Today’s post will let novelist Jose Manuel Prieto—a Cuban told by the government to leave the country in the 1980s—speak about the Cuban revolution in his own words, which are eloquent, insightful and straightforward. These passages were taken from his piece in The Nation today, “Travels by Taxi,” which itself is an adaptation of a much longer manuscript of Prieto’s.
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There’s the need, in speaking of the negative impact the Cuban Revolution has had on so many things, to speak also of all its achievements, how good it has been for so many other things. It’s so inadequate to paint it as the blackest, the most terrible, the most murderous—for it isn’t any of those things, not at all, though for far too many years it has always ended up doing harm. It’s impossible to strip the Cuban Revolution of the reasons for its great popularity, its hard-won fame. There are touches of genius present throughout the work of the Cuban Revolution and in its very conception…
And it’s not been mere thievery. That is one of the first things that must be said about the Cuban Revolution. Neither Fidel Castro nor the Cuban Revolution is a vulgar plunderer whose only goal is self-enrichment. On the contrary, I see an entirely different trait: a deep and terrible idealism.
Who hasn’t seen this? Which of its opponents hasn’t wished for the Cuban Revolution to be worse than it truly is, for the greater weight and forcefulness of his argument against it, to avoid confusion and keep from having, in the midst of his diatribe, to acknowledge its better intentions?…
The unusual spectacle of the greatest and most powerful country on earth, the United States, caught up in open war with so diminutive an adversary, like a wild animal in captivity, the astounded villagers crowding around to poke at it through the bars of its cage: that alone has captured the imagination of our contemporaries.
It has enabled Fidel Castro to present his triumph as the greatest, the most unlikely, the most consummate. It’s been an enormous contribution to his cause, a wellspring of strength he’s never stopped drawing on for all these years, a subsidy no less rich and generous than the Russians’ very real millions. And the Russians contributed voluntarily, in full awareness; the United States involuntarily, pathetically, ineptly…
It’s something like a heroic epic, with very bad bad guys and very good good guys, its narrative technique quite primitive but magisterially in tune with its time, a poem of rebellion against the grown-ups in which a few young men (not particularly important that this side happens to be Caribbean) rebel against their elders (very important indeed that this side is the United States). Deeply resonating through the capitals of Europe, with all the symbolic charge of leaving home and going out into the open air of the hippie encampment, well in advance of the upheavals of 1968 and perhaps one of the secret reasons for them.
And for those who are confused by the unswerving loyalty of so many Latin American intellectuals, so many writers of genius, to Fidel Castro, let me explain. They see him for what he is: the greatest fabulist of his time, an outstanding performance artist whose famous speeches are the most considerable part of the performance. The writers know he is as great as they are for this one achievement: his discovery of how to cease being a provincial in the arena of world politics, his strategy of effectively embedding himself in world literature (or in the world’s fictions)…
His admirers forgive him—and with them, the whole world forgives him—for having taken an entire country prisoner, for the terrible impoverishment of its life, all in the service of a confrontation they saw as far too costly for their own countries, a confrontation that a public not silenced by the pretext of an eternal state of emergency, not automatically accused of giving in to the Enemy, wouldn’t hesitate to condemn…
There’s been year after year of unbearable scarcity, the eternal backdrop for a population struggling to live in utmost deprivation. For whatever reason it may be, whatever reason you or anyone else wants to put forth—beginning, naturally, with the US embargo—the Cuban Revolution is a resounding failure.
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Prieto’s article makes several points that I do not necessarily agree with, but in the meantime he has produced a very interesting and worthwhile article.
The complete piece is here.
