CUBA: REFLECTIONS ON A REVOLUTION
Pedraza-Bailey, Silvia
Silvia Pedraza-Bailey, a native of Cuba who emigrated with her family in 1960, teaches sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She has returned to Cuba twice in the last few years to do...
...That is what everyone calls everyone else in Cuba...
...if the problem is bigger, to a small hospital in the nearest city...
...Then the CDRs took on more positive functions, and their block-by-block organization helped to spread the public health services...
...The eradication of prostitution and vice, the spread of the educational and health services all over the country: those are very good...
...As a Cuban, I feel deeply offended to think my history begins with Lenin and the October Revolution...
...In so doing, they legitimate the fact that only a few people make all the critical decisions...
...TAREK HAMADA, a student, is pursuing a career in journalism...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Sincerity is very difficult to assess in a society where there is enormous control...
...Klein, who was selling his belongings to go into exile, he repeatedly explains to everyone, "But I am not that Mr...
...HAMADA: What about racial discrimination...
...So when the exiles returned, they would ask me to let them off at that store...
...Of course, no one was opposed...
...when I climbed in a taxi . , the driver told me that he could not drive as far as I wanted because he had a very ancient battery and the only new cars Cuba imported had all gone to the party...
...But after a number of years, she begins to say, "Hell, this one is an alcoholic...
...if it is serious, they are sent to Havana...
...But attitudes do not disappear by fiat...
...One man, a former bus driver, was very explicit...
...When, in 1979, Raul Castro announced, "We cannot keep blaming the embargo for everything, as we have so often done in the past," he underscored its usefulness...
...Overt discrimination ended...
...it practically starved the Cuban people...
...That happened in Cuba...
...That lasts a while...
...I will give you an example...
...Klein...
...To my mind, the best analogy is a woman whose first husband was a wife-beater...
...HAMADA: What do you think about the claim that life is better now than under Batista...
...Batista was horrible: corruption and repression marked his regime...
...morally sound or tainted, that the path to rehabilitation goes through a prison...
...Everyone has one of these," he said...
...But people do not participate in anything whose outcome is critical, because those decisions don't go outside of the party...
...It signifies: We are with the revolution...
...Moreover, if sometime in the last two decades there were chances for the United States to have acted to promote a liberalization in Cuba, those opportunities were missed...
...In sincerity they decide where to build a restaurant...
...At one point, he pulled out a book, like a passport, an identification book: with his name, photograph, a number, addresses at home and work...
...It just so happens that he is an alcoholic and cannot hold a job...
...Once again, you have to declare yourself...
...They began with categories of people whose passing no one objected to: the detested big landowners, corrupt officials...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Several different lessons: • For American foreign-policy makers, the futility of economic coercion...
...one cannot say this is democracy when one cannot speak freely, participate while one's privacy is respected, lead a life without scrutiny, or become a member of an opposition that has a voice...
...That number is a file...
...They lent me a history book...
...Nor is it being free...
...But I would not want that if it means the absence of liberty and dissent, which are also real...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: It depends on what we think of as participation...
...For young Americans, the end to that romance woven around Cuba...
...Raul Castro told the people: "We have run out of wood, but we are planting trees today: we are planting a new seed that [we] will someday reap...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: One of the big draws of the revo lution came at the outset when they rightfully eradicated the blatant forms of discrimination that had existed in Cuba...
...I...
...For example, in 1961 Cuba ran out of paper...
...After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, both the exiles and the Cuban government saw the revolution as consolidated...
...Have things changed much...
...When they are after the Jews, we insist, "But that's about the Jews, not about me...
...And in that file they have your life...
...HAMADA: Cuba's achievements, it is said, lie in health and education...
...not because their relatives returned with stories of achievements, but because they looked like they had decent lives...
...For most Cubans now, there is an enormous credibility gap between the things promised and delivered...
...I used to drive a bus," he said...
...They use Jose Marti as a symbol not only in Cuba...
...I have a good friend from Mariel, who now drives a secondhand car and holds a modest job cleaning while attending night school...
...Diplomatic solutions would have been better...
...Before the revolution, blacks were not allowed access to the restaurants and hotels in Havana, to the social clubs of the elite...
...But the answers Cuba devised to our problems have not solved them either...
...it is too late...
...The embargo did not hurt the Cuban government...
...For many, that haze became focused on Cuba—Cuba as a wonderful thing...
...512...
...HAMADA: Marti is often used as a symbol in Cuba...
...That task they fulfilled...
...When I went to Cuba, I visited the family of my friend from the Mariel exodus...
...Therefore, many people engage in dissimulation...
...It does not...
...There wasn't a Cuban left in Cuba at the beginning of the revolution who was not against all that and for the revolution...
...Raul Castro told them, "You are supposed to keep an eye on everybody and a hand ready to grab them by the neck...
...When my friend's brother, a construction worker, came for me at the hotel, he phoned me from the lobby, greeting me with "compafiera...
...Klein who realizes that, in persecuting a Jewish Mr...
...Cuba claimed that if we rid ourselves of capitalism and American intervention and built a communist society—poverty, privilege, and racism would disappear...
...On my route was the big store they built for the foreigners...
...For Cubans, both in the United States and in Cuba, a reevaluation of goals...
...In Cuba, there have been vast changes in the participation of women in society, but the double standard persists in the sexual ethic, and sexism (although affectionate) pervades the way men treat women...
...In addition, the Cuban government derived much legitimacy from it, insisting that all their problems—with consumption and distribution, food, housing, poverty—were products of the embargo...
...However, there are now 23 years of something else...
...That was very easy to do, because much damage was done to my generation: the Vietnam war, Watergate, a succession of events that resulted in a serious erosion of public trust and public feeling...
...In the beginning, counterrevolution was widespread, the exodus was a flood...
...A century ago, Marti explained its essence: the end of colonial domination, the consolidation of democracy and republic, and the eradication of racism and discrimination...
...My favorite analogy is to our universities...
...HAMADA: What produced Cuba as it is today...
...We have a myriad little committees—some to welcome students, others to bid them farewell— in which we all participate, but none of them touch the essentials of the university...
...Writing letters, drawing a sketch, taking one's photograph for posterity were nearly impossible...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: The Mariel refugees have also told me that the return visits helped to release the exodus...
...But it's very good for you...
...The second husband is sweet, treats her well, brings her flowers...
...Even the scarcity Cubans lived with had merit...
...Certainly the position of blacks today is better than it was, but it is not perfect...
...A young man in the military told me, "They began with the prostitutes...
...But Cuba is not, I am sorry...
...Women are also an example...
...Reading it, I underwent an emotional transition that I imagine is very close to what my people in Cuba experienced, but very gradually...
...Moreover, the Central Committee controls the party, and Fidel Castro controls the Central Committee...
...Charisma helps enormously in getting from the beginning to that point...
...The French movie Mr...
...Most of us are like that...
...Then we sat on a bench, just outside the hotel, alone, with no one near...
...I wondered how it was possible to use one person on both sides...
...In the early years there was a sense that a new society was being built, and every action contributed, as Castro said, "another step on the road of building communism in Cuba...
...Since they are a block-by-block organization, they know everyone who comes into your house, everyone who leaves, what time you arrive and depart...
...The committees were initiated by the end of 1960 for surveillance...
...At the end, he is on a train to Auschwitz, still explaining he is not that Mr...
...The revolution did away with those forms of discrimination promising a society of perfect equality between blacks and whites...
...When I ordered a sandwich, the waiter told me that he could only bring crackers and cheese, for a sandwich you needed a party card...
...HAMADA: What about education...
...expecting Castro to deliver them from a terrible past to a better future —someday...
...But there is still no paper in Cuba...
...I wanted not only to let her family know that she was well, always remembering them, but also to allow myself to see what life was like for decent, working-class people...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Working-class people were constantly trying to deliver a message...
...She has returned to Cuba twice in the last few years to do research for her study on Cuban (and Mexican) immigration to the United States...
...All societies should provide good health care for their citizens...
...racial prejudice did not...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Yes, people have access to good, free health care...
...It begins with the War of Independence and its heroes, Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo...
...think the key lies in the difference between social movements and government policy...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Jose Marti is, in one person, Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson: emancipator, fighter, philosopher, thinker...
...HAMADA: Speaking of heroes, Castro has always presented himself as a charismatic deliverer of Cuba...
...In attitudes, not a great deal of change has taken place...
...Klein...
...Finding traces of the Jewish Mr...
...They know where you are, where you work, where you live...
...Even poor people in remote rural areas have access to a free education and, ultimately, they can study at the University in Havana...
...HAMADA: Were they really sincere...
...For some years, she says to herself, "It's too bad that he has passed out once again, and this 510 other job hasn't worked out, but he is kind to me and never beats me...
...This was a symbol that the revolution was just beginning and it would bear fruit in the future...
...The place of women...
...When they arrived at the little man, he realized that social control was also about him, but by then it was too late...
...Each of us has a complete file...
...They said prostitution is evil, a crime...
...Like most of the Third World, we in the Caribbean come from societies produced by colonialism, by the enormous intervention of the foreign powers, whether British, French, or American, in both the economy and the polity...
...To continue my analogy, after two bad marriages, to authoritarianism of the right and authoritarianism of the left, perhaps we can have another chance to grasp for a good marriage...
...HAMADA: Are there lessons to be learned from Cuba...
...And to that life they admit very few people, because it is a big risk...
...Klein, the Nazis threaten him too...
...That's what a social movement will do, because in a social movement people work not only on changing society but also on changing themselves...
...Those are the roots of the revolution...
...In a society, however, where people's lives are completely controlled, people feel that is good, but it is not enough...
...The revolution eradicated what could be eradicated by law, by social policy...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Considering the meager old public education system in which for the most part the elite attended private schools and the rest were left with few public schools, Cuba's expansion of the public-school sector is downright impressive...
...But then they have consolidated control...
...In The Middle Passage, V. S. Naipaul concludes that these accumulated pressures had left the area with an enormous tendency toward authoritarianism, because the leaders who emerge tend to be authoritarian—even if they say, "We will break with this past and create a different future...
...But there is also a third category, which is what makes living in a society like Cuba different: people who may not be for it, but who do not have the choice of staying out of it...
...What disturbed me came . . . when I asked to see the children's textbooks...
...She gave me some small things to take to her family: chewing gum, hair clips for the girls...
...we know the constancy of poverty and overpopulation...
...They live one life in public and another life in private...
...This is what the revolution has done.' " HAMADA: Don't people participate in People's Power...
...In Cuba, her life was completely controlled, and she was imprisoned for writing "Down with Fidel" on the walls...
...At some point it stops being about the Jews, and starts being about you also...
...We come from plantation societies that produced racism and inequality among races...
...In Cuba, you participate or you become suspect...
...are adequate and decent...
...After 20 years, many relationships that had fallen out of use were reestablished, and those in Cuba could ask, "If I come, will you help me get on my feet...
...That is what Martha Hanneker argues in Cuba: Dictatorship or Democracy...
...And they ostracize and jail the suspect...
...On the first page I found Lenin and the October Revolution...
...For example, women are not cheapened through prostitution...
...Of course, I visited my family, but they still are the middle class...
...In Cuba, very early on, the old jury system was destroyed, the press shut down, social protest abolished, and collective bargaining ended when trade unions became only transmission belts for the party...
...You see this number...
...At some point, the legitimation that no matter how bad this is, it is better than what used to be runs out on people...
...A second category is made up of people who are opportunistic, who jumped on the bandwagon...
...For example, after the Mariel exodus, those who stayed staged a massive march of support...
...In the United States, we have a long way to go to achieve social democracy...
...It has run out on a lot of people...
...HAMADA: Some people argue that the 1980 exodus was partly caused by the more than 100,000 exiles, who returned home [on visits], saying, Look at everything that we have...
...Hence, it is not that people are not sincere...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: In many ways, the history of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution [CDRs] is a microcosm of the history of the revolution...
...Certainly, for the Mariel refugees and many more in Cuba, these were false promises...
...as in every society...
...For many, the Cuban revolution served as a repository of anti-American-government feeling...
...Is the health system good...
...Since the 1980 exodus, Cuba is back to what it was in the beginning: a country with enormous discontent and dissent, a pervasive bitterness that is palpable on the streets...
...Until, as Cubans, we learn the importance of this balance, we will continue to sweat our fevers, as Marti wrote...
...He thought that Cuba had to achieve two essential things: one, to free itself from the colonial domination of the United States and of 511 American forms of both political and economic intervention . . . ; the other, to achieve the development of republic, constitution, democracy, and eradication of racial discrimination...
...In Cuba, people participate in lots of these little committees that decide things whose outcome no one cares about...
...Thanks to the thoroughness of inoculation campaigns, such diseases as tuberculosis and polio have disappeared...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: The revolution has done some good things, and I do not wish to deny either the good or the harm...
...Cubans in this country stress his emphasis on democracy and republic...
...HAMADA: Did you feel people were trying to convey something to you because you were Cuban...
...If a minor problem ails them, they go to a polyclinic...
...All the new institutions created in the last decade have not changed that hierarchy of control...
...Both sides use Marti, but each focuses on only one side of his legacy...
...But now they have returned to their function of surveillance...
...Whenever we speak, she always stresses that what matters most to her is the freedom...
...But the incentive to leave was not just economic...
...Yet charisma alone does not achieve control...
...What does that tell you about the politics of charisma...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Charisma signifies the "gift of grace," the special personal powers a leader has that enable him to move people and carry them with him, so much so that they may not notice what is happening...
...That is real...
...Is it better than the years of Batista...
...Clearly there are people in Cuba who strongly believe in the revolution...
...SILVIA PEDRAZA-BAILEY: For my research on policy changes regarding the Cuban exodus, I recently read through more than 20 years of Granma, the official Communist party newspaper...
...Klein makes that point...
...In France, during the Nazi occupation, there is a non-Jewish Mr...
...Is it not a two-edged sword to use Jose Marti...
...They have given it everything they have to give...
...Recently, I have come to understand the two sides of Marti's thought...
...When having a new car depends on being a party member, and having a television set on being in the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, that is in no sense being equal...
...The schools...
...TREK HAMADA: From your experience in Cuba, your interviews with refugees, and your research, how would you assess the mood in Cuba today...
...Cuba wiped out tuberculosis in record time by delivering the vaccines through the CDRs, who made sure every child on the block was inoculated...
...therefore, let us round up the prostitutes to rehabilitate them...
...As soon as we were near it, I would tell them, Took at what the revolution has done: that store is for you and for the party, but the rest of us can't buy there...
...But in the process they established that it was okay to collect some people...
...Our legacy saddled us with a tendency toward authoritarianism, of the left and the right, both of which are equally evil to my mind...
...The spread, linkages among levels, the opportunity: that is fine...
...But one cannot substitute just health and education...
...I asked him a great deal: he told me details about Cuba I had never heard before...
...The counterrevolution virtually 509 ceased and the Cuban exiles got busy with the task of living in America...
...Cuba emphasizes his desire to end American colonial domination...
...the Cuban community in the United States also incorporates his writings in everything that they do...
...HAMADA: What have the recent immigrants told you about the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution...
...This interview is reprinted, with permission, from the Fall 1982 issue of the Washington University Magazine, copyright © 1982 by Washington University...
...PEDRAZA-BAILEY: Our legacy...
Vol. 30 • September 1983 • No. 4
