Three Cubas

Three Cubas

As the United States reopens its embassy in Cuba, we offer three accounts of the country’s aging dictatorship, and what the future could hold.

On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry presided over the reopening of the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, fifty-four years after President Dwight Eisenhower ordered it closed. The Obama administration’s rapprochement with Cuba has been hailed as a foreign policy landmark and has prompted much speculation about the island’s future. Will the island embrace capitalism once and for all? If so, will it become more democratic or more authoritarian in the process? Or, just maybe, can Cuba transition toward a more just socialism—one that builds on the country’s egalitarian legacy and remarkable achievements in education and health care as it abandons the one-party system?

We offer here three accounts of Cuba past, present, and—perhaps—future:

Co-editor Michael Kazin recalls his 1969 trip to Cuba with the first contingent of the Venceremos Brigade, a group of U.S. would-be revolutionaries “excited to learn from men and women who had already made a triumphant revolution of their own.”

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein recounts a more recent trip (2012), which left her feeling that the island wasn’t quite “hurtling towards capitalism” as the Economist then proclaimed.

And James Bloodworth interviews several of the country’s democratic socialists, who offer their vision of where Cuba could go next.

“We need more solidarity and support of the international democratic left,” says one of them. Time for a new Venceremos Brigade? —Editors