Margaret Randall presents herself on her blog as “a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist.” She is the author of as many as 100 books, and this is her fifth work on Cuba. She lived on the island from 1968 to 1979, a period generally remembered as particularly repressive toward artists and writers. As a matter of fact, like many of her friends, she personally “felt the heavy hand of official marginalization” (16) during that time; she tells the story in To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (2009). But she “did not blame the Revolution” (16) for it.
This stance points to one of the two keys to unlock this very personal essay on postrevolutionary Cuba: the utopia is one thing, reality-generated “errors” are quite another. Echoing Augustine's dual vision of a City of God and a City of Man, Randall's account points first to parallel worlds where the ideal shapes reality without being really tarnished by all too human mistakes. The author does not spell out the second key explicitly, but it shines through the book: it is the idea that Cuba's internationalist policy, especially the humanitarian kind (fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone, delivering earthquake relief in Haiti, healing sufferers in Chernobyl), is the ultimate repository of the revolutionary utopia. Though she continues to defend the regime and most of its policies vigorously, the reader is forgiven for concluding that the “Revolution” is purer in its exported version than at home.
The organization of the book is puzzling. Randall begins to discuss the main topic only in Chapter 5, on Cuba's solidarity with Africa. The previous chapters offer rambling observations about the Cuban model, many of them concerning domestic cultural policy. Chapter 6, on Latin America, contains no analysis of Venezuela, the most important recipient of Cuban “aid” in the hemisphere. Chapter 7 is curiously devoted to “Internationalism, Cuban style,” presumably the subject of the entire book. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 are arguably the most useful, as they are entirely devoted to Cubans' firsthand accounts of humanitarian projects in Angola, Ethiopia, and Zambia. The remaining chapters concern global interventions in education (Chapter 11), health (Chapters 12 and 13), and sports (Chapter 14).
If Randall is willing to address some of the blemishes of domestic policies, one can lament her unwillingness to address tough questions about Cuban internationalism, such as the following: Does it really make sense for a poor country with a population the size of North Carolina's to send hundreds of thousands of troops (and see thousands of them die) to conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East? When Cuba provided the troops and the Soviets the logistics, such as in Angola, is it conceivable that Cubans (mostly blacks) were at least in part cannon fodder for Russian foreign policy? What was the point of dying for Assad in Syria? (Her caveat: “This was not today's Syria, but that of Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafaz al-Assad” [71]). In Latin America, was Cuba not inspiring and supporting pretty much all armed insurgencies against bourgeois order, including democracies like Venezuela's, not just the ones “attempting to defeat cruel dictatorships” (1)? Only about a quarter of the $6 billion a year the Cuban state is charging for health services abroad is used to pay doctors and nurses, who work in the worst possible conditions. Does not this—plus the fact that health professionals make only about $30 a month at home and cannot leave the country without the government's permission—at least invite qualification of the cliché that “Cubans study medicine at no cost” (162)? There may not be simple answers to these questions, but they must not be ignored altogether. In conclusion, this book is hardly an important contribution on the subject, unless the real subject is Margaret Randall herself, a prolific and talented activist who writes passionately about her lifelong quest for utopia.
