The most optimistic Cuban commentators today can be heard arguing that the economic crisis on the island in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union has brought with it Cuba’s first chance to be truly independent. The island passed from being a literal colony of Spain to being what Cuban scholars refer to as a “neocolony” of the United States in 1898, and then to a state of economic and political dependence (albeit of a different nature) on the USSR after 1959. In each of these periods ideologies of national independence provoked strong resonances among the population. But the nature of this nation and the meanings of independence have been subject to repeated contestation.
Fidel Castro welcomed Pope John Paul II to Cuba on 22 January 1998 with a speech denouncing Spanish colonialism, and linking Spain’s extermination of Cuba’s indigenous population, its enslavement of Africans, and its atrocities...
