Exporting Revolution

With this book, Margaret Randall wishes to reclaim the term “exporting revolution” from its Cold War connotations by which the United States denigrated revolutionary Cuba for intervening in the internal affairs of its neighboring republics. She replaces it with a more contemporary meaning of international solidarity through “the Revolution's extraordinary humanitarian aid and disaster relief” (p. 1). Indeed, this is a story worth telling. The revolutionary government since the 1970s has diverted scarce economic resources not only to send troops to Africa but also to dispatch Cuban educators and medical personnel to many poor countries of the global South.Randall has assembled wonderful details about Cuba's missions abroad. Her book contains interviews that she carried out with returning doctors, nurses, and teachers. Especially poignant is Randall's interview with Nancy Alonso, who went to Ethiopia while the Berlin Wall still stood and returned to a Cuba in economic decline after the Soviet Union collapsed. Randall informs about the many disaster relief missions that Cuban personnel carried out in Peruvian, Pakistani, and Haitian earthquakes and in the Ebola outbreaks of Africa. In their educational and medical work abroad, Cubans responded to requests by host governments. Cuban professionals specialized in providing these services to remote, rural locations, in imitation of Cuba's domestic policies that doctors and teachers repay their free education with service in the countryside. Sometimes host regimes provided supporting funds to sustain Cuban doctors and nurses, but not always. In other cases, nations such as Bolivia and Venezuela compensated the Cuban government. The author also emphasizes the full scholarships that Cuba provides to thousands of foreign students in its medical schools.Margaret Randall is a longtime resident of Cuba. She authored previous books on Cuban women that featured information on how the revolution changed lives at the community level. She remains unabashedly pro-revolution, praising all things Cuban and criticizing the hostility of every US presidential administration since 1959. She especially points out little-known dirty tricks that American diplomats play to subvert Cuba's international projects. Such examples include the State Department's effort to sponsor the defection of Cuban doctors abroad, notwithstanding that defectors might not be able to pass US medical exams to practice stateside. Most scholars find it difficult to refute Cuban objections to US policies.On the other hand, Randall glosses over Cuba's earlier efforts at the export of revolution—namely, the training of Latin American guerrillas in order to spread revolution to other countries. She mentions briefly that Fidel Castro was attempting to defeat “cruel dictatorships” in Central and South America (p. 1). Yet, when Cuban-trained guerrillas in the 1960s commenced armed uprisings in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina, these countries had elected governments rather than military juntas. The generals came later. Ernesto “Che” Guevara and 15 Cuban fighters arrived in Bolivia in late 1966, for example, just months after Bolivian voters had elected a new president by a wide margin. True, René Barrientos was a former air force general, but he did have a substantial following among the peasantry.Nonetheless, readers of this book will gain a perspective as to why socialism in a poor country continues to undertake such an expensive mission abroad. The project maintains revolutionary fervor, presents new generations of Cuban citizens with selfless goals, and earns the support of other small countries in the United Nations. The export of medical and educational personnel also promotes an image of socialist solidarity surviving heroically for six decades under the very nose of the world's most powerful capitalist country. This is no small tale in these days of opioid epidemics and school shootings in the hegemon

Economic growth · Government (linguistics) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · World War II · Cuban History and Society · Law