cuba 2.0, publicación digital del PDC-Cuba

In this April 19, 2011, file photo, Fidel Castro, left, raises his brother's hand, Cuba's President Raul Castro, center, as they sing the anthem of international socialism during the 6th Communist Party Congress in Havana, Cuba. Raul Castro was named first secretary of Cuba's Communist Party, with his brother Fidel not included in the leadership for the first time since the party's creation. (AP Photo/Javier Galeano, File)

SPECIAL TO THE JERSEY JOURNAL

The Fidel-&-Raul Castro regime marks 53 years this Jan. 1. The brothers unquestionably enjoyed extraordinary popularity in 1959, but the enthusiasm soon vanished as they turned Cuba into a financially and spiritually bankrupt Marxist anti-utopia. 

As a result, nearly two million Cubans of all social backgrounds have fled, many of them settling in Hudson County.

By the 1950s, Cuba was a regional leader in numerous social indicators, notwithstanding instability and corruption during the republican era (1902-1958). But since 1959 the island-nation has become a backward, closed society beleaguered by unproductivity and rationing.

Sociologist Tomas Masaryk noted that "dictators 'look good' until the last minutes"; in Cuba's case, it seems particularly fine to certain U.S. intellectuals. Comfortably from abroad, apologists contend that most of the socioeconomic problems that traditionally afflicted the prior five and a half decades were eliminated after 1959. Yet, fact-finding by international social-scientists challenges this fantasy.

An early, little-known account uncovering some effects of the Castros' regimentation came from research in Cuba in 1969-'70 by U.S. cultural-anthropologists Oscar Lewis and Douglas Butterworth. They intended to test Lewis' theory that a culture of poverty would not exist in a Marxist-oriented society. They had naively presupposed that the socially alienating conditions that engender such phenomena could develop among the poor solely under capitalism.

The Lewis-Butterworth early on-the-ground scrutiny validates many accounts by respected experts and the much vilified exiles. There exists a culture of poverty in Cuba, although it is not necessarily a survivor of the old times, but seemingly a by-product of the Castros' totalitarian socialism. There were always poor Cubans, and some version of the culture of poverty might have existed before; but in my communications with Butterworth, he reconfirmed another discovery. The researchers could not document a case for a pervasive pre-1959 culture of poverty. The authorities must have suspected the prospective conclusions because the scholars were abruptly expelled and their Cuban statistician imprisoned.

Upon the 53rd anniversary, the old Lewis-Butterworth analysis invites renewed reflection. Apologists customarily replicate propagandistic cliches by blaming failures on external factors, such as the ending, two decades ago, of the multibillion-dollar subsidies from the defunct Soviet Bloc.

The anthropologists' undertaking, however, revealed that life for average Cubans in the Castros' first decade was already beset with corruption and time-wasting food lines. Likewise, Butterworth described how ordinary people were engaging in what socio-behavioral scientists now call "everyday forms of resistance." Cubans were already undermining the police-state through black-marketeering, pilfering and vandalism, as we hear that they continue to do decades later.

After more than half a century of oppression and poor quality of life, one hopes for a transition to an open society with equal opportunities for every Cuban.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The author, a long-time Hudsonite, is a political-anthropologist affiliated with Icod Associates of New Jersey.