(Map of the Caribbean by Juan de la Cosa circa 1500; Wikimedia Commons)
A century and a half ago, the Cuban political thinker José Antonio Saco complained that many of his contemporaries were “taking as the general opinion that of only the circle in which they themselves move”. This was neither a new problem nor one unique to Cuba, but it has remained an enduring problem for those of us who study Cuba from abroad. It is a problem from which I am not immune. As we enter into yet another year of the pandemic that has prevented me from returning, it is also a problem that I have been thinking about quite a bit.
Cuba is a complicated country. More complicated, at least, than its 11 million inhabitants would suggest. A large part of what makes Cuba analysis so difficult is the combined lack of transparency from the government and lack of polling data. Even the best Cubanist is forced to depend to a large degree on their social circle, especially those they trust, to understand the fluctuations and the nuances of political coalitions there which aren’t easily trackable in the same way that they are in many other places. Even without being dishonest, the politics and perceptions of friends and acquaintances color how we perceive Cuba, especially if you are abroad for months or even years at a time.
Cubanists know this, but even while we know it on some level, we cannot escape the distorting pull of our social circle. Like the Eddington experiment, showing that gravity could bend light, our social circles bend even obvious facts before they reach us, changing how we see the world in ways that are as inexorable as they are difficult to perceive.
Years ago, while returning from a trip to Cuba, I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to really understand what was happening there, I would need to spend half the year there, maybe more. A high bar, but for good reason. Being there inoculates you against wild conspiracy theories, helps contextualize news as it comes in, and it constantly confronts you with nuances and contradictions that challenge your assumptions. It doesn’t fix everything, of course, and certainly doesn’t cancel out the lack of government transparency or absence of good polling, but it at least offers some key insights and at least some protection against misinformation.
There are certain things that you just have to live in order to understand. When I came back to the United States from my undergraduate studies in Cuba in 2013, I had missed a lot. The Occupy Movement had just been a story on the news to me, not something I lived through. I had no idea what the ‘Tea Party’ movement was. People kept talking about the ‘Koch Brothers’, but I wasn’t sure how to even pronounce their names. While looking these topics up online did offer basic context for what everyone was talking about, there are aspects of life in the US during my undergraduate years that I will probably never fully ‘get’ in the same way my peers who lived through them do. It would be like trying to explain what life was like during the Trump administration to someone who didn’t live through it; no number of examples or amount of information will every fully convey it.
After several years away from Cuba I constantly feel the tugging urge to return and the gnawing sensation that I have been away for too long. I doubt that I’m alone in this. A lot of us have been unable to go back and ground ourselves for a while. A lot has changed since many of us last went. Returning doesn’t magically give us the ability to see and understand everything. It won’t give us clairvoyance either. What it will do is ground us. That’s something we could all use right about now.
This Substack wasn’t created to for these kinds of posts, but it is something I have been thinking about for a while so it felt good to flesh it out and post it. Currently in the works: the myth of Cuban food independence.