A Retrospective
by
Ronald H. Chilcote
My familiarity with Cuba began during a September 1958 visit to Havana,
the culmination of four months’ travel throughout Latin America. Life in the
city was corrupt, with gambling and prostitution. The Cuban Revolution
brought hope for profound change everywhere. Those days of graduate study
at Stanford revolved around the revolution and the fellow students who
joined together to analyze the role of revolution and the left. With one of our
professors, Ronald Hilton, we exposed the Bay of Pigs plans well before the
April 1961 invasion. Another of our professors, John J. Johnson, wrote on the
military’s assumption of a professional role in Latin America, and in fact
his work contributed to the United States’ counterinsurgency plans. The
Pentagon sent six of its young officers to learn about Latin America at Stanford
and then to participate in some of the coups that later overthrew legitimate
regimes. Two of them, for example, worked with U.S. Ambassador Lincoln
Gordon in the 1964 overthrow of the Brazilian president João Goulart.
My work on Brazil, Portugal, and the Portuguese colonies of Africa was
fundamentally framed within the Cuban experience. I wrote a monograph on
the great African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, who was deeply influential,
along with Che and Fidel, in the Tricontinental, based in Havana. I returned
to Cuba three times, first for six weeks during 1968 and twice during the
1980s, once to participate in a conference and once to attend the Latin
American Film Festival.
The work of fellow students at Stanford was also shaped by the Cuban
Revolution: Donald Bray and Tim Harding wrote on Cuba in a collaborative
project widely used in classrooms everywhere; Saul Landau produced celebrated
films on Fidel and Cuba; James O’Connor wrote a doctoral thesis and
book on monopoly capitalism in Cuba; Sandra Levinson founded the Cuban
Studies Center; Richard Fagen wrote on the early experiments of the revolution;
Jim Cockcroft’s interest in Cuba led to his early work on the Mexican
Revolution; inspired by Cuba, Dale Johnson turned to Chile; and Fred Goff
founded the North American Congress on Latin America. At nearby Berkeley,
fellow students, including James Petras, Robert Scheer, and Maurice Zeitlin,
also were caught up in the revolution.
Many of us evolved through Latin American Perspectives, which published
many articles on the Cuban Revolution, including a provocative debate in
Havana involving several of our editors and an issue and later a book of
Cubanmaterial (the first anthology by Cubans published in English)made possible
because three of us traveled to Cuba to help scholars there with revisions
of their manuscripts.
In retrospect, I find it astonishing that 50 years of the Cuban Revolution
have demonstrated not only that profound change is possible but also that, in
the face of major challenges, ideals and goals can be upheld through continuous
struggle. Of particular importance to me is the drive to provide for the
basic needs of all people in Cuba. The accomplishments in the eradication of
illiteracy, in educational advancement, in the provision of health care everywhere,
and in maintaining the welfare of Cubans set an example for others.
The contemporary experiences of other progressive governments throughout
Latin America are likely to bring substantial changes. May the Cuban
Revolution serve to remind us that meaningful change is possible elsewhere.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES,
Issue 164, Vol. 36 No. 1,
January 2009 130-131
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X08329178
© 2009 Latin American Perspectives
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