On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (Review)

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In June 2023, 95-year-old linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky tragically suffered a massive stroke. Fans of Chomsky, whom The New York Times called “the most important intellectual alive,” have acutely felt the absence of his prolific voice in the public sphere ever since, especially during a year of momentous events, including the genocide in Gaza. So, it may be surprising that Chomsky’s most recent book (and, alas, quite possibly his last), published in July 2024 with his long-time collaborator, author, and activist Vishay Prashad, is “On Cuba” which is its title. Yet, given the subtitle, “Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle,” it may be unsurprising, for the Cuban Revolution is currently facing its greatest existential crisis since the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Chomsky’s close collaborators, including Prashad, often transcribe their conversations with Chomsky to turn them into accessible books. Unlike most in this genre, however, On Cuba consists of a traditional narrative interspersed with italicized quotes from Prashad’s conversations with Chomsky. While the narrative’s organization is not always cohesive, its central theme is clear: The U.S. government and media apply a different standard to Cuba than to U.S. client states.

Lest there be any doubt about where their sympathies lie, Chomsky and Prashad include a brief foreword by Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel. This is sure to draw the ire of Cuban dissidents and others critical of the Cuban government. But if ire is the reaction, it reflects the unremitting U.S. hostility toward the Cuban Revolution that created such polarized geopolitics in the first place.

The book draws on declassified documentation conclusively demonstrating that U.S. hostility toward Cuba since 1959, which has included proxy invasion, terrorism, assassination attempts, and psychological and economic warfare, has little to do with Cuba’s actual or alleged human rights abuses and authoritarianism. For example, Chomsky and Prashad quote from the U.S. State Department Policy Planning Council in 1964: “The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the United States, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half.” They then appropriately comment, “The dating is almost precise. It refers to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The Cuban Revolution defies the Monroe Doctrine.”

For non-specialist readers, the book’s most revelatory quotation may come from the notorious memo that first articulated the rationale for U.S. economic warfare against the Cuban Revolution, unchanged to this day. Written in April 1960 by the State Department’s Lester D. Mallory, the memo concludes that, due to Castro's popularity, “the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” The U.S. government must, therefore, use “every possible means” to “weaken the economic life of Cuba.”

As Chomsky and Prashad point out, anti-Communism provided the pretext for undermining the Cuban Revolution, even though Castro did not declare the socialist character of the revolution and that he was a Marxist-Leninist until 1961, after the failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. Still, despite the Cold War’s end, the Helms-Burton and Torricelli Acts passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton in the 1990s severely tightened the blockade while explicitly calling for regime change. These two patently extraterritorial laws, along with hundreds of other complex rules and regulations, enable the U.S. government to sanction third countries or private entities from trading with and investing in Cuba. Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has every year overwhelmingly condemned these crippling sanctions, leaving the United States (along with Israel, which always votes with its patron) wholly isolated within the international community. Although this perennial vote is significant news, the U.S. media barely report on it, unlike when the UN condemns the actions of U.S. “enemy” states.

Chomsky and Prashad argue that the hardline Cuban American lobby and its outsize influence over Florida’s electoral politics, along with Cuba’s geographic proximity, are the principal reasons why U.S. policy toward Cuba remains ossified (except during Obama’s second term) even after the Cold War’s end. To provide relative context, On Cuba discusses U.S. policy toward Cuba’s neighbor Haiti at some length. Like Cuba, Haiti underwent a profound social revolution that triumphed in 1804 and freed Haitians from French slavery and colonialism. For this, France and then the United States have mercilessly “punished” Haiti ever since through economic blackmail, invasion, and occupation. During the Cold War, the United States actively supported right-wing dictatorships in Haiti, even as Haitians suffered far more than Cubans, and still do. Comparing Haiti’s current lawless gang rule with Cuba’s low levels of crime and far higher health and educational levels makes this abundantly clear.

The authors rightly praise Cuba’s impressive accomplishments in social development and its international solidarity, such as deploying soldiers to defeat apartheid in southern Africa and doctors on missions to underprivileged areas in many countries (including far wealthier ones). The United States has vehemently opposed these solidarity missions. While this trenchant critique of U.S. policy is warranted, the book’s scant analysis of Cuban socialism’s internal dynamics left me wondering whether a more accurate title would be “On U.S. Imperialism toward Cuba.” Indeed, including a deeper analysis of Cuba’s internal developments might have enriched some of the authors’ conclusions. For example, the authors briefly describe the 1970 sugar harvest as “disappointing” and preventing export diversification. Yet the failure to diversify the economy was already the reason for the return to sugar production in 1963, with the Socialist Bloc’s support. The inability to diversify reflected U.S. policy toward Cuba, both before the revolution and from 1959-1963, when the U.S. program of “economic denial” severely hampered the island’s economic potential. However, the massive six-year mobilization for the “Ten Million Ton Harvest,” as the government publicized it everywhere, diverted labor from other critical economic sectors. This “disappointing sugar harvest” thus largely rests on Castro’s ill-advised decision of ten million or bust, for which he ultimately took responsibility (albeit it was too little too late by then). In other words, the 1970 harvest reflected both the combined long-term pressure of the United States and the short-term strategic errors of the Cuban leadership.

Where more internal analysis of Cuba would have been useful is in a brief paragraph that recounts that Chomsky criticized the Cuban government in a 2003 debate about political prisoners and repression on Cuban national TV and radio with National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón. Unfortunately, it provides no further details about their exchange beyond the fact that they agreed to disagree. Additional information would have been helpful for readers like me, who sometimes find it difficult to critique both U.S. imperialism and the Cuban government while avoiding “both sides-ism.”

Both sides-isms often pass for nuance and balance in the United States, even among some Cuba specialists. In general, and primarily since 2018, when Díaz-Canel assumed power from Raúl Castro, both sides-isms have attributed equal responsibility to the Cuban government’s actions as to U.S. sanctions, the pandemic, climate change-supercharged hurricanes, and the Ukraine war. Trump’s baseless re-listing of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism in 2020, making it nearly impossible for Cuba to obtain international loans, and the Ukraine War, which increased inflation globally and diminished Russian oil deliveries to Cuba’s beleaguered energy sector are major causal factors of the humanitarian crisis that is driving record outmigration.

Overall, On Cuba successfully debunks what I have termed “blockade/embargo denialism,” or the denial that the asymmetric Cuban-U.S relationship is like that between a mouse and a lion: The U.S. lion has its paw’s claws on the Cuban mouse’s tail, yet excoriates the mouse for tangling its tail up instead of running straight ahead unchecked. However, by literally and figuratively focusing primarily on the lion’s share of this relationship, On Cuba comparatively neglects to discuss how even mice, per Marx, “make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.”

Mikael Wolfe is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University.

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