Has Cuba Met the End of History?

The essayist and critic Iván de la Nuez left his native Cuba in 1991. At the end of that year, on Christmas Day a hemisphere away, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. The USSR dissolved; the Cold War was over. Cuba had been no stranger to the exigencies of radical and rapid political transformation, but the loss of vital Soviet subsidies and trade with former Eastern bloc—forces that had effectively kept the country afloat for the previous two decades—meant that as the Soviet Union disintegrated, it took Cuba’s economy down with it. Cuba hawks in Washington and Miami licked their chops in anticipation of what they assumed would be the Cuban Revolution’s long-awaited demise.

In Washington, President George H.W. Bush feted the fall of the Soviet Union with a televised speech to the nation, celebrating what he called “a victory for democracy and freedom.” In Cuba, however, Fidel Castro—himself a fastidious student of history—read the moment quite differently. In those years, he took to concluding his speeches with a slogan proclaiming another imagined future: “Socialism or death.”

That Iván de la Nuez left Cuba at this exact moment is the unwritten thread that binds his recently translated essay collection Cubanthropy: Two Futures That Happened While You Were Busy Thinking. His essays probe the tensions between the island’s at-times-pyrrhic pursuit of sovereign nationhood and a globalized neoliberal order that cares increasingly little for the nation-state. He views these tensions through two perspectives: the first, Cuba’s fervent adherence to a socialist future during and after the Cold War; the second, the post–Cold War prism of capitalism’s ostensible victory, when, despite the supposed end of history, Cuba still clung desperately to the socialist hopes of the revolution’s first decades.

It is perhaps uncomfortable to acknowledge how wrong both camps’ predictions were. But to be living in Cuba as it was plunged into an economic crisis in the 1990s was not a matter of mere discomfort; it was a matter of survival. That specific imperative knows no geopolitical rivalry or ideological grandstanding—life is simply what a person must do to bridge her present with her future. It is in service to that possible future, one where the centrality of human need tempers the intransigence of ideology, that de la Nuez writes.

Given the extremity of the 1990s—what Castro dubbed “the Special Period in Times of Peace”—one can perhaps understand why de la Nuez calls Cuba a scale model of the world and its crises. But the Special Period is only one of the many possible instantiations of the role the island has played in both geopolitics and ideological debates since the 1959 revolution.

The Cuban Revolution’s ambitions had long been global. In the 1960s, diviners in Havana believed that the ouster of the dictator Fulgencio Batista following a years-long guerrilla campaign offered a replicable blueprint for nationalist liberation, first across Latin America and then the whole of the decolonizing world. Ernesto “Che” Guevara drafted his manual on guerrilla warfare, and the French political theorist Régis Debray heralded a “revolution in the revolution,” in which he juxtaposed Che’s prescription regarding the historical conditions necessary to produce Marxist-Leninist revolution in Latin America against the Soviet and Chinese models. In a tone somewhere between reverie and pity, de la Nuez notes how Debray and the generation of 1968 looked at Cuban-style guerrilla warfare as a “panacea” as well as a potential alternative to the rigidity and cruelty of Stalinism. In a world constrained by bipolarity, Cuba appeared to offer a new path forward—perhaps even many paths.

“It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist,” Guevara wrote; “the insurrection can create them.” Che and the Cuban Communist Party’s “Americas Department” thus adopted a foreign policy rooted in exporting its revolutionary model to other theaters in the hemisphere—against the expressed wishes of Moscow, under whose economic yoke Havana had yet to decisively fall. In 1966, Havana hosted the Tricontinental Conference, a historic summit where leaders from Latin America, Asia, and Africa gathered to address the Global South’s struggle against European and North American colonial and imperial domination.

It is rarely the fate of radicals to achieve the entirety of their ambitions, however. “What diversity there had been at the beginning was heading mercilessly toward uniformity,” de la Nuez writes of the revolution’s first dramatic decade. Guevara would die during a failed guerrilla campaign in Bolivia the year following the first Tricontinental. Not long after his death, Cuba undertook an ambitious project to harvest 10 million tons of sugar cane—an unprecedented yield. The initiative sought to reverse centuries of single-crop exportation and underdevelopment by generating the economic momentum that would lead to industrialization. By 1970, however, the country-wide sugar mobilization had failed to meet its ambitious goal. That failure gave way to the full-blown Sovietization of the Cuban economy, and Havana’s henceforth intractable dependence on Moscow came in exchange for relinquishing its attempts to export the Cuban Revolution.

Even so, the country’s significance continued to manifest outside its borders. Cuba was not only the communist specter haunting the Americas throughout the Cold War; it was also a pipe dream for student radicals and leftist intellectuals abroad who could celebrate the revolution’s accomplishments without bearing the sacrifices such radical change demands. De la Nuez recalls a photo of Che Guevara with Jean-Paul Sartre when the philosopher toured Cuba in 1960: In the image, the guerrilla lights the Frenchman’s cigar using a compact leather-bound lighter, a gesture in which de la Nuez reads one of the iconographic tropes of the revolution.