How Did Fidel Castro
Hold On to Cuba
for So Long?
The combination of geography, charisma,
and authoritarianism that helped the revolutionary
outlast 10 American presidents
Fidel Castro’s death came more than a decade after the Cuban revolutionary and authoritarian first handed power to his brother Raul during a severe illness. Castro resigned permanently in 2008, prompting then-President George W. Bush to declare his hope for a democratic transition and vowing that “The United States will help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of liberty.”Cubans have not yet realized them. Raul Castro began to open Cuba’s economy, and accelerated that opening through a rapprochement with the United States beginning in 2014, which later saw President Barack Obama nominate an ambassador to the island for the first time since the Eisenhower administration and significantly loosen America’s five-decade trade embargo. But Cubans still could not choose their leaders; as Human Rights Watch noted: “Many of the abusive tactics developed during [Fidel’s] time in power—including surveillance, beatings, arbitrary detention, and public acts of repudiation—are still used by the Cuban government.” While Obama offered a measured statement on Fidel’s death, declaring that history would judge his legacy, Cuban American members of Congress were blistering. “A tyrant is dead,” remarked Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican representative. “Castro’s successors cannot hide and must not be allowed to hide beneath cosmetic changes that will only lengthen the malaise of the Cuban nation.” The Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez declared in Spanish on Twitter that Castro’s legacy was “a country in ruins, a nation where young people do not want to live.”
Kornbluh: Many of the people who lived in the rural countryside, [people who] had no access to health, education, clean water, housing. You need to remember that Cuba was a relatively well-developed Caribbean island before the Cuban revolution, but there was a lot of social expectation and a tremendous amount of inequality. Just to give you an example, Cuba imported more Cadillacs than any other country in the word, for the wealthy class and for the U.S. elites who vacationed and lived in Cuba. After the revolution Fidel famously announced, “We don’t need Cadillacs. We need tractors.” And he banned the import of all new American cars and transferred the money that would have been otherwise used by the state for those types of imports to buying agricultural equipment and making an effort to develop the countryside—building housing in the countryside, schools, hospitals, and creating educational opportunities for Cubans, that particularly rural Cubans would not have otherwise had.
Gilsinan: To talk about Cuba as a global power, how did he manage to wield such disproportionate influence, relative to his position at the helm of this small island that became increasingly poor following the revolution? To what extent was this the power of being able to stick it to the United States so consistently?Kornbluh: I think this is Fidel Castro’s greatest legacy: transforming Cuba from a regular-sized Caribbean island into a player on the world stage completely disproportionate to its geographic size and location. There is no doubt that while the impact of Fidel’s vision and socialist principles on Cuban society will be debated for years if not decades to come, his impact on Cuba as nation in the global arena, as a sovereign, proud, and supportive nation on kind of the correct side of history if you will—supporting the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; the efforts very early on [supporting] small groups of guerrillas called the Sandinistas to overthrow the brutal and greedy Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua; having kind of the Cuban equivalent of Doctors Without Borders, sending tens of thousands of doctors around the world on free medical missions, to be supportive of other communities that didn’t have access to doctors—Cuba really gained in tremendous prestige, influence, and impact.
Gilsinan: Not in all cases on the right side of history, right? Certainly not on the right side of the Cold War, and elsewhere in Africa—Angola, for example.
“We were all Fidelistas. Until after
the revolution when you lined those guys
up at the wall and shot them.”
as you say, “push Cuba into the arms of the Soviets”? You’re
saying that that wasn’t inevitable?
not really the turning point, but they became kind of a propaganda
asset for the Eisenhower administration. Fidel was unbelievably
furious about this because there hadn’t been a single statement in the
press about how Batista was butchering innocent Cubans for years,
and the United States had supported him endlessly while he was
doing this. And then Fidel comes in and the revolution succeeds, at
tremendous bloodshed and cost to many many Cubans, from Batista’s
bombing with U.S. planes, U.S. bombs given to the Cuban air force.
And then suddenly human rights was an issue after the revolution,
when it never was before.The turning point was the agricultural reform,
which nationalized land that was held by U.S. agricultural corporations,
and a lot of Fidel’s rhetoric and anger, which U.S. officials couldn’t
really see past. And kind of an overreaction to the first Soviet mission
to Cuba, which at that point was not a military relationship. Fidel only
declared Cuba a socialist state after the preliminary attack in the Bay
of Pigs, at the point he understood that they were going to be attacked
by the United States. At the funeral of the initial Cubans who were
killed in what was considered the first airstrike, to take out his air
force, by the CIA, he announced that Cuba was going to be a member
of the socialist bloc and he basically called on the Soviet Union to
protect them. But the actual assault came that night. There was no
military relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union until after
that point. And then of course, because of that attack, Fidel was for
more predisposed to accept the Soviets’ offer of nuclear missiles to
deter another attack.
“Cuban society certainly is evolving
economically. And somewhere
down the line that is going to have
a cultural and political impact.”
Gilsinan: How much has changed since Fidel stepped down?
Kornbluh: Quite a bit has changed in Cuba since Fidel Castro stepped aside 10 years ago. He was felled by a severe case of diverticulitis, two botched operations, internal septic shock—he almost died twice. His brother took over in what was a seamless transition of power—shows you very clearly that this wasn’t just a one-man rule in Cuba, it was very institutionalized, the Communist Party system. Those who somehow hope that now that Fidel has died there will be upheaval or political change in Cuba are going to be disappointed.
But much has changed. That’s another reason I don’t think there’s going to be the upheaval that some people actually want, in the United States. Raul Castro understands that in order to have what he calls “sustainable socialism” you have to be able to generate resources that can be distributed, and the state is not able to do that. He has created a private sector which now accounts for almost 27 percent of the Cuban workforce; it’s largely tied up in tourism, but not completely. It continues to grow, but very slowly, in some ways too slowly for the Cuban population that has waited a long time, and has had its expectations raised by the normalization of relations with the United States. But with the social and economic changes under Raul Castro, Cuban society certainly is evolving economically. And somewhere down the line that is going to have a cultural and political impact. But things have changed. At this moment we have a normal U.S.-Cuban relations of sorts, the president of the United States has gone to Cuba—I had the great honor of going with the White House press corps with him—and it’s been an extraordinary dynamic. That dynamic was already kind of under a shadow from the new president-elect, before Fidel died last night.
Fidel’s death has kind of put Cuba on the agenda in a dramatic way. The fight over his legacy is one that’s going to require Trump taking a position—obviously the Cuban American community, hardline Cuban Americans in Congress demanding that Trump reverse what Obama has done and punish the Cubans for whatever. So there’s a dark shadow falling over the extraordinary initiative taken by Raul Castro and Barack Obama, that’s now almost at its second anniversary, with everybody wondering, will Donald Trump be the businessman and see the positive side of continuing commercial and economic relations with Cuba in a normal way? Or will he be the political figure who makes good on his campaign rhetoric of “reversing” Obama’s executive orders unless Cuba “meets our demands”?
Cuba doesn’t yield to the demands of the United States of America.
Gilsinan: Has Trump made any specific demands?
Kornbluh: He only made them in the context of trying to win the Cuban American votes in Miami, saying that his demands were going to be for religious freedom, political freedom, etc. Whether there’s been any back-channel discussion between the United States and Cuba so far, I don’t know. The Obama administration opened up this extraordinary back channel to Cuba, as the title of our book suggests, and that channel is still open. And I assume that messages have still been passed through it, regarding the incoming administration. But what Castro’s death does is takes kind of an issue that was going to stay kind of low-profile and down on the totem pole of Trump’s agenda, which would have allowed quiet communications and kind of a “let’s get to know each other” period after Trump was sworn in, to now being something that loud and noisy and high-profile and contentious, and that will only continue through the period of the memorial service in the coming days for Fidel Castro, and that’s too bad.For all the narrative of him waving his fingers and screaming about those awful Yankee imperialists, he understood that the security and validity of of the Cuban revolution would be safeguarded through normal, respectful relations with the United States. And he reached out to every president since Kennedy, quietly, secretly, every once in a while publicly, to say, “As long as you treat us with respect, we’re willing to talk to you about what your interests are.” And the documents are indisputable on this—we have all the messages that he sent to Kennedy, to Lyndon Johnson, to even Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. They show somebody who was really very invested in a better relationship with the United States—not to the point of sacrificing his revolutionary principles, but in saying that coexistence was possible. I think that’s the message now that the Cubans hopefully will be able to send, and that will be received positively by the incoming administration.
Gilsinan: Are you hopeful about that?
Kornbluh: No, I’m not. I’m not as hopeful as I would like to be. Obama has worked very hard to make this normalization process irreversible—he has opened the doors to travel, he has gotten the airline companies invested, he’s gotten some of the hotel companies invested, he’s gotten some of the agricultural interests in various key Republican-dominated states invested in a process of better commercial relations. So he’s trying to make it a lot harder for Trump to simply dismiss all of this and reverse it. When you go back to the history of U.S.-Cuban relations and you see that really the breach in relations came over rhetoric, and thin-skinned U.S. officials—you know, we’ve got the most thin-skinned U.S. president-elect probably in the history of the presidency at this point. And somebody who loves to be a bully, and somebody who plans to bring new meaning to the expression “the bully pulpit” of the presidency. I am worried, because of Cuba’s defensiveness, and because Cuba refuses to be bullied, I am worried about how quickly the situation could deteriorate. I’m worried that it will, but hoping that it won’t.