Fifty Years of Revolution: Perspectives on Cuba, the United States, and the World

3. “Flicking the Eagle’s Feathers”?: Cuba, Revolution, and the International System

3 “Flicking the Eagle’s Feathers”? Cuba, Revolution, and the International System Candace Sobers In many ways the twentieth century was a century of revolutions. Despite the long shadow of two global clashes, for some the endless conflicts surrounding the two world wars are what shed more light on the nature of the international arena and prove the more fascinating site of intellectual investigation. Since 1900 there has been at least one major revolution on every continent (barring Antarctica), not to mention a perpetual stream of revolts, rebellions, civil wars, and coups.1 Due to the sheer prevalence of sociopolitical upheaval, any attempt to define the twentieth-century international arena without acknowledging the constancy of revolution is at best incomplete, at worst misleading. If, as a general category of sociopolitical phenomenon, revolutions are challenges to the international system, then the Cuban Revolution was, and perhaps is, one of the more significant challenges of the twentieth century. Though revolutions are prescriptions for immediate change, their reverberations can be felt across space and time. Without searching for direct causality, there are ways to look for revolutionary influences, even if it is not possible to precisely measure their weight. Some cases are more clear-cut than others, such as the influence of the French Revolution on the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. Other times the chronological and geographical distances may be much greater, yet the connection remains strong, as in Ho Chi Minh’s 1945 invocation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Similarly , echoes of the Cuban Revolution can be heard across the international system. This chapter investigates the Cuban Revolution, and the resulting Cuban state, as a revolution; that is, as an episode of radical, large-scale sociopolitical change, located in the wider arc of twentieth-century international “Flicking the Eagle’s Feathers”? · 53 history. The precise chronology and contours of the Cuban Revolution— from its intellectual roots in the independence struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the multiple, sometimes competing anti-Batista/anti-imperialist struggles of the 1950s, to Fidel Castro’s fateful arrival in Havana on January 1, 1959—have been covered extensively elsewhere. Instead, this chapter proposes an alternate approach to assessing the Cuban Revolution. Seeking a path of inquiry somewhere between the structuralist approaches of revolutionary theorists and the more precise views of historians of Cuba, this chapter considers the Cuban Revolution not as a national issue, nor as a Latin American issue, nor even as an episode of Cuban-U.S. relations, but as an international issue with global ramifications. In so doing, it raises compelling questions about the nature of the international system, the place of revolutionary states, and the particular legacy of the Cuban revolutionary experiment. In this chapter I suggest that by making an explicit commitment to internationalism , and by deliberately positioning itself as a model of third world revolution, the Cuban Revolution drew and maintained the heightened attention, and in some cases ire, of the international community. I first consider the postwar international system and the nature of revolutions, locating the Cuban experience firmly within the catalogue of twentiethcentury revolutionary movements; second, I investigate the principle of internationalism, and in particular, Cuban revolutionary socialist internationalism ; third, I point to the 1975 Cuban intervention in Angola as a key example of internationalism in action. This chapter is thus a first cut at assessing the international legacy, and thus persistence, of the Cuban Revolution. Revolutions and the International System Situating the Cuban Revolution in international relations history requires first defining revolution itself. The study of international relations (IR) history generally presumes the existence of an international system. The international system, traditionally defined, is an assembly of interacting units, where the primary unit of analysis is the legally sovereign and territorially bounded nation-state, and the primary level of analysis consists of relations between such states and their representatives (whether individuals or institutions).2 Of course, such statist perspectives can be problematic. Historians generally reject the notion of the international system as an “objective social realm.”3 Just as the state must be historicized to render 54 · Candace Sobers it a valid category of analysis, so must the idea of an international system. Empirically, states rise and fall, fragment and reassemble, and change over time, as has the international system. The post–World War II international system came to be largely characterized by the ideological and military antagonisms between...