Vol. 72/No. 19      May 12, 2008

Eighty-five people, including students, professors, and others, attended the meeting, which was sponsored by the International, Latin American, African, and Asian Studies programs; the Chinese and African student associations; and the Latin American Studies Club. Alexandria DeLong, president of that club, chaired the event and spoke about the example of Cuba’s internationalist support to the Angolan people fighting repeated invasions of South Africa’s apartheid army between 1975 and 1988, and the Cuban doctors in Venezuela today.

Marc McLeod, director of the Latin American Studies program, observed that the book “provides fascinating first-hand detail about the process of revolution itself.” Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong, who joined the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army led by Fidel Castro as youth in the late 1950s, “credit the socialist revolution for their opportunity to become leaders,” he said.

McLeod recalled visiting Cuba during the depths of the economic crisis Cuba faced in the 1990s after the collapse of its principal trading partners in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In dealing with deep-going food and fuel shortages, “the revolutionary leadership demonstrated a non-dogmatic adaptability,” he said. “In Our History, the generals describe many of the flexible and creative ways the leadership responded to the challenges they faced.”

Kan Liang, the director of International Studies and professor of Chinese history, described the massive importation of Chinese indentured laborers to work on Cuban sugar plantations in the mid-19th century. Many Chinese laborers, subjected to horrendously abusive conditions, joined the liberation wars against Spanish colonial rule, a 30-year struggle that was intertwined with the fight to abolish slavery and bonded labor of all kinds on the island. He also described China’s support to the Cuban Revolution’s victory in 1959 and Ernesto Che Guevara’s trip to China in 1960, which was followed by 20 years of “cool” relations, he said, because of Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union during the Sino-Soviet split.

Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the book and president of Pathfinder Press, pointed to the opening years of the Cuban Revolution, when “a land reform placed titles in the hands of more than 100,000 landless peasants, an urban reform slashed rents to 10 percent of a family’s income, and a literacy campaign mobilized 100,000 young people to wipe out widespread illiteracy throughout the country in less than a year. These measures ran into head-on conflict with the property interests of the ruling classes in Cuba and the United States,” she said. “And that is the source of Washington’s 50 years of implacable hostility toward the Cuban Revolution.”

A member of the audience who identified himself as belonging to the group Socialist Alternative said that while there is “no doubt that there have been advances in Cuba, there is also a dictatorship.” He asked Waters if “now that Fidel Castro no longer heads the government, will the Cuban people rise up to form a true form of democratic socialism?”

Waters responded that contrary to the picture often given by the U.S. press, “Cuba is not a dictatorship. Working people there determine governmental policies to a greater extent than anywhere else in the world. Like the opening years of the Russian Revolution,” she said, “the Cuban Revolution has established forms through which the will and interests of the working class are expressed.” She pointed to decision-making processes which involve broad input from mass organizations, factory committees, and workers’ assemblies. “These are not structures that correspond to any institution of ‘democratic capitalism,’” she said. “In Cuba, a different class is in power, the working class.”

Waters added that Cuba “is in no way a utopia, and Cubans who support the revolution are the first to point to its faults. But it is closer to what socialists and communists have always fought for than anything else that exists in the world today.”

In response to questions and discussion about whether Cuba’s new president Raúl Castro is more open to following the “Chinese model,” as the U.S. press states, Waters noted that Cuba is not following any “model,” but discovering its own road. “As Fidel has frequently said, the Cuban leadership thinks the worst mistakes they made were because they once thought that others knew better than they did how to build socialism.”

Asked about the changes taking place in Cuba in recent months, such as the opening up of tourist and the availability of cell phone services, Waters replied that these popular measures are not being adopted because Fidel Castro is no longer president. “They have been in the works for some time and are possible now because of the strengthening of Cuba’s economic situation.”
 
 
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