3/27/15 Havana, Cuba

Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad wrote about a semi-distinguished group of American travelers who embarked upon a journey to the Old World of the Mediterranean on the ship, the Quaker City. Pragmatic and accomplished but generally ignorant of history, the travelers make naïve but truthful observations about the foreign cultures they met. Lost on them were the nuances of these foreign lands, upon which they pronounced judgments confidently.

In contrast to the innocents abroad, Marc Frank is a journalist who has lived in Cuba for twenty years, and he writes about the complexities of Cuba in his new book, Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana. Our group from a Citadel study abroad program met with him in a Havana restaurant the other day. Frank’s grandfather wrote a book about the country, so in some sense he inherited his relationship with Cuba and his appreciation of the intricacies of this foreign culture.

Reading Frank’s book, one learns that Cuba is a totalitarian dictatorship run by a single political party that persecutes dissidents such as Osvaldo Paya. In 2015 the vast majority of 11 million Cubans lack access to internet, and the country affords a special position to one newspaper: Granma, the communist party paper.

Yet there are debates within this seemingly monolithic system. For instance, Juventud Rebelde, the communist youth paper, in 2006 wrote a scathing three-part series on graft and the dismal offerings in shops, bars, and other retail sector services, titled “The Big Old Swindle.” Some Cubans can get underground access to internet, and spread its information by word of mouth. There are regional newspapers. Cuba is an enigma.

However, on this issue I have an affinity with the passengers of the Quaker City. Cuba effectively has one newspaper: Granma. This is the only newspaper I see distributed outside my hotel. Reading its pages, I learned about “US efforts to make the Ukrainian right wing government a thorn in Russia’s side.” I learned that Caracas declared peace against US aggression, and the “The United States threatens Venezuela’s national Security” (Venezuela has a per capita murder rate 2.5 times that of Mexico). I performed a mental experiment, substituting the names of countries in the headlines of Granma. Imagine the The Wall Street Journal heralding, “It Is Impossible to Seduce or Buy America, or to Intimidate Britain.” The sole newspaper of Cuba offers indoctrination, not debate.      

I must confess, I get confused sometimes trying to categorize editorialists in major US newspapers. I know the Wall Street Journal is conservative and the New York Times is liberal. I know that Peggy Noonan is conservative and Paul Krugman is liberal. But I get confused because I know that David Brooks writes for the New York Times, but he is conservative. And the Wall Street Journal runs Op-Eds from that guy from the Brookings Institute (liberal), but I can’t remember his name though I recognize his pixilated portrait. This knowledge is just enough to shake my confidence in my ability to accurately categorize other writers. Have I missed something? Is that person from Arkansas whom The Post and Courier publishes conservative or liberal, or both? The simplicity of Granma is enticing. 

But, no. It is hard to swallow the pedantry of Granma. No doubt this is how the travelers on the Quaker City would see it. Give me the messiness of two newspapers or two hundred newspapers with a welter of categorizable and uncategorizable writers. 

Havana, Cuba, 3/21/2015

The second day of the Citadel business school spring break trip to Cuba gave an opportunity to walk around the Vedado neighborhood, a middle class and relatively touristy area of town.

Strolling along the Avenue of Presidents, one sees monuments to famous presidents of the region: Benito Juarez, Mexican president and defeater of the invading French; Salvador Allende, leftist president of Chile and martyr to the coming Pinochet dictatorship; and Simon Bolivar, liberator of Spanish America. 

Except for Cuba, that is. The societies that would become 17 modern Spanish speaking countries and one Portuguese speaking country were liberated from Spanish rule in the 1820s. Cuba and Puerto Rico were the exceptions, because these island nations would not receive independence until the Spanish American War in 1898.

The Simon Bolivar monument, the largest on the avenue, was thought provoking because it speaks to inconsonant interpretations of the 11 million person island’s place within the 580 million person Latin American region. Is Cuba part of a cohesive Latin American civilization, such as that written about by Richard Morse in his classic 1964 essay “The Heritage of Latin America” in a volume edited by Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies (1964)? Or is Cuba an outlier, a country that diverged from a coherent and identifiable Latin American developmental trajectory?

Morse, son of a wealthy New England merchant family who lived from 1922-2001, dedicated his life to studying Latin America and offered one of the more compelling defenses of the former thesis. Morse was a student at Princeton University in 1940 and wanted to study abroad. His first choice, France, was not possible for obvious reasons, so he took the next best opportunity available to him: Cuba. Morse would imbibe the literature and culture of the region for the rest of his life, which ended in Petenville, Haiti.    

Morse would argue that Latin American countries, including Cuba, shared a common Iberian heritage that shaped their worldview. Features of this tradition included the Catholic religion, the established Catholic Church, a distinctive orthodox migration pattern from the Iberian Peninsula that contrasted with the heterodox North American migration from England, and distinctive Spanish notions of government, among others.

In contrast, the ‘Cuba is distinctive’ interpretation has no one proponent, but the existence of this intellectual tradition can be inferred. Thousands of books have been written about Cuba since the 1959 Revolution of Fidel Castro, while only a handful of books have been written about similarly sized Honduras or Nicaragua. The most distinctive selection of writers, analysts, adventure travelers and the like have had their attention riveted by this island because of the uniqueness of its 1959 Revolution and the regime it installed. Evidence is seen in the dilapidated Faulkneresque mansions of Havana inhabited to this day by poor people. While the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto extensively studied Lima’s shantytowns and published the results in The Other Path, nothing like these occupied mansions exists anywhere in Latin America.

Enter Simon Bolivar, The Liberator. Though Bolivar did not liberate Cuba, the presence of the statue perhaps suggests that Cubans see their relation to the rest of the Spanish-speakers of the hemisphere as that of lost or separated siblings. Cuba should have gotten independence from Spain in the 1820s, with the rest of the region, but God willed it otherwise. There is no analogous monument to George Washington in Havana.

A stroll in Vedado neighborhood endorses, perhaps, the thesis of Morse.

Brian Norris

Assistant Professor

Department of Criminal Justice

The Citadel