At 50, the Cuban Revolution is Facing a Mid-life Crisis

By Daniel P. Erikson
Latin American Advisor, January 28, 2009

WASHINGTON—On January 1, 2009, the Cuban Revolution that brought the Castro regime to power marked its 50th anniversary. A half century has passed since a 32-year-old Fidel Castro led a small band of rebels to triumph during the 1959 Cuban Revolution, ousting the unpopular and corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batistia. In the early 1960s, Castro's embrace of communism and his alliance with the Soviet Union horrified the United States. Dwight D. Eisenhower initially responded by imposing economic sanctions in 1960 and then breaking diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961. President John F. Kennedy then supported the Cuban exile-led Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, which boomeranged painfully when Castro's forces easily crushed the poorly organized effort. In early 1962, Kennedy placed a comprehensive US embargo on the island that remains the centerpiece of US policy towards Cuba to this day. In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted when Kennedy learned that Fidel Castro had entered into a secret agreement with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, and the incident remains the closest that the world has come to a nuclear war.

The dramatic events of the 1960s proved to be only the beginning. In the years that followed, the Cuban Revolution upended US priorities in Latin America. During much of the Cold War, the Castro government actively supported wars of liberation in Latin America and Africa, and its fingerprints were found on events across the globe. Fidel Castro sparred with a string of Kennedy's successors, including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. In the late 1970s, efforts by President Jimmy Carter to normalize relations with Cuba ultimately came to naught, and during the 1980s Ronald Reagan continued to promote a hard-line sanctions policy towards Cuba. In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War appeared to create a brief moment of opportunity for the United States and Cuba to set their relationship on a new path. By 1992, the Cuban economy was reeling due to the loss of nearly $4 billion in annual Soviet subsidies, and the country was teetering on the brink of disaster. Instead of reaching out to Cuba, however, the US responded by tightening the screws further with the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, and then President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act in 1996. Most recently, George W. Bush, who tightened the sanctions in Cuba, took a parting swipe at the Castro regime and accused it of rebuffing US overtures. Indeed, the US and Cuba have never capitalized on the available opportunities to reconcile their estranged relationship, instead littering their history with diplomatic failures.

It is worth remembering this history now that the 82-year-old Fidel Castro is shuffling off the political stage to leave his 77-year-old brother Raul in charge of Cuba. The recent inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th American president has generated renewed optimism about setting the US-Cuba relationship on sounder footing. After 50 years, the Cuban Revolution is facing a mid-life crisis as the island's 11 million citizens question why it has yielded little more than authoritarian politics, economic despair, and meager social safety. But the revolution has also demonstrated an impressive ability to adapt and survive that cannot be easily dismissed. Obama is the 11th American president to confront the foreign policy challenges posed by the Cuban Revolution, and if history is any guide, he will not be the last.

Dan Erikson is Senior Associate for US Policy and Director of Caribbean Programs at the Inter-American Dialogue. He is also the author of The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution.