We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World

From the moment that Cuba passed into the world at large as a subject deemed worthy of sustained scholarship—which is to say, ever since January 1, 1959—the topic of Cuba developed into something of a Rorschach blot: Cuba as a point of view. Cuba as a politics. Cuban studies—what was once upon a time known as “Cubanology”—emerged out of a charged environment of polemics—that is, a politics—with defenders and detractors of the revolution in robust dispute about almost all facets of the Cuban condition, past and present. Disinterest and dispassion have rarely been hallmarks of Cuban studies. Objectivity—perhaps. Neutrality—never. Much has changed in the intervening decades. Cuba has changed. The literature on Cuba has changed. Social scientists have introduced complexity. Humanists have offered subtlety. Detachment has reduced engagement. Mostly. Traces of the politics persist, of course, inscribed in new paradigms of scholarship, precisely within the very narratives rich with complexity and subtlety. It is in this sense that one welcomes the appearance of Helen Yaffe's We Are Cuba!, a spirited defense of the Cuban Revolution that, as Yaffe indicates in the opening sentence of the acknowledgments, “owes its existence to the Cuban people whose principled intransigence and revolutionary resilience sustained their system into the post-Soviet world” (p. vii). The defense of Cuban socialism is unabashed and unambiguous; it is all-encompassing and well documented. The years of the Special Period serve as Yaffe's point of departure, nearly a decade during which Cubans experienced daily life as a vertiginous free fall into an incomprehensible abyss. Yaffe is indeed correct to celebrate the resourcefulness of the Cuban people and the resolve of the Cuban leadership at a time of withering adversity—all in all, achievements properly recognized and correctly acknowledged, a tribute indeed to the genius of Cuban pragmatism. And throughout the book Yaffe chronicles the country's well-known advances in biotechnology, health care, and education. But all is not well, Yaffe understands. There are incalculable moral costs and enduring psychic consequences to decades of “principled intransigence and revolutionary resilience, ” of unrelieved struggle and unending sacrifice for a future that never arrives. Vast numbers of Cubans continue to experience the circumstances of daily life with a grim resignation. Yaffe is correct to note that “the prospects for the revolutionary people of Cuba are deteriorating”—an observation offered before COVID-19 arrived to the island (p. 277). In what is otherwise a most complete book, some lapses rise to the level of glaring omissions. The failure to address the subject of race relations in post-Soviet Cuba is inexplicable. The silence on the economics of immigration is similarly perplexing. Any discussion of the solvency of vast numbers of Cuban households—and to a large extent the Cuban economy itself—must acknowledge the extensive support networks from abroad. The importance of remittances cannot be exaggerated, presently an estimated 4 billion annually and constituting one of the principal sources of foreign exchange. We Are Cuba! makes for good reading. It offers an important point of view through which to engage the subject of contemporary Cuba. It will no doubt provoke lively debate, all in the spirit of the polemics of old: a reminder of the very things that made Cuba so interesting in the first place.