Cuba is a compelling, confounding and wildly contradictory place. Depending on who you are or who you talk to, you may hear that it’s an authoritarian hellhole, a tropical socialist idyll, both or just about anything in-between. I’ve been alluding to eventually visiting Cuba since the very beginning my trip, and I’ve finally made good on that: I was eager to see the reality for myself, to try and separate propaganda from reality and to hopefully learn a thing or two about that messy interface where ideals meet reality.

It turns out I had a lot to say, but if I were to attempt a pithy one-line summary, for an Anglocentric audience at least, I’d say this: imagine if Britain fended off the Luftwaffe at the Battle of Britain and waited a few years, but then the invasion of France just… never happened, and instead the country lived under the Blitz for six decades and counting. If that’s satisfied your curiosity then congratulations, you can have your afternoon back. Otherwise, read on.

This post will be a little different to the others in this series. For one, it will be Long with a capital Jesus, Ben, sometimes less is more; at just over 30,000 words (excluding appendices) it is more than half the length of a Ph.D. thesis, and there are around 500 links, so don’t overlook the table of contents off to the side (or above, if you’re on a mobile device). There are several reasons for this length: The Brigade itself was two densely-packed weeks of fascinating and often challenging educational explorations, political discussions that would run into the wee hours of the early morning and at least one dancefloor punch-up. As such, there’s a lot to get through, and that’s before I even get to my extra week in Havana or lingering questions that I’ve been grappling with ever since leaving, or new ones that have been raised as I’ve continued to research the topic. On those latter points, expect this post to contain more mini-essays and digressions than usual, and for many paragraphs to end with question marks, rather than full stops.

Secondly, whereas I usually don’t directly attribute quotes in these reports and leave out most people’s names, I don’t generally follow any hard or fast rules for this. However, given the politically sensitive nature of this trip and the increasing levels of political repression back in the UK, I will be applying the Chatham House Rule much more strictly in this piece, except for public figures and those Cubans named in the CSC’s own report.¹ Also, I’m writing this up from my notes over a month later, so any direct quotations should be considered potentially paraphrasal, not least because most of the speakers were talking in Spanish.

Background ¶

I went out of my way to find a way of visiting Cuba that would be political, rather than just laying on sunny beaches and knocking back Havana Club. But why, and from what angle, was I so keen to visit?

Why Cuba? ¶

Akala first piqued my interest in Cuba. I was reading his Natives against the backdrop of the 2020 George Floyd protests and, in a chapter entitled Why Do White People Love Mandela? Why Do Conservatives Hate Castro?, he related the following:

This came in the personal context of my own politicisation, which I plan to write more about elsewhere but which we could perhaps say had started in earnest two years earlier and was turbocharged during the pandemic. I was questioning a lot of my prior conceptions of the world and actively seeking out information that would challenge these. However, I don’t think I had ever really thought much about Cuba before this. I had a vague image of Castro with his beard and military fatigues and that he was some sort of dictator, and something something communism, but nothing beyond that. But now I was intrigued.

Time passed, until I found myself gearing up to head to Latin America for the better part of a year. I hadn’t thought much more about Cuba since 2020, but now that I would be heading to its neck of the woods I decided it was time to swot up. I started with Manufacturing the Enemy: The Media War Against Cuba. From the introduction onwards, the book was eye-opening. For example, this quote:

Bolender then cites a comparison of pre-Revolution Havana with the rest of the country, which I think is well worth quoting here in full:

Bolender adds that:

The whole book was like this, countering the freakishly consistent media line from the US press; regardless of an individual outlet’s supposed political leaning, they march in lockstep on this issue.² He traced the use of the same tropes regarding Cuba all the way back to the time of the Spanish–American War, a time when the US was more open about its imperial ambitions. I also learnt that Cuba hadn’t originally declared itself Marxist–Leninist, and only moved into the Soviet sphere of influence after being frozen out of any alternative by the US:

In addition, whilst the US continues to claim that the Cuban government never reimbursed the owners of land and property that was seized after the Revolution, this was not for lack of trying on the Cubans’ part:

There were all manner of startling quotes, some of the most astounding coming straight from the mouths of US politicians. For example, a 1960 memo. from some State Department ghoul on the original motives behind the blockade, namely denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. And also this from President Kennedy himself:

Around the same time I also read Chomsky’s Rogue States (which includes the evocatively-titled essay Cuba and the U.S. Government: David vs. Goliath), binged the podcast series Blowback and watched an explainer of how their electoral system works. I now knew that something really interesting was going on in the Caribbean, and I needed to get myself to Cuba. But how? And, more importantly, how could I get there in a more political capacity?

I initially tried contacting the University of Havana, who I’d heard offer month-long Spanish courses, but my emails bounced. Whilst looking for options, I discovered the UK-based Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC). As luck would have it, they run a May Day Brigade to Cuba every year for young trade unionists. As young in the UK trade union movement can mean up to 35 years old that wasn’t a problem, but I’ve been union-less³ since I quit my last job back in mid-2022. But, after some discussions (and getting a UK-based friend to phone their office because my emails weren’t getting through) I was on board, and at a highly reduced rate since I didn’t need the flights from or back to the UK.

Ben, the Anarcho-Trotskyist CIA Agent ¶

So, I had established my interest in Cuba, and I had found my in, but from what perspective would I be coming? For the precise definitions I am using for the various bits of political terminology, see the relevant appendix.

I am intentionally woolly about my own politics. A politics pal of mine once called me a horrible floating voter, though years later he had settled on defining me as some kind of anarchist. I’ve always found precise political labelling to be an exercise as unedifying as it is distracting, and at its worst it can become dangerously prescriptive. I don’t think a healthy mind selects an ideology and then queries it when making decisions, people just follow their beliefs and intuitions (or what they think will benefit them) and eventually the resultant behaviour forms patterns that can reveal their underlying motivations (perhaps even to themselves). I just say and do what feels right, try to constantly question myself and present my working wherever possible; I will leave the ideological classification problem up to my future biographers.

But I do understand that that can be unsatisfying. For one, any Marxists in the audience will be uncomfortable with not knowing which box to put me in so that they can then denounce me for being in that box. And everyone knows one can’t be taken seriously in the political arena without regurgitating a load of books at people first, so here are my theoretical bona fides: I’d not call myself a Marxist, or an anyone-ist for that matter,⁴ but I appreciate some of Marx’s method and disagree with other parts. I think the base and superstructure concept and the theory of alienation are solid; I think the more teleological or predictive parts are clearly not borne out by history since he was writing. I’ve not directly read the scriptures beyond the Communist Manifesto (though Capital and Eighteenth Brumaire are on my to-read list), but I’m familiar with a lot of their contents through secondary sources. I studied Rosa Luxumberg and the Spartacists way back at school along with Russian history from Tsar Nicholas I to the death of Stalin,⁵ and I went out of my way to visit the memorial to Kurt Eisner whilst passing through Munich last summer. I’ve read some bits and bobs of Lenin, and occasionally he manages to stop being a histrionic weirdo long enough to produce something valuable like Imperialism. Other writers I’ve read who tend to appear under the Marxist label include Franz Fanon, Fredy Perlman, Mark Fisher, de Beauvoir and Sartre, plus related post-colonial authors like Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe, though I’m sure there are many more that I’m neglecting, or that I don’t think of as Marxists.

I personally think communism sounds pretty neat, even as I doubt that it is achievable on a large scale, but I’d be perfectly happy with a system in which people are able to pursue it locally if they want to and aren’t hurting anyone inside or outside of their communities. I’m against authoritarian socialism in principle and I think that Marxism–Leninism specifically—don’t you see, the beatings are for your own good!—is an idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe [it]. Of all of its variants the ones that tend to end up doing the least harm (e.g., Titoism) seem to get called Trotskyist, so I guess that’s my preferred strain, but don’t mistake this for support of Trotsky; he deserved every inch of that icepick for his work in Kronstadt. There is a certain idealistic tragedy to Trotskyism, though. Marxism–Leninism is a fundamentally bad idea that goes horribly wrong pretty much every time it gets attempted, and Stalinism and Trotskyism represent the two possible responses to this that don’t require one to re-examine the underlying philosophy: simply deny that things are going wrong or that all the death and destruction is great, actually; or say that this example doesn’t count because of whatever reason, but the next time will surely be different. Or, put visually:

Image by the author, top cartoon by K.C. Green, bottom images by the BBC

I do plan to try and properly articulate my own politics (and, perhaps more interestingly, how they have developed over time) in a future million-word, twenty-appendix blog post. For now, suffice it to say that back in 2014 I eighteen years old, listening to Pat the Bunny, reading Emma Goldman and calling my views something akin to anarcho-communism. Between 2014–16 I was reading more CrimethInc. and exploring post-left anarchism, before deciding that fishing food out of dumpsters forever didn’t appeal. In 2018 I tried to describe what I now know is an organicist position, arguing in favour of confederalism as the only system of association that could reflect this.⁶ Around the same time a combination of me leaving university to become a real human being, a couple of relationships, reading the exquisite Letters of Insurgents and, most importantly, encountering the Kurdish Freedom Movement led me to a new appreciation of my own politics, and over intervening years I’ve further explored both that movement and related ones (e.g., the Zapatistas of southern Mexico) and sought out more practical activities.

Philosophically I’m an absurdist, and I take a lot of moral cues from Camus’ postwar humanism. Ethically I’m generally deontological in my approach.⁷ Politically I suppose I’m currently best described as a democratic confederalist or communalist, and one could broadly lump me in under the banner of libertarian socialism, but most important to me is that I identify myself as being firmly within the without adjectives camp; the anti-authoritarian streak has always been present in my thinking, even when my understanding of how best to achieve this have changed. That all said, I’m not so doctrinaire that I can’t recognise that some states are preferable to others.

As a result of all of the above, though, I rather stood out amidst the rest of the Brigade. Most of the Marxist–Leninists correctly identified me as an anarchist (but made it sound like a slur) and a couple decided I was a Trotskyist; I think that’s tankie for dick. Thanks to my US citizenship and weird Nicaraguan origin story,⁸ the one thing that everyone could agree on was that I was clearly working for the CIA.⁹ But, whilst I am not certainly not ideologically aligned with the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and I think the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is as bad as any other,¹⁰ I am always happy to talk with anyone, no matter how much we disagree; I believe in separating a person and their ideology, and I can point to a lot of instances where maintaining connections and friendships across seemingly-irreconcible differences of opinion has proven beneficial in the long run. I’m also unrelentingly catholic when it comes to my choice of sources, and perpetually curious; I enjoy the thought of finding out that I’ve been wrong about something and the thrill of new information far outweighs any embarrassment I might have felt at having been wrong to begin with (or, perhaps, having lacked nuance).

So, consider this piece as one of reportage and rumination, not propaganda, from a source openly sympathetic to the goals of the Cuban political project, but also primed to be sceptical of the Cuban government (as with all governments) and cautious not to be made a useful idiot.¹¹ Wherever possible I have tried to find sources to back up the claims that I heard made, as well as counter-evidence or potential caveats that I think are worth noting; the absence of a link does not necessarily mean the claim is incorrect, but only that I was unable to independently verify it.

The Brigade ¶

After a 16-hour bus ride to San José, a night spent sleeping in Juan Santamaría International (or trying to sleep, to be more accurate), two flights and another 5 hours in José Martí International—the most boring airport terminal in the world—waiting for the rest of the brigade to arrive, here we all were, ready for two jam-packed weeks of revolutionary politics and cuba libres.

Photo by the author

Our delegation of 50-ish trade unionists (plus me!) hailed from all across the UK & Ireland, representing industries ranging from transportation to healthcare and included a mix of union staff, workplace reps¹² and rank-and-file members. On the political front I think everyone was some kind of (state) socialist, maybe some of them were also communists, and there were perhaps 10–15 avowed Marxist–Leninists of some stripe or other, including around 8 card-carrying Communist Party of Britain members.¹³ There was definitely a sizeable contingent of not-particularly-radical brigadistas who were mainly there for a Caribbean holiday, and more power to ’em. All of the brigadistas, even those with whom I had major political difference, were fine company, and after months of barely seeing a Brit this experience has confirmed my belief that we are objectively the funniest people in the world.

The XVI Brigada Internacional Primero de May in total brought together over 300 delegates from 29 different countries, representing every single continent bar Antarctica. The Yanks had the largest presence in total, split into a few delegations, but we were the second-biggest group. Whilst this was the sixteenth May Day-specific brigade, international solidarity brigades have been coming to Cuba every year since the ’60s.

Photo by the author

We kicked off the Brigade at the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), part of Cuba’s impressive domestic biopharmaceutical industry, with a floral tribute to Jose Martí and a few rounds of ¡viva!s—these would become a recurring theme, and eventually a running joke. After filing into a lecture theatre under the watchful gaze of a slideshow of Fidel Castro photos and words like revolutionary, humanist and absolute ledge, we heard from CIGB Director Dr Marta Ayala and Fernando González Llort, President of ICAP and one of the Cuban Five. There was a comment in memoriam for a recently-deceased South African activist, which prompted a (communist) rendition of My Mother Was a Kitchen Girl. We were told about the fuel shortage currently wracking the country,¹⁴ due to which we had had to abandon our initial itinerary and the Julio Antonio Mella International Camp in favour of staying in hotels within Havana; we were also told that due to this, the traditional large May Day celebrations in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, which usually saw millions of Cubans bused in from around the country, had been reduced to a number of smaller, localised celebrations.¹⁵ The meeting ended with a recital from a young, though very impressive, violinist from a local school.

Lectures ¶

Our time in Cuba began with three consecutive afternoons of lectures, each following a morning of collective agricultural work. I will deal with the former here, and the latter later on.

The Economic Situation in the Country and the Impact of the US Blockade (Gladys Hernández) ¶

First up was Gladys Hernández, Researcher at the Havana-based World Economy Research Centre (CIEM), talking to us about the current economic situation in Cuba and the continuing impact of the now 61-year-old illegal US blockade of the country.

Hernández acknowledged that Cuba was currently facing, perhaps, the biggest crisis of [its] history. This came in the context of an international economic crisis (or, as she called it, multicrisis) caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which supplies 80% of the world’s grain), and of course the COVID-19 pandemic. What made Cuba’s situation different to other countries’, though, was that most countries aren’t under a blockade, which had been intensified by Trump with 243 new measures in the midst of the pandemic. As a result, inflation in Cuba hit 70% in 2021, though it was now down to the mid-40s;¹⁶ the economy shrank by 10.9% in 2020, and growth dropped below 2% in 2022, compounded by Cuba’s worst-ever fire at a vital oil storage facility in Matanzas and the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian making landfall. As a result, the government had had to reintroduce measures not seen since the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba also has its eyes trained on threats further over the horizon, such as preparing for the impacts of climate change.

There was some positive news, however. President Biden repealed a handful of his predecessor’s new measures (though most remain in force). Cuba had seen the lowest COVID-19 infection rate and case fatality rate in all of Latin America (0.37% compared to 1–1.54% in the rest of the world). Cuba had seen only 8,530 deaths from the disease, and has achieved a 98% vaccination rate compared to 94% in the developed world and only 6% in the developing world, which includes children in the world’s first such programme.¹⁷ The pandemic had been bad, she acknowledged, but Cuba now had a lot of international prestige from its domestically-produced vaccines and low infection and death rates.

And whilst they had not yet hit their target of 2m tourists for the year (down from a pre-pandemic annual number ~4.7m), 1.7m had thus far come to the island. To support this, and a 18% annual growth rate in tourism, hotels had been built at a breakneck pace: there were now 300, compared to only 57 in the ’80s, though I’m unsure if she was talking about the whole country or just Havana. We want tourists to come back, Hernández said, and told us that the bulk of the previous year’s visitors had been from Russia; obviously, this proved to be a basket best not filled with all of one’s eggs.¹⁸ Cuba had recently signed an memorandum of understanding with China aiming to strengthen tourism co-operation between the two countries.

She then took on the claim that Cuba’s economy is dependent on remittances sent home from Cubans abroad, highlighting that these bring in a little over $2bn per year and claiming that they were important, but not vital, in the face of a total GDP of $107bn (though they are apparently the country’s third largest source of foreign currency, after medical internationalism and tourism, which helps to explain the damage done when Trump-era sanctions resulted in the closure of Western Union branches across the island; these were amongst the handful of new restrictions that Biden has since repealed).

Hernández expressed her frustration at the US’ reinstating (in the final few days of Trump’s presidency) of Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, this country that has done so much for the world. She also criticised those who claim that the government does nothing for Cubans, highlighting the 1.5% unemployment rate,¹⁹ recently raised minimum wage²⁰ and representative nature of government (more on this later); I like our popular government, she said, saying that it was composed of ordinary Cuban men and women. This was all particularly frustrating, she added, because the US and Cuba have much to discuss, highlighting issues of illegal immigration, drug trafficking and the threats posed to the Caribbean by climate change.

Hernández then explained the changing makeup of the Cuban economy, particularly the growing non-state sector, pointing out that micro-, small- or medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) represented 29% of employers within the country in 2022; the remaining 70% were state enterprises.²¹ This is certainly impressive, given that they have only been permitted since 2021,²² but she did not mention the domination of the military in an estimated 40–60% of the foreign exchange sectors of the economy. There is a law currently under discussion that would raise state wages, which would allow state employers to be more competitive with the higher-paying private enterprises. She recognised that communist countries in Asia (e.g., Vietnam, China) had been successful in adopting measures to encourage their state agencies to become world leaders, and that this was an example that Cuba was keen to follow.

She also addressed the 2021 protests that had shaken the country. Thousands had taken to the streets with a cry of DPEPPDPE, but Hernández claimed that there were only a handful of actors operating in bad faith, whilst the majority were just confused and understandably angry about the ongoing energy and food crises.²³ She said that, in response to the unrest, the government had instigated transformation programmes in around 2,000 of the most-deprived barrios in the country, including 66 in Havana alone, to address the accumulated needs of the people. We don’t want you to think that Cuba has no problems, she stated, but we will face them.

She closed by telling us that this was perhaps the most important brigade, and that we must be [Cuba’s] messengers. Cuba doesn’t publish everything about the good that is going on in the country,²⁴ she said, adding (somewhat menacingly, to my ears) that there is a need to educate [Cuban] media to better promote the achievements of the government. She then said that the global balance of power is currently shifting drastically: 60% of international financial transactions now take place in US dollars, down from 78% 10 years ago;²⁵ the introduction of the euro in 2002 had provided a valuable alternate foreign currency; and Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT network would likely startle many others into accelerating efforts to build an alternative (though she thought that China could probably never be removed in the same way). In this context, Cuba had recently rescheduled its debt payments to the Paris Club and Russia, having gone into debt²⁶ to fund development processes (which she said is not the same [as going] into debt as a fascist dictatorship, though I’m unsure what exactly she was referring to; I can’t find anything to suggest that fascist dictatorships are particularly prone to debt forgiveness). Hernández stressed that we were never forced to accept terms we don’t agree with, unlike with the World Bank,²⁷ and we believe debts must be repaid.

The Legislative System in Cuba and the Latest Laws Adopted (José Luis Toledo Santander) ¶

Our second lecture was on the topic of the Cuban legislative system: how it works; its composition; and its recent activities. It was delivered by Dr José Luis Toledo Santander, ANPP deputy for the Plaza de la Revolución municipality since 2018 and chairman of its Commission for Constitutional and Legal Affairs, whilst Gerardo Hernández Nordelo (another member of the Cuban Five, and also a deputy) moderated.

Toledo Santander began by highlighting the intense lawmaking activities currently underway within the Assembly, saying that 35 laws had been passed in the previous session alone.²⁸

In April 2019 they had adopted a revised constitution, following a three-month nationwide consultation and referendum. 135,000 meetings were held, and Cuban exiles were invited to participate. Three printings of the draft constitution sold out, and one author describe[d] Cuban citizens attending assemblies with annotated copies of the draft, demonstrating their level of engagement. Toledo Santander said that the vote saw a total of 7.85m votes cast out of a total voting population of 8.7m,²⁹ for a turnout of 90.15%, and that the 90.61% that voted in favour therefore represented 78.3% of the total voting population.³⁰ The new constitution reaffirmed that the Communist Party of Cuba … is the superior driving force of the society and the State which organizes and orients the communal forces towards the construction of socialism and its progress toward a communist society. It also reaffirmed that that country is governed by a socialist economic system based on ownership by all people of the fundamental means of production as the primary form of property as well as the planned direction of the economy; in Toledo Santander’s words, the Cuban economy recognises the market, but doesn’t let it go wild.

The new constitution defines seven types of property, and Toledo Santander highlighted the key ones as being private property, personal property and property owned in a joint venture with the state; he provided the example of a house, stating that this would be personal property (and pointing out that some 85% of Cubans are homeowners), but would become private property if it were rented out. He said that the MSMEs were a mixture of private enterprises and joint enterprises with the state.

He also highlighted that the new constitution guarantees human rights, as it declares that human dignity is the supreme value that underpins the recognition and exercise of the rights and duties enshrined in the Constitution, treaties, and laws and also that the Cuban State recognizes and guarantees to a person the non-renounceable, indivisible, and interdependent enjoyment and exercise of human rights, in correspondence with the principles of progressivity and nondiscrimination. However, words alone do not mean much—the North Korean constitution also claims that citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association, for example—and Toledo Santander specifically has been accused of approv[ing] laws that violate constitutional rights and of being a defender of the anti-constitutional theory that the magna carta cannot establish guidelines for the Communist Party.

He contrasted the political structure of the government now to how it had been under the previous 1976 constitution, which had introduced the election of delegates to the newly-constituted ANPP, which was the supreme authority of the state. These delegates received no salary, were non-professional and met for two sessions per year, plus any extraordinary sessions (of which there had been 4 in the past year, Toledo Santander said). The position of President of the Council of State was introduced and made the head of both the state and the government. Since the new constitution, the head of government is now the Prime Minister of the ANPP, and the head of state is now the newly-created post of President of the Republic, currently Miguel Díaz-Canel. This change came about, said Toledo Santander, because Cuba wanted a president with powers, but not presidentialism, and so it created a semi-parliamentary system in which the President recommends a candidate for Prime Minister, who is then appointed by the ANPP, and likewise for the members of the Council of State (the real day-to-day governing body in the country).

Cuba is divided into 168 municipalities, which are grouped into 15 provinces. Prior to 2019, local government was conducted by Provincial Assemblies, but it was found that they slowed down the system, so they were abolished in favour of new provincial governors and deputy governors, along with a provincial council to which they are accountable. In municipal elections, the people of the municipality recommend candidates (between 2–8 per ballot), who then need to win 50% of the vote (plus one) to win, and elections are re-run if that threshold is not met. The new constitution also introduced municipal mayors to replace the old system in which one person headed both the legislative Municipal Assembly and the executive Administrative Council, which left them overstretched. Governors and deputy governors are elected by Municipal Assembly delegates. Toledo Santander added that Cuba does not have a constitutional court, and so responsibility for ruling on constitutionality is left to the ANPP.

He then moved on to the recently updated Código Penal. Under the new code, he said, no-one can make a statement to the police without a lawyer, and the police must provide public defenders. He spoke of a long-standing desire to reduce pretrial detention times that had finally been realised though the granting of a right to go to court to challenge one’s detention; habeus corpus is now part of the constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Criminal hearings are public in Cuba as a holdover from the Spanish system, and this has been strengthened in the new Código Penal. In addition, the administrative silence has been recognised as an infringement on the rights of Cubans, and public bodies can now be censured for acts of omission as well as commission. New types of sentences had been added that included weekend sentences of community work, and there was a new mechanism for early releases.

He did not at any point address the hundreds still imprisoned following the 2021 protests, nor persistent allegations of forced disappearances³¹ and torture;³² Cuba ratified the UN Convention against Torture in 1995. His only addressing of the domestic authoritarianism practised by the Cuban government was to quote Aquinas, saying that if a castle is under siege, all dissent is treason.³³

Most relevant for me, and perhaps only me, was that the new Código Penal was preceded by Cuba’s first bespoke data protection law. Toledo Santander didn’t go into further detail here, but a cursory look online suggests a legal regime not too dissimilar to that of the GDPR, complete with a distinction between personal and sensitive data, defined bases for lawful processing, data subject rights, though there seem to be fewer of such rights and the exception to requiring consent to access someone’s data when done so for reasons of general welfare, public order, and national security is likely not subject to any of the (admittedly imperfect) scrutiny as in other jurisdictions; I have noticed that Cubadebate, which the BBC say has become something of a sounding-board of public opinion on the island in recent years, is not available over HTTPS.

Toledo Santander went on to complain about the media criticising the new Código Penal for not reducing the number of crimes that merit a death sentences. He said that the number had not increased and that the Cubans were enemies of the death penalty in principle,³⁴ stressing that there had been no executions carried out for a decade and that state policy is to maintain it only for exceptional circumstances; the 1997–8 hotel bombers had not been executed, he pointed out, and nor had a Miamian who assassinated a Municipal Assembly president.

He addressed a couple of other important laws, old and new, such as the recently-passed Food Sovereignty and Security Law and the post-9/11 Law against Acts of Terrorism; he didn’t elaborate further on either, but the latter does have a rather interesting introduction:

Lastly, he addressed the recently-passed update to the Código Familia, which he said does not impose any one model of the family, but rather tries to protect all family types; 66.85% voted in favour of the revisions, on a turnout of 74.12%. Much of the international coverage has focussed on the new Code’s legalisation of gay marriage through its redefinition of marriage from being between a man and a woman to being between two people, the reforms go far beyond that to encompass gender equality, the rights of gender, sexual and relationship minorities (GSRMs) and surrogacy; Toledo Santander said that the latter had been a particular struggle, as there were fears that legalising it would lead to people selling their babies, and so safeguards in the final version include the requirement that the people must be related to one another, a court must approve it and any doctor who conducts the process irregularly will be stripped of their medical license. The Código Familia has been hailed as being among the most progressive in Latin America. Vital in the success of the campaign was the support of Mariela Castro: Raúl Castro’s daughter; current director of the CENESEX; and the first (and, as far as I can tell, only) person in the history of the ANPP to vote against a piece of legislation.

Closing, Toledo Santander admitted that he do[es]n’t live in a perfect system and that we know people’s power is not a finished job, but we are the first so we are always learning. He also stressed that the Cubans are always happy to listen to what our friends tell us, and that they have learned that solidarity does not mean to beg, it means to share what you have.

The Media, the Disinformation War on Cuba and the Role of Social Networks in Defence of the Revolution (Michel Enrique Torres Corona) ¶

For the final lecture, we heard from Michel Enrique Torres Corona, Director of the Nuevo Milenio publishing house and host of Con Filo counter-propaganda television program.

Torres Corona stated that Cuba is subject to an information and media war, more so now than ever before following the boom in online media, as a result of which the war has acquired new features. Con Filo was created a few days after July 11, 2021, in light of the violent protests which he said were the result of the peak of the pandemic, combined with regular blackouts and a frustrated population. However, he alleged that there was also a large media drive against Cuba, such as the claimed hijacking of the popular pandemic hashtag #SOSCuba; this was an attempt, he said, to tr[y] to sell an image of a country in shambles, not a home, which got into people’s minds.

He said the Foreign Minister of Cuba had held a press conference regarding the hashtag, claiming that it represented algorithms and money; others have said that this is at best an exaggeration, and as with most Internet operations it will likely never be possible to confidently attribute responsibility. Torres Corona further minimised the protests, arguing that whilst books on regime change say you need to keep unrest going for at least a week, July 11 only lasted 24 hours. He claimed that the Revolution was never really in danger, but [July 11] was a before and after in our perception. They realised the threat of social media disinformation and that one can defame and attack anyone over digital networks with no consequence except maybe banning (emphasis mine, given the intense repression faced by independent journalists in the country). Before July 11, he said, there had been a difference between online toxicity and toxicity on the streets.

Cuban media, he said, realised the need for a space where people could compare the things that they are seeing, and Con Filo was the result. It has several social media accounts, though some have been blocked; I was able to find YouTube and Facebook profiles, but they appear to have been namesquatted on Twitter by someone retweeting anti-government messages, which is quite funny.

He said that Con Filo had three objectives:

On the first point, Torres Corona cited an article he had read that claimed that Cuba was the poorest country in Latin America, which ignored Haiti.³⁵ He said that the media try to keep people in a state of constant rage, giving the hypothetical example of an angry guy who has a bad day at work, then gets home to find that there is a blackout; this guy is already in an optimal state of rage, and then he goes on his phone and sees disinformation that tries to keep him there. He confessed that the most difficult part of countering fake news is countering stories that contain elements of truth.³⁶ He is clearly aware of this in his own work; for example, this episode features footage of people challenging a US State Department spokesperson over Cuba’s presence on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, including this absolutely exquisite squirm:

In the episode, Torres Corona then goes on to recount the lengthy and violent history of US-backed terrorism against Cuba. The US barely needs help to look bad, particularly in the context of Cuba, and this is a much more effective piece than just dismissing the July 11 protests out-of-hand as having been foreign agitation. The show is also chock-full of Internet memes.

On the second objective, he told us how Cuba has gone from a country with no Internet to one where people connect all the time in just five years, from little Internet to 4G. He singled out CiberCuba as a particularly active misinformation campaign that preyed on Cubans’ digital illiteracy, as they don’t now how to protect their data or avoid scams. The first step, he said, was to instil a discipline of suspicion, which would help to dull the impact of manipulated images and AI-generated audio and videos (the former of which they addressed in an episode entitled El rostro del fascismo); in the future … we must be suspicious of everything.

Regarding the third objective, Torres Corona talked about bringing in historians and suchlike who have influence, but only amongst academics and challeng[ing] the myth that everyone online is anti-Revolution, saying that we have made emerging groups visible. He also mentioned a pro-democracy group called Archipelago, led by playwright Yunior García, who had planned a series of marches in November 2021. Torres Corona proudly recounted how the Con Filo team had clashed with them, showing their links to external backing, and arguing that you can’t exercise a constitutional right against the Constitution. They had also challenged the idea that García is an honest activist, and had countered reports that he was missing in prison and being tortured by releasing footage of him alive and kicking in a Spanish airport a long way away and safe from what he kicked up. This is all a very unsavoury way of describing García being surrounded in his home and prevented from leaving it to join the marches, and then choosing to flee into exile rather than facing imprisonment; this is no doubt why there was some controversy around Torres Corona being invited to be a keynote speaker at an academic Cuba conference in the UK last year.

Torres Corona went on to talk about Con Filo’s work reporting on campaigns around new laws and political events happening in the country. He highlighted an episode of the show—Nos vamos para Miami—about a recent Cuban–American baseball game. He said that the episode showed people the faces of hatred and fascism, including people in US shirts insulting the Cuban players.

He said some some had criticised Con Filo for publicising counter-revolutionaries, but he claimed that even people who don’t agree with communism, when they see those people, those dark anticommunist figures in Miami, they turn against them. He stressed that we do not do research or do reports, we just try to counter the misinformation narrative. He said that any country can have weeks or days or unrest, citing the gilets jaunes in France, but the news stops referring to them quickly. July 11 is still being talked about. Only one person died,³⁷ there was no lethal force³⁸ or tear gas, yet we are presented as a repressive dictatorship.³⁹ He acknowledged that people are thinking beings with different opinions, not all opposed or all for, and we need dialogue, he said, though this was rather at odds with his treatment of Yunior García. He said that being objective is better in the long run, it will make us more persuasive, and said that we don’t want to just make propaganda.

In the Q&A, someone asked about election interference and its role in the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Torres Corona responded that we must not be against tech., and the Bolsonaro won because of fear and xenophobia. Hitler had done the same thing, he added, long before social media. In response to another question from one of the Ghanaian delegates, he said that we have Cuban doctors in Ghana in places Ghanaian doctors wouldn’t want to go, and then paraphrased an African proverb that says until rabbits learn to write their own story, the tale of hunting will always glorify the hunter. In another question, about how one determines how many reporters to produce each year in a planned economy, Torres Corona stressed that he was a propagandist, not a journalist, though I’d be intrigued to know what he thought the different was in Cuba. He also commented on the high quality of Cuba’s journalistic education, saying that some people take that training and choose to work for the counter-revolution.⁴⁰

Concluding, Torres Corona thanked anti-government rap groups with US links; one member of one had been filmed asking for an invasion of Cuba which was great, we just played that all the time. He contrasted the contemporary Cuban exiles in Miami with José Martí and Fidel Castro, who were both exiled for a long time, but [who] spent it plotting their return. Cubans, he said, are educated on moral authority. The exiles are not courageous or willing to sacrifice, unlike Castro and the guerrillas; if they were courageous, they would be revolutionaries.

Tour of the Revolution ¶

We spent the rest of our time being bused to and fro around Havana (with a police motorcycle escort, no less) for numerous visits. This began with three mornings of agricultural work, the first two at the CCS “Arides Estévez Sánchez”.

Photo by the author

The urban farm—named after a revolutionary, Army officer and co-founder of the Communist Party of Cuba who was killed in the line of internationalist duty by an anti-tank mine fighting in the Angolan Civil War—is part of the internationally famous Cuban urban farming movement, of which Monthly Review has said:

We helped out with the work, planting corn, weeding plant beds and more. I ended up acting as translator between the president of the farm and several of the brigadistas, who wanted to know more about his life and work. When one asked him how many hours he worked, he said that he worked about 8 hours per day, 7 days per week and had done for 14 years.⁴¹ We asked if he enjoyed it—if he was a campesino feliz, in my translation—and he said yes; we asked if he ever took holidays, and he said he sometimes went home to spend time with his wife and children, though often they came to see him at the farm and stayed over. But he did say that he loved coming to the farm to hang out with the other members, who seemed to form the bulk of his social circle, and he had travelled a little to the Dominican Republic for work purposes.

Photo by the author

For the third day, we visited the much larger UEB Latin America, which takes products from other farms and processes them. We planted more things, cleared more fields and prepared herbs for use in pharmaceuticals and alternative medicines. We were told at the end that we had performed several months worth of work in only a few days, so it seems enough monkeys and enough typewriters really can do more good than harm.

One afternoon we visited Toitico Producciones, a social centre and after-school club that provided young people with music and dance lessons, English classes and more. The kids there put on a show for us which was certainly entertaining, but some Latino music should absolutely not be danced to (not to mention twerked to) by seven-year-olds.

We later visited the Psicopedagogical Center “La Castellana”, a center dedicated to caring for those with neurological, physical and social impairments. We watched another performance from the service users and then had a tour, seeing the products of their art therapy workshops (including big cardboard vaccines). Many of the brigadistas, particularly those working in education and care, marvelled at the low staff to user ratios, community integration and life-long care. We followed this up with a visit to the Center for Neurosciences of Cuba where they presented some of their recent research on Alzheimer’s in the warmest room in the world; as a non-neuroscientist and very sweaty boy, I can’t say I took a lot in.

Photo by the author

We also visited Industria Electrónica Empresa “Camilo Cienfuegos”, a factory that produces many domestic electronics products. Here we heard from the SNTI about how unions work in Cuba, providing social services as well as workplace representation to their members,⁴² as well as some of the difficulties faced by the business due to the blockade. The union head talked about how emulación socialista promoted competition between workers and improved productivity, though he didn’t tell us who the Cuban Stakhanov was. The director of the factory told us that they were the first industry in the country to be fully powered by renewable energy, and said that a hard year for the country has come to an end [but] perhaps others shall come. We were led around a showroom of products produced by the factory, where I took the opportunity to ask how many hours the workers here put in: 8 hours per day, Monday to Friday, which explains why the place was so empty on the Saturday we were there. I can’t help but feel the farmers are getting shafted on the work-life balance here.

In the Q&A session I asked the following, in Spanish because I was getting fed up with the recurrent language barrier issues:

The key takeaway from the response was finding out that they use GNU/Linux in the factory; I later found out that they’ve even rolled their own distro. called Nova, based on Ubuntu. That’s pretty cool.

That evening, we headed to the Casa de la Amistad for the much-awaited International Night! Everyone had been lugging around beers, jars of Branston pickle, Fray Bentos pie tins and more since leaving the UK, but we were finally able to lay them all out on the table for the delectation of the other delegations. I helped flog the wares for a while, mostly so I could keep an eye on the various ales that had been included; I made sure to help myself to some much-needed free samples. We were certainly one of the most popular stalls—the Yanks had only brought political literature, and had shown up too late to get a table—but our primary cultural contribution was probably getting the teenage-looking waitstaff very drunk on Jameson; I hope they did us proud by picking up a bag of cans at the local offie and drinking them in a park later on.

Photo by the author

The food and drink were but one part of the culture sharing: there was also a performing arts element. Most delegations went for songs and a couple for poems, whilst the Yanks performed some embarrassingly serious slam poetry about how they aren’t really American and we should stop calling them that. The MVP was probably the old Andalusian guy who stood up on his own and belted out a song. But, soon enough, our own time came. And then the skies opened. Undeterred and highly inebriated, the lot of us clambered up on stage and unfurled our flags as almost all of the audience fled under cover (though not the Communist Party of Ireland guys, who boldly sat in the rain cheering us on because they’re real Gs). Then, dripping wet, we proceeded to belt out (and occasionally forget the words to) Viva la Quinta Brigada and There is Power in a Union. We left the stage, paused for a rousing chant of Lizzie’s in a Box and proceeded to earn our reputation as the trashy delegation that has the most fun. I’ve never been so proud to be British.

Then, to cap off our time in Havana, we visited the Centro Fidel Castro Ruz, a museum and library dedicated to the famed revolutionary who led the country between 1959–2008. Hosted inside a gorgeous house (that had been requisitioned from the American socialite who originally owned it after she fled following the Revolution), the centre features all manner of Castro bits and bobs, from his favourite AK-47 to a pair of boots he once wore. I’ve always found museums dedicated to a single person a little weird, and this was no exception, but there were some really cool exhibits, such as one in which cylinders could be plucked from a map of the world and placed onto a table to reveal a breakdown of Castro’s interactions with that country.

However, whilst we were basking in Fidelismo a violent storm struck Havana, leaving parts of it heavily flooded; on our coach ride back we made waves driving through several of the larger puddles and saw someone wading down the road in water up to their waist. We were later told that the May Day celebrations scheduled for the following day had been cancelled as a result, and there was many a disheartened brigadista to be found in the hotel bar that night.

Photo by the author

We spent what would have been May Day wandering around Havana Viejo instead. A group of us headed over to the Plaza de la Revolución so that everyone could get some photos in front of Che’s big head, and I heard that someone from another delegation had taken a taxi there early in the morning just to make sure that the parade wasn’t still going ahead and we were just being kept away; who says tankies are paranoid? We stopped at a few pleasant but unmemorable (though quite expensive) bars and visited the Feria de Publicaciones y Curiosidades, where I picked up a copy of Castro’s History Will Absolve Me and we lost another brigadista for several hours as he tried to haggle them to within an inch of their lives on various tchotchkes and knick-knacks.

In Your Own Time, Go On ¶

The organised trips were certainly interesting, but the real highlight of the trip was all of the unscripted interactions that took place during our downtime. It was during these that we were able to talk to ordinary Cubans, members of other delegations and one another. I think it is important here to mention that we had complete freedom of movement during the whole brigade, with no hard requirement to attend any of the programmed visits and no register-taking. In the evenings we were completely left to our own devices, as well a couple of afternoons that had been put aside for us to wander Havana Viejo and Trinidad. Brigadistas routinely headed into Havana, had candid discussions with normal Cubans and saw some more of the realities of life in the country first-hand. In this I am glad that I did not come straight to Cuba from the UK and have instead spent 7-odd months in Central America recalibrating my sense of comfort, because I heard remarks from some brigadistas who I think interpreted some of the things they saw as signs of uniquely Cuban poverty, whereas I’ve come to regard them as common to the whole region; having to put toilet paper in the bin, for example, or ramshackle houses made of bare cinder blocks with corrogated sheet metal roofs.

All of this is for me perhaps the single most compelling piece of evidence to counter the common narrative of Cuba as just another authoritarian state. The organisers clearly had enough trust in both us and the Cuban people to leave us to explore freely and, from a practical standpoint, the ability to go off-script at any time means that it was not possible to have stage-managed our experience; Potemkin villages are no use when the people you’re trying to impress can walk right up to them. We even got to experience the famous healthcare system as an on-call doctor stayed in the hotel with us for the duration of the Brigade, and later more acutely when one of our brigadistas injured her ankle and was whisked away to hospital for an X-ray and cast, at no cost and with minimal crowding in the waiting room; our brigade paramedic, who had accompanied her, was suitably impressed.

The Internet was also interesting to experience. There are a handful of US media outlets and independent blogs that are banned by the Cuban government, but Internet censorship is by no means as pervasive as in places like China. The only issue I heard about of a brigadista being unable to access something (unsurprisingly, we don’t generally read Cuban dissident blogs or US media outlets) was when they tried to submit some university coursework and were unable to access the portal for doing so; this seems to have been a result of US sanctions, though. Cubans used common social media sites freely, and we even saw an ice cream parlour with a ring light setup for filming TikTok content. The US government seems to be a bigger threat to Internet access in Cuba than the Cuban one.

Also relevant is that there were no restrictions to us using VPNs when accessing the Internet, so whilst actually getting online could certainly be a pain in the arse those with the technical means were generally able to access everything they wanted, and my Internet traffic will be of little use to any Cuban spooks listening in. Unlike China, where VPNs are generally illegal and using one can get one in trouble, in Cuba they seem to be widely accepted (though, of course, treatment of us tourists and the normal Cubans may vary) and we even had speakers directly point to them as vital for bypassing US restrictions, for example when accessing scientific papers.

Lastly, whilst Cuba is statistically a very safe country, we did encounter a few issues. One pair of brigadistas ended up in a hairy situation when a Cuban who had been showing them around the city invited them into their home, before threatening them into buying something. Another time the pair tried bringing a friend they had made in town back to our hotel, but the security wouldn’t let him into the lobby: it’s not clear if this is because of a risk of crime or because they didn’t want us to fraternise too much, but all of the hotels in downtown Havana had doormen who I assume fulfil a similar function.

Prostitution is also semi-legal and very visible in the tourist areas, but the oddest thing were the jinteros: they’d strike up conversation by asking you where you were from, and then ask if you wanted to exchange money, or buy drugs, or procure prostitutes. A couple of the more persistent ones would walk alongside you for a bit or put a bit more effort into building rapport first, and the most dedicated guy I encountered completely changed directions and walked with me for about five blocks, also advising me on which restaurants to eat at, asking if I wanted to go for dinner with him and, when all that failed, switching tack and asking me to give him money to buy a pizza. It was all very surreal and, irritatingly, you couldn’t just filter out where you from?s because just as many random Cubans would also ask that out of curiosity and not follow it up with anything. I’ve been in Latin America for a while, in places as poor if not poorer than Cuba, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

Cubans on Cuba ¶

Many brigadistas reported Cubans complaining about the shortages, as expected, but also some interesting comments about how it’s impossible to succeed without being involved with the Party. One reported that they were unable to start a business if they wanted and that there was no scope for entrepreneurship within the country’s system; this would seem to run counter to the recent proliferation of MSMEs, but it may be that there are other hurdles to overcome, such as lack of access to the capital to start a new business in the first place.⁴³ One brigadista reported that someone had told them he was waiting for the first opportunity to leave the country. Other travellers I’ve met on my wider trip have related similar stories, with one having been told that the Castros are the most corrupt family in the island.⁴⁴

The government line would no doubt be that these are all CIA agents who just happen to be posing as taxi drivers and the like, or (more charitably) that they have been misled by online disinformation.⁴⁵ Both of these dismissals are, I think, silly and even self-defeating; there is a lot of evidence to suggest that open democracies have a major advantage in responding to crises, due in part to the speed with with issues can be identified, different solutions proposed and debated and implementation monitored. Perhaps more importantly, people need a pressure release valve and they need to vent. But whilst repression of dissent in Cuba is well-documented, the willingness of ordinary Cubans to share their thoughts with us does suggest that they individually feel fairly safe to do so, although we can’t discount that we as foreigners pose far less of a risk of reporting them to the authorities than their fellow countrymen. But perhaps general dissent and criticism is mostly tolerated, up until the point it starts to look like a movement.⁴⁶

Also, without wanting to invalidate the critical views expressed, I don’t think anyone expects the average Cuban to go on and on about the Revolution and the wonders of socialism to the same extent as the political and industrial big-wigs that we were hearing from in the organised part of the tour.⁴⁷ Most people are not ideologues, and most people don’t really care about politics in an abstract sense: they want food to eat, safe water to drink, healthcare for when they get sick or injured and the promise of a better life for their children. And here we have to acknowledge the famous David Foster Wallace line about fish in water:

What I mean by this is that Cubans live, and in most cases have always lived, with a social safety net that most people in the world can only dream of. The hedonic treadmill is real, and it must be easy to lose sight of that in the context of one’s (very real, very legitimate) complaints. So amidst the other comments, there were also people who complained that the much-vaunted Cuban healthcare system was corrupt because, if you wanted to get seen quickly, you have to bring the doctor a sandwich. And whilst it may be difficult to start a new business, one does not have to worry about becoming destitute if it fails, as 20% do in their first year of trading in the UK.

This all makes it hard to disentangle their complaints about the specific system under which the country operates from the kind of complaints one would expect to find in any poor country (or, for that matter, any country at all). Out of 216 countries, Cuba is ranked 69^th in nominal GDP, 89^th in GDP (PPP) and 113^th in GDP per capita. But, as Helen Yaffe has pointed out:

I want to conclude this section with two further complications. First, I don’t want to suggest that everyone we spoke to was wholly negative. I struck up a conversation with a guy in a hole-in-the-wall food joint who said he loved living in Havana, largely due to the party scene, as well the bookseller working at the Feria de Publicaciones y Curiosidades (though he was trying to flog Soviet tat to gringos, so he may have been incentivised to big up the socialist paradise angle). However, I do think that the majority of Cubans we spoke to (if I include both people I talked to and conversations related by other brigadistas) were critical. Second, we spent most of our time in Havana and, per that quote I mentioned earlier, the difference between the city and the country can be stark in Cuba. It’s possible that those Cubans living in the capital were better-off than those in more rural areas, but at the same time it is also possible that those campesin@s would be more grateful to improvements brought to them by the Revolution, particularly if they or anyone they know experienced life under the Batista regime.

Viva la Drinking Brigada ¶

The conversations within the Brigade, and within our own delegation, also provided some fascinating insights into the ongoing issues back home (remember, I’ve been away for the best part of a year, leaving as just about everyone seemed to be going on strike but before the Tories banned effective protest), the differences and similarities between different struggles around the world and some absolutely rogue political takes.

I had a lot of time to pick the brain of one particular (and perfectly affable) raging tankie, but from other conversations I think the conclusions I’m about to draw apply more broadly than just him. I do think that we are broadly trying to do a similar thing—expressing scepticism and seeking out information contrary to mainstream media narratives—but as far as I can tell, he (and others) seem to have drawn the correct conclusion that our own media and government collude and propagandise, but then chosen to respond with complete credulousness towards propaganda from other (in most cases far nastier) regimes. I’m sure he would reply that I’m a counter-revolutionary for not accepting the claims of benevolent workers’ dictatorships at face value, or that the pursuit of objective truth is a bourgeois delusion, and that I am foolish for not treating mainstream media accounts (or, for that matter, reports from Western human rights organisations)⁴⁸ as a priori invalid. But I would say that however much one opposes NATO/US imperialism/etc., the enemy of one’s enemy is not necessarily one’s friend; one can easily have two enemies at the same time.

With many on the Brigade, and certainly my tankie pal, there was also a marked tendency towards whataboutery.⁴⁹ A good example of this was an early conversation where someone asked what I thought about China, which I ended along the lines of genocide is bad. My interlocutor did agree in principle, and then there was a pause, after which he added that the US supporting Islamist terrorists in Xinjiang is also bad. Did the US do that? I don’t know, but it certainly sounds like something they’d do. Is that also a shitty thing to do? Yes. Does that being a shitty thing have any bearing on the shittiness of China’s ongoing abuse of the Uyghurs? No, and neither does the presence of Islamist terrorism whether US-supported or otherwise. The whole idea of crimes against humanity is that they can never be justified by circumstance. Perhaps this is a consequence of the materialist conception of the world, where the role of human agency is diminished in the face of powerful forces of history beyond our control, but whilst it can sometimes be appropriate to establish the reasons that have influenced some decision, the causal responsibility and the moral responsibility for a decision itself are two very distinct things. The tankies certainly aren’t so quick to provide exculpatory context for the dreadful treatment of Muslims by the US, UK or Israel.

As a consequence of my travels I became known immediately as Ben from Nicaragua, at least when people weren’t just calling me Trot or spycop. Quite a few people wanted to know what Nicaragua had been like, and I can’t shake the sense that I left a trail of disappointed communists when I described it as an oppressive dictatorship and told them that that Revolution had been betrayed. Then again, for avid readers of sites like the Grayzone, which for the last couple years has been full of pro-Ortega propaganda, it must have been quite the shock. I think they got over it, though, either by dismissing me as a trustworthy source or by arguing, as one did, that the Sandinistas had never be really leftist to begin with: they were apparently always just social democrats.

We shared our hotel with most of the other European, African and Asian delegations. I’ve been told that our hotel had been under refurbishment when the accommodation plans changed last-minute, and staff were still ferrying in furniture several days into our arrival. Eventually the pool opened up, and we were just down the road from a cluster of beachfront bars. The hotel also put on regular evening entertainment, with the Madreagua dance troupe sharing the Santería religion and other elements of Afro-Cuban culture with us. A video of me dancing with an African love goddess exists somewhere out there, but unfortunately the person who took it never shared it with me.⁵⁰

Of course, there were some interpersonal dramas within the contingent. Most were the inevitable result of throwing 50-odd mostly-strangers together for a fortnight of drinking, but a couple were more political in nature, and thus are of interest to his essay. For the most part the tankies were dismissed as just being a bit odd by the rest of the delegation, but they had a particular beef with one brigadista in particular that I believe pre-dates the trip. The interesting part is that I heard one of them describe this brigadista as having no politics. However, I was also told that that the allegedly apolitical brigadista had successfully unionised their own workforce, and (dare I say it) there may be more productive ways of being political than reading endless theory and casually dropping terms like petite-bourgeois into conversation.

There was also a small Korean delegation sharing our hotel, made up of a bunch of South Koreans dressed in Jeon Tae-il t-shirts and one Spanish guy who was studying at Pyongyang University and dressed in head-to-toe North Korea gear every day. They were approaching things very seriously, inviting other delegations for sit-down talks in the hotel lobby to discuss one another’s political situations and strategies; notes were taken. I somehow ended up as one of our representatives, and it was an interesting chat. They said that professing communism has been illegal in South Korea since 1948 and, whilst the others were indignant about this, I can’t help but feel that if Cuba gets the besieged city allowance then the same must surely apply to someone with North Korea as a neighbour. All of them, South and (honorary) North, were pro-reunification, but their geopolitical analysis was intriguing: they praised former president Moon Jae-in for pursuing peaceful reunification, and felt that the US had scuppered the efforts out of a desire to maintain a vassal state in Asia. They asked us if we thought China was imperialist, and one of our group used a thousand words to say no, at which point they simply replied we do; one Austrian guy who had decided to sit in on the conversation was so shocked that he literally jumped out of his chair and ran around to better hear. The Koreans stated that they felt China was blocking the peace process for the exact same reasons, out of a desire to maintain North Korea as its vassal. China doesn’t want unification, they said, they want North Korea for themselves. The Koreans, as they considered themselves, are pawns.

But perhaps the most interesting conversations were with one of our contingent who I think is the wrongest human being I have ever had the pleasure to talk to, and whose wrongness is archetypical of several issues I’ve noticed across the Left, and certainly amidst this brigade. However, he was uncommonly direct in articulating his wild ideas, and oddly forthcoming about them, which made him the perfect avenue for exploring his (and, by extension, others who are less willing to admit it’s) worldview. But I’ll do that in an appendix.

International Solidarity Conference ¶

At the end of our time in Havana, we attended the International Meeting of Solidarity with Cuba at the Palacio de Convenciones.

Opening ¶

The conference opened with a panel, moderated by President Miguel Díaz-Canel and featuring various Cuban politicos and several international guests, including our own CSC Director Rob Miller.

Ulises Guilarte, General Secretary of the CTC, gave the introductory speech, talking about how the May Day celebrations had been rescheduled to May 5. Díaz-Canel then spoke briefly, saying that the main cause of our problems is resisting, after which Anayansi Camejo, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, took the stage. She started by quoting Fidel Castro to say that international solidarity with Cuba is on the rise, and that Cuba had a responsibility not just to its own people, but to others who look to it as an example as well.⁵¹

She then lamented the impacts of the US sanctions, asking how much more could be done by our doctors without this blockade? She complained that Cuban businesses were deprived of access to US markets and criticised the listing of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, saying Cuba does not sponsor terrorism, it is a victim of it. She pointed out that the US let the airline bomber live a quiet life in Florida, and she stressed that Cuba does not sponsor terrorism, it sponsors peace; it does not sell arms or do assassinations. She quoted Castro again, from the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, saying what the imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here. She stressed that we want to be equal neighbours with the US.

She then highlighted Cuba’s hosting of the third round of ceasefire talks between the Colombian government and the FARC, and listed several other struggles in which Cuba had intervened: Palestinian liberation; Sahrawi nationalism; the Bolivarian Alliance; US reparations for slavery; and Puerto Rican independence, with her describing Cuba and Puerto Rico as two wings of the same bird. She stressed that Cuba has a firm commitment to the UN Charter, to international law and multilateralism, but would always resist efforts to make everyone follow US rules. The weapons of the Cuban Revolution, she said, will continue to be humanitarianism, solidarity and two other things I didn’t catch. She closed by again quoting Castro: the world has been in solidarity with Cuba … Cuba has experienced what solidarity is about.⁵²

We then broke up into one of five workshops each:

• Anti-imperialist unity against the Monroe Doctrine;
• Young workers;
• Women for Peace;
• Challenges of the Working Class Around the World; and
• What Can International Solidarity Movements Do to Help End the Blockade?

Discussing US foreign policy didn’t seem particularly relevant to me, and I reasoned that the challenges of the working class around the world would be far removed from the challenges for it in the UK (or, for that matter, my own white-collar world of IT), so I went to the final workshop, which appealed because of its practical focus.

Workshop: What Can International Solidarity Movements Do to Help End the Blockade? ¶

Gerardo Hernández Nordelo again moderated, along with the Vice President of ICAP Victor Gaute López. The workshop took the form of a series of 3-minute interventions, mostly scheduled in advance.

First up, the Ambassador for the Sahrawi Republic spoke about how they are the only Spanish-speaking country in the Arab world, as a legacy of colonialism. He pointed out that it was the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Polisario Front this year, and said that the blockade was better than white phosphorous and bombs being launched against Cuba.

He was followed by a Palestinian activist, who thanked Cuba for providing him a scholarship to study medicine there. He mentioned Khader Adnan, who had died earlier that morning in an Israeli prison after an 88-day hunger strike. He again thanked Cuba for t[eaching] us that the Palestinian cause is one of the most just causes in the world, and for Cuban support … always be[ing] unconditional. He closed by highlighting that this year marked the 75^th anniversary of the Nakba, that there were over 250 martyrs whose bodies Israel had not returned to their families and that 157 Palestinians have been killed this year alone, most between 20–25 years old.

Another speaker thanked Cuba for its support for the Colombian peace process. One of the organisers of the Canadian Che Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade, which has been coming to Cuba for three decades, pointed out that the Canucks were standing side-by-side with the US delegation. He quoted Che, saying that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. An Ethiopian delegate announced that expressing solidarity to Cuba is, to me, a duty. The heads of two of the American delegations delivered a joint statement.

Unfortunately, almost all of the interventions were completely unrelated to the topic of the workshop. Barely anyone had any suggestions for how to work against the blockade; just a lot of warm words. The two speakers who did have something worthwhile to say were one delegate who said that if each of us can convince a couple people to come to Cuba as tourists, to spend money here, we are doing our part to break down the blockade, and then our own Rob Miller who talked about a current CSC campaign, but I’m not clear if this is public yet so I’ll remain schtum. During his intervention, he mentioned that following the passage of the Helms–Burton Act, the EU, the UK and others passed legislation designed to protect their people from any sanctions.

The final speaker was Chris Smalls, founder and president of the Amazon Labour Union, who the Yanks had brought with them on the Brigade. Whilst what he’s achieved is certainly very impressive, and he’s probably one of the most interesting and effective labour organisers currenly active, getting called one of the most influential people of 2022 and the future of labor by Time seems to have gone to his head: he mostly spent the conference drifting around taking photos with giddy Americans and being filmed doing so by his entourage of cameramen; he gave a clearly unprepared speech about why we should all work to unionise Amazon that stood out as rambling even amidst a workshop rife with it;⁵³ and he was dressed like an absolute pillock.

Plenary ¶

We regrouped in the main hall for a closing speech from Díaz-Canel. Unfortunately, all of the seats with live translation headphones were taken by Spanish-speakers who weren’t using them, so after a while I left. From the bits I could pick up, and everything I’d heard over the past week, I was pretty sure I could piece together a pretty accurate idea of what the speech involved: blockade this; viva la revolución that; Castro quotes peppered throughout.

Photo by the author

Some time later, Granma published a translated transcript of the speech.⁵⁴ And yeah, I was pretty much bang on. He started by talking about how in Cuba it’s the workers who are in power, affirmed everyone present’s support for human solidarity … and the causes pursued by the peoples for their true emancipation and quoted the Internationale. He talked about the Monroe Doctrine, he complained about the blockade and he stressed that three processes of participative democracy [the Código Familia referendum, plus municipal assembly and ANPP elections] staged just in the last six months, show the people’s trust in the Revolution, the boundless effort to ensure social justice at its core, and in the leadership of the revolutionary process (emphasis mine, as he didn’t mention that abstention in elections that used to see near 100% turnout has reached record highs).

Later, he addressed criticisms of Cuba’s commitment to socialism:

I would have liked to have seen him justify his commitment to specifically authoritarian state socialism, but alas. He then addressed the history of the Cuban Revolution, acknowledging but also challenging its position within the Soviet bloc:

He made the very valid point that it is incredible that our ability to develop is constrained by two laws of another country, referring to the Torricelli Act and the Helms–Burton Act, before building to a rhetorically excellent crescendo:

He concluded his speech with a fun story about revolutionary optimism:

But astute readers will notice that I have skipped over a big chunk of the speech and, unfortunately, in between those two snippets, Díaz-Canel couldn’t help but trip over his own dick:

And here the rhetoric of human solidarity and emancipation hit the brick wall of the company the Cuban government keeps: a right-wing dictator, shouted-out-to by name, draped in the tattered flag of a past revolution who now guns down his own youth, impoverishes his people for his own enrichment and denies women the basic human rights that the Cubans keep stressing are an indispensible part of true social justice; and the Syrian regime—which has been enthusiastically running its way through the crimes against humanity bingo card for decades now, which is responsible for torturing to death over 14,000 of its people over the past ten years alone and which is now routinely detaining, abusing and disappearing returning refugees—gets to enjoy close, friendly bonds because of its rejection of terrorism.

Cuba has also long been one of the North Korean regime’s staunchest allies.⁵⁵ Díaz-Canel has been on a jolly to that delightful spot already; I wonder why he neglected to shout them out in his speech?⁵⁶ Cuba, even in its current authoritarian form, deserves so much better than to share space with monstrous regimes like these, and it pains me to see it debase itself like this. Instead, let me close this section with an example of how a truly revolutionary statement of international solidarity can sound:

Spíritused Away ¶

For the final few days of the Brigade, we headed out of Havana and off to the province of Sancti Spíritus: home to one of the most important sites of the Revolution, some charming colonial towns and perfect beaches.

Che (Hey Hey) ¶

On the way we stopped off at the town of Santa Clara, which holds particular significance for the Cuban Revolution. It was here that the Revolution was won, and it is here that the remains of one of its great heroes were laid to rest.

Photo by the author

We started at the Che Guevara Mausoleum, a sprawling complex comprising a huge statue, a tiled plaza and a mausoleum. Here we took an all-brigade photo, but I’m unsure which of the 300-odd phones it was taken on.

Then we headed into the town to visit the Tren Blindando, which commemorates the Battle of Santa Clara: the decisive battle of the Cuban Revolution in which Guevara and his suicide squad managed to ambush a heavily-armoured train carrying thousands of soldiers of the Batista regime en route to reinforce their forces elsewhere. 340 guerrillas attacked a force of 3,900 and forced their surrender; within 12 hours of the victory, the dictator had fled Cuba and the Revolution was victorious.

We then returned to the Mausoleum, where we queued up to shuffle past the crypt in which Guevara’s remains, alongside those of several of his comrades, were interred following their repatriation from Bolivia in 1997; an eternal flame flickered off to the side. Then we went through the Che Museum, where another brigadista asked me what I thought of the man. My response could be summed as mixed, but I don’t think I articulated myself very well at the time, so here we go for another attempt:

Che was and is three very different things: a man; a myth; and a legend. As a man he was both remarkable and flawed, as all men are. Bimbling my own way through Latin America for the past year, I obviously feel some common cause with the idealistic young middle class boy of the Motorcycle Diaries, who seems an eminently likable guy with a poetic turn of phrase.⁵⁷ As a military tactician he was unusually skilled, as the Battle of Santa Clara (and many other battles besides) can attest. He was clearly brave, often very creative and seems to have behaved chivalrously in battle (at least as regards his treatment of the regular regime soldiers). He clearly deserves the adoration the Cubans lay at his feet; without him, they probably would not have their country. He did a lot of good work post-Revolution, such as the Literacy Brigades, and I respect him for realising that his true calling lay elsewhere after his disastrous attempt to be a banker:

Photo by the author

There are criticisms often made of him that lack legitimacy. Mainstream sources often claim that he was privately racist, or openly homophobic and participated in the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba. However, these claims seem to revolve around a mixture of invented quotations from far-right activists and genuine quotations from the Motorcycle Diaries that reflect his young sheltered rich kid upbringing more than anything, and which he repudiates in the book’s closing passage; his actions fighting against Apartheid, in the Congo and so on serve to challenge this alleged racism.⁵⁸ It’s also often claimed that he was overzealous in the post-Revolution executions of Batista-era officials, but many of these were war criminals by any measure and his personal bloodthirstiness (at least at this point in time) is disputed; to quote Che biographer John Lee Anderson:

However, that does not mean there are not legitimate criticisms to be made as well. For me, the biggest obstacle to hagiography is his growing fanaticism and detachment from reality, which was clearly incipient even in his early days, but which definitely metastasised over time:

Just after the Cuban missile crisis—the closest humanity has ever come to nuclear annihilation—he declared that if the rockets had been under Cuban control they would have retaliated against any US aggression by shooting the Yankee boats out of the water and firing on US cities;⁵⁹ we can all be very grateful that he was nowhere near the big red button, and it shows the change from the younger man who had sent back a postcard from Japan that read in order to fight better for peace, one must look at Hiroshima. If anything, Guevara’s growing unhingedness gives me more respect for Castro for managing to reign him in quite effectively.

By the time he went to Bolivia to try and provoke revolution without any knowledge of the ground, and having made no effort to forge support amongst the people there, his former military genius had devolved into banditry and nincompoopery; the Bolivians turned him in to the military, and why wouldn’t they? He was an annoyance and a threat that they felt no common cause with, largely through his own decisions. In sum:

But where the man Che ended, the legend Che carried on. The Bolivian Army, when they published the photo of his corpse accidentally laid out in a Christlike pose (and later removed his hands for identification, with predictable echoes of the stigmata), scored perhaps the greatest political own goal of the last century.⁶⁰ This, along with Korda’s famous photo, served to guarantee him a permanent place in the pantheon of worldwide revolutionary heroes. As is the case for all historical figures, the flow of time has served to smooth of his rougher edges and leave only a series of his greatest moments. In this way, he can serve as a positive example, and no doubt this legend has gone on to inspire many fine acts. Like all historical heroes, he has become a partially-fictionalised simulacra of himself, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

When I was in Nicaragua, I stayed in a building that also housed an office of the Organización de Revolucionarios Deshabilitados “Ernesto Che Guevara”. One of the Nicas I worked with talked of how Che was an inspiration to him, a warrior and a man who helped us gain our freedom. I didn’t understand this last part at the time as I couldn’t find any evidence that Che had ever been to Nicaragua, or involved in the Sandinista Revolution, but I eventually realised I was misinterpreting two parts of the statement: by we, he meant both the Nicaraguans specifically and the Latin Americans in general, due to Che’s important role in the solidification of a united, anti-imperialist Latino identity; and by helped, he didn’t mean by providing training or engaging in combat, but by the promulgation of his ideas in works like Guerrilla Warfare and giving the people the confidence that they could fight their oppressors, and that they could win. The great irony here is that if or when the next generation of Nicaraguans overthrow their current dictator, many of them will probably be wearing Che shirts as they do so. They won’t be being hypocritical or naive, just as most skaters probably don’t know many details about the life of Andre the Giant; Che’s face has just become a symbol of a vague group affiliation and opposition to illegitimate power, largely disconnected from the flesh-and-blood revolutionary to whom it once belonged.

Lastly, when I say the mythic Che, I mean the way in which the legend Che intersects with Latin American religiosity. This is very much my observation as an outsider looking in, but Christianity here is full of religious icons, be they in small roadside chapels and or in paintings inside every small business, asking for the saints’ protections and blessings. There’s everything from saints that bridge indigenous beliefs and Catholicism to saints who shag your wife whilst you’re away. Within this cultural milieu, I think the image of Che has become yet another holy figure, whose protection can be invoked and who will invariably watch out for the poor and the exploited; for example, in Mexico I saw small businesses with banners announcing their membership in an anti-protection-racket collective, and besides that text was a familiar face.

This legacy is a fitting monument to who Che was, at his best moments, and it would be callous to deny his importance to a people who deserve all the sense of security they can derive from it. It doesn’t really matter that I have my issues with Che the man; we’re barely even talking about the same person.

Sancti Spíritus ¶

We arrived in Sancti Spíritus several hours later, and were welcomed by provincial officials outside the Monumento a los Mártires in the centre of the city. Then we split off into our separate hotels; whilst we hadn’t seen much of the American delegation thusfar as they were in a different hotel to us, here we would be sharing with them.

The following day we visited UEB Genética “Dos Ríos”, where we heard about their collective cattle ranch.⁶¹ Then we headed to the Hospital Provincial “Camilo Cienfuegos”, part of the second tier of the three-tier Cuban healthcare system (which comprises per-town family doctors, per-city polyclinics/hospitals and per-region specialist institutions). We heard from the hospital’s director and the head of its union. They told us about the structure of the Cuban healthcare system, the facilities they had to work with and their contribution to Cuba’s famed medical brigades: the back of the lecture hall was filled with medical staff and he asked all those who had participated in an overseas mission to raise their hands, whereupon they received a standing ovation.

A slight dampener was placed on the situation by one of the Yanks, who kept loudly talking over people asking questions. One of our brigadistas politely asked her to be quiet, at which point she flipped out and kicked off, including grabbing them by the shoulders and attempting to force them to turn back around. Our brigadista (with maturity I doubt I’dve been able to muster in her shoes) moved to another seat rather than escalate the situation, but when her neighbour tried to tell the American to be quiet, she changed tack and started booting off about white people denying black people spaces. Try as he might, not even one of the black members of our own delegation could convince her to stop.

This, it should again be stressed, during a lecture in a hospital as part of a solidarity brigade we are all members of.

Next up we visited one of the neighbourhoods under transformation that we’d heard about in the first lecture, as part of the government’s response to the conditions that it asserts led to the 2021 protests. We saw another performance from the kids and visited the local clinic, where we heard about the Cuban mother-and-child medical programme that provides support for things like routine vaccinations. Then a bunch of the kids hitched a ride on our ancient schoolbus, and we treated them to a cultural exchange:

Later that night we attended a block party in another neighbourhood, put on by the CDRs there. We drank, we danced and had a jolly good time, although Rob did pick a bad time to give a speech (i.e., after we were all rather drunk). A couple blocks away, the Cubans were firing absolute zingers at the Americans.

Photo by the author

The International Incident ¶

We headed back to our hotel and continued the drinking. With one assault under our belts that day, relations between us and the Yanks were strained. Whilst some of our delegation have occasionally let themselves down with respect to the Americans (e.g., booing them when they asked questions in Q&As), the Cubans had been models of hospitality. I think it’s clear that they view the Americans as the most valuable people to get on-side (for obvious practical reasons), and so the Yanks had been getting the best hotels, best visits (e.g., the Latin American School of Medicine and a personal sit-down with the president) and effusive praise every time they asked a question. I think the whole dynamic was best captured when we arrived at the hotel and the Cubans unfurled various flags, including the stars and stripes: a nice welcoming gesture (and probably the only US flag then flying in the whole country), to which some of our group assumed the Yanks had put it up themselves and started talking about nicking it later that night. At least the Cubans seem to know their friends from their enemies, and they are always at great pains to stress that they have no issue with the American people, only the US government.

And so I was very heartened that it appeared we had put aside our differences for a trans-Atlantic dance-off that night. I was sat with my back to the dancefloor, but when I saw one of our brigadistas walk past with a face like thunder, I knew there was something worth watching going on behind me. Sure enough, the dancefloor had descended into chaos, with several people screaming and holding one another back as the lights went up and the music cut out. Things eventually calmed down and the Yanks skulked off to sit in the dark by the pool whilst crisis talks within our delegation continued for several hours.

Near as I can tell, the problems began when one of the Americans took it upon themselves to determine which songs we were or were not eligible to request from the DJ (apparently Kanye West is theirs). She then repeatedly trod on a crutch-bound brigadista’s plaster cast-wrapped foot and nearly started a mass brawl with the immortal line above. Someone (white) told her she was being an embarrassment, so for good measure she retorted that your whole race is an embarrassment. Whilst I spent a lot of this trip running defence for the Yanks amidst the more exuberant members of our brigade, this was the third bizarre incident in as many days, as well as the second time in 24 hours that they had physically assaulted one of our group. Nothing was done about it and, as some of our brigadistas rightly pointed out, brushing the hospital incident under the carpet had all but guaranteed this result.

From what I could gather, the US contingent in the hotel with us was made up of several groups who largely didn’t know one another before coming. There was a core of pretty normal young Cuba solidarity activists who were fine, a small group of older black guys and gals who’d been coming to Cuba for decades who were also sound (and had been sharing some excellent stories; I’d heard suggestion that they may have been former Panthers, which would seem to check out), plus a group from the Black Alliance for Peace in matching t-shirts who I didn’t speak to. On top of this coalition, though, was a small group of unknown affiliation who could perhaps be described as belligerent nutters, racial obsessives⁶² or—and apologies for the tricky political science terminology here—giant throbbing cocks. We heard from some of the normal guys that they had apparently been sidelined by these kooks within their own delegation, and some of our own (black) delegates felt that they were trying to transpose the incredibly fucked-up racial politics of the US onto everywhere else in the world without regard to how the realities differ; how quintessentially American. To top it all off, this explosive coalition was being held together by the pair of teenagers who were the contingent co-ordinators (although no shade to them, the one I spoke to was nice enough and it’s an impressive achievement on both their parts).

May Day, at Long Last ¶

There was no time to dwell the following morning: it was time for us to join the (belated) May Day festivities! Hundreds of people lined the streets and many more participated in the march itself: schools; unions; youth clubs; and more, to which we added our own varied delegations. This was actually my first-ever May Day parade; go hard or go home.

Ruaraidh

Ruaraidh

Cuba Solidarity Campaign

We followed the parade with an afternoon in the colonial city of Trinidad. It was incredibly quiet (I think we were there in the off-season), but even by the high standards of some of the other colonial cities I’ve visited on this trip it was beautiful. We embarked on a walking tour, but a group of us decided pretty quickly that we’d rather sit at a rooftop bar and take in the ambience of the city rather than learn about the origin of the rocks used to build it, so we gave them the slip.

Then we all headed to the gobsmackingly gorgeous Playa Ancón, where the sun was shining and the bars was all free. We all ended up in the water before long and a regular stream of brigadistas carrying armfuls of cuba libres, entire two-litre water bottles filled with beer, or sometimes both kept our thirsts well-quenched. For hours. I can count on one hand the times I’ve been that drunk, and I’m sure by the end of it we were largely swimming in a pool of spilt alcohol, but the aquatic conga lines were well worth it.

Photo by the author

As an odd sideshow, the crutch-basher from the night before made a point of coming up to two of our black delegates (but not, as far as I’m aware, the crutch-bashee) to not-really-apologise for the night before. I then watched her spill her drink all over another of our brigadistas, who had sitting on the steps beside her happily minding her own business. I have no idea if this was intentional or is this person just cannot help being the biggest weapon on the planet,⁶³ but I was pretty astounded by the whole scene.

We returned to the hotel and the drinking continued. Tentative trans-Atlantic dancing resumed again, but the lunatic fringe showed no signs of showing up and the night passed without incident, except that some wag decided to push me into the pool whilst I had my phone in my pocket: one stream of obscenities later I was in my room trying to assess and mitigate the damage to the best of my incredibly inebriated ability. Then I decided that the vibe was gone and the night was over for me.

The following day that same wag donated her own phone to the cause of Ben needs some way to access his boarding pass to leave the country (along with other practical issues that gradually piled up over the course of the morning).⁶⁴ We all headed back to Havana, stopping for lunch en route. Me and the other brigadista who would be staying in Cuba worked the room saying our goodbyes, and then the others set off towards the airport whilst we got ripped off for a taxi to the city.

Alone in Havana ¶

Connectivity in Cuba is difficult at the best of times, but I can hardly think of a worse place to have to rebuild one’s digital affairs. I’ve already had to go through this once on this trip, from the middle of the jungle no less, and this was infinitely more of a ballache. At least that first run had taught me some hard lessons about how I had my stuff arranged that helped to mitigate some of the damage the second time around.

ICAP sorted me out with a hotel room and I had a chance to say goodbye to some of the other delegations, who we hadn’t seen much of since leaving Havana several days earlier. Then they hooked me up with a casa particular to stay in, but it lacked Wi-Fi and the nearest hotel’s connection was incredibly flaky, so I had to move. I looked up other casas on Airbnb and tried to book with one, but I first had to set up an account. Then I had to go through several steps of validation, like sending a picture of my ID, all of which failed for different reasons; I don’t know which, if any, were blockade-related. All of this was taking place as I tried to squeeze their godawful bloated React monstrosity of a site through a slow, temperamental and time-limited Wi-Fi connection, on an unfamiliar phone loaded with stock Android and all the bullshit that that includes.

I eventually messaged a host directly rather than booking through the site and arranged to meet them somewhere. I then nearly made myself homeless by accident when I checked out of my current place and headed across the city, and then I couldn’t find the host and had no means of contacting them. After waiting for half an hour longer than agreed I headed to the nearest hotel, where they told me the Wi-Fi was only for guests and I would have to walk several blocks to the nearest ETECSA store. I must’ve looked every bit as stressed and harried as I felt, because one of the receptionists gave me a Wi-Fi card to use and I eventually managed to link up with my host. I sincerely hope that anyone who works at Airbnb catches a non-fatal but irritating disease that is easily treated if caught on time, but they are unable to book the appointment because their GP’s Web site asks them to provide loads of unnecessary details first; I am pleased that me not booking through the site means that the host got to keep all of the fees they usually take out.

I spent the next several days catching up on work with my lovely, reliable and unlimited casa Wi-Fi connection, and checking out pretty much every eatery within three blocks: shout-out to Los Nardos and its weird fake-indoor-street-façade aesthetic. I also managed to get my old phone to turn on long enough to extract all of my photos and notes before the touchscreen started to freak out; I’m leaving it off now until I’m back in the UK.

Me and the other brigadista met up a couple of times, visiting the famous Hotel Nacional where the service was terrible, but we had a very interesting political conversation, which included at least one mild epiphany regarding my own sense of internationalism and affinity for the Kurdish movement, but that’s a story for another time. Even as someone who’s been to a few colonial cities now, Havana really was something else, and bizarrely the city it reminded me most of was Rome; something to do with the grandiosity and age of its buildings, the sheer number of them covered in scaffolding or hollowed-out and the unexpected ways in which historical artefacts kept cropping up in repurposed form:

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

We met up again on my final day in the city to visit the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, which housed a bunch of very snazzy Bauhaus pieces, followed by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which had an excellent collection of Cuban art from a variety of periods. The ’50s–’60s were definitely a dull period for Cuban art as everyone seemed to just copy Picasso, Pollock and the rest, but pre- and post-that there was plenty to enjoy,⁶⁵ and I thought some were surprisingly spicy for the political climate in Cuba; perhaps good Party members don’t tend to visit art galleries.

I’ve always been more of a museum guy than a gallery one, and said so: my compa retorted that museums were bad and imperialist, which I didn’t immediately grasp until I realised she was talking about colonial plunderhouses like the British Museum. When I think museum my first thought is the National Museum of Computing near Bletchley Park, which I can’t really see upsetting anyone. We both agreed, though, that portrait galleries were terrible.

Painting by Pedro Álvarez

Painting by José Toirac and Tanya Angulo

Painting by Marcelo Pogolotti

Painting by Gilberto de la Nuez

Painting by Marcelo Pogolotti

Painting by Rafael Zarza

Installation by Lázaro Saavedra González

Installation by Carlos Consuelo Castañeda Castellanos

Painting by Juan Moreira Bencomo

Painting by Marcelo Pagolotti

Painting by Carlos Enríquez

Installation by René Francisco Rodríguez and Eduardo Ponjuán González

Painting by Tomás Sánchez

Statues by Alberto Lescay Merencio

Painting by Flavio Garciandia de Oraá

Installation by Carlos Alberto Estévez Carasa

And, just like that, it was finally time for me to leave. I had a bit of a strange interaction at the entrance to the airport when a guy demanded to know my destination and to see my passport before he’d let me in; I can only imagine that he was on the lookout for Cubans trying to leave,⁶⁶ but I don’t really see what function he served that the check-in agent didn’t already (unless the danger was that the check-in agents worked for the airlines, not the government). Then, because I just never learn, I settled in for another long night of trying to sleep in an airport.

My flight was at 6am, and I still had a load of Cuban pesos to spend. The government have shut down the official exchange points, so it’s not possible to convert pesos back into foreign currency. Unfortunately, despite what the signs on their desks claimed, none of the shops in the terminal were actually 24-hours. I managed to buy a copy of the Motorcycle Diaries (in Spanish) from one woman just as she was closing up, but that still left me with a big wad of notes that would soon be worthless. I found a couple of open cafés that would only take foreign currency and a book shop that had a few books I would have bought, but it didn’t open until 6:30; the woman running the only open shop a few doors down refused to take my money to give to the book shopkeeper when they showed up, and I didn’t fancy serving myself and risking getting arrested on my way out of the country.

In the end I gave about $60 worth of pesos to the cleaning ladies as I was queueing to board the plane, or several times their monthly salaries; how’s that for wealth redistribution?

Conclusions ¶

Photo by the author

My time in Cuba was fascinating, both the organised and the unorganised activities and the discussions I had throughout the three weeks. That is, in part, why this has taken me over a month to write up and why it is so long: I had a lot of things to process, a lot of research to do and a lot to say about my experience. Whatever someone may think of my political perspective, I don’t think anyone could accuse me of being unfair in this report.

So what conclusions have I drawn from this experience? I’ll break each part into its own section below, and whilst each should stand alone they are also intended to build on one another.

Democracy with Constrained Characteristics ¶

Let me state at the outset that I am far from prescriptive when it comes to what is and isn’t democracy. I once derailed a good chunk of my Master’s dissertation learning enough Greek to define a tree traversal mechanism that could be used to argue for giving dogs the vote, for example. In the second chapter of that dissertation, I argued for:

I was by no means convinced even then that the systems of representative practices in the likes of the UK and the US, with their periodic elections and delegation of responsibility, are the one and only means of guaranteeing democracy, concluding that …representative democracy is more accurately described as democratically-elected oligocracy. In the years since I wrote that I have become more and more convinced that the electoral systems of these liberal democracies are in fact a profoundly undemocratic and disempowering force, even without the addition of expressly anti-majoritarian features like first-past-the-post in the UK and the Electoral College in the US. In this I am very influenced by way in which the term democracy is used within the Kurdish Freedom Movement, which emphasises autonomy and mass participation at all levels as indispensable components of a truly democratic society and which often talks of creating democratic modernity as opposed to the current state of capitalist modernity.⁶⁷

All of this is to say that I am primed to appreciate the Cuban democratic project, at least as it exists in theory. The actual process of voting, as I’ve addressed already, seems to be sufficiently secret and non-compulsory (and the Pioneers who traditionally guard the ballot boxes are adorable), though nosy neighbours can be far more of a threat to one’s well-being in an authoritarian state like Cuba than elsewhere; we arrived too late to witness the elections in person, and I would have very much liked to have done so. Many structural aspects of the system seem designed to promote bottom-up representation; for example,⁶⁸ elected Municipal Delegates make up to 50 per cent of the National and Provincial Assemblies [which] ensures that local people are fully part of all governmental bodies and creates strong links between the National Assembly and communities throughout the island. Similarly, people cannot nominate themselves [as candidates for the municipal assemblies], and neither can the PCC nominate: it must be the residents in the ward who nominate the candidates. The deprofessionalisation of the legislature though the lack of a salary and part-time nature of the role is also, to my mind, desirable, as is the ban on campaigning.

However, this only applies at the municipal—i.e., lowest—level, and the Party controls the nomination process for the higher levels of the system to ensure that they maintain control over the actual direction of the state. The membership of the Candidacy Commissions are supposed to ensur[e] that the National Assembly reflects all sectors of Cuban society, including workers from the state and non-state sectors, members of the mass organisations, farmers, nationally known figures from the arts and sports, members of the armed forces, women, people of colour, all age-ranges, and from all parts of the island, but the Assembly only meets a couple times per year, and the Council of State is not quite so representative.

Fundamentally, though, choices within unreasonable constraints are not choices all, and so whether or not one thinks the Cubans have a real say in the composition and working of their government hinges on whether or not one thinks the constraints imposed are reasonable. Because the Communist Party of Cuba is the only party allowed to operate within the country, and despite it’s constitutional ban on being directly involved in elections, it has a hugely dominant role in the political system of the country despite it’s membership only being 700,000 (~6% of a population of around 11m). Despite representing a tiny fraction of the population, Reuters claim that all top level government and military officials are party members, as are most lower-level functionaries, and leaders of labor and other mass organizations, and even a more sympathetic source said in 2015 that 59.24% of those elected are members of the PCC, while 6.75% are members of the Union of Young Communists (UJC).⁶⁹

The only evidence I can find that there have ever been opposition candidates running in a Cuban election is these two guys in 2015 (which the previous source declined to mention, despite its seeming lack of historical precedent).⁷⁰ However, there are apparently other prospective opposition candidates who, it is alleged, are denied the chance to run for one reason or another. One article claims that vote share has no impact on the positions gained by elected officials, which does suggest that it is largely a rubber-stamping exercise; recall that the ANPP only meets for a few days every year, with day-to-day legislating being handled by the Council of State, and that Mariela Castro is seemingly the only person to have ever voted against a piece of legislation.

I’ve heard it argued that this all merely represents the formal codification of an often-unspoken reality within liberal democratic systems; that is, whilst we may have a proliferation of parties, they ultimately all represent the interests of the wealthy and the neoliberal world order.⁷¹ And certainly, we’ve seen in both the UK and US in recent years that when a socialist (even a moderate one) does try to run for high office, the powers-that-be are merciless in their fearmongering and character assassination. However, whilst the UK’s billionaire press did lose their collective goddamn minds over Corbyn, there was no risk of him being jailed for opposing the dominant ideology and no attempts to drive his car (or, I supposed, Chairman Mao-style bicycle) off the road. Similarly, there is no suggestion that the vote counts of the 2017 and 2019 general elections were illegitimate, meaning that even if the media coverage will have given many a distorted view, Corbynism failed to win over a sufficient number of voters for other reasons besides this (in the latter case, I imagine mostly Brexit). All this is to say that, whilst the deck is most certainly stacked within our own system, this just does not compare to Cuba where the deck is a load of copies of the same card and you risk jail for proposing a game of anything other than 52-Card Pickup.

So, Cubans’ only means of expressing dissent through their electoral system is through abstention, and the two possible forms of this seem to be massively on the rise: turnout in elections that took place shortly before we arrived was only 75%, down from a normal baseline of near 100% for the duration of Fidel’s reign; and the number of people voting selectively from the list of candidates provided has doubled from ~5–9% under Fidel to ~20%. I think the contrast in turnout between the 2019 constitutional referendum (~90%) and the 2023 parliamentary (~75%) and 2022 municipal (~69%) elections may be illustrative of this dissent;⁷² it would make sense that the former was viewed as a way to effect actual change, though within limitations, whilst the others are not (although the low municipal turnout would run counter my theory that there is at least low-level democratic engagement in Cuba). This is also why Torres Corona’s point about the relatively small scale of the July 11 protests is disingenuous; that they happened at all is remarkable (and, whilst I was in Havana following the Brigade, there was another protest in Guantánamo Province that led to the Internet being shut down for 24 hours).

The Cuban state’s (or, more accurately, every state’s) go-to response to accusations of repression is to point at external and internal threats, but what struck me was that no real attempt was made to outright deny that the repression existed throughout the trip; it was just ignored, not mentioned. Sometimes, it was indirectly implied to be necessary to defend the Revolution, and I am somewhat sympathetic to this argument: the Cuban Revolution (and the Party that considers itself its steward) has been facing an existential threat from the most powerful empire humanity has ever seen for sixty years. We’re not just talking times of war here, we’re talking times of absolutely cartoonish villainy: take, for example, Operation Peter Pan, where the CIA and the Catholic Church conspired to spread fear amongst Cuban parents that the government were about to nationalise their children. They then facilitated the exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied minors (some as young as 6), many of whom suffered abuse and neglect in their new homes and perhaps as many as 10% of whom were never reunited with their parents. There have, historically, been no depths to which the US is unwilling to sink against Cuba, and in that light it makes a lot more sense why the government wants to keep a tight grip on the information reaching its citizens (amongst other, more normal state reasons like suppressing criticism and maintaining control).

Also, in the face of such pressures, it is unlikely that the UK or US would brook much criticism: this is not speculation, we have the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 from the First World War, the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939 from the Second and the Terrorism Act 2006 and the USA PATRIOT Act from the War on Terror, along with pandemic restrictions on speech, assembly, etc. When faced with a threat, be it military, economic, disease or otherwise, the state will encroach on people’s rights to guarantee its own security.

The other reason I am somewhat sympathetic to the Cuban government argument is that the UDHR lists 30 rights, of which the rights to freedom of expression (art. 19) and peaceful assembly (art. 20) are only two: where these are fairly well-established in the UK and US (current Tory/Republican attempts to restrict them notwithstanding), we’re backtracking on guaranteeing others such as the right to asylum (art. 14). Some are potentially better achieved through alternate systems (e.g., the right to democracy [art. 21], which sounds like it could well be better served by the more participatory Cuban system that we have been shown than our own system of five-yearly elections of careerist PPE graduates and atrocious wankers) and on some, the Cubans are leaps and bounds ahead of us (e.g., the right to education [art. 26], taking into account their far more limited resources).

But there is certainly a viciousness to a lot of their rhetoric around dissidents,⁷³ as well as all of the well-document allegations of physical brutality and persistent harassment. Even beyond Díaz-Canel calling for people to fight the July 11 protests in the street, the constant talk about shadowy counter-revolutionaries who are all US-funded foreign agents really starts to wear. For one, it often makes very little sense: nobody starves themselves to death for a pay cheque from Uncle Sam. For two, it can serve to confuse cause and effect: yes, the US probably does recruit and train individuals for the purpose of destabilising the Cuban government, but likely far more common is that they find people who have organically decided they are against the system they live in for whatever reason, and support them because their interests are aligned. That doesn’t make those people paid shills, and it doesn’t inherently make their complaints illegitimate; the Cuban government’s repression may well put them in a position where they have no means to make a living beyond what the US offers them. It’s telling that so many of the new generation of dissidents, like Yoani Sánchez, are young; they weren’t there for the triumph of the Revolution or the almost apocalyptic ideological struggle of the Cold War, they just know the Cuba of today that they have been born into and think it could be improved in ways the current system does not allow.

To quote Amartya Sen, democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes.. Despite the risks, Cubans (and especially young Cubans) are increasingly speaking out. Those that do not speak out publicly are clearly making their dissatisfaction known through the limited electoral means available to them, as I’ve said. Given the inherent ambiguity of abstention figures and the like it’s hard to tell exactly what message they’re trying to send; are they annoyed with the PCC and its authoritarianism, or with the entire socialist project? So whilst I do think there is some form of genuine participative democracy happening in Cuba, at least at the lower levels, it is highly constrained and has little to no sway in the upper echelons of government. I do understand that there are practical reasons for this—Bolender writes in Voices from the Other Side that the Cuban side has determined unity to be a crucial weapon in combating terrorism, subsequently developing a low tolerance for anything that is seen to be jeopardizing strength of patria, and the paranoia of the PCC is certainly not without cause—but if they really believed their own rhetoric about the people standing behind them (the Party) through thick and thin, they would have nothing to fear from giving the people a means to contradict them, and to be clear on exactly why they were doing so. Or perhaps the voters would give the Party its first unquestionable mandate to continue on.

A Blockade for All Occasions ¶

One thing that kept coming up, in every single talk we heard or visit we made, was the blockade. Now, obviously, the blockade is hugely damaging. It is estimated to have cost the Cuban economy over $1tn over half a century.⁷⁴ It has certainly killed people. In the grand scheme of US crimes against humanity it is amongst the longest-running, least-successful and perhaps most pointlessly cruel. It clearly hasn’t worked and there is no reason to expect that the sixty-second year of the blockade is the one that’ll finally clinch it.

Of course, opposing the blockade was one of the key purposes of the Brigade, so it is unsurprising that it kept coming up, but it really did get blamed for everything. For example, whilst writing this piece an article came out in the Cuban state press claiming that the blockade was responsible for hindering 13,000 cataract surgeries; however, at no point does it explain how the blockade is responsible, just that they have that many people on their waiting list. It doesn’t even say whether those surgeries are actually held up, or if that’s an unusually high number to have on their waiting list.⁷⁵

But, and there is a but, shortages and privation were not unknown to every other Marxist–Leninist country in history, even without a blockade. My parents spent time in Czechoslovakia in 1990 and described the empty store shelves to me. The Soviet Union was repeatedly wracked by famines of its own making, as is North Korea today. Centrally planned economies centrally suck for a whole slew of reasons that have been debated over at great length, and I don’t even think reasonable communists and I disagree totally on this; consider their recent opening of a partial private economy, and Toledo Santander’s comment about recognising the market, but not letting it run loose. Market forces are a tool like any other, powerful if utilised correctly and dangerous if misapplied or fetishised.⁷⁶

So would Cuba still be facing the economic struggles it is facing today, absent the blockade? Is it facing the same problems that previous planned economies have done, albeit exacerbated by the blockade, or has its distinct form of socialism solved all of those and all that remains is the blockade? If anyone could do it, my money would be on the Cubans, but it is impossible, under the current circumstances, to separate the signal from the noise; the only way to find out is to change the experimental conditions, and see what happens to a post-blockade Cuba. That, pragmatically, is reason enough to oppose the blockade: either Cuba can then flourish to the extent they claim they could, or the government loses its biggest excuse for its failures and finds itself out on its arse before long. Either outcome would be fine.

Wheat from Chaff ¶

Talk to any pro-Cuba activist, and you will invariably hear several stats: the six-month literacy campaign in the ’60s practically eradicated illiteracy in the country; Cuba spends over twice the proportion of its GDP on education as the UK and US (the second-highest rate in the world, after the Marshall Islands); and Cuba has amongst the highest life expectancy and lowest infant mortality rates in the world. These are all true, and represent incredible achievements for the Cuban project, but to ascribe them specifically to the Marxist–Leninist aspect of the Cuban project seems to me to be misleading.

For example, India had a literacy rate of around a third of Cuba’s lower, rural rate in 1960 (~20% to Cuba’s ~60%; the Cuban city rate was ~89%), and whilst the rate certainly hasn’t improved anywhere near as quickly (now sitting at ~70%, 60 years later), that improvement represents almost 900m newly-literate Indians—90 entire Cubas worth of people, or an average of 7,500,000 every six months—and India did it without Marxism–Leninism or even a commitment to communism (though they did have a partially-planned economy from until 1991). Similarly, if you add India to that graph of infant mortality, the range of the y-axis quadruples just to fit the Indian rate in 1960, and whilst today it is still several times the rates of Cuba, the US and the UK, the reduction is just phenomenal. Infant mortality worldwide has more than halved since 1960. And on education spend as a share of GDP, Cuba is an outlier even amongst other Marxist–Leninist countries: Vietnam is #91, China is #110 and Laos #154. Meanwhile, the Scandinavian social democracies—Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland—are all in the top 20.

I’m not here to try and Hans Rosling all of the magic out of the Cuban political project; many of its achievements are genuinely incredible, especially given its limited resource and the continual spectre of the blockade, and Rosling’s use of those similar figures to defend the current world order are similarly vulnerable to criticism. But they do show that Marxism–Leninism alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for the achievements that have been made. Many of the examples I cited above show that the gains of the Cuban Revolution come within the context of worldwide improvements, or of similar advances made in countries that have adopted very different economic systems. To quote someone I met in Mexico, it shows that maybe ideology isn’t the whole story; things like penicillin are good, and things like hand washing are also good. But, in the light of my previous conclusions about democracy in Cuba, examples like the education spending⁷⁷ show that the very just priorities of the Cuban project are not necessarily dependent on its current Marxist–Leninist ideology, just as the Revolution itself wasn’t. Cubans claimed back their nation and their right to self-determination, and there is no reason to assume that if the Cubans were to implement a pluralistic democracy they would choose to give up their social services or strong sense of community:⁷⁸

Obviously, this would require some smart structural work⁷⁹ to ensure that an ideologically-redirected Cuba would not be torn apart by foreign capital as was the former Soviet Union.⁸⁰ We in Britain had a health service, if we could keep it, and we proved that we could not; the loss of the Cuban health service would be a loss not just for Cuba, but for the world, and should absolutely be avoided. But as much as the PCC tries to conflate itself with the Revolution, and itself with the people of Cuba, the Revolution succeeded independent of it and the Cuban political project would be more than able to continue independent of it again, as would the people of Cuba, should they choose to do so. And the pragmatist in me wonders if reforming from a post-Cold War Marxist–Leninist holdout into a highly protectionist democratic socialist state, with the same peace- and justice-focussed foreign policy (along with their distant neighbour Costa Rica), would serve the cause of removing the core justification for the blockade (though I am not so naïve as to think it would disappear overnight), allowing the project the breathing room it has long deserved, without betraying its principles; such a Cuba could well prove to be about as benevolent a state as is possible.⁸¹

As Castro himself said, upon arriving in Havana after the overthrow of the dictator:

The Marxist–Leninist ideology and its attendant authoritarianism appear to now be an obstacle to the nation’s peace, whilst also not being a vital necessity for any of the achievements that people laud Cuba for. The Marxist–Leninist experiment has been run many times over the past century, and it has always failed; the state does not wither away, it just ossifies and grows at the expense of the people until it either finds a relatively stable equilibrium or overextends and brings the whole project down with it. Marxism–Leninism clearly does not lead to a communist society, that much is clear. A Cuba that was willing to abandon that project, whilst remaining socialist, would have a world to win.

What is to be Done? ¶

The challenge represented by ending the blockage is huge. There is no point in appealing to any sense of morality or justice amongst the squalid ghouls that populate the US foreign policy apparatus; these are the same creatures who will hear that their sanctions are killing half a million children and glibly declare that they think it’s worth it. Cynically, trying to mobilise popular opposition against the blockade within the US is a long shot, as the wishes of the American people have very little sway over the direction of the federal government, particularly (in this case) whilst the Miami exiles remain such a potent voting bloc (though to try is still better than to not). And, most relevantly for our delegation (and all but one of the delegations that made up the Brigade), we don’t even live in the US.

The one unilateral option open to the Cuban government is what I have just discussed,⁸² but for us, there is only person-to-person solidarity. We (and the Brigade as a whole) demonstrated this in abundance, bringing suitcases full of medical and educational supplies with us which were then distributed during our visits. Not only that, but by visiting the country at all (which, for the Yanks, meant being harassed by border thugs upon their return home)⁸³ we brought much-needed foreign currency in with us and can take stories out with us; per one of the few practical suggestions in the conference workshop, we can tell others to visit, too, and do likewise. We can educate ourselves about the Cuban Revolution and the remarkable successes that their political project has achieved since; we can be forthright, though fair, in pointing out its problems, and choose to provide critical friendship over meaningless flattery, which would do more harm in the long run. We must be windows to within and advocates from without, but never propagandists, who invariably undermine their own credibility and soon become useless.

So, in (finally) closing, I say:

• ¡abajo el bloqueo!, without equivocation;
• solidarity with the Cuban people, as to all peoples, and their right to determine their own fate without the US or the PCC interfering; and, of course,
• ¡viva la Decimosexta Brigada!