Revolutionary Cuba: The streets are ours! 3rd edition
Rock Around The Blockade
Larkin Publications, 2021 72pp, £2.95
For almost three decades, Rock Around The Blockade (RATB) activists have campaigned in support of socialist Cuba via protests in Britain and exchanges with Cuban youth. Drawing on these experiences – as well as Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’s rich accumulation of news archives – the campaign has released an updated edition of Revolutionary Cuba: The streets are ours! From the Spanish conquest to the high-profile international custody battle for six-year-old Elián González in 1999, to the present day, the 72-page pamphlet provides a comprehensive overview of Cuban resistance. As the erstwhile colony’s history unfolds on its pages, the pamphlet takes up the question: how has the Cuban socialist project, in the thick of the most enduring blockade in modern history, managed not only to persevere but to flourish?
To answer that question, RATB sets the stage for Cuba’s six-decade tenure as a challenge to US hegemony. We begin in July of 1953, when 160 young militants, including Fidel and Raúl Castro, stormed the Moncada Barracks in Santiago and the Bayamo Barracks in Oriente. According to Revolutionary Cuba, what followed was a revolution that combined guerrilla warfare with mass proletarian struggle in the cities, united under the leadership of the 26 July Movement. Having ousted the Batista dictatorship, Cuba’s new socialist government hastened to nationalise industry, expand state education, reduce rents, and otherwise direct political and economic activities in favour of the working class. The pamphlet goes on to explore Cuba’s sometimes fraught but nonetheless necessary relationship with the USSR, culminating in the Special Period that safeguarded revolutionary gains in the devastating wake of Soviet collapse.
During this time, the Cuban people faced profound hardships. Having suddenly lost the majority of its markets and oil supply, Cuba’s GDP, government spending, and imports nosedived. However, in spite of those trying days – or perhaps because of them – the resilient Caribbean nation has gone on to become a global model of sustainable development: increasing its citizens’ lifespans, mean years of schooling, and standard of living whilst minimising the country’s carbon footprint. This achievement was announced by the World Wildlife Fund in 2006, when Cuba’s ‘La Revolución Energética’ inaugurated a new era of energy efficiency and renewable generation. In Revolutionary Cuba’s newly expanded section on climate change, RATB outlines how this ecological restructuring occurred, noting that Cuba has since been ranked as the most sustainably developed country worldwide. Of the progress made since the Special Period, the pamphlet’s authors reflect: ‘When compared to the slashing and privatisation prevalent in capitalist societies in crisis, Cuba’s response to severe economic crisis is astounding; a feat of socialist planning and popular mobilisation.’
Other highlights include ‘Women in Cuba’, ‘LGBT rights in revolutionary Cuba’, and ‘Revolution and the fight against racism’. Providing a striking alternative to the dominant narrative in western media, Revolutionary Cuba situates Cuban gender and race relations within their historical and socioeconomic contexts. From this perspective, the pamphlet details Cuba’s unprecedented achievements in health care, reforestation, and social emancipation whilst also addressing criticisms levelled against Cuba, a longstanding target of anti-communist media spectacle. This smear campaign runs parallel to US aggressions against Cuba, mobilising the US and British public in support of imperialism and the capitalist economic paradigm. In this regard, Chapter Six is particularly enlightening, as it deals with Britain’s consistent efforts to undermine Cuba.
The pamphlet also contains an appendix, with a translation of Fidel Castro’s famous speech to the Rio Earth Summit and a reprinted Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! article by Helen Yaffe, a lecturer at University of Glasgow. In the latter, Yaffe, author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, explains how the beleaguered island of 11.2 million people was able to rapidly and assiduously respond to news of the coronavirus outbreak in China in early 2020, implementing measures that ‘enabled the entire population to be regularly screened [for Covid-19] whilst an efficient system of testing, contact tracing and quarantine centres was put into place.’ Cuba’s proactive approach to the spread of disease is, as she delineates, informed by the core features of its socialist development, like its single, universal, free public health care system; its biopharma industry; and its solidarity-based medical internationalism.
The US will go to any inhumane length to quash its ideological rivals. Meanwhile, Cuba, for its part, has taken on a leadership role in the international community’s multilateral campaign to curb the pandemic, deploying the lauded Cuban medical brigades to over 40 countries to treat Covid-19 patients. RATB locates this initiative within Cuba’s broader policy of ‘doctor diplomacy’, which has, since 1960, dispatched some 400,000 Cuban medical professionals to work in over 160 countries during times of crisis. For Yaffe, this outreach represents nothing less than ‘the threat of a good example.’
The British media, it must be stressed, acknowledges this ‘threat’, too. As RATB notes in Chapter 13, any mentions of Cuba’s accomplishments in the ‘liberal left’ Guardian or on the ‘impartial’ BBC are invariably couched in relation to Cuba’s supposedly vast ‘human rights violations’, with plenty of negative modifiers for the otherwise ‘authoritarian’ and ‘repressive’ Communist Party of Cuba. The section concludes: ‘As the renewed ideological onslaught gathers pace, we must expose the barefaced lies and distortions that the human rights industry and media war spew into our newsfeeds.’ It is in this spirit, then, that interested parties are encouraged to arm themselves with the knowledge found in Revolutionary Cuba. The streets are, after all, ours.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 282 June/July 2021
