csillagkohó’s Reviews > Cuba: An American History > Status Update

🍄 "In 1992, the government was building underground bunkers for use in the event of a US invasion. By the end of the decade, in a typically Cuban twist, the dark, dank tunnels were being used to grow gourmet mushrooms for the international and high-end tourist market."

☢️ "One source of moral capital in Fidel's efforts to discredit the Soviets [after Gorbachev cut aid] came from the most unlikely place: the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. In 1990, as Soviet aid to Cuba was disappearing, Castro opened a center to treat Soviet children affected by the disaster. Against the Soviet abandonment of socialist solidarity, Castro relished touting its antithesis."

"Officials in Washington presumed that Cuba's international role was that of a Soviet proxy. But Cuban foreign policy was often at odds with Soviet wishes. Che publicly questioned Moscow's trade policies with the West, and Havana broke with the Soviets on the nuclear test ban treaty. Cuba's most significant dispute with the Soviets was a broad, ideological one: the question of whether to promote revolution abroad."

This is interesting: the early waves of Cuban emigration to Florida were, as is well-known, white and upper-class. But those who arrived in massive numbers around 1980 were a more typical cross-section of Cuban society, including large numbers of poor blacks, drawn by the extraordinary privileges the US government bestowed on Cubans. These new arrivals were soon ostracized both by the "first wave" and US officials.

After the vaguely Maoist episode of the "10 million ton harvest" campaign in 1970, the government moved to pragmatism: "Exemplary workers would receive bonus pay ...The new emphasis on material incentives was subsidized by stronger ties to the Soviet Union." But "these strengthened ties—premised on the exchange of sugar for oil—meant the survival of two longtime features of Cuban society: monoculture and dependency."

An adviser to JFK secretly met with Guevara in Uruguay in August 1961, four months after Bay of Pigs. He relayed the message Guevara had passed to him: ""He wanted to thank us very much for the invasion—that it had been a great political victory for them—enabled them to consolidate—and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal." Goodwin was almost speechless: "I said he was welcome."" ☠️

"The American officials who devised the policy of covert action against Cuba understood that the Cuban Revolution had massive support. So, the CIA concluded that for their US-backed opposition to be successful against Castro's government, it had to bear some resemblance to the revolution itself. It could have no connection to Batista, and it had to espouse some of the same principles championed during the struggle."

The 1959 land reform law was "moderate and well within the mainstream of the era's economic thinking. Its proscription against large landholding was present in UN recommendations for agrarian reform. But even a moderate law created enemies, especially among landowners ... In Cuba, much of the land directly affected by the law was US-owned. On June 11, the US sent a formal diplomatic note protesting the law."

"Over the years, Castro himself gave different answers to the question of when he became a Marxist—from vehement denials during his first years in power to official pronouncements in the 1970s that Marxism-Leninism had guided the revolution from the very beginning in 1953. Late in life, his interpretation, ironically perhaps, approximated the arguments long made on the right: he had been a communist all along."

"Batista understood that his enemies' power came largely from popular support for reform. Having crushed Grau's government in 1934 and the remaining opposition in the two years that followed, in 1936 he began pursuing the policies of his enemies as if they had been his all along ... In 1937 he released a 'Three Year Plan' that included health insurance, the abolition of large landed estates, and a literacy campaign."