If you are a person “on the left” anywhere in the world, you have surely heard about the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It was a landmark for Latin America and a symbol that an alternative to US capitalism and imperialism (in 1959 we were in the middle of the Cold War) could exist, impacting all subsequent generations.
However, 65 years later, what do we know about today’s Cuba and what happened during those decades? Here are some findings based on data, economic and political studies and, in particular, listening to Cubans who have been on the streets for three years and continue to protest against the precarious living conditions on the Island, repression, and the lack of freedom of expression.
Photo: Helena Náhuatl
- Cuba experienced a social explosion in 2021. In many regions of the Island, people went to the streets to protest for food, medical care, dignity and freedom of speech. Since then, more than 1,500 have become political prisoners and almost half of them are still incarcerated.
1,558 people between the ages of 12 and 68 were arrested after 11J (July 11), according to data from Justicia 11J, a group that compiles official and family data on political prisoners. Most of them, 92% according to the group, do not belong to any political or civil society organization, nor do they collaborate with any means of communication. Countless stories with faces, identities and details of life prove that the 11J was something spontaneous and engaged in by ordinary people, overwhelmingly. This makes explicit the big lie of the Cuban government, which attributes 11J to a coup attempt orchestrated by the United States. 11J was born out of the indignation and immense needs of the Cuban population. Until the last reports, 681 people remain in prison, some with sentences of more than 20 years.
Freedom to all the brave people who today are imprisoned in Cuba!
Photo: Alexander Hall
2. If you have opinions contrary to the Cuban government, you can be kidnapped, interrogated, beaten, harrassed in your own home and have a government agent assigned to watch every step of your life.
In Cuba there is a government body called State Security (S.E.), a political police that is in charge of knowing everything about dissidents and the so-called “counterrevolutionaries” of the population, closely following their every step, even introducing themselves and giving their codenames to the people under surveillance. When the S.E. concludes that some situations are potentially “dangerous” for the regime (such as any critical event or gathering people without prior authorization), they discourage taking to the streets so that the guarded do not “have problems”.
This intensifies when you are a person who has already positioned yourself critically to the government, but it happens with Cuban society in general.
https://www.cubaxcuba.com/blog/inseguridad-estado-ilegalidad-poder-cuba
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/4x2jjtQFp5QxZQuX/?mibextid=oFDknk
3. The Cuban minimum wage is less than 10 dollars, food is very expensive for the population and subsidies for the basic food basket are decreasing, in addition, the supply of electricity is unstable and precarious. There are people living on the streets or large families sharing precarious homes, and a lot of social inequality.
Living in Cuba is a great challenge for its inhabitants. The “libreta”, a kind of basic basket subsidized with essential products in certain quantities, is insufficient for the month and its articles are increasingly scarce, such as meat and milk, distinguished visits in the diet, as well as eggs. The power cuts are recurrent and have even resulted in protests in some provinces in this year 2024.
As for housing, it is estimated that 15% of Cuba’s houses are at risk of collapsing due to lack of maintenance and 3 or 4 generations of the same family share the same roof because they do not have the possibility of finding a house for their family nucleus.
Meanwhile, 5-star hotels are built and prioritized along the Malecón (the barrier between the sea and La Habana) and CP leaders and regime insiders live in their mansions in Miramar or Siboney.
Check out: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c720vpjrydvo.amp
https://eltoque.com/ministro-de-salud-reconoce-escasez-de-recursos-humanos-y-materiales-para-2024
https://eltoque.com/crisis-energetica-en-cuba-apagones-y-sin-soluciones-duraderas
https://martiverifica.netlify.app/crisis-de-la-vivienda-cuba-se-derrumba
4. In Cuba, 11 times more is spent on hotel construction than on agriculture and measures to ensure food security. Cuban health and education are in a major crisis, including in primary care.
According to data from the government itself (ONEI), in 2022, 32.9% of the country’s total investment was linked to hotel chains, in contrast, only 2.6% went to agriculture and livestock.
Despite low hotel occupancy rates, large complexes and luxury chains continue to be built in Havana and at Cuba’s Caribbean beach resorts.
Check it out: https://eltoque.com/por-que-cuba-sigue-construyendo-hoteles
https://www.cubaxcuba.com/blog/estado-cubano-fin-costo-cero
Photo: Helena Náhuatl
5. According to recent estimates, almost 18% of Cuba’s population has migrated in the last 2 years.
The greatest exodus in history can only be explained by the deep social and economic crisis of the Island. Increasingly, the Cuban government prevents any prospect of improving life within the country. There are no work alternatives, decent wages or the possibility of critical positions for an improvement in living conditions.
Regardless of their political views, the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who left the country went in search of a less suffocating alternative to life, even if the price for it is exile and the cruel and unjust loss of citizenship.
Check out: https://www.cubaxcuba.com/blog/huida
6. The Island is governed by a new bourgeoisie of Communist Party members who control existing state-owned enterprises and privatize key sectors of the economy. Yes, there is a criminal economic blockade against Cuba by the United States and it should end, allowing access to food and supplies with greater ease, agility and better prices.
However, those who say that the economic, social, energy, food and all sectors of Cuba crisis exists because of the United States Blockade, deny the government’s own statistics. The truth is that Cuba today has a great dependence on countries of European imperialism and has already privatized an important part of the economy, leaving some strategies in the hands of the capitalists who run the PCC.
Check out: https://litci.org/pt/2021/08/12/64633-2/
7. The LGBTI+ community denounces harassment and lack of rights
In Cuba, there is an important dissident LGBTI+ activism that has managed to include the right to equal marriage in the Constitution, but basic rights are still denied to queer people.
LGBTI+ people took to the streets on June 11, especially trans women, demanding dignity and access to the minimum, such as public health, condoms, not being assaulted on the street for working as prostitutes and the right to formal employment (here is an interview with some of these women present on the streets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2j1-q_lMGU).
The result is that many of them were sentenced to heavy sentences for speaking out. Brenda Diaz, a trans woman on the streets on 11J, was sentenced to 14 + 7 months in prison and suffers constant abuse, in addition to not having adequate treatment for HIV, chronic gastritis and kidney stones, diseases she already had before arriving at the prison.
Check out: https://justicia11j.org/personas-de-la-comunidad-lgbtiq-presas-en-cuba-por-motivos-politicos/
Photo: Helena Náhuatl
8. There are socialists in Cuba who are against the government and the dictatorial regime
The Cuban government says that any dissent to its regime is orchestrated by the United States/Miami (where many right-wing neoliberal Cubans are in exile). And this is repeated around the world by Stalinists and supporters of the Cuban regime in general. 11J broke with this hegemony and showed the world that there is a socialist, anarchist left and sectors of defense of Human Rights in Cuba that do not preach neoliberalism as a response to today’s Cuba, on the contrary, they want a just, egalitarian and rights-based society, including democratic ones.
The Cuban Critical Left is an important example of this sector.
9. The Communist, Maoist and other leftist parties defending the Cuban CP are against the democratic freedoms of the Cuban people and their just struggle for dignity.
By saying that Cuba is socialist or even heading for it, organizations around the world present a dictatorial horizon, of misery and without transformative perspectives for a vanguard that seeks an alternative to capitalism.
If the Cuban Revolution was a milestone and a path in its time, the developments of the regime led by a guerrilla took an opposite path. The repression, the encasement of a bureaucracy that replaced the working class, the oppression of any kind of diversity (such as the UMAPs, places of forced labor to which many homosexuals and dissonant voices were sent, a fact recognized by Fidel Castro himself https://www.jornada.com.mx/2010/08/31/mundo/026e1mun) and the denial of the World Revolution, set back achievements and advances by leaps and bounds over the years.
The most honest and correct way to defend socialism anywhere in the world today is to say loud and clear: there is no socialism in Cuba.
Check out: https://litci.org/pt/2021/11/01/65240-2/
10. There is no socialism in Cuba, but the experience of the Cuban revolution is an example of how socialism can exist if it is built directly under workers’ control, with freedom of expression and a vision of revolution that goes beyond the Island.
Revolutions exist and can achieve great social achievements. The Cuban Revolution is an example that has inspired generations in Latin America and must be reclaimed.
It is up to us, later generations, to build and guide organizations and movements that can, in fact, be instruments of the working class, youth and oppressed around the world for the seizure of power and the overthrow of capitalism.
The seizure of power in the Cuban Revolution was led at first by a non-socialist sector, in fact a petty-bourgeois guerrilla, which “Stalinized” over time and, with that, not only set back the achievements of the Cuban people, but restored capitalism in the country, making misery and inequality rules like most Latin American countries, while maintaining strong repression and the lack of democratic freedoms on the Island.
Defending Cuban sisters and brothers today is defending their right to freedom, to a political and social revolution under workers’ control and that they can in fact have a dignified life and without the immense social inequality that prevails on the Island today.
Check out: https://litci.org/pt/2022/01/14/aonde-vai-cuba/
Photo: Helena Náhuatl
