While attending a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco a few years ago, I heard some participants refer to the irony of Cuba’s having come “full circle” since the days before the revolution. In prerevolutionary Havana, the best hotels and shops were reserved for the foreign tourists and the relatively few Cubans who had Yankee dollars. Today it is the same, these “foreign policy experts” gleefully observed.
This judgment overlooks some important differences. Strapped for hard currency, the revolutionary government elected to take advantage of its beautiful beaches and sunny climate to develop a tourist industry. Today, tourism is one of Cuba’s most important sources of hard currency, if not the most important.
True, tourists are given hotel accommodations that most Cubans cannot afford. But in prerevolutionary Cuba, the profits from tourism were pocketed by big corporations, generals, gamblers, and mobsters. Today the profits are split between the foreign investors who build and manage the hotels and the Cuban government. The portion going to the government helps to pay for health clinics, education, the importation of fuel, and the like. In other words, through the public sector, the people reap much of the benefits of the tourist trade—as is true of the export earnings from Cuba’s sugar, coffee, tobacco, rum, seafood, honey, nickel, and marble industries.
If Cuba were in exactly the same place as before the revolution, completely under satellite-state servitude, Washington would have lifted the embargo and embraced Havana. When the Cuban government no longer redistributes a major portion of the surplus value to the common populace, when it allows all surplus wealth to be pocketed by a few rich corporate owners, and when it returns the factories and lands to a small opulent owning class—as the former communist countries of Eastern Europe have done—then it will have come full circle, returning to a privatized, free market servitude. And then will it be warmly embraced by Washington as have the Eastern European nations.
Western policymakers say as much. In 1994 I wrote a letter to then-Representative Lee Hamilton, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urging a normalization of relations with Cuba. He wrote back that US policy toward Cuba should be “updated” in order to be “more effective,” and that “we must put Cuba in contact with the ideas and practice of democracy . .. and the economic benefits of a free market system [italics added].” The US blockade, Hamilton went on, was put in place to “promote democratic change in Cuba and retaliate for the large-scale seizure of American assets by the Castro régime.”
Needless to say, Hamilton did not explain why his own government—which had supported the prerevolutionary Batista dictatorship in Cuba for decades—was now suddenly so insistent on installing western-style democracy in that country. The revealing thing in his letter was his explicit acknowledgment that Washington’s policy was dedicated to advancing the cause of the “free market system” and retaliating for the “large-scale seizure of American assets.” In so many words, he was letting us know that a core commitment of US policy was to make the world safe for corporate investments and profits.
Those who do not believe that our rulers are consciously dedicated to the propagation of transnational corporate capitalism (even after they say they are) should note how they explicitly press for “free market reforms” in one country after another. We no longer have to impute such intentions to them. Almost all their actions, and with increasing frequency their own words, testify to what they have been doing.
When forced to choose between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, the empire builders unhesitatingly embrace the latter, although they also prefer the legitimating cloak of a limited and money-driven “democracy” when possible. Such is the face of imperialism.