5-19-08, 9:47 am
Chapter four of Gerald Horne’s important new book, Blows Against the Empire, is titled “Cuba Si, Yanqui No.” Although written before Fidel Castro stepped down, it shows that those who smugly state that “Communism is dead” and it is only a matter of time before some Cuban Gorbachev is doing commercials for the new casinos in Havana are smoking something other than Cuban cigars.
Horne’s overall thesis is that U.S. imperialism is both in crisis and decline, a point increasingly made in a different way by non Marxist commentators who simply describe the rise of the Chinese and Indian economies, the technological innovations emanating from Asia, and the rise of the European Union and its currency, the euro, as the central development in the global economy, not the abstract idealist notion of “globalization.”
Horne contends that Cuba has and is prevailing, “not only because of the sweat and toil and ideological rigor of the Cubans themselves, led by the Communist party….” but also because of Cuba’s important economic relationships with Venezuela and China. Whereas U.S. cold warriors in the past hailed the success of their embargo and joked that the only thing you would see on the roads of Cuba were old 1950s U.S. cars, Horne notes that there are now thousands of modern Chinese made busses on the island. Cuba and China have developed extensive economic relations over a wide variety of goods, including intellectual property (technology). Besides sugar, Cuba is exporting new medicines to China (including anti-cholesterol drugs) while China is working with Cuba to upgrade telephone, radio and other communications technologies on the island.
Horne recounts the ongoing narrative history of the U.S. government’s attempts to destroy the Cuban revolution over what in 2009 will be 50 years. But he also recounts not only Cuban resistance but the truly heroic aid that Cuba, a small country, has provided for peoples through the world.
Those Americans, who have seen Michael Moore’s documentary, Sicko, know what students of health care through the world have long known. The Cuban revolution established an advanced form of socialized medicine which not only provided medical care for the Cuban people, who today have the longest life expectancy of any Latin American people, but produced tens of thousands of doctors and other health care workers who have made a huge contribution to world health care in Africa and Latin America particularly.
Since 1963, when Cuban doctors provided aid to newly independent Algeria, to 2005, 100,000 Cuban doctors have been involved in providing aid to 97 nations. No country of any size, certainly not the U.S., which still does not have a system of socialized medicine has done anything like that. One of my students, for example, who comes from Taiwan and from an anti-Communist Chinese nationalist family, told me that he plans to go back to Taiwan where there is free health care and free public transportation for senior citizens, itself a comment on how far away the U.S. has strayed from the rest of the developed world in this key area.
The achievements of Cuban health care are too long to catalogue, but it is interesting to note, as Horne does, that even officials of the World Bank (which has not given Cuba a penny of aid since the revolution, thanks to the U.S. embargo in 1960) have praised its work in providing for the welfare of its own people and its international aid to poor countries (of course, the World Bank does little to advance such programs anywhere, but undermines them through attaching loans to “free market development”).
This means nothing to the Bush administration, though. It has intensified its war against Cuba even though these acts, like its invasion of Iraq, have lost it support throughout the world. Horne then analyzes the continued war against Cuba with a growing war against developing socialist oriented governments throughout Latin America and also the rightwing crusade against poor, largely Mexican and Central American undocumented workers that has become a staple of rightwing U.S. politics and has led to suffering and abuse.
The U.S. through both the military and “private contractors” continues to support terror and murder in Columbia and other Latin American countries against trade unionists and other opponents of rightwing regimes. It continues to work to overthrow socialist oriented governments which in general appear to be advancing. Also, as Horne mentions, it takes in tens of thousand of wealthy reactionary Latin Americans who living the socialist oriented countries.
Looking positively at possible U.S. Cuba relations, Horne notes that today there are many American firms that want to do business in and with Cuba, just as in 1933, I would say, some of the strongest backers of Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of recognizing the Soviet Union came from corporate leaders (who didn’t like the Soviets and soon wouldn’t like Roosevelt) who saw recognition as an aid to international business relations.
Looking at the Bush administration’s attempts to make NAFTA into a hemisphere system, Horne worries that such policies, in the name of “free trade,” may in reality produce a “free path” to the kind of terror tactics now used widely against activists in Colombia and lead the U.S., increasingly desperate because of its rivalries with the European Union and others, to try to create a hemispheric neo-colonial empire, to make all of Latin America what Cuba was under the Batista regime.
If John McCain gains the presidency and right-wing Republican rule continues, that is a real possibility. If is also a prescription for disasters that might make the present Iraq horror seem relatively minor.
--Norman Markowitz teaches history at Rutgers University. Purchase Horne's book here.
