Maurice Halperin returned to Cuba in 1989, some 20 years after conducting his academic and policy work during the Cuban Revolution’s first decade (1962-1968).
In almost all respects the revolution’s impact 20 years later disappointed him. This book is a highly readable account of that disappointment.
An academic whose career was scathed by McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria, Halperin taught in Canada (Simon Fraser University) after stints in the Soviet Union and Cuba. He had high hopes for an anti-imperialist, progressive revolution in Cuba that would avoid the pitfalls of Stalinism and would nurture a genuinely nationalist attack on poverty and racism. He hoped for a new democracy in Cuba. As an octogenarian looking back on the revolution—and forward to the mid-1990s—he expresses real sadness. This distinguishes Halperin’s book from the bulk of works by revolution bashers and anti-Castro Cubans.
Halperin’s sympathies notwithstanding, his essay reiterates most of the now-common critiques of the Cuban Revolution: Castro’s overbearing personalism and the system’s authoritarianism, bureaucratic ineptitude, inefficiency, and corruption. Halperin addresses the failed political economy; the rationing system; the roles of the interior ministry, the secret police, and the military (and General Ochoa’s execution); Cuba’s African policy; and the effects of perestroika and the demise of the Soviet Union. He also notes that “a considerable amount of terror has been part of Castro’s Cuba for more than 30 years,” citing Cuban author Jorge Valls’ claim that “only South Africa, Indonesia, and possibly the People’s Republic of China came close” (p. 167).
Like many other writers, Halperin concludes that the Cuban Revolution’s successes were a product of Castro’s skill in fostering nationalism; in achieving (with Soviet help) important gains in health care, education, and international prestige (up to the 1980s); and in using anti-Americanism to account for the revolution’s difficulties. He also asserts that Castro’s failures “bear the imprint of his monumental ego, his reckless self-confidence, and, most important, his unchallenged authority” (p. 175). In part, these personal attributes stem from “the personality disorder that Castro displayed as a child and throughout the rest of his life” (p. 185).
Halperin’s reflections on the revolution do not range as widely as Andrés Oppenheimer’s in Castro’s Final Hour (1992) or as analytically as the essays in Carmelo Mesa-Lago’s edited volume Cuba After the Cold War (1993). Halperin’s book still warrants attention as a volume that encapsulates personally the optimism of the early years, the later disenchantment, and the gloom of the 1990s. In the final pages, Halperin tells the reader that in 1989 he “found the popular mood one of deep discouragement, . . . I could see the toll being paid in the weary and cheerless faces I passed on the street” (p. 190).
