To the American popular eye, pre-revolutionary Cuba was the island of sin, a society consumed by the illnesses of gambling, the Mafia, and prostitution. Prominent US intellectuals echoed that view. Even in 1969, when Cuban reality had changed drastically, Susan Sontag described Cuba as “a country known mainly for dance, music, prostitutes, cigars, abortions, resort life, and pornographic movies.”
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When in the 1950s, I became involved in the struggle against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, one of our teachers remarked that we had no real reason to criticize the state of our country because so many other nations in the region — such as Bolivia and Haiti — were much worse off than us.
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In Cuba the one-party state is a very controversial question that few of the left-wing critics of the Cuban regime have been willing to address. What follows is an attempt to explore, from the left, some of the issues around this topic.
Read MoreThe US and Cuba have finally resumed diplomatic relations. The rapprochement has also refocused attention on the fifty-year-old American policy that allows Cubans to immigrate to the United States in unlimited numbers, a “privilege” not conferred upon citizens of any other country.
Read MoreMy expectations were not high when I accepted the invitation of an old out-of-town friend to see the Rockettes’ Christmas show. But once there, the cultural shock made my critical faculties go on overdrive as if they had been put on steroids.
Read MoreSixty Cuban Americans from across the United States released an open letter to the Obama Administration strongly disagreeing with the position of Cuban-American legislators from Florida on retaining Cuba on the State Department’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism.”
Read MoreThe cultural and, to a certain extent, political liberalization that has taken place in Cuba, particularly since Raúl Castro assumed power in 2006, has been mostly limited to certain circles, such as the cultural-political milieu of the Catholic Church, and, to a lesser extent, the academic and artistic milieux of the island.
Read MoreAccording to one of the criticisms elicited by my article “Cuba’s One-Party State is the Main Obstacle” published in Havana Times, multiparty systems are a bad idea because they are invariably corrupt and inevitably involve the unprincipled politicking that characterized pre-revolutionary Cuba and other electoral systems in capitalist countries.
Read MoreEven though the monopoly of power by the Cuban Communist Party may be compatible with a certain degree of liberalization – that is, a relaxation of the control that the State exerts over certain aspects of economic and social life – that political monopoly is the main obstacle to the genuine democratization of Cuban society.
Read MoreThe absence of the right to travel abroad since the sixties has been a major source of discontent among Cubans. With the measures recently adopted by his government, Raúl Castro is now trying to lower the intensity of that discontent by making the existing rules to leave and enter the country more flexible, and in the process, achieve other goals.
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