Caliban After CommunismThoughts on the Future of Cuba

Like most Americans, I welcomed the Obama initiative to re-establish diplomatic relations and open up new commercial and travel ties with Cuba. I also welcomed the reform process in Cuba itself, though I thought it was moving too slowly. The new initiative by Trump, though it symbolically cancels the Obama accord, does not in fact change things all that much in the short run. The Cuban response to the Obama initiative was sluggish and cautious, and now with the hostility of the new administration will be probably even more sluggish and cautious. Why not? The Cubans know that while there is much to be gained from making a transition out of Communism, there is also much to be lost: consider the cases of Hungary and Poland, for example, now both moving towards right-wing authoritarianism. And in Cuba's case there will be no EU to bail it out.

So it matters what form the transition in Cuba will take. But I think it would be fair to say that whatever happens in Cuba in the coming period—whether there will be a decisive shift towards economic liberalization, multiparty politics, and integration with the world market; or whether things will remain more or less the same (unsatisfactory but survivable); or whether there is a possible a "third" way, something like a Cuban version of the Chinese path—will be a disappointment.

Hungary and Poland were appendixes of the Soviet system, with regimes essentially imposed on recalcitrant populations by the Red Army in the wake of the Second World War. But Cuba made its own revolution. It was in the 1960s and 70s a powerful, vigorous, attractive example of a possible alternative secular modernity. An alternative to what? An alternative to capitalism as a model of development for Third World or postcolonial countries, but also to the increasingly sclerotic, repressive model of Soviet socialism. In this sense, Cuba could be said to have been a "world–historical" entity, in Hegel's sense of that term.

I hope I am not being too rhetorical in saying that Cuba was a beacon of hope for millions of people around the world. It was Vietnam's ally in its war against the United States. It was Cuban military forces that helped defeat the South African army in Angola, an achievement that led to the eventual collapse of the apartheid regime (whereas the United States supported that regime). It was Cuba that supported the revolutionary upsurge in Central America in the 1970s and 80s, and the Sandinistas in particular. It was Cuba that provided decisive medical and humanitarian aid to Haiti in the wake of the terrible earthquake.

But it was also the idea of a secular revolutionary modernity that the Cuban revolution represented that was compelling (an idea embodied in the great films produced by the Cuban film institute, the ICAIC). It was for my generation in the United States—the generation of the Sixties—a great inspiration, a source of enthusiasm about the possibility of change, an enthusiasm that animated the New Left, the civil rights movement, and the women's movements, for example.

We now know what many had feared inside and outside of Cuba: that despite its initial daring and originality, the revolution steered too close to the Soviet Union and was dragged down by the collapse of the Soviet bloc after 1989. Cuban socialism, which, to repeat, was the result of a popular revolution from below, and not imposed by the Red Army, as in the case of many Eastern European countries, survived. But it lost its normativity. The end of that normativity in the 1990s was expressed by the Cubans themselves in the somewhat oxymoronic concept of the "Special Period in times of peace"—Período Especial en tiempos de paz (oxymoronic because one expects states of exception in a period of war, not of peace). The idea of the Special Period was meant to signify publicly and officially that while the Communist regime itself did not collapse, as was the case in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, what remained was no...