Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity by Margaret Randall (review)

The Cuban Revolution and the long endurance of the Castro government continue to fascinate scholars, political activists, and other concerned parties. The passions aroused by Revolutionary Cuba have abated somewhat of late, but even so the ideological divide between partisans for and against this island nation remains stark and sizeable. Margaret Randall's Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity stands unequivocally with those who endorse, admire, and cheer the record amassed by the Cuban government since the Revolution of 1959.

An American-born poet and prolific writer who lived in Cuba from 1969 to 1980, Randall is a long-time champion of leftist causes in Latin America and elsewhere. Throughout this work, she lauds revolutionary Cuba's long policy of internationalism. Despite its relatively small size, population, and economy, Cuba frequently has injected itself onto the world stage in various venues for various reasons. Randall praises Cuba's international accomplishments in the fields of education, health care, disaster relief work, cultural affairs, and athletics. She also salutes Cuba's participation in wars in which it sided with belligerents deemed to have been either victims of imperialism or soldier-advocates for socialist agendas, such as during the Angolan civil war when Cuba's military fought for years alongside the most-leftist faction in that conflict. She holds that Cuban soldiers, unlike U.S. military personnel, rarely suffer from PTSD. That is because Cuba's overseas battles possessed such unambiguous moral clarity that no subsequent misgivings or feelings of guilt haunted its soldiers' memories.

Randall repeatedly asserts that a fundamental distinction exists between the internationalist aims, attitudes, and actions of the United States and Cuba. U.S. foreign policy, she asserts, has long been dominated by an imperialist impulse driven by capitalist greed, ideological fears, and a bullying, self-serving sense of its own exceptionalism. But revolutionary Cuba's internationalist posture, she writes, has from the start been grounded in humanitarian and socialist values.

Randall's staunch support for Cuba is perhaps most vigorous in her commentaries on the country's international education and health-care activities. She proudly notes that for many years Cuba has been sending teachers to other countries to combat illiteracy. These educators have demonstrated an "astonishing" level of "ingenuity and solidarity" (158), asserts Randall, who confidently cites the government's claim that if its "Yes I Can" literacy program were fully adopted and given $1.5 billion in funding, illiteracy would be eradicated planet-wide within ten years.

Extolling Cuba's health-care system as "a model that works" (159), Randall asserts that Cuba has frequently offered its doctors and medical services to people in other countries. She concedes that Cuba has derived "much-needed revenue" from these efforts; nonetheless, the government's "primary impetus" for extending this aid "is its commitment to worldwide health" (173). Addressing the Cuban government's controversial decision in the 1980s to confine citizens infected with HIV, Randall acknowledges that "closed communit[ies]" were established for this purpose. But, these "pleasant lodgings with all the amenities, the latest medications, and diets rich in the nutrients needed" were made available cost-free to the affected patients, many of whom "have opted to remain in the communities" (169–70) even after being permitted to leave.

To be sure, on a few occasions Randall qualifiedly acknowledges that at times the regime has fallen short of its loftiest ideals. Regarding the creative people who have voiced internal disapproval of the government, Randall admits that "the Revolution has not yet learned to live with its most biting critics" (31). She also chides Cuban nationalism, which in the Revolution's first three decades produced "domestic policies [that] were often extreme," inspiring "attitudes toward those wishing to leave the country [that were] uncompromising and inflexible" (211). Further, Randall notes the "complex but disappointing" reality that, despite governmental efforts, "racial prejudice" and "gender equality" are issues that remain "troubled by a certain stagnation" (78). The author...