article examines Bohemia as a communicatory tool and a site of dissemination and contestation to demonstrate how the Cuban Revolution both endorsed and criticised the cultural ideals it inherited. Bohemia elucidates a dynamic between grassroots enthusiasm, institutional mobilisation and popular disenchantment, whereby gender discourse functioned to encourage and regulate behaviour. The article first focuses on the construction of national identity through historical narratives in Bohemia, exploring the uses of José Martí and Mariana Grajales to create an ambiguous discourse framing behaviour, both domestically and internationally. It then shifts to the discursive construction of the individual Cuban woman, analysing the multiple contentious identities that existed in this post-revolutionary cultural framework, using this incongruity to evidence fundamental shortcomings in the revolution’s approach. The final section bridges the national and the individual to understand how these discursive frameworks were used to encourage female participation in the workplace, in political organisations and social campaigns. This analysis also highlights that the central dissonance within the revolutionary project’s cultural framework prevented the realisation of gender equality. This article therefore argues that a gender analysis is integral to understanding the nature, legitimacy and longevity of the Cuban Revolution on both a national and international level.

Notes from the Editors, January 2022

buy this issue
 This number of Monthly Review is a special issue guest edited by Manolo De Los Santos and Vijay Prashad on The Cuban Revolution Today: Experiments in the Grip of Challenges. Although it covers the major internal struggles of the ongoing Cuban Revolution, along with the external attacks on it by Washington, one unaddressed area of critical importance, which deserves mention, is Cuba’s world leadership in sustainable human development.

Introduction

The U.S. government is obsessed with Cuba. Cuba is a small island, ninety miles off the shore of Florida, that is home to eleven million people. Not a day has gone by that the United States has not tried to overturn the Cuban Revolution, through the assassination of its leaders, invasions by proxy forces, preventing it from normal commercial and diplomatic relations, and encouraging social distress in the island to become a counterrevolutionary force. That is the level of the obsession.

The Labour Situation in Colombia and Human Rights

The Labour Situation in Colombia and Human Rights Omar Romero Díaz (bio) Colombia, a country where for more than two hundred years it has been added to absolute poverty, since independence, a historical process that ended the colonial stage by the Spanish Empire, since the appearance of unions in Colombia that the Colombian State broad sectors of the political, economic and business class have been unable to recognise the role of the trade union movement in the defence of labour rights and union freedoms and its leading role in the different scenarios of a democratic state. This is what explains the wave of systematic violence since its appearance at the beginning of the last century, referenced in the “Masacre de las Bananeras” (English: “Massacre of the Banana Workers”) in 1928, with the murder in the central park of Ciénaga, of more than 3000 workers of the American United Fruit Company by the machine guns of the national army, for demanding better wages and job guarantees. Similar behaviour has occurred at various times of confrontation with trade unionism as some cases worth mentioning: on 23 February 1963, 11 workers and an 11-year-old girl died in the Municipality of Santa Bárbara, Antioquia, when there was a strike by the workers of Cementos el Cairo, the military attacked the camp of the strikers; in 1969, in the National Patriotic Strike against the administrative reform of Lleras Restrepo; the same in 1977 in the realisation of the National Civic Strike recorded as one of the largest mobilisations in national history; the strikes of the USO Workers’ Union in defence of Ecopetrol; of the Telecom Workers, led by SITELECOM, to prevent its sale; the innumerable teacher strikes under the direction of FECODE in defence of public education and the rights of teachers; the public sector strike in 1998; and many more battles of Colombian workers, many of them recorded in national history; such as the recent National Strikes of 21 November 2019, and 28 April 2021, which led to a social rebellion, which others call a social explosion. This violence against the trade union and social movements, of expressions of protest and popular uprisings is consigned, indisputably, in the first place, by the struggle in defence of life, land, workers’ rights, food sovereignty, peace with social justice, health, and defence of the environment and natural resources and, secondly, for the submission of the country’s rulers to the United States and its strategies of confrontation in the cold war with the former Soviet Union. Violence and anti-communism In the Treaty of Versailles, the triumphant imperialist powers to counteract the triumph of the Russian revolution and its influence in the labour sectors founded the ILO in 1919 and recognised workers’ rights through fundamental agreements, several of them ratified in 1933 in Colombia. In the vision of combating communism, we will mention that the violence of the late 1940s was engineered and directed by the United States against democratic movements. It is worth remembering that, in December 1952, through Legislative Act 01 of 9 December, the Congress of the Republic convened a National Constituent Assembly of fascist orientation and by legislative act 06 of 14 September 1954, decreed: “The activity politics of international communism. The law will regulate the way to make this prohibition effective”. Likewise, the partisan violence that worsened around 1948, with the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, a dissident political leader of the Liberal Party who sponsored the debate on the Banana Massacre, is based on Truman’s crusade since March 1947 against international communism and all forms of popular mobilisation to maintain US domination and contain the Soviet Union, which intensifies with the triumph of the Cuban revolution. The struggles from the workers were stigmatised in this anti-communist strategy by the Washington doctrine. In the context of the peace processes of Belisario Betancur, successful with some insurgent forces and unsuccessful with the FARC, there is the appearance of the Patriotic Union and the exacerbation of the most conservative sectors of the national scene with the creation of paramilitary armies, which sharpens the violence against the democratic and leftist sectors from the mid-1980s onwards. This...

Agrarian Reform and the Radicalization of Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1962

In 1959, Cuban revolutionaries enacted an agrarian reform law that transformed the island. This article examines the radicalization that took place within that process, on the farms of Cuban peasants and cooperative workers, particularly in Pinar del Río. In the face of growing conflict with former landowners, beneficiaries of the law appealed to the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA) for redress. Drawing on letters sent from beneficiaries of the law to INRA offices, this article argues that peasants and cooperative members pressured the government to deliver the benefits it had promised, pushed INRA to act against the interests of landowners, and thus propelled the radicalization of the revolution.

Translation Practices during the Cold War

This article focuses on the cultural Cold War in the Caribbean from the sixties to the nineties, when Cuba was a member the Soviet socialist bloc. During that period, both the United States and the Soviet Union deployed different strategies to control the area, economically, politically, and culturally. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 changed the Caribbean geopolitical map and allowed the Soviets to have a more definite point of entry to the region, while at the same time it represented a threat to US interests not only in the area but also in the rest of the continent. As this study demonstrates, the competing powers supported the production and distribution of periodical publications translated into the local language to promote their ideologies and ways of life. In the case of Cuba, a new cultural and translation system was created following the Soviet model. The translation practices implemented by both superpowers played not only a fundamental role in the circulation of a “high” literary culture, but they also promoted various forms of consumption of “popular culture”.

From Utopia to Dystopia: The Demise of the Revolutionary Dream in Futuristic Cuban Cinema

The armed insurrection that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959 was one of the most influential events of the 20th century. Like the Russian and Mexican revolutions before it, the Cuban revolution set out to bring social justice and prosperity to a country that had suffered the evils of corrupt regimes. A small country thus became the center of world debates about equality, culture, and class struggle, attracting the attention of political leaders not only from Latin America but also from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Its intent to forge a model society has often been described in utopian terms. Writers, artists, and filmmakers turned to utopia as a metaphor to trace the evolution of the arts in the island from the enthusiasm and optimism of the first moments to the dystopian hopelessness and despair of the last decades. Indeed, the Cuban revolution, like so many other social revolutions of the 20th century, became the victim of a whole series of internal and external forces that ended up turning the promised dream into a nightmare tainted by autocratic leadership, repression, and political and economic isolation. Although Cuban literature has extensively addressed these issues since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is only recently that we can find similar trends in a cinematic output that portrays Cuba as a utopia gone sour. This article examines recent films such as Alejandro Brugués’ Juan de los Muertos (2011), Tomás Piard’s Los desastres de la Guerra (2012), Eduardo del Llano’s Omega 3 (2014), Rafael Ramírez’s Diario de la niebla (2016), Yimit Ramírez’s Gloria eterna (2017), Alejandro Alonso’s El Proyecto (2017), and Miguel Coyula’s Corazón Azul (2021). These films use futuristic imageries to offer a poignant (and often apocalyptic) depiction of the harsh paradoxes of contemporary life in Cuba while reflecting upon the downfall of utopia.

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

How do political actors forge social solidarity across preexisting axes of social difference? This article investigates how political elites undertaking projects of political articulation—understood as linking together diverse constituencies to create integrated political blocs—contend with preexisting cultural constraints embedded in the social fabric. I do so by tracing how the post-1959 Cuban regime attempted to build a population-wide revolutionary identity despite persisting cultural understandings of women primarily as apolitical housewives. Through systematic analysis of a large corpus of state discourse in the form of speeches and women’s magazines, I show how regime leaders negotiated, with varying degrees of success over time, the cultural constraints that gender posed to their unifying project. Ultimately, the regime’s initiatives to politicize women through including them in mass campaigns and radicalizing their traditional household tasks were relatively successful, but cultural backlash against women’s increasing presence in the labor force prompted the institutionalization of a gendered division of labor in the economy that traditionalized their initially radical entry into the workplace. Analyzing how political elites confront and manage social differences within political blocs promises to contribute to a better understanding of the political production of social solidarity and its downstream effects on categorical inequalities.

The origins of the Cuban Revolution of 1959

Coveted from the beginning of the 19th century by the United States who wanted to annex it to their territory, Cuba lived under the constant threat of seeing its aspiration for independence questioned by the powerful neighbor who denied them the right to a sovereign existence. After the military intervention of 1898 and the occupation of the island, Washington in one way or another exerted a more or less direct influence over all aspects of Cuban society, thereby gaining control over its natural resources. The origins of the 1959 Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro lie in the turmoil of this tormented history, between aspiration for independence and subjection.