Socialist Viewpoint

Don Hopkins is a long-time Black scholar and writer and o had once been the administrative assistant to the UC Berkeley chancellor.

Former President Jimmy Carter's recent trip to Cuba has stirred the political passions of America over an issue that has always been very close to my political heart. Many years ago, when I was a Yale graduate student, I sauntered forth from a successful night at the Marshall Chess Club in New York's Time Square only to be confronted with a newly minted edition of the New York Times which blared from its headlines: "US Invades Cuba!" To paraphrase a political editorial much hated by conservative Americans, I felt I had been enslaved all over again. This was the Bay of Pigs invasion. Many Americans like me had followed closely the events that led up to victory of the Fidel Castro-led Cuban peasants that resulted in the overthrow of the government of the dictator, Fulgencio Batista. For politically sensitive Black Americans, the struggle to oust Batista was the Caribbean wing of the American Civil Rights movement.

We followed that struggle as though it were our own. Cuba, prior to the conquest of Castro, was the mirror image of the American South in its race relations. Cuba prior to Castro was a typical southern state where the inhabitants spoke with a Spanish accent.

The leadership class in Cuba prior to Castro was what we'd call "lily white." It was basically a two-tiered society, in which the upper and middle class was predominantly "white" people of Spanish, other European or British American origin, and the bottom class was predominantly Black and mixed-races. The capitol of the leadership was Havana. The core of the workership was the Oriente Province, later dominated by a large American Company, United Fruit, where Castro was born.

During the waning years of the Civil War in America, when the handwriting was on the wall that the South would lose, substantial numbers of white slave owners fled the country, along with their slaves, and settled in Cuba, vowing to maintain the race/class privileges they enjoyed in the South. These refugees from the Confederacy were welcomed by and blended in well with Spanish colonizers that had enjoyed their own period of slavery and depended upon slaves and later their offspring to harvest the sugar cane and provide the labor for its agriculture.

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Under Spanish rule, and thereafter under American supported Batista rule, Cuba became the playground for American politicians and gangsters. Its best properties were held by multinational corporations. Black Cubans were rigidly discriminated against, and prominent signs warned them that most public beaches and other areas of public accommodation were off-limits to them.

This is the Cuba that official America looks back upon with such maudlin nostalgia. Anyone reading America's newspapers today would not pick up so much as a hint of this antebellum background about Cuba. The only thing one reads in America's newspapers and hears on American radio and television is that Cuba is a communist island 90 miles from America. It is a brutal dictatorship run by Castro, who is an unmitigated and unreconstructed thug. One hears only about the absence of civil liberties in Cuba; only rarely and begrudgingly does one hear about the absence of the abject poverty that so many especially black Cubans lived in prior to Castro.

Only rarely and begrudgingly is there mention of the low infant mortality rates; of the universal access to free public education through college; to the successful integration of black Cubans into the educated and political classes and the military; to the existence of universal health care; to their export of medical, scientific and other expertise to other impoverished nations of the Caribbean and Afric(lnot to mention, America.

Black Americans, who have traveled widely in the Caribbean, as has this writer, have made comparisons between Cuba and other countries previously colonized by European nations-St. Thomas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mexico, Haiti, etc.-will say almost to the one that Cuba s night and day ahead of them all in the living conditions afforded the common man, and the aspirations afforded the upwardly mobile.

Many Americans like myself have felt it tragic that this nation has treated the Cuban revolution with such unmitigated scorn and hostility. As we've noted the progress Cuba??s have made under Castro, we are left to wonder what could have happened had America been Cuba's friend instead of its most implacable enemy. The sorrow 'felt about our tragic relationship with the lovely island is only enhanced when we realize how our politics have been shaped (some would say, held hostage) by the hatred of Castro felt by a relatively small colony of Cubans in voluntary exile in South Florida.

Their hatred of Castro and his government is upfront and personal. Many of their parents were in the leadership class under Batista; they lost privileged positions, land and property when they tled the island after the revolutionmaintaining their race and class-based prerogatives was inconsistent with democratic reform.

While imprisoned by Batista, Castro wrote his version of Martin Luther King's famous epistle, the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." I am sure one was inspired by the other. Castro's was called "History Will Absolve Me." It is one of the most moving political documents of any time. I would invite readers to £:ind it on the Internet and read it.

Elmore Leonard wrote a very insightful novel, entitled "Cuba Libre," which one can get at Amazon.com. In its closing chapters, there is a recapitulation of the final days of the revolution that ousted the Spaniards. The book reprises the role America played in a successful effort to sabotage and later compromise that revolution.

Theodore Roosevelt was the American President who betrayed the Cubans who overthrew the Spanish. He helped install the first of a succession of puppet governments that became the Batista dictatorship. Roosevelt was said to have opined that America could not tolerate "another Black nation" (alongside Haiti) in this hemisphere. Castro comes from the mostly Black Oriente province. His opposition comes from the mostly white Havana.

Their policies were segregationist. His policies are integrationist. How should a sensitive Black American view Cuba? You figure.

-NY Transfer News Collective