Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History reviewed by Perry Anderson

Level heads about Cuba are few. Since the Revolution of 1959, most writing about the island has been highly polarized, between an ardent sympathy and passionate hostility. Hugh Thomas's monumental history, from Columbus to Nixon, has till now been the principal English-language work to survey its experience with a greater sense of distance and proportion, though by no means immune to the ideological currents of its time. But it is now thirty years old, and the need for a more up-to-date – and less unwieldy – account of the extraordinary record of the island has been clear for some time. Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History meets the bill splendidly. In just over three hundred crisp, lively pages he covers its four centuries of colonial rule by Spain and twentieth century of independence, with consistent balance, penetration and eye for significant detail. The achievement is all the more impressive in that Gott lays his own political cards without fuss on the table, as a long-time reporter and observer not just of Latin America, but more particularly of its successive guerrilla and revolutionary movements, from Guevara's expedition to Bolivia down to the nine lives of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela today (about which he has written what is still the most informative book). Staunchly radical, he has also always been independent-minded, a maverick with little time for official cant coming from any direction.

Thus he makes short work of the conventional image of Spanish colonization of the island, which would have it that the native Indian population was rapidly exterminated, leaving little or no trace in its subsequent history, and dismisses equally briskly the idea that the 26th July movement against Batista accorded any importance to Cuba's blacks – whatever the later policies of Castro in power towards them. Due homage is paid to the remarkable figure of Jose Marti, the most eloquent voice of late nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism, but Gott points out that an unknown Italian teenager, Michele Angiolillo, struck as decisive a blow for independence by his valiant assassination of the architect of Spanish reaction, Antonio Canovas, which finished off the political will to hold down Cuba in Madrid.

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American designs on the island form a central – and continuing – part of the story of modern Cuba. Gott handles these lucidly and coolly, without yielding either to self-centred US narratives or their emotional opposites. The overblown episode of the Missile Crisis, on which a vast and still spreading slick of hagiographic oil has been poured in the States, featuring Kennedy as a hero of lofty resolve and sagacity, is cut down to size – though Gott, stressing the extent to which the dispatch of rockets to Cuba was a Soviet initiative, never requested by Castro, could also have noted that it was American missiles in Turkey, at closer range to the USSR than Cuba was to the US, which gave Khruschev the understandable idea of creating a counterpart platform in the Caribbean. It is a strength of Gott's work to treat the record of American imperial rapine calmly, as the natural conduct of the world's largest capitalist power. From his account, it is clear that in the twentieth virtually all the most ruthless acts of US political interference, military aggression and economic asphyxiation have been the work not of the more 'conservative' but of the more 'liberal' regimes in Washington – Democratic rather than Republican Presidents, from Wilson's dispatch of the marines in 1916 to occupy the island, through Roosevelt's interventions to crush the revolution of 1933, to Kennedy's invasion of 1961,  Johnson's immigration scheme, and – last but far from least, the two great vindictive landmarks of Clinton's rule, the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts. It is no surprise that this year it should have been Kerry who clamoured for tougher measures against Chavez, or that a Venezuelan gusana could publicly pine in the International Herald Tribune for the defeat of Bush, to clear the way for a more effective assault on Latin American sedition.

In treating the forty-five years of the Fidelato itself, Gott pays discriminating attention to the different phases of its domestic record, from its fumbling early economic experiments, through a decade of relatively prosperous dependency on subsidized Soviet imports of its sugar, to the catastrophe of the 'Exceptional Period' when – Russia now in turn an American dependency – Cuba's life-line was cut off by Yeltsin, before a partial recovery and reconversion of the economy through tourism was achieved in the later nineties. In a chapter entitled 'Cuba Stands Alone', Gott does not gloss over either the political duress or social drift of these final years, yet regards the Revolution's survival against the grain of the time as one of its most remarkable achievements, which he hopes may yet assure it a soft landing into some less than neo-liberal version of capitalism in the new century.

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But the history of the Revolution has, of course, been as much international as national. Here Gott is in his element, tracing successive Cuban attempts to assist revolution in the Latin American mainland, and – paradoxically with greater success – dispatching expeditionary forces to Africa for major military campaigns in Angola and the Horn. This has been the side of the Cuban Revolution that, together with much lower levels of repression, has distinguished it most decisively from the Russian or Chinese – its notable lack of national egoism, and sense of solidarity with the struggles of other peoples. There is little doubt that it is the Latin American matrix of Cuban identity that has made this possible. However tight or vicious the American – and often, little less so, European – blockade of the island, from the beginning right through the present, there have always been upheavals on the mainland to keep it moral and sometimes material company from afar: the Guatemalan, Venezuelan and Uruguayan guerrillas in sixties, the Chilean and Peruvian regimes of the early seventies, the Nicaraguan revolution in the eighties, and the upsurge of Chavismo in the late nineties. It is this context, as much as anything else, that has prevented a deliberate isolation greater than either Russia or China suffered at the hands of the West, from becoming an involution of the kind they traced.

What of the future? The Clinton regime concocted advanced plans for suborning the Cuban officer corps after the departure of Castro. The wealth and power of Miami, where the exile community can contemplate with satisfaction the recovery of properties lost far longer ago than in Eastern Europe, are bound to weigh heavily in the outcome. Reintegration of Cuba into the 'international community' may not be such a harmonious affair as Gott, who takes Mexico rather than Afghanistan or Bohemia as a model, would hope. It would be surprising if it all ended in a gentleman's agreement.

December 2004

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