The Cuban Revolution and Western Intellectuals and Cuba: A Personal Report (continued)

I would agree with those who argue that despite its internal policies, the Soviet Union has remained a beacon to those peoples who have not been able to break the chains of imperialism and capitalist underdevelopment. In a similar fashion, Cuba remains such a beacon to those who suffer from poverty, hunger, ignorance, and disease throughout Latin America. But political support of the movement for democratization of Soviet society can only increase the appeal of socialism to those searching for a way out of the misery of capitalism. Helping those who seek to restore the original spirit of October is helping to fulfill a promise which could widen the appeal of socialism to millions of the world's peoples. To cover up for and apologize for Soviet repression only makes the job of widening the appeal of Cuban socialism in Latin America harder.

To many North American radicals, the contradictions of Cuban policy are to be ignored or wished away. Their response to Cuba is reminiscent of that shown by many Western travelers to Soviet Russia during the 1920s and 1930s. It was during that period when an institutionalized model for travel to socialist nations was developed. Radicals, wary of life and politics in America, turned their own alienation from and despair about the United States outward. Identification with the great Soviet experiment became a substitute for their own impotence at home. Any criticism of Russia, any candid discussion of Soviet problems, any acknowledgment that Stalin's reign of terror was ruining the spirit of October--was considered grist for the mill of pro-Axis and reactionary forces.

Travelers to Russia during the early years of the Soviet Revolution, as many contemporary visitors to Cuba, felt themselves to be witnesses to the birth of a new epoch. Russia had a superiority that the capitalist United States could not match. Writer Stuart Chase typified the attitude of sympathetic travelers when he wrote in 1931:

For Russians, the world is exciting, stimulating, challenging, calling forth their interest and enthusiasm. The world for most Americans is dull and uninspiring, wracked with frightful economic insecurity.

Compare Chase's words with those written by Michael Parenti, a radical US visitor to Cuba, writing in 1974:

Yet what struck me and other members of my group about the people of Havana was the absence of the kind of "struggle" one experiences in North American cities. . .Cubans are not preoccupied with money anxieties of the kind that plague most Americans, and the absence of money problems and all related competitiveness, personal fears, and aggressions has a palpable effect on social relations.

Like those of the Old Left, many members of the New Left have come to idealize one or another socialist country. The process was explained by Todd Gitlin back in 1968: "For generations the American Left has externalized good: we needed to tie our fates to someone, somewhere in the world who was seizing the chances for a humane society." Cuba became that place for many of the New Left.

Once Cuba was chosen for that purpose, it became difficult to look upon the process of the Revolution dispassionately. Like the Russians, the Cubans arranged carefully guided tours, taking visitors to official agencies, model factories, farms, and cultural centers. But it was not the tours that produced a distorted judgment. The visitor saw only what he or she wanted. Evaluations were made according to one's own values and expectations. Cuba had become an image, not a nation to be studied that was going through a revolutionary process.

Like the travelers to Russia in the 1 920s, members of the group that traveled to Cuba with me revealed a familiar psychological attitude. To criticize Cuba, they argued, was to aid the Revolution's enemies. After all, Cuba remains, after the Chilean coup, "once more the only socialist government in Latin America." The job of North American radicals is to "offer political support," not to indulge in the bourgeois luxury of independent criticism; radicals should not "arrogantly assert [their] individual right to pursue [their own] sense of truth," convinced that their individual views "can be measured against a whole people's safety."

The argument is an old one: refrain from criticism, lest you fall into the waiting hands of reactionary forces. Cuba becomes a replacement for one's shattered hopes about America. By supporting Cuba, one gains membership in the hallowed fraternity of those acting to build a new world--a task deemed impossible to work toward in the reactionary United States. To attack any developments within Cuba becomes identical with working against those who desire to build a free human community.

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