Chico Peace Alliance Lecture Series

July 9, 2016

Cuba: What Comes Next?

by Stephen Lewis

As the Trump administration asphyxiates Cuba and threatens to extradite/kidnap its leadership, it is worth noting that there is nothing new in the United States’s desire to control the island. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various presidential administrations tried to outright purchase Cuba from its colonial master, Spain. For John Quincy Adams and others, it was simply a matter of time before Cuba dropped into the US’s lap, just as an apple might fall from a tree. Most US politicians and investors were content, though, to allow imperial Spain to assume the direct costs of administering the island. Indeed, the US did not intervene in the Ten Years War (1868-1878), which began as a tax revolt and evolved into a serious threat to Spanish rule. The US only became directly involved when it looked like Cuban rebels might successfully expel the Spaniards in the late 1890s and create a multiracial, sovereign Cuban republic.

The key figure in this second serious bid for independence was José Martí, a Cuban writer who spent much of his adult life as an exile in New York City. Martí’s movement, “Cuba Libre” aimed for more than simple political separation; it also sought social revolution. By the 1890s, slavery had been abolished on the island, and the visionary Martí dreamed of an independent post-racial Cuban nation. But he worried about US intervention. In his famous 1891 essay “Our America,” Martí warned, “The hour is near when [our America] will be approached by an enterprising and forceful nation that will demand intimate relations with her, though it does not know her and disdains her.” Martí took up arms when fighting broke out again in 1895. The day before he was killed in battle, he wrote:

Every day now I am in danger of giving my life for my country…in order to prevent, by the timely independence of Cuba, the United States from extending its hold across the Antilles….I have lived in the monster, and I know its entrails—and my sling is the sling of David.[1]

Martí was dead, but “Cuba Libre” gradually wore down the Spanish occupiers. “Cuba Libre” represented all the island’s regions, its social classes and racialized groups. Roughly 40% of its officers were Afro-Cubans. After two years of fighting, the Cubans had Spain on the ropes. In early 1898, the US government seized on an accident—the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor—as the pretext for entering the war. The US navy quickly overwhelmed the Spanish navy, and the US army—with Cuban support—pushed the exhausted Spaniards to sue for peace. But when Spain surrendered in July 1898, Cuban soldiers, not Spaniards, were the ones asked to lay down their arms. Cubans were not even invited to the Paris peace conference. US historians literally wrote Cuba out of the conflict, even though tens of thousands of Cuban rebels had perished and more than 200,000 Cuban civilians had died from famine, disease, and forced relocation. The misnamed “Spanish-American War” also erases the role of Filipinos who struggled mightily to resist the simultaneous US takeover of their homeland.

Once the US controlled Cuba, investors flooded the island. By 1905, US citizens and companies owned 60% of Cuba’s rural land and 90% of its tobacco trade, its mines, its railroads, and its electricity and telephone systems.[2] Protestant missionaries poured in. The US occupiers helped find the cure for yellow fever, but they also introduced Jim Crow to the island. The Marines were summoned occasionally to crush rebellions, but the US had little interest in a prolonged, direct occupation. In 1901, a senator from Connecticut, Oroville Platt, drafted an amendment to the new Cuban constitution. It laid out the terms for a perversely neocolonial relationship. The Platt Amendment gave the US the right to maintain a navy base at Guantánamo Bay and prohibited Cuba from conducting its own foreign policy. Without a hint of irony, it also gave the US the right to intervene in Cuba for the “preservation of Cuban independence.”[3] If Cuba was ever to become sovereign, it had to first acquiesce to the Colossus of the North.

Even after the Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934 by an ephemeral reform government, the US held veto power over Cuba. US investors built hotels, casinos and brothels. Some Cuban nationalists feared that US tourists were corrupting the island. While urban Cubans lived well relative to other Latin Americans, the Cuban peasantry was desperately poor and malnourished.

In the early 1950s, a brilliant Jesuit-educated lawyer named Fidel Castro tapped into Cuban grievances, offering a nationalist reform movement that built on José Martí’s vision. Castro’s failed attack on the Moncada army barracks in 1953 is well known to the readers of this newsletter. So too is his defense speech, which ended with the following immortal lines: “Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.” [4] Castro spent more than two years in jail. Released by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Castro travelled to Mexico, met Che Guevara, and plotted his return. The rebels’ struggle against the Batista regime culminated in a dramatic victory in January 1959.

Once in power, the Cuban rebels quickly delivered. They implemented major land and rent reforms, raised the minimum wage, lifted legal restrictions on Afro-Cubans, and seized foreign-owned oil refineries, banks, and utilities. The US retaliated by refusing to purchase Cuban sugar. It also attempted to isolate Cuba politically. Castro was not a Marxist when he took power, but US hostility gave him little choice but to seek close ties with the other superpower at the time, the USSR. Soon, the Soviets were purchasing Cuban sugar at above-market prices and providing the Cubans with subsidized crude oil. The US found this completely unacceptable. The failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 compelled Castro to ask Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev for missiles and nuclear warheads, leading to the terrifying October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. By the end of that year, Castro declared “I am a Marxist-Leninist and I shall be one until the last day of my life.” [5]

US politicians found Cuban intransigence infuriating. Not only had Cuba defied US imperialism and allied itself with the US’s mortal Cold War enemy, it was also remarkably successful at raising living standards for ordinary Cubans. By 1970, Castro had established free health care, free day care and education, and free transportation and utilities. Revolutionary Cuba had outlawed prostitution, rehabilitated prostitutes, and carried out a dramatic literacy campaign that promoted the ethos of volunteerism. Income distribution had improved dramatically, and life expectancy increased from 57 years in the mid-1950s to about 70 by 1970. Cuba boasted Latin America’s highest literacy rates and its lowest infant mortality rates. Revolutionary Cuba’s success was a public relations nightmare for the US, which vowed to punish Cuba and demonstrate the high cost of socialism in the western hemisphere. The US imposed an economic embargo in 1960, and the CIA launched countless attacks on Cuban infrastructure and on Castro himself. These failed assassination attempts, some involving LSD, infected diving suits, and exploding seashells and cigars, seem almost comical today. But they couldn’t help but harden Castro’s view of the US.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Castro successfully supported liberation movements in Africa and sent tens of thousands of doctors to various countries in the Global South. When the Berlin Wall was breached in late 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many observers expected the Castro regime in Cuba to fold. As a graduate student in history in the 1990s, I reasoned that since the US had “won” the Cold War, perhaps there was no longer a need to continue punishing Cuba for its stubborn adherence to socialist principles. After all, the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations sought free trade agreements with “communist” China and Vietnam. Why not lift the embargo on Cuba? But domestic politics (especially in south Florida) forced a tightening of the embargo while the Cuban economy struggled to find new markets and a new supplier of oil. This was euphemistically known as the “Special Period in Peacetime.” Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez came to Cuba’s rescue shortly after he was elected president in 1998. Chávez provided Cuba with cheap oil and employed tens of thousands of Cuban doctors. Venezuela truly was Cuba’s lifeline.[6]

Today’s disastrous situation in Cuba is partly the result of the US’s longstanding determination to punish the Cuban leadership for defying US hegemony and embracing socialist principles. We will never know if socialism can thrive in the western hemisphere without heavy subsidies because the US completely sabotaged the Cuban experiment. Fidel Castro, for his part, used US hostility to explain away the shortcomings of the Cuban system, excuse the worst excesses of Cuban authoritarianism, and to justify his own extremely lengthy dictatorship. Now, as autocrats divide the world into spheres of influence, neither Putin nor Xi is willing or able to defend Cuba. The island has been crippled by decades of economic strangulation, isolated from its former trading partners, and mismanaged by GAESA, a shadowy consortium of Cuban military and business figures that controls most of the island’s economy, including its tourist industry. (It has been reported that the Trump administration is negotiating not with President Díaz-Canel, but with GAESA.) Even Cuba’s longstanding defenders feel that the Revolution died years ago, that Cuba’s current crisis began well before the US seized Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January and prohibited Venezuela (and Mexico) from delivering oil to the island.[7]

As Cubans limp along without fuel and with very little food, Trump may seize the opportunity to distract Americans from his multiple corruption scandals, the Epstein files, and his self-inflicted quagmire in Iran. Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio has his own personal reasons to bring the Cuban regime to its knees. “Victory” in Cuba might also boost his presidential ambitions. As the US inflicts collective punishment on the island, in violation of international law, it is important to remember that the Cuban people have a deeply rooted 

tradition of resistance. It is in their collective DNA. Whatever form Trumpist aggression ultimately assumes, the Cuban people will likely play a major role in determining their destiny.

1  Ada Ferrer, Cuba: an American History (New York: Scribner, 2021), 142, 145.

2  Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 27.

3  The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds. Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 147-149.

4  The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 314.

5  Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 331.

6  Health problems forced Fidel Castro to cede the Cuban presidency to his brother Raúl in 2008, who in turn left the presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2019.

7  Boris Muñoz, “Alejandro de la Fuente: ‘El problema de Cuba no es ideológico, es una incompetencia imperdonable’,” El País, March 28, 2026.

Steve Lewis

May 31, 2026