Cuba

Film Review | Literature Review | Training

25 February 2021

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In the late nineties at Presbyterian College I was growing into my own as an adult, but still childishly rejecting the ideas of my parents simply because they were the ideas of my parents. The kid who had taunted his father on the night of the '92 election "you're just pissed because your guy is losing" was now learning about the plague of neoliberalism in Central America and the long fight against the yanqui. And, yes, marines, fruit companies, and other American institutions did some bad shit; the Monroe Doctrine and the proxy conflicts of the Cold War to name a few. The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be a dangerous one though. And Cubans, rejecting the overt and sometimes malignant influence of their northern neighbor in the mid 20th century chose a different local tyrant, Castro, who was aligned with the Soviets over the American backed one, Batista. What does that have to do with me? After the Fall of the Soviet Union at the start of the 90's Cuba just kept doing it's thing and so represented the antithesis of my dad's world.

So I read Immanuel Wallerstein as recommended by my sociology professor, Chuck McKelvey, and had my understanding of American history forever altered by his world systems perspective. Wallerstein wrote from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein had spend his years in the US and where another man who was also profoundly altering my worldview, Kurt Gödel, was also affiliated. I went to Honduras. I saw the poverty, the trash every, the men guarding the banks with machine guns. I saw the huge banana farms and the university with students who seemed to know so little. And I blamed the US.

In this environment I started looking at Cuba as a potential savior and socialist paradise and began reading books on the subjects (as is my habit). I got a laudatory book from Wallerstein on Cuba and dove in wholeheartedly. The problem I kept running into was the numbers didn't add up. Graph after graph seemed tilted toward how successful Cuba was, so these errors didn't appear accidental. While Wallerstein's dictum was that "all good scholarship is polemic", I had also started reading Feynman's lectures and had adopted "if it disagrees with experiment then it is wrong". And looking deeper at Cuban history it was impossible to ignore the continued human rights abuses of the Castro regime. Just because this caudillo wasn't backed by the US didn't make him the benevolent dictator I imagined.

Fast forwarding to today, Cuban socialism keeps going; repressing its population in the name of protecting it from repression from the north. Professor McKelvey now calls Havana home rather than rural South Carolina. The Obama administration tried to open the door between the two countries a bit, but progress remains slow. The support of Venezuelan caudillo's oil has propped up Cuba as that country sent tanks into the streets to quell dissent and disenfranchised people to maintain the kleptocrats. The enemy of my enemy is my friend continues to be a basis for Cuban foreign policy.

Inside of Cuba entrepreneurs are trying as they always do to better their own lives and in doing so bettering the lives of their customers. Or at least providing services customers want. As of this month they can do it in multitude of more areas. The 2010 list proscribing 127 professions entrepreneurs were allowed to operate in has been replaced with a list of 124 professions^* they are not allowed to operate in. In effect this opens up all the other professions not on that list for entrepreneurs. Average Cubans will benefit.