• Cuba: a new history by Richard Gott, Yale University Press 2004, £18.99
Gott’s new history of Cuba is painted on a broad canvas, encompassing 400-odd years of history in 325 pages, from Cuba’s pre-Columbian Indian settlements to the 21st century, taking in Spanish colonialism, British occupation, slave rebellions, piracy, US neocolonialism and the complex internecine political faction-fighting that ensued, as well as the Revolution and the following 45 years. This is a well-researched, erudite epic that is valuable for locating key events in Cuba’s history against an international political and economic background.
Nonetheless, the book is fundamentally flawed by Gott’s refusal to understand the dynamic of a socialist revolution or to explain any post-revolutionary developments in those terms. He sees Cuba’s proclamation of socialism as simply a necessary sop to the Soviet Union to ensure economic and political support; Castro’s famous ‘I am and always have been a Marxist-Leninist’ is dismissed as an opportunist move to ingratiate himself with Brezhnev.
Gott allows his own liberal concepts to mar a very good section on how the struggle against slavery and racism in Cuba was inextricably bound up with the struggle for independence, particularly after the black revolt in Haiti. The white elite perpetually raised the spectre of a ‘black republic’ if Cuba ever achieved independence as an argument for annexation with the slave-owning south of the United States; white immigration was encouraged and black uprisings severely repressed. The struggles against Spanish colonialism of the late 19th century were dependent on the slaves and ‘free blacks’ who made up the ragged Mambisi armies of the national liberation struggle. But then Gott goes on to suggest that the lingering racism of a white elite still lay at the heart of the revolutionary government because it was lukewarm on the issue of black separatism; he quotes black US novelist Alice Walker’s disappointment at finding young black Cubans in 1977 taking ‘no special pride in being black’. ‘The more we insisted on calling ourselves black Americans, the more distant and confused they grew’. He might have done better to quote former Black Panther Assata Shakur who understands that ‘revolution is a process, so I was not that shocked to find sexism had not totally disappeared in Cuba, nor had racism, but that…the revolution was totally committed to struggling against racism and sexism in all their forms…Cuba has the social system that will eventually wipe out racism.’
Similarly, Gott writes powerfully about Cuba’s revolutionary internationalism, particularly its support for the struggle in Angola and the victory at Cuito Cuanavale which turned the tide against apartheid in South Africa. He is frank and, I think, fair, about the more vexed issue of Cuban support in Ethiopia. Yet he is unable to link this outstanding international solidarity with any common principles about the Revolution. When writing about the struggles in Chile and Nicaragua in the 1970s, he makes unsubstantiated claims that Castro gave only reluctant support to these events, perceiving them as a challenge to his status in the region. He is dismissive about Castro’s suggestion that Allende needed urgently to arm the workers, suggesting Castro did not understand the realities of the situation.
But where this book really falls down is in its mealy-mouthed and grudging attitude to the achievements of the Cuban Revolution. In fact, from Gott’s descriptions, it is frankly surprising that more people did not hop on the first boat to Miami. ‘Cuba was not a poor country in 1959, with down-trodden people rebelling against their state of backwardness’, Gott writes. ‘It was relatively well-off…On a range of other socio-economic indicators – urbanisation, literacy, infant mortality and life expectancy – Cuba was among the top five countries in Latin America…The introduction of universal health care is often considered one of the great triumphs of the Revolution. Yet pre-Revolutionary Cuba was not backward in its provision of medical services…’ and so on. This may have been true for the urbanised elite, but the rural majority had an income at the time of $91.25 per annum – an eighth of that of Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. A third of the workforce was unemployed or underemployed, 43% were illiterate, life expectancy was 59 years and infant mortality was 60 per 1,000 births. Why does Gott seek to gloss this reality? Is it so that he does not have to trumpet the achievements of post-revolutionary Cuba? Beyond qualified approval for the 1960 Literacy Campaign he has little to say about Cuba’s education or health systems after that, even during the Special Period when spending on health and education was ring-fenced. When commenting on Cuba’s survival post 1991, unlike the socialist countries of eastern Europe, Gott writes: ‘The Cubans had more to defend – their history, their sense of their own identity and their amour propre’. How about their schools and hospitals, infant mortality rate of 7.2 per 1,000 live births (in 1991, now 6.2), old people’s homes, community organisations, democratic participation, a sense of hope and social justice – socialism itself?
After the early ‘ardour’ he describes in his prologue, his Cuban Revolution becomes a lifeless, inflexible, tired and essentially failed experiment, whose people are ‘tired of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps’. Castro, variously described as a ‘Spanish-style general’, ‘dinosaur’ and ‘ageing rock star’ ‘may have performed his last great revolutionary service to his country…by surrendering to the inevitable and by reintroducing Cubans to the seductions of capitalism very gradually’.
The epilogue, a bleakly pessimistic swansong for a society Gott sees as already ‘post-Castro’ says more about Gott’s own political cynicism than Cuban society. Perhaps if Gott could have taken one eye off his liberal audience long enough to write about Cuba’s Battle of Ideas, its infinite flexibility and willingness to admit to mistakes and build for the future, its proclaiming of a vision for a better world and its excoriation of capitalism in every international venue, the voice it continues to offer today for those opposed to imperialist war, destitution and brutality, he might be a bit more cheerful.
Cat Alison
FRFI 182 December 2004 / January 2005
