What is special about Cuba? Why is it worth a visit? Moreover, why write a book about that country, perhaps the last outpost of communism, for Indian readers?
My book Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution is a serious effort to answer all these questions, and more. It is a dive into Cuba’s modern history, a close look at its current challenges as a nation buffeted by adversities, and a deep meditation on its future in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Notwithstanding its plight that resembles a ship on storm-tossed seas, Cuba is an outlier in more ways than one and, as a metaphor for resistance – and survival, so far – it has many lessons to offer the rest of the world, including India.
Firstly, no other country has survived American sanctions this long. The Caribbean nation has faced United States sanctions since 1960. The Cubans call it El bloqueo, or the blockade, which, in fact, became a full-fledged boycott following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
The aim of these sanctions was simple: regime change. And yet, when Joe Biden steps down as US President on January 20, 2025, to make way for Donald J Trump, he will be the 12th President of the world’s biggest military power to leave office without ensuring a change of guard in the small, yet defiant neighbouring island located barely 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
A memorandum drafted in April 1960 by Lester D Mallory, then US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, had spelled out a method for American action, and Uncle Sam invariably continues to deploy it to this day.
It said that any anti-Cuba policy must be designed “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of (the) government.” It also said, “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”
For me personally, travelling to Cuba was a hot pursuit of memories collected since childhood, an upshot of growing up in a Marxist household in Kerala where you still discover a special affinity for names such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Learning about Cuba by going to Cuba was more fulfilling and a vivid, enriching experience. It is also worth sharing.
Knowing Cuba and its endless trials under the weight of sanctions also enlightens us as world citizens and human beings about the arrogance of power, its vehemence, and the consequences of an absence of equilibrium in geopolitics.
Cuba and the US had hostile relations since the Revolution of 1959 led by Castro and others. The concomitant nationalisation of American assets in the island once ruled by a US loyalist is no secret. US forces trained and armed Cuban exiles to wage a war against Castro’s Cuba in 1961 and failed miserably. Their attempts to bump off Castro himself are also well-known — and part of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lore on its list of unrealised goals.
It was the fear of communism and Soviet influence of the last century that forced American policymakers to slap sanction after sanction on a country they considered an inconvenient neighbour. This, too, is public knowledge.
And so, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the world expected the US to go gentle on its neighbour, which was, until the Revolution, an offshore empire of the American mafia and the playground of the US’ rich and infamous. It was a place where, for the high and mighty, nothing they did was sinful. Nobody missed that era before Fidel Castro as much as the American mafia and its promoters did.
The end of the Soviet Union didn’t convince the Americans to adopt friendly policies towards Cuba, although it did so with a country that gave it a bloody nose — Vietnam. Instead, the US government, first under the watch of Republican President George Bush Senior and then under Democrat Bill Clinton, imposed far more stringent sanctions on Cuba, apparently anticipating that it could cause more hunger and desperation and help overthrow the communist party-led government.
Cuba, left high and dry after the collapse of Russian communism and the dismemberment of its former East European partners, rattled under economic crises until the late 1990s, during what they call the ‘special period’, or Período especial.
The Cuban story is crucial and must be told and repeated, because since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has annually adopted a resolution demanding that the US end unilateral sanctions on that country, setting a record of sorts in the process. The resolution was passed by a brute majority year after year, including in October 2024. Often, the only countries that voted against were, obviously, the US, and Israel.
Tragically, these US sanctions often become international sanctions because of the penalty clauses in the laws that place restrictions on countries and companies that do business with Cuba. This has led to overcompliance on the part of countries, corporations, and potential investors, adding to the woes of the Cuban people.
Considering that the island nation is a stable neighbour in the region, in sharp contrast with others that engender crime and cause a drug menace to the US, these sanctions against Cuba are strange. For instance, ships carrying goods to any port in Cuba cannot enter any port in the US for 180 days. So, if any international shipping company wishes to trade goods or services from a Cuban port, the ship cannot dock in the US for the next six months. This law is part of the Torricelli Act, which was passed in 1992 by President George Bush Senior ahead of a presidential election.
The same year, Bush had pardoned Orlando Bosch, the man charged with killing 73 people by bombing a Cuban civilian aircraft.
In 1996, US authorities created the curiously titled Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act, widely known as the Helms-Burton Act. This Act was designed to prevent foreign countries from engaging in trade with Cuba by subjecting foreign nationals to travel restrictions and financial liabilities in the US.
Then came what is often referred to as the Cuban thaw when, in 2014, President Barrack Obama and Cuban leader Raúl Castro announced the process of normalising relations between the two countries. In 2016, Obama became the first US president since 1928 to visit Cuba. While Obama did nothing to ease the sanctions, his efforts were lauded widely, but with Trump coming to power in 2017, relations deteriorated.
Trump came up with more anti-Cuba laws in 2019. Before he left, he also put the island nation on the list of sponsors of terrorism. Biden, who replaced him, did nothing to reverse them after he was elected in 2021.
Cubans now face the worst economic hardship yet, far more severe than what they faced after the fall of the Soviet Union, because the infrastructure they had built earlier has worn out. After all, the country had never recovered from the draconian sanctions imposed in the 1990s.
The re-election of Trump raises fears of further sanctions, especially since his new team is filled with anti-Cuba politicians, most notably the incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He had been called out for embellishing his family’s story by saying his parents had left the island after Fidel Castro came to power, while in reality they had left it before the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
The writing of this book required research that helped me learn more about iconic leaders like Che Guevara beyond what is known about him in textbooks. I also met intrepid scholars and senior government functionaries, besides young people aching for change.
My book on Cuba isn’t only a political commentary, nor is it confined to stories of friendship between Fidel Castro and Indira Gandhi or, for that matter, Kerala’s love for the Cuban experiment and its fabled biotech prowess. It is also about the fun of travelling to a tourist paradise known for three Ss (sun, sand, and salsa), three Rs (rum, rumba, and romance), and three Cs (cigars, classic cars, and communism).
Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution (Rs 399) was published by Penguin India in November 2024 and is available here.
Ullekh NP is a writer, journalist, and political commentator based in New Delhi. He is the executive editor of the newsweekly Open and author of three other nonfiction books, War Room: The People, Tactics and Technology Behind Narendra Modi’s 2014 Win; The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox; and Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics.