Reflections on the Cuban Revolution Today

By Harry Targ
(730 Words)

This Commentary is Unpublished

President Bush now travels through the African continent trumpeting the United States as a model for the peoples of the Global South. At the same time Fidel Castro steps down as Cuba's chief of state stimulating reflections on the role of the Cuban revolution at home and abroad. Which country has had a more progressive impact on the historical development of the world?

....In the words of C. Wright Mills, reflecting on the Cuban revolution at its outset, Cuba remains part of the "hungry bloc," not in the sense of poverty and scarcity as he meant it -Cuba is part of the developed world in these terms- but in the sense of still struggling to achieve its right and capacity to define its own destiny. In fact, it could be argued that Cuba's "hunger" for self-determination, its spirit of nationalism, is what drove the revolution in the nineteenth century, in the 1930s, in 1959 and still drives the revolution today....


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Harry Targ teaches U.S. foreign policy and political economy at Purdue University. His book on Cuba is called Cuba and the USA: A New World Order?, International Publishers, 1992.