The Future at Last: the Cuban Embargo Unraveled

http://savageminds.org/2014/12/20/the-future-at-last-unraveling-the-embargo-on-cuba/

Just for the fun of it—in the aftermath of President Obama’s announcement that relations between the U.S. and Cuba were thawing—I decided to revisit the conclusion to my now ten year-old dissertation in which I had done the academically forbidden: I gazed into my “crystal ball” to imagine the future. I laid out a couple of scenarios involving Fidel Castro’s dying in office or relinquishing the position while still alive. Then I outlined another scenario that resonates with today:

There is one other possibility that does not depend on the life or death of Fidel Castro, but on the U.S. government’s decision to end the economic embargo of its own volition. Many historians have written about Castro’s skill at manipulating the Cuban people’s nationalism into anti-Americanism … If the U.S. imperialist role in Cuba prior to the revolution were not ample justification, more than 40 years of economic sanctions is an easy means not only to generate nationalist sentiment, but also serve as a crutch for the revolution’s many failures. The U.S. argues that it maintains sanctions in order to bring about Castro’s downfall, but the only reason the socialist government can even attempt to contain the capitalist incursions exemplified by tourism is precisely because of the blockade… t would be impossible for Cuba’s socialist government to contain the onslaught of American-style capitalism as it is practiced on a near-global scale today. The blockade is what allows the Cuban government to safely experiment with capitalism within the socialist context (Roland 251–252).

Since it is no longer looking into the future, but watching the present unfold, I hope it is safe to dust off this nugget for consideration at this moment. The question I have received most frequently in the days since President Barack Obama’s and President Raúl Castro’s simultaneous announcements is, “this is good, right?” And of course it is! More than 50 years of trying to bully Cuba into doing what the U.S. wanted is untenable. But as anthropologists, we are also interested in know what the changes mean on the ground, so I am more interested in asking who will the policy changes affect? But first a little background to the blockade…