The following is a reflection from my experiences as a participant of the 40th Southern Cross Brigade to Cuba in January 2025

A group of bumbling American tourists joined our company of internationalists for the tour of the Fidel Castro Centre in Havana. Apparently seeking a relaxing Caribbean getaway, where they wouldn’t be reminded of their country’s dubious legacy in the region, they made no secret of their aversion to references to US subversion of Cuban sovereignty. A short film recounted the historic defeat of Yankee imperialism at the Bay of Pigs in 1960. They shuffled away from the group. “That’s not how it happened” I heard one of them mutter, awkwardly prying open a door to make his escape.

Observers in the Global North too often have a superficial image of Cuba, with 1950s cars puttering along while tourists drink mojitos on the beach, and jazz fills the air as throngs of cigar smokers look out over the rooftops of Havana. Cuba seems stuck in time, a relic of a bygone era, its technology, its politics, seen in passages by Graham Greene perhaps, or from grainy black and white footage of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The tiny island’s threat to the imperialist project of the United States also seems to be from another era, a relic of Cold War hysteria which too many, under the haze of liberal progress, believe is behind us. But Cuba’s anti-colonial resistance has a long history. 

CUBA’S ANTI-COLONIAL HERITAGE

Cuba found itself on the frontline of colonial violence that ravaged the hemisphere after 1492. Spanish Imperialism imposed on the first island it occupied slavery, genocide and extraction in the ‘New World.’ The forests of Cuba were hacked apart for timber and to make room for plantations and mines. Resources would be used to enrich the Empire and fund further imperial endeavours.  

Early to colonial oppression, Cuba was late to independence. By the 1830s, the majority of Spanish colonies in the Americas had achieved some sort of independence. But Cuba’s pyrrhic victory in 1902 exchanged Spanish yoke for the expansion of US colonial designs. Yankee capital developed Cuba’s economy into a sugar monoculture, dominated by agribusiness and dependent on export to its imperial neighbour. The early Twentieth Century saw regular military interventions in Cuba to ensure its subordination and maintain its underdevelopment. Sugar would be exported and everything else imported courtesy of Washington. 

The revolution of 1959 addressed the economic and social consequences of this arrangement. Land reform was a major project of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, which came directly into conflict with the interests of capitalists in the United States. Turning to the Soviet Union for support, Cuba embarked on a project of rapid industrial development. It was rewarded for its “disloyalty” to imperialism by a blockade which has remained in place ever since. Cuba remained dependent on sugar exports and was reliant on cheap oil and industrial machinery it could obtain through its relationship with the socialist world market. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 precipitated an end to an essential lifeline to the socialist world market. Cuba was thrown into a crisis – completely isolated, under blockade, and dependent on imports for basic necessities, particularly food. The 1990s is known in Cuba as ‘The Special Period’ where shortages, blackouts and corruption ran rampant as people did whatever they could to survive. Still looking outward to the structure of the world system in the 1992 Rio Summit Fidel Castro pointed the finger at the voracious appetite of imperialist nations in causing climate change, and Cuba made a dramatic shift towards agroecological practices to secure food sovereignty, while the Global North hastened towards apocalypse. 

Since 1959, Cuban society has developed its own approach consistent with its socialist principles and sovereignty. President of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) Vinnie Molina, who led the 40th Brigade alongside trade unionist MaryClare Woodforde, reflected on these challenges in the CPA weekly The Guardian. Molina wrote, “Cubans are following a way to socialism that will work for the Cuban people: They don’t look to copy other parts to socialism… other forms of socialism cannot be mechanically transplanted into the Cuban reality.” 

SOLIDARITY AND THE SOUTHERN CROSS BRIGADES

Since 1984 internationalists from Australia and New Zealand have crossed the world, as part of the Southern Cross Brigades, in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. The brigades are hosted by the Cuban Institute for Friendship among People (or ICAP in its Spanish acronym), founded by Fidel Castro in 1960. After forty brigades, the task facing friends of the Cuban Revolution remains an urgent one: seventy years of ceaseless assault by US imperialism has left its mark on the island trying to maintain its socialist character in the presence of a hostile empire and within a capitalist world system. 

Ernesto Teuma, a young socialist militant who I met on my first trip to Cuba, represents a new generation of Marxist activists, who want to tackle the contemporary crisis through a close study of Cuba’s material conditions. These activists, workers, and intellectuals seek to apply lessons of the revolutionary project with the aim to invigorate Cuban Marxism with fresh energy. Teuma is a contributor to the theoretical blog La Tizza (‘The Chalk’ whose name is taken from Cuban slang meaning ‘to be cool’). In an interview with New Left Review in 2024 he summarised some of the challenges facing Cuba:

Political culture has remained somewhat static whilst society, the economy, and even the state have evolved in significant ways. Some party and state officials understand that but others are still struggling to grasp this new complexity which naturally affects how they manage social contradictions and respond to crises… Navigating them is difficult for a generation raised in a political landscape with other very different sources of legitimacy… It is not a matter of personal failings. It is a unique historical conjunction, a crisis at so many levels that it’s hard to grasp even from within.

Writing on one of these contradictions in La Tizza in 2024 Teuma explains:

In the private sector employment functions under a much stricter and precarious set of conditions than the state sector and still under the universal social policies that, up to a point, assure the basic conditions for life are provided. Private employment has not yet finished developing, but its future conflicts, driven by the absence of labor rights, discrimination, and the lack of security already visible as it becomes consolidated.

The spectre of the private sector was visible on the Brigade on our visit to the Mariel Special Development Zone. This initiative, while remaining under Cuban law regarding labour rights, provides preferential tax incentives to foreign capital to operate in Cuba. Tax incentives for foreign capital are also available in regional development projects too and targeted specifically on chronic deficits which Cuba has faced in food production and renewable energy. These projects are developed intentionally and always with an eye on maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party over the Cuban economy. Nonetheless, as Teuma says, it has generated new contradictions that the Revolution has not faced before and new sites for conflict between labor and capital. All of this in a political culture where unions are accustomed to negotiating with a workers’ democracy and central planning has allowed the state to rapidly redeploy its resources in response to changes in the world. 

I recalled to Adriana, while overlooking the sea from a rooftop on Havana’s bay, something which she had said to me my first time in the city. She was the interpreter assigned to our first brigade and has a passion for the natural world. Distracted and looking at the sky she pointed out to me a flock of pelicans. “There were never pelicans here,” she said, “the bay was too polluted for fish to live there.” She recounted how the city had recognised this problem, and initiated a massive project to clean up the bay and reduce pollution into the sea. “Now there are fish, and the pelicans have returned.” Looking down at the bay, I saw a group of locals, standing on the sea wall casting fishing rods into the waters which divide Cuba from its hostile northern neighbour by only 145 kilometres. There is life here, and life must be given the space to breathe. 

Let Cuba live.