Castro’s Revolution at 30--Old Enough to Be Out of Fashion

On New Year’s Day, 30 years will have elapsed since Fidel Castro and his bearded guerrilleros made their triumphal entry into Havana, marking the beginning of what was to become the first socialist revolution in Latin America.

A measure of the revolution’s success and importance is the fact that it has endured, under often exremely adverse circumstances; an indication of its difficulties and failures is the continuing doubt rearding its future and relevance to the Latin American experience. After three decades, the Cuban Revolution’s standing in Latin America is ambivalent. Cuba’s prospects for normalizing its turbulent relations with the United States are still uncertain.

Cuba today is closer to being a “normal” member of the hemispheric community than ever before. Talk of Cuba reentering the Organization of American States is premature, but, at a formal level, relations with the rest of Latin America are certainly improving. Cuba has normalized its relations with a number of Latin American nations, including, most recently, Brazil and Ecuador, following Uruguay and Argentina. Castro has attended the inaugurations of two chiefs of state (Mexico and Ecuador) in the last few months, and he may well be present at Carlos Andres Perez’ inaugural ceremony next month in Caracas.

Some of the reasons for this trend also help to explain why, at least from a Cuban and Latin American point of view, there is some hope for normalization with the United States. Partly as a result of U.S. attempts to have Cuba ostracized by the international community, and partly because his domestic situation allowed him to do so, Castro has implicitly acknowledged that the human-rights situation on the island, mainly in its prisons, is a legitimate subject of regional and international concern. In order to block the United States’ ill-fated attempts to obtain a United Nations Human Rights Commission vote against Cuba in 1987, the regime was forced to enter negotiations with other Latin American governments regarding fact-finding missions, reports and so forth. As a result, numerous missions, both multilateral and from the United States, have traveled to Cuba and issued reports that, while not totally favorable to Castro, clearly show that the accounts of a Cuban gulag were greatly exaggerated. The entire process has contributed to an improvement in relations with the rest of Latin America, and has heightened hopes for a rapprochement with the United States.

The agreement on Southern Africa is also a factor in this regard. The Brazzaville accords, which provide for Namibian independence and a Cuban withdrawal from Angola, were achieved under U.S. and Soviet auspices. They obviously remove a major point of contention from the U.S.-Cuban agenda, which since 1975 had been making an already difficult situation much worse.

With these significant changes in Cuba’s stature, many in Latin America believe that, with a new Administration in Washington, there is hope for significant improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations.

Viewed from a domestic American perspective, these hopes probably do not seem realistic. There is no constituency in the United States in favor of normalization, and there is a strong constituency against it. There appear to be intrinsic merits for normalization and obvious advantages to be derived from it--for Cuba, for Latin America and even for the United States; yet it is also true that in the latter case these are not terribly important. A U.S. Administration that established diplomatic ties with Cuba, ended a nearly 30-year trade embargo and reached an agreement on the Guantanamo naval base would be applauded throughout the hemisphere and in Europe, but certainly not in Miami and probably not elsewhere in the United States.

In a sense, Cuba’s tragedy as the revolution turns 30 lies precisely in this type of paradox. After so many years of having a disproportionate effect in the region and throughout the world, due largely to American hostility, Cuba no longer seems as important or as relevant as it once did. Although there is a notable intellectual effervescence in Havana’s universities, newspapers and artistic circles, Castro’s obvious distaste for Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms place Cuba out of the mainstream of left-wing thought and action in the region. And the continuing popularity of Reaganomics among the hemisphere’s ruling circles, together with Cuba’s enormous economic difficulties, makes the Cuban model less attractive than ever to Latin American elites.

For the first time in Latin America, abject poverty, malnutrition and ignorance were eradicated, thanks to the Cuban Revolution. It gave the Cuban people, particularly the peasantry, a sense of dignity unknown in Latin America. But the costs grew, time has gone by, and the achievements of yesterday, while never negligible, appear less impressive today.

Fidel Castro and his revolution are not irrelevant or marginal; they are simply and sadly out of fashion.