Mad about Cuba: Resistance and Transition
Cuba is unique in more ways than one. The country has been under the longest trade embargo in modern history — since 1960. Since the Revolution, the US has seen 13 presidents remit office. All these American presidents have remitted office after failing to achieve regime change in the Caribbean country through what the Cubans consider as the economic asphyxiation of their homeland.
Christopher Columbus first reached the Bahamas in the year 1492 before heading to Cuba, which was the first geographical entity in that part of the world that attracted his attention. He is believed to have said of Cuba, ‘The most beautiful island that eyes ever beheld.’ Columbus never travelled to any part of what is now called the United States.
The Italian explorer, who launched voyages sponsored by the Spanish monarchy, was on his way to the east along with his crew and they thought they had reached the shores of India.
For centuries, after Columbus and his men returned to Spain from the Caribbean in early 1493, Cuba endured the Spanish conquest and the near extinction of its indigenous races, called the Taino, because of persecution and epidemics. The Taino people introduced the concept of hammocks to the world and offered the roots of words such as barbeque, canoe, and hurricane to their colonizers.
In 1511, Diego de Velazquez, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage in late 1493, founded the first Spanish settlement on the island and became its governor. The indigenous name for the place was Baracoa, which still exists. Velazquez went on to create a total of seven urban settlements that included Santiago de Cuba and Havana in the early sixteenth century. The island also witnessed the infusion of African slaves to work in gold mines, sugar plantations and tobacco fields.
The Spanish managed to keep other colonial powers away, including the British who had occupied Havana after the Seven Years’ War in 1762, but the British returned the city to the Spanish in exchange for Florida eleven months later. All through the Spanish conquest, especially in the nineteenth century, the Americans had eyes on Cuba.
In 1848, American President James K. Polk offered to buy the island for $100 million but the offer was rejected by Spain.
Cuba had been vulnerable to attacks from pirates and other reckless men from Europe for long until the Spanish strengthened it with forts and walls. But the locals began a decades-long struggle for independence from Spanish rule in the late 1860s. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbour on 15 February 1898 was the pretext for the US to intervene in the Cuban War of Independence and to trounce the Spanish within months in what became known as the Spanish–American war. Spanish control of Cuba ended on 16 July 1898. The Americans didn’t do it to help a beleaguered local population in the neighbourhood against a colonial European power, but out of neocolonial designs. They themselves annexed Cuba in 1898 and ruled till 1902, with the aim of turning Cuba into a client state.
In exchange for withdrawing from Cuba and rendering it a vassal state, the US brought in what came to be known as the Platt Amendment of 1901, which stipulated seven conditions one of which was the right of the ‘United States to intervene unilaterally in Cuban affairs’.
The veterans of the Cuban liberation struggle were shocked by the American behaviour. They couldn’t come to terms with the Americans engaging in the transfer of power talks with the Spanish without them. These parleys were held in Paris and elsewhere and Cubans were considered by the American generals and politicians as people incapable of self-governing themselves. In place of the Cuban flag, what came up after the Spanish flag was the American one.
Over the next years, Americans tried to educate Cubans to become loyal servants of the American cause, and teachers in the newly created schools were taken to the US to be brainwashed. But Cubans resisted. To cut a long story short, the four-year total occupation of Cuba by the Americans revealed their aversion to Cuban self-rule. Their politics of condescension is much older than the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro, or communism in the island nation.
Although the Republic of Cuba was established in 1902, Cuba remained a client state of the US with a puppet government in place. By 1907, foreigners, most of them Americans, owned an estimated 60 percent of land in rural Cuba; the resident Spanish owned 15 percent and only 25 percent was in the hands of the Cubans. Of the twenty most productive sugar hubs in Cuba in 1925, only one was Cuban and the rest were American. Cuba was a money-spinner, nothing else, for the Americans.
Among the critics of the puppet regime, not even those who fled were safe. Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, one of the founders of the original Communist Party of Cuba, was shot dead in Mexico City in 1929 by assailants who were allegedly linked to Gerardo Machado, then President of Cuba who was notorious for being repressive. It is a different matter that the Mexican government of the time blamed his death on internal rivalry among the communists.
The Platt Amendment continued to be in place until 1934, and after it was repealed, new laws were brought in to ensure American supremacy over the sugar markets of the country. Under America’s remote-control rule, which lasted until the Cuban Revolution of 1959, dissent was quelled, and puppets were anointed and promoted in Cuba. Successive US presidents of the time turned the island nation into a wild holiday destination for its rich and a hub for its mafia, ninety miles from the mainland. It was the equivalent of the British Raj in India, and the American corporations and gangsters made enormous profits as millions of Cubans lived in abject poverty.
Incidentally, there is something uncanny about the time between the aborted attack by Castro and his team on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on 26 July 1953, and the Revolution of 1 January 1959. The latter, a triumphal and epochal event, took place five years, five months and five days after the Moncada attack. I read this interesting fact in an account of the Cuban Revolution in Malayalam in a book by the late C. Bhaskaran, a Marxist intellectual and writer.
Cubans are also inventive in their political messaging.
Can you imagine that decades before the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, India, came up with their election symbol of broom, Cuba already had their share of broom politics?
Cuban politician Eduardo Rene Chibas, who founded the Orthodox Party in 1947, was vehemently opposed to the corruption rampant in Cuba and the American mafia treating the island as a haven. Not only did he extensively use radio to communicate with the people, but his supporters brandished brooms in processions to highlight his message of clean governance.
Then came the era of Fidel Castro.
After the 1953 Moncada uprising, Castro served a prison term in the Isle of Pines where, it is said, the future leader of Cuba read twelve to fourteen hours a day. He immersed himself in philosophy and fiction, mostly masterpieces like Crime and Punishment and Les Miserables and others. It was here that he also read Karl Marx’s Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Class Struggles in France, and so on. He was released within two years in the face of student protests.
What Castro did best in the initial years while he was campaigning for the Revolution from the heights of the Sierra Maestra mountains along with fellow guerillas was making use of publicity to his advantage and becoming the talk of the town. He knew the importance of propaganda.
While he was waiting for the right occasion to strike at the Batista regime in Cuba along with other guerilla leaders with whom he lived in the mountains from 1957, he managed to offer interviews to The New York Times and CBS, and in the process, grabbed the limelight once again. Reading those articles and hearing Castro speak, even the American public was awed at the charismatic, courageous and handsome young leader, who was barely thirty at the time.
The Revolution was not overtly a communist one to begin with. Most comrades of Castro were die-hard Cuban nationalists who fought for freedom and not for communism. Most of them championed the ideals of nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, poet, and philosopher Jose Marti who worked to end Spanish rule in Cuba. Talking to reporters in New York in April 1959, Fidel himself said he was a man of democracy and that he was not a communist. Yet, there was a lack of clarity and debate about his political affiliation.
That debate continues: was he a communist to begin with or did he become one later? Or was his political philosophy a fusion of Marx and Marti?
This ability to garner publicity was visible in New York in September 1960 when he attended a UN summit. He stormed out of the Hotel Shelburne on Lexington Avenue over their demand for a hefty deposit and headed to Hotel Theresa in the black neighbourhood of Harlem. At this spot, Castro drew crowds and met several world leaders, including then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, African American icon Malcolm X, Russian leader Khrushchev and others. David Talbot writes in his best-selling The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (William Collins, 2015):
“Castro’s mastery of the media game was on full display during his Harlem sojourn. After Eisenhower snubbed him by not inviting him to an official reception for Latin leaders, the Cuban premier responded by inviting Theresa’s all-black staff to a steak dinner in the hotel banquet room with him and the popular Almeida.
“When articles suddenly began appearing in New York newspapers, alleging that the Theresa was overrun with hookers, Fidel again parried the propaganda thrust, declaring in his speech at the UN, ‘They began spreading the news all over the world that the Cuban delegation had lodged in a brothel. For some, a humble hotel in Harlem, a hotel inhabited by Negroes of the United States, must obviously be a brothel.”
The hotel is defunct now, though the 13-storey building still stands and is designated as a New York City landmark. While in NYC, I visited the spot in Harlem and found myself sharing an evocative moment with some fellow Malayali friends who came along.
In the early years of independence, there wasn’t a visible push towards communism except from Raul Castro and Che Guevara. The Cuban leadership veered towards the Soviets after learning of how the Americans were training Cuban expats and arming rebels within to wage a war against Fidel Castro. After receiving intelligence about CIA-sponsored coup attempts against him, Castro openly turned to the Soviet Union for help and soon there were nuclear missiles facing the US in its own backyard. The Cold War heightened and pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear war, but restraint on the part of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, the leaders of the US and USSR, respectively, prevented a dangerous conflagration. The USSR withdrew its missiles from Cuba and the US from Turkey, where the Americans had placed similar missiles. Castro was miffed at being kept in the dark about the negotiations between the US and the USSR, but Moscow would soon find ways to placate him.
Importantly, a world war was averted, but Cuba was punished with trade embargoes. To date, they are still in place.
The aim of all American presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower has been to get the people who elected Castro to power to throw him out — it never happened. He died in November 2016 and had been in retirement since 2008 when his brother Raul assumed power. Raul served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 2011 to 2021 and as President of Cuba from 2008 to 2018. Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel, an engineer with a PhD in technical sciences, stepped into Raul Castro’s shoes, occupying both the key positions he had held. Despite prophecies of the communist party’s fall from grace, it is still firmly in the saddle.
But the experiment in America’s backyard with socialism has not been easy, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Soviet ships had supplied Cuba with the necessary oil, machinery and various other commodities, and Cuba dispatched sugar, cigars, nickel and so on in return. The fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989-90 and then the Soviet Union itself a little while later was a huge blow. But Cuba has survived the vagaries of time and sanctions for more years without Soviet support than with it. The Russian embassy tower is still a landmark building on Quinta Avenida (Fifth Avenue) in Miramar, but its magnificence has obviously faded, and it looks like a pale shadow of what it once was, when it brimmed with Soviet officials and agents.
Interestingly, Cubans achieved several feats without Soviet supervision even when the latter was still a superpower. Notably, among its international interventions to ensure that leftist forces prevailed in other countries, Cuba’s presence in Angola was instrumental in stopping the South African army from assailing the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which had led the liberation struggle against the Portuguese. Cubans assisted the MPLA against the South African army, which eventually withdrew and stopped aiding MPLA’s rivals in Angola.
Cubans did it with local help and without much Soviet assistance. The Cubans were in Angola from 1975 until 1991 when South Africa was an apartheid state backed by the US. ‘Cuba withdrew from Angola with honour, and it could rightfully share in the credit for Namibia’s independence,’ conceded Major Jayson N. Williams of the United States Army. Marquez pointed out that Angola finally gave the Cubans the satisfaction of the great victory that they so badly needed. The Americans soon—especially after the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988—forced South Africa to the negotiating table.*
Nelson Mandela recalled later, praising Castro, ‘The decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces [in Angola] destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.’ Alongside, with the Soviet empire crumbling, the US’s interest in fighting wars where their archenemy was not actively involved began to wane.
* The South African newspaper Weekly Mail described it as ‘a crushing humiliation’ for apartheid South Africa. The publication reported on 1 July 1988, ‘Africa’s strongest army is without certain air superiority in a war which more resembles the trenches of the Somme than more familiar counterinsurgency war of modern times.’ It was the biggest war fought in Africa post-World War II.
Now, decades later, allowing an experiment with socialism in Latin America to flourish and succeed is
not in American interest and its policies are proof of its convictions. Notwithstanding global condemnations that we have discussed before, the US has refused to budge, often finding support from Israel alone.
The blockade has led to disenchantment among residents who were once votaries of a socialist Cuba. A chunk of them, meanwhile, aren’t overly enthused about the ongoing privatization either, especially outside of cities.
Many Cubans appear confused and say that all they want are steady supplies — of essential food items, including milk, medicines, cell phones and batteries. On the streets, people mostly appear perturbed or anxious, and, if they are in long queues outside meat stores or other rationing facilities, they stand bored and irritated. The agony of not having much to choose from upsets ordinary people, especially because they are now exposed through social media, friends, family and occasional travel to sprawling malls and the consumerist culture of advanced countries where people earn, they assume, enough to enjoy the varieties of life.
Cooked meals are available at affordable rates in government-run cafeterias, but then one must put up with the monotony of eating similar kinds of food every day. A thirty-two-year-old woman in Old Havana, who looks much older than her age, remarks, ‘The quality is not good, and I would say it’s not much food either.’ She rues that the long lines for buying groceries or medicines also include older people. ‘The government sort of assigns social workers to senior citizens and those who live in the poorest conditions, but I cannot tell you how well they fulfil this purpose. Sometimes, people in the community help them. I would say this all depends on people’s kindness,’ she explains.
One person, a middle-aged man with three generations living in his household, tells me, ‘Pensioners have the lowest income in the country. It’s only 1500 pesos, unless they worked for the armed forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, or FAR, in Spanish). People who work there have many, many benefits, and depending on their ranks, their salaries are higher, and therefore pensions are higher.’
He shares his experience of the ration shops, which distribute subsidized items, ‘We only get five eggs per person a month. Sometimes in Havana we are lucky and get seven, but not in other provinces.’ He says that if he were to depend on government stores alone for foodstuff, he would end up spending around five months at a time without coffee. ‘I think it’s being distributed with greater frequency in some areas of the city. And Cubans love coffee, so,’ he shrugs, his unfinished sentence expressing both resignation and longing.
A young undergraduate student from the university enlightens me with more details about the long queues for essentials, especially after Covid-19. ‘There are basic products that you can buy in these CUP stores and lately there is a shortage of things so there is a cap on how much one household can buy. It’s ten pounds of chicken, one package of sausage, one litre of cooking oil, two packages of minced meat, and one kilo of laundry detergent. If you are lucky, you can buy them all on the same day. If not, you’ll have to go to the store to see when they start distributing the missing product,’ she explains, adding that these quantities are for an entire family, regardless of the number of members they have. ‘For me, because I live alone,’ she says, ‘this would be enough for a whole month. Perhaps it will also be enough for a household of three people if they plan their meals well. But for more than four people, it’s not enough. And they would have to go to the informal market or the private sector to buy the rest of the products,’ she emphasizes, standing outside Havana University, the alma mater of the likes of Castro and hundreds of other revolutionaries whose names have been lost to history.
It was here that the country’s student movement played a pivotal political role in the 1950s, including the violent calls to free Castro and his comrades from jail following the Moncada attack.
All shortages are not caused directly by the blockade, but by supply-chain constraints indirectly linked to the sanctions. For instance, Cuba gets its milk powder from New Zealand, but since the country is often short of cash, there are concomitant delays.
But what American reporters and TV crews, who visit Cuba to voyeuristically portray its poverty and shortage of essential goods, do not acknowledge is the freedom they have in Cuba. Surveillance of journalistic activities by foreigners is almost non-existent. Though independent local journalists do complain of interference by the state and of being forced to go into exile in the face of harassment, there are no reports yet of any journalist in Cuba losing their life over their work, unlike in other Latin American countries, or even India.
Fidel Castro told Barbara Walters in his 1977 interview that the Cuban idea of freedom of the press isn’t the same as the one in the US — and that criticism of socialism is not welcome in local media. But this appears to be a theoretical concept. For all practical reasons, at present, there is no curtailment of freedom for foreign TV crews and bloggers landing in Cuba and broadcasting its poverty and food shortages to the world.
Ironically, what doesn’t come under intense scrutiny in the Western media or in most blogs—apart from routine reporting of press conferences and briefings by White House officials, including the president — is the American obsession with prolonging its criminal and inhuman sanctions against Cuba, a country that has multiple strengths across a variety of fields, including biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.
Let’s not forget that propaganda from the US demonizing Cuba as a terrorist state is not Trump’s doing either. It is much, much older. As early as 1978, John Stockwell, a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and chief of its Angola Task Force chief, had spilled the beans about the spy agency’s propaganda against the Third World, especially Cuba, in his tell-all book In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story. He had also given interviews since the late 1970s, calling out the CIA for unleashing lies to trash Cuba.
Essentially, all such misinformation campaigns are an outcome of a tragedy of errors on the part of administrations that chose to ally with vote banks and refused to make healthy foreign-policy decisions. For his part, Antonio R. Zamora says in his book on Cuba (What I Learned About Cuba by Going To Cuba) that Kennedy is always blamed for the Bay of Pigs setback for the US, although it was the previous D. Eisenhower Administration that ‘allowed Cuba to develop a massive purchase programme in 1959, two years before the invasion’. It was impossible even for the US to take on a country that had acquired weapons and trained its troops well. Many of these weapons came from the US’s allies.
Later, what Castro said in an interview with Robert MacNeil of PBS NewsHour in 1985 confirmed the cause of the military transition of Cuba at that time: necessity. The Cuban leader said in the TV chat that, thanks to the Bay of Pigs Attack of 1961, Cuba began to fear more such attacks and so it aligned with the Soviet Union and installed missiles in Cuba. The Cuban leader also said it was an outcome of America’s actions, not his or the Soviet Union’s.
Meanwhile, Zamora also points out that the Americans don’t take into consideration how Cuba has changed from its early decades to the 1990s, after the decline of the Soviet Union. Cuba adopted a new Constitution in 1992 transforming into a secular state from the atheist state it was earlier. It also allowed for private ownership in real estate in certain cases and brought in a new foreign investment code. When Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, it was an ideal moment for the Americans to build bridges, but they continued to remain sceptical and indifferent.
The Pope said, ‘Cuba should be opened to the world and the world should be opened to Cuba.’ American reluctance to change was conspicuous until Obama made the right noises starting in 2013. And then, when the world thought Americans were fully prepared to bury the hatchet, Trump came to power and put things in reverse gear.
Strikingly, when you fly down to Havana from the US on a Delta Air flight, the airline brings along American cleaning staff — even if it wastes seats and costs money — presumably because they don’t want Cubans to do the job. It makes great sense in this context to quote Wayne S. Smith, former US diplomat and author who has written books on US-Cuba relations, ‘Cuba has the same effect on US administrations as the full moon has on wolves: it is an obsession.’
The blockade has escalated to become the most complex, prolonged and inhuman act of economic warfare ever committed against any nation. As mentioned earlier, Cubans estimate the losses accumulated during this time at more than $144,413,400,000 (more than $144 billion) at current prices as of 2022. Since the sanctions are conceived to impede trading relations with third countries, it has hurt foreign investment and literally cut off most sources of revenue for Cuba, which is seeking its rightful place and dignity in a world dominated by the US.
Like most segments, the education sector too feels the pinch of embargoes. According to the Cuban foreign ministry, the damage caused by the blockade to the educational sector from March 2022 to February 2023 is higher than $75 million. It states that students cannot access more than 300 websites that are of interest to computer scientists since they are blocked for Cuban IP addresses. Such a policy that wickedly fuses malice and schadenfreude and is deplored by the world has no moral justification or legitimacy.
There is easily a lot of scope for improvement of relations between the two countries. Voting preferences could change, altering political compulsions. The Cuban-American diaspora is not a monolithic entity that is staunchly opposed to the loosening of sanctions on Cuba.
On the other hand, a visit to Cuba proves that Cuban Americans are at the forefront of making the most of the changes sweeping modern Cuba, which is blessed with natural resources that include cobalt, nickel, iron ore, copper, salt, silica, manganese, timber and petroleum besides gold. It is home to the third-highest reserves of what is often called the precious metal of the future, cobalt, after the Democratic Republic of Congo and Australia.
Cobalt offers Cuba great promise because the precious metal is used for lucrative business purposes, including making batteries for smartphones, tablets, laptops and electric vehicles. Cobalt is particularly abundant in the Moa region, in the east of the island. The lack of adequate foreign investment hurts mining and deprives the country of related economic gains, but the potential for growth remains.
Italian geopolitical analyst and author Emanuel Pietrobon has stated that Western countries, including the United States, are deficient in nickel and cobalt, which means that a Russian-BRICS-Cuban cooperation in the sector could considerably increase their negotiating power with Washington. He is of the view that Cuba is a country with enormous significance in the world scene because it is one country that makes the Americans lose sleep. ‘Cuba has a role to play in the current hegemonic struggle between the West and the Rest. Russia and the BRICS should take advantage of its geostrategic and geopolitical position and act accordingly (to help Cuba tide over its current difficulties) — Cuba’s salvation might mean the multipolar transition’s culmination,’ he says.
Cuba is also a natural habitat for hundreds of thousands of species of flora and fauna. The bright side of the sanctions has been that in and around Cuba, in the ocean and in cenotes, many species of fish and animals that had gone extinct elsewhere in the Caribbean — due to industrialization — have survived here. But then, the challenge of preserving them and monetizing such attractions remains an arduous task. Trafficking in rare species, along with increased tourist footfall, poses a grave threat to Cuba’s virgin forests and sea life.
Now, let’s look at what the Cuban Revolution has done for the people. Zamora says in his book that the Agrarian Reforms Law of 17 May 1959 gave ownership of land to more than 1,00,000 small peasants and their families, benefitting more than 5,00,000 people. The Urban Reform Law of 17 October 1960, according to his studies, allowed tenants to buy a house over twenty years with a payment of close to 30 per cent of their monthly income. The Revolution also ensured greater participation of women in the country’s workforce and government. Indeed, women played a crucial role in the years leading to the 1959 triumph, with Cuban revolutionaries such as Melba Hernandez, Celia Sanchez, Haydee Santamaria and Vilma Espin being some of them.
The literacy programme was a huge hit too. While upper-class Cubans migrated abroad, those in the middle and lower classes stood to benefit from the Cuban government’s policies in the initial decades. True, aspiring classes are now looking for an end to their hardship, but the 2021 policies have given a section of them a sense of hope amidst all the shortage, endless queues and daily frustrations of long waits for transport.
Even so, continued American sanctions are hurting the Cubans, forcing many young people to sell their properties and whatever they own and move abroad to start struggling anew in pursuit of their ambitions.
It would be wise therefore on the part of the US to stop using its Cuba policy as a mere electoral ploy, which amounts to making a great power appear abysmally petty, like a selfish Big Brother with wounded pride and an overbearing ego. Instead, the White House could act maturely and admit that it failed to assassinate Castro, at least since he is now dead, and to topple Cuban socialism—or socialism with Cuban characteristics—and instead become a force multiplier of the new trends buffeting the Caribbean nation, a tourist paradise known for three Ss (sun, sand and salsa), three Rs (rum, rumba and romance) and three Cs (cigars, classic cars and communism).
As I leave Havana, I wait outside the Jose Marti International Airport to look at the vast expanse of green outside, and the pregnant white clouds against the tranquil blue skies. The resplendence is familiar. This and all the other sights I have seen in Cuba are as vivid as the photos and descriptions that had mesmerized me in my teens. I am overcome by an intense sense of deja vu. As a Malayali fed on books about the heroism of the Cuban Revolution, this visit was like a destiny waiting to be fulfilled. I ended up learning, unlearning and relearning. I had amazing access and exposure to a world I had so far read about and watched from across the seas. It is a nation in economic turmoil largely thanks to the blockade. Although the spirit of the Revolution is alive in the minds of the older generation, the younger lot do not want to know the reasons why they are suffering, and instead they want results. Which explains the exodus of the young.
The highlight of all was the connection I could establish with Cuban art and culture. Certain names linger in my thoughts — the names of singers, movies and filmmakers who throw open the portals to understanding Cuba. I tend to associate them with the mystic spelling of a perfect morning coffee: musicians Bole de Nieve, Tete Caturla, Ibrahim Ferrer, movies such as La Última Cena (The Last Supper), El Cuerno de la Abundancia (Horn of Plenty), Lista de Espera (Waiting List) and so on. The influence of the great Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier cannot be underrated either, and the sublime voice of Osdalgia left me craving for more.
It occurs to me that this defiant island nation has many lessons to offer. It is a country that shoulders endless burdens. Cubans are still trying to find the meaning of the absurdity of the decades-old US blockade and so is the rest of the world. The Americans have dramatically changed their policies for others, but not for Cuba. Since 1995, the United States has been friends with its one-time nemesis, Vietnam, a country that humiliated them, trounced them, and punctured their inflated ego. But Cuba — which is struggling to find new friends to tide over its economic woes and has since March 2024 famously re-established diplomatic ties with South Korea after sixty-five years, its ally North Korea’s arch-rival — is still an outcast for the Americans who seem persistent on clashing with it long after the Cold War is over. It is as though the Americans and the Cubans are like blood brothers vying to see who will blink first. As much as the situation can be put down to American condescension and farcical errors, a sense of tragedy bestrides the geopolitics of the region. The US and Cuba are culturally and otherwise so near and yet so far.
As I head home, I cannot shake off the feeling that another Revolution — this time a silent one — is in the offing.
Ullekh NP is a writer, journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi. He is the executive editor of the newsweekly Open and author of three nonfiction books: War Room: The People, Tactics and Technology Behind Narendra Modi’s 2014 Win; The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox; and Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics.