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The ‘Cuban Spring’ Fallacy: The Current Incarnation of a Persistent Narrative
Abstract
This paper explores the role of communications technology in the U.S.-Cuban relationship. It argues that the idea that anti-government dissidents will use the Internet, cell phones, and social media to foment a popular uprising on the island, modelled after the ‘Arab Spring’ is flawed because it fails to take into account the uniqueness of the Cuban situation. The paper then explores how it has become possible for this idea to have gained such traction in certain discourses in the United States. In doing so, the paper considers the history of paternalism and imperial hubris that has dominated U.S. policy toward Cuba, with an emphasis on the relationship during the Castro era. The paper demonstrates that current U.S. policy rests on fallacious assumptions about Cuba, the Cuban state and the relationship between the Cuban state and the Cuban people. The belief in a ‘Cuban Spring’ and in the idea that the United States could engender revolution in Cuba via communications technology is part of this larger narrative.
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Author and article information
Notes
We thank Naomi Schiller of Temple University, discussant for a presentation of an earlier version of this paper at the Works in Progress in Latin American History and Society (WiPLASH) at New York University, for this insight. We also thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her comments and suggestions.
After being cancelled by the George W. Bush administration in 2003 they were reinstated by the Obama administration in 2011.
According to Otero and O'Bryan forms of civil society in Cuba are ‘unorganized dissidence, prodemocracy and human rights groups, seeds of opposition political parties, the regrowth of religious activity, and independent press, and the microentre-preneurial sector’ (36). See especially pages 39–49 of their article for a comprehensive summary of groups they see operating in civil society.
According to the Cuba poll, conducted in 1994, 50 per cent of Cubans valued equality over freedom, and 38 per cent valued freedom first (Whitefield and Sheridan 2008: 101).
The majority of remittances come from family abroad in the United States, and the amount of remittances permitted by U.S. law has also fluctuated greatly since the 1990s.
Gaceta Oficial de la Republica de Cuba, 2 November 2011. For an analysis of recent economic reforms see Richard E. Feinberg, ‘Reaching Out: Cuba's new economy and the international response’, Brookings Institution November 2011; and Pavel Vidal Alejandro, ‘Cuban Economic Policy under the Raúl Castro Government’, p. 55. Available at http://www.ide.go.jp/Japanese/Publish/Download/Report/2009/pdf/2009_408_ch2.pdf. (Accessed 6 July 2010.)
See, for example, Christopher A. Vaughan, ‘Cartoon Cuba: Race, gender and political opinion leadership in Judge 1898’, African Journalism Studies 24, no. 2 (2003): 195–217; Louis A. Pérez Jr., ‘Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US policy toward Cuba’, Journal of Latin American Studies 34 (2002), 227–254; Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the imperial ethos (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2008); Lars Schoultz, ‘Blessings of Liberty: The United States and the promotion of democracy in Cuba’, Journal of Latin American Studies 34 (2002), 397–425.
The CIA apparently tried everything from assassination attempts via poisoned cigars to attempting to make Castro's beard fall out.