Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has found himself in the middle of a mild controversy now that it’s been discovered that his parents didn’t flee Cuba in 1959 – as he has said on a number of occasions – but in fact left Cuba in May 1956, just a few months before Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries landed on the island.
According to the established culture of the Cuban diaspora centered on Little Havana, Cubans who emigrated before 1959 are suspected of being former supporters of Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed military dictator of Cuba who was overthrown by Castro.
I, like Sen. Rubio, don’t think it matters when his parents emigrated from Cuba and why. In this country, no individual should be applauded or shunned by the beliefs and actions of their parents. An individual is just that: an individual.
What interests me more is what Rubio has to say about Cuba, past and present. In an op-ed published by Politico on Friday, Rubio describes Castro as “a brutal communist dictator” who “took control” of his parents homeland, forcing them to flee and live out the rest of their lives in exile.
This is what I don’t get about Cubans who talk about the island as a former paradise now in the grips of a cruel dictator. Do people honestly see it that way? Is it because Cuba’s now communist?
I’m no supporter of the Castro regime. But I am and will always be an ardent supporter of the revolution’s promise of a better, more egalitarian Cuba. Critics of the Castro seem quick to ignore – either out of ignorance or on purpose – the violence inflicted on the Cuban people by Batista (described by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., among others). These critics seem to forget that Batista himself took power through a coup just months before a legitimate election in 1952, that the colonel whored Cuba out to America’s gangsters and business barons, and that he suppressed Cuba’s intellectuals and working poor alike. (He even closed the University of Havana in 1956.)
Rubio and many Cubans seemingly avoid the messy fact that the Cuba Revolution was widely supported by Cubans and members of the international community. Castro had landed in Cuba with a band of barely 80 men in December 1956. Initially, Batista was receiving military support from the Eisenhower administration in his attempt to quell the rebellion, but Eisenhower pulled his support in 1958 and then placed an arms embargo on Batista’s regime. By 1959, thanks to the rebel campaign of recruiting countryside peasants and members of the urban working class, Batista was on a plane to the Dominican Republic, taking $300 million with him.
Cuba and his revolutionaries – especially “Che” Guevara – immediately became the icons of every progressive movement that has sprung up ever since. The inspirational power of the 26th of July Movement was even noticed by many Americans as well. The Pulitzer Prize-winning political commentator and Cold War columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in a 1964 Newsweek article:
“The greatest threat presented by Castro’s Cuba is as an example to other Latin American states which are beset by poverty, corruption, feudalism, and plutocratic exploitation ... his influence in Latin America might be overwhelming and irresistible if, with Soviet help, he could establish in Cuba a Communist utopia."
Yet Castro failed to establish a utopia in Cuba. The failure primarily resulted from Cold War politics. The United States feared a communist state so close to its shores, and for the next 70 years, the American government would do everything its power to suffocate and squeeze the island into submission. There are U.S. programs – like the multimillion-dollar-a-year Radio y Televisión Martí – to undermine the Cuban government, and in 2006 the British documentary 638 Ways to Kill Castro famously detailed the numerous CIA plots to assassinate the Cuban leader.
Despite all the obstacles placed in front of it, the Cuban Revolution has managed to achieve some of the goals it set out to tackle. After a successful campaign in the 1960s to raise Cuba’s appalling literacy rate, Cuba is now just a fraction off 100 percent literacy. Cubans also enjoy access to decent health care and a good education as fundamental human rights.
The economically crippled stated of the island has more to do with U.S.-Cuba relations and not with the Cuban government itself. When Cuba’s main economic partner after the revolution, the Soviet Union, collapsed in the early 1991, so did the Cuban economy. And the United States has done next to nothing to better the lives of the Cuban people, once among our closest allies. The embargo only makes it harder for Cuba to establish its utopia.
Rubio’s views toward today’s Cuba – while they may be part of mainstream Cuban culture in the United States – don’t reflect the widespread view of Cuba that many progressive Latinos hold today. His views on Cuba represent just one more way in which the Florida senator with a Spanish name does not represent the Latino community in America.