“There is much in the Cuban system that is worth preserving, and much that the world can learn from it.”

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Most of the inhabitants of the Cuban Island at the time Columbus found them in 1492 were Indians from the Taino culture. They were a peaceful hunting-gathering people who lived in villages and who had a rudimentary agriculture. They lived well on a diet that included fish, potatoes, manioc, and fruit. There may have been 100,000 or so of them. Fifty years later only about 3,000 remained. They had been enslaved and subjected to Spanish laws and spirituality. Most died from either disease or the harshness of their lives. Some escaped. Now there are a few families remaining in the eastern part of Cuba who may be descendants of these original inhabitants. Or perhaps there are none.

The Taino made clay pottery. They were themselves of the earth – of clay. They were fragile and easily broken. The Spanish were iron people. Their swords and guns were made of iron, and their crucifixes as well, and perhaps their hearts. They were not easily broken. A Darwinian interpretation might say that it was a matter of the survival of the fittest. Perhaps. I suppose it depends on what you mean by “fittest.” But when I think about the Taino, I grieve their loss.

It is a common and questionable practice to begin histories of the “New World” with it’s discovery by Europeans. There were, after all, people already here when the Europeans arrived, and one must presume that things happened in their lives also. In some cases, as with the Aztecs and the Inca one can make out the lines of a history in the European sense of the term. These people fought wars, built empires that could be dated, and subjected others to exploitation. But the Taino, it seems, lived generation after generation just going about their daily business of hunting and gathering, growing food, making love, raising children, and burying their dead without a lot of fuss. That doesn’t sound too bad to me, but was it history? Perhaps it can truthfully be said that the Spaniards brought history to these original inhabitants along with their diseases, their iron, and their institutions of exploitation.

One of the first historical events that is recorded in Cuba was the suppression of any resistence to the Spanish enslavement of the Indians. In 1514 the captured chief and resistence leader, Hatuey, was condemned to death. He refused the offer to be baptized, explaining that he never wanted to see another Spaniard again, not even in Heaven.

History or no, my mind keeps going back to the time before Columbus. I see a people tending to their individual and collective needs without much need for clothes, weapons, courts of law, elaborate rituals, conquest, or iron. Perhaps it is just a fantasy in my mind that they were happy. Its hard to know. But it is at least possible that the most beautiful, and therefore the most important, events transpired in Cuba before history arrived on it’s shores in 1492. Also it is possible that a different kind of history could have emerged from these people of clay had they been left alone. I wonder whether the people of iron will always rule the earth. I’m sure I don’t know. What is clear is that the people of iron did create the history of Cuba beginning in 1492, and that it has been something of a nightmare.

What can be said of the next 400 years? That’s a long time to summerize. Of course many things happened. A thriving cattle business developed, and then Cuba became a world leader in the production of sugarcane. This brought wealth to the ruling groups, but this wealth was always created by the labor of slaves. When too many of the Indians either died or managed to escape, the Spanish brought in African slaves to work in the Cane fields. Mexican Indians and even some poor people imported from China were brought in to further supplement the labor force. Competition emerged between the Spanish and the British, and finally the United States began asserting it’s will in Cuba. But how important is it to dwell on the names and nationalities of these exploiters and the dates of their wars? The basic pattern was not seriously challenged throughout a period of almost 400 years. A wealthy elite lived off the labor of a wretched, enslaved and powerless majority. Slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1886.

During the last half of the 19th century Cuba made two attempts to free itself from Spanish rule, both of which failed. Then, in 1898, after the mysterious explosion that destroyed the US warship the Maine, the Spanish-American war broke out. The US was victorious, and this ushered in the US control of Cuban politics which lasted throughout the first half of the 20th century. By the 1920s two thirds of Cuba’s farmland was owned by US companies. Cuba’s manufacturing industries were crippled, and discrimination against the blacks was institutionalized. Tourism based on gambling, prostitution and alcohol flourished.. Military dictators, aligned with the interests of the US, kept the population, most of which lived in abject poverty, under control. Fulgencio Batista, who ruled from 1933 to 1959, was one of the most ruthless and irresponsible of these US supported dictators. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that “by the end of the 1950s Cuba had developed one of the leading economies among Latin-American nations.” By some measures this was true. And to it’s credit, the Britannica article does mention in passing some of the problems that plagued this “leading economy.” But perhaps a more detailed description from another source will serve to make clear just how fundamentally flawed this “leading economy” really was. In an article entitled “Cuba: Socialism and Democracy” (1974) Peter Taaffe gave this description:

“Before the revolution, Cuba was a paradise for the rich – a playground particularly for American tourists – but a nightmare for the workers and peasants. In 1950-54 the average per capita income in Delaware, the richest state in the United States of America, was $2,279, while in Cuba it was only $312, ie $6 a week. Even in Mississippi, the poorest state in the USA, average per capita income stood at $829! Fifty-four per cent of the rural population had no toilets at all – not even a privy, and malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis were rampant. There was 25 per cent illiteracy and a similar percentage were unemployed at any one time, ie one in four of the population. Fewer children proportionately of school age went to school in the 1950s than in the 1920s, yet Havana in 1954 had more Cadillacs than any other city in the world!”

In 1959 Fidel Castro overthrew Batista and set up a communist state in Cuba. This naturally offended the United States which supported an invasion of the Island by former Batista supporters – not surprisingly made up of mainly of upper middle class people. The invasion was a huge and embarrassing failure. The invaders were captured and ransomed to the US in exchange for medical supplies.

After the revolution Cuba turned to Russia, both as a model for its own society, and for financial and military support. In this way Cuba became a critical and dangerous focal point in the cold war. The most dramatic event in this conflict was the Cuban missel crisis of 1962, which is the closest the world has ever come to all out nuclear war. For a period of time Cuba continued to see itself as a revolutionary leader, and sent aid to a number of guerilla groups in South America and Africa. But by the 1970s Cuba realized that it was over-extending its meager resources, and it limited itself to providing medical and technical assistance to other countries.

Although Cuba was no military threat to the US, it did present the threat of an important example. Therefore the US dedicated itself to the overthrow of Castro’s regime in Cuba. The two main means used by the US were supporting the exiled Cubans in Miami in their continuing efforts to bring down the regime in Cuba, and trying to strangle the economy by enforcing a very damaging economic embargo against the country. Cuba could not be permitted to succeed. After the revolution Cuba implemented a number of practices in order to pursue its goal of producing an equitable and humanitarian society. It collectivized all but a few of the means of production, nationalized the oil industry, established a centralized, planned economy, and moved toward industrialization. Also it developed a very strong system of health education and welfare services. The results were mixed.

For a variety of reasons the economy as a whole has not thrived. One could say that given the US embargo, Cuba’s economy never had a fair trail. To some extent this is true. Also Cuba was hurt by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which traded with Cuba on terms that were favorable. Another factor was that a great many of the people with technical skills in a variety of areas were members of the upper middle class and most of them fled the country after the revolution. One has to add, however, that the sort of central economic planning that characterized the Soviet system has proven to be a clumsy and inefficient means of managing some aspects of the economy. Cuba’s doctrinaire refusal to allow any aspect of its economy to come under the dynamics of the marketplace has probably hurt the country.

In the area of health education and welfare Cuba has excelled since the revolution. Education is free at all levels, and illiteracy has been almost eliminated. Health care is available and free to the entire population. The Cuban system of primary health care has become a model for the world. More than 90% of the labor force is covered by social security which provides for old age, disability and survivor pensions, and other benefits. All these efforts have produced remarkable and measurable results regardless of the many economic hardships the country faces. UNICEF’s 2003 version of the State of the World’s Children lists the under five mortality rate for Cuba as 9 per thousand. This compares well with the United States’ achievement, with all its wealth, of 8 per thousand. An adult literacy rate of 97% speaks of the effectiveness of its educational programs. For a poor country to achieve these levels of health and education shows what is possible when the resources of the country are equitably distributed and when there is the political will to attend to the basic needs of the population. The world has a great deal to learn from Cuba in these matters.

It seemed to me that the collapse of the Soviet system entailed both gain and loss. I understand that now there are more billionaires in Russia than in any other country in the world. I’m not sure that fact bodes well for the average citizen. I wonder what would have happened if Russia had transitioned to a system more like the one in Sweden. Better yet, suppose they had transitioned to a third way that was neither the rather clumsy and somewhat repressive centralized system of control under which Russia had administered their entire economic system, nor the kind of bandit capitalism that now appears to have sprung up. Suppose, for example, that the government would itself have been the provider of capital for worker owned businesses, and that this truly democratic form of commercial organization would have provided the backbone for a new kind of market economy. Around this core of worker owned businesses, the society could have maintained a large pubic sector to insure the health, welfare and education for everybody, much as they do in Sweden. In addition they could have encouraged the development of small to medium sized businesses — businesses that would not be permitted to become monopolies, and would be required to provide workers a living wage. Such a mixed economy might have provided for the basic needs of everybody and at the same time allowed for initiative and creativity in the business sector. The vision of a world that meets everybody’s needs, and that supports a multiplicity of values, need not be rigidly linked to any particular ideology – whether Marxist or capitalist.

Let me admit it. My heart is with the Cuban experiment. I do have concerns about the country’s human rights record. I would like to see Cuba do better than the US in this regard. That would not be too difficult. And I would like to see a free press in Cuba. It is hard to have confidence in a press that is controlled by the government, whether that press is in occupied Iraq, or in Cuba. Still Cuba has taken seriously, as have few other countries, the need to provide for the health, educational, and welfare needs of all its citizens. Given the hostile political environment in which they have had to function, their accomplishments are remarkable. UNICEF ranks them among the top nations in the world in the manner in which they meet the educational and health needs of their people. There is much in the Cuban system that is worth preserving, and much that the world can learn from it.

My heart is with the people of Cuba because I feel that in some peculiar way they may be the clay people attempting once again to assert an alternative vision of how life might be lived. But history will not leave them alone. Cuba faces a difficult dilemma. To simply repeat what they did the day before, and the day before that, in an ongoing daily round that does not change, is no longer an option. If they cling to rigid ideologies, the clay people will once again be broken. If, on the other hand, they capitulate to the demands of the iron people to the north, they will lose their heart and soul. It is conceivable, however, they could create and move forward on a third path – a mixture of what they have already created and that works well, and some new innovations that the world has not yet seen. The window of opportunity that was open in Russia before its collapse may still be open in Cuba. Perhaps a different kind of history is still possible.