What a trip to Cuba meant for a US student in the 21st century
On the morning of May 21, 2024, in the small but endearing airport of Burlington, Vermont, I hugged my father tightly and bade him and my stepmother goodbye, a little over an hour before embarking on the journey that would change my life. I was preparing to spend a month abroad — something I had never done before — and the uncertainty of the journey ahead was all at once exciting and unsettling. On some level, I knew right there in the airport that the trip would alter the course of my life. To what extent and in what ways it would do so, I was not sure — I could only guess.
My parents divorced when I was very young — I have no memory of them being together. Despite the split, I have the chance to visit my father frequently, for which I am grateful, but I spent most of my time growing up in the household of my mother, a Russian immigrant whose decision to move to rural New York afforded her no opportunities to employ the master’s degree she had earned in her home country. The result was that my mother was forced to put herself through school again here while working part time as a clinical assistant to provide for herself and her child — me. As one might imagine, this was tremendously stressful for her.
Certain memories from this period still stick out to me: paying for food at a gas station with the money in my piggy bank. Mom crying and shaking the steering wheel when the car would not start in winter. I noticed things: the stress on mom’s face after a long day at work, the bags beneath her eyes. The sharpness of her voice was not so much a product of anything I had done, but rather of so many different stressors and financial strains piling up. The Christmas tree slim on presents.
There were some things I did not notice. Some things she told me later, when she had gotten a better job and the worst financial strains were behind us. How my Christmas presents the year the tree was thinnest on them all came from a local charity. How she pretended she was not hungry when there was only enough money for one of us to eat.
Abstracting from the emotion of these experiences and training the cold eye of honest appraisal upon them, I can say that they are likely to elicit sympathy. They are also far from the most horrible experiences that class societies have forced working people to endure throughout history. My best friend in my Senior year of high school had once been homeless. A girl I knew once told me how her family’s home was being repossessed by their bank.
Independence
Long before I grew and began to take note of such things in my immediate vicinity, the working classes of Cuba had been trapped in a struggle for their own emancipation. Spanish colonizers in the 16th century forced indigenous Taíno to flee to neighboring islands or the mountains to avoid being murdered and enslaved en masse. Later, those same colonizers kidnapped Africans and brought them to the island in chains, instituting a slave labor system that would last hundreds of years. In 1898, just when brave Cuban independentistas (independence fighters) were about to rid the island of Spanish colonialism for good, the United States intervened militarily with the express goal of filling Spain’s former role as the hegemonic power in the Caribbean.
After 1898, the Cubans ostensibly obtained independence, but the US retained the right to intervene militarily in Cuba whenever it wanted. US soldiers laid the groundwork for the predominance of US capital in the Caribbean nation’s economy.1 Cuban production served the interests of US businessmen, whether the Cubans liked it or not. This state of affairs, which prevailed on the island for decades, was suddenly and rapidly reversed after 1959. Fidel and Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos and Ernesto Che Guevara led a revolutionary movement, toppled US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and took a series of bold measures against imperialism, nationalizing land that had formerly belonged to exploitative US corporations and refusing to allow Washington’s politicians to dictate life in Cuba.
I am hardly the first person to write about such things, nor am I the most qualified. But my growing interest in working class history — a product of my childhood experiences — and my own university’s partnership with the University of Cienfuegos, coupled with my interest in the Spanish language and Latin American culture, all combined to bring me to the land of orange earth and great horned bulls in the countryside and the most hospitable people in the world: Cuba.
Socialism in action
For years leading up to the trip I had been studying the texts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which I found convincing from a rhetorical perspective, and which felt very much like the natural intellectual expression of the emotions my family’s brush with poverty evoked in me. The deeper I delved into Capital, The German Ideology or Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, the stronger my desire became to witness firsthand what life was like in a post-capitalist society. Marx’s conception of the working class as an entity capable of independent development outside its relationship with capital seemed brilliant — how would real working-class people pursue that development? Unfortunately, thus far, the US working class has not had the opportunity to find out. Thus, to go beyond the realm of theory and see what real people thought about socialist solutions where they had been implemented, became a primary motivator for my trip.
Stepping off the plane and into the warm Caribbean air was something of a dream for me. As we took our hour and a half bus ride from the airport where we arrived to the city of Cienfuegos, my eyes were constantly swiveling, drinking in as much of the countryside as possible. I quickly discovered that my Spanish was not as good as I thought it was, but I was there to learn and that was what mattered. I got better quickly; dozens of tiny, everyday interactions forced me to learn to respond in ways that I had not thought to investigate when I had a purely academic understanding of the language. (You learn the difference between scrambled and fried eggs very quickly when you vastly prefer one and accidentally ask for the other).
I came to Cuba with a group of five other students, four from SUNY Potsdam, like me. One, John Scott, was from Louisiana, attending Ole Miss University. One of our professors, Axel Fair-Schulz, was born in East Germany, and had been an intellectual mentor for me. Axel co-taught our course on the Cold War with the affable Dictinio Diaz Gonzalez, a brilliant Cuban professor with a crown of gray hair wrapped around his head and an impressive ability to dance. Yadira and Dayana, our guides, made themselves indispensable by translating for us and informing us about the history of the island.
Education and healthcare
Very quickly we learned what the revolution meant to everyday Cubans. Dayana’s grandmother and her entire family had been poor peasants prior to 1959, unable to pay for basic education. When the Revolution came, massive literacy campaigns were carried out across the country. Dayana’s abuela was one of the beneficiaries; she learned to read and write at 26 years old.
Stone steps greet you at the entrance to one of the main buildings of the University of Cienfuegos. There is a mural painted on the wall just beyond those steps. It reads “Sin educacion, no hay revolucion ... no hay socialismo posible.” (Without education, there is no revolution... [without it] socialism is impossible). We learned how before the revolution, there were just a handful of universities scattered across Cuba. The campus where we studied day in and day out had not existed before the revolution. Today, dozens of universities dot the island, spread across hundreds of campuses. Dayana’s grandmother, who had been illiterate until she was 26, was able to send all four of her children to receive a university education — an opportunity she likely would not have had without the revolution.
In the US, the ruling classes continue to squeeze universities by making them operate like businesses and slicing their budgets. We live in the richest country on Earth, yet higher education in the US is cripplingly expensive. Cuba — an island with far fewer resources than us — manages to provide free education for all its citizens. This despite the illegal sanctions the US government has maintained against the island’s people since the 1960s. Perhaps we in the US should shift our priorities from contributing to the material scarcity of other countries to making education as affordable as they do. We certainly have the means — if only we wrest control of society for working people from the hands of the capitalists. Dictinio, our Cuban professor, once recounted how Fidel Castro visited his childhood school on occasion, overseeing its construction along with many others. For Cubans, education is the revolution — it is the very core of what it means to be revolutionary.
We took several day trips around the island between classes, including visits to the Bay of Pigs and old Spanish colonial fortresses. In Havana, we visited art museums and Afro-Cuban cultural events. To finish off the journey, we took a week-long road trip across the island, visiting the cities of Trinidad, Matanzas, Pinar del Rio and others, learning a bit about the unique histories of each and getting a feel for contemporary Cuban culture. We moved around enough to work up some serious sweat in the blazing summer sun, but fun conversation and good company made the heat just a little less oppressive. Our guides were careful to remind us to drink enough to stay hydrated. When one travels there are always concerns about how the stomach will adjust to the local food, but in that regard, I had few issues. Funnily enough, the one time I was sick in Cuba, it was my own fault.
When I made the ill-advised decision to consume an aging airport sandwich, I quickly began to regret it. Our guides brought me to a local medical clinic in Cienfuegos. Joking with the staff there after they gave me something to ease my stomach (and some electrolytes to stay hydrated) is one of the fondest memories I retain from the trip. Cuba provides free healthcare for its citizens. The US ruling classes will not do the same, despite the U.S. being the richest country on Earth. The working class is fed up with the affordability crisis — Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in the New York City mayoral primary is an indication of this. Perhaps we can use the momentum of his victory to begin to build a new socialist movement in the US, reminiscent of the Cuban model in that it puts people before profits.
Since the revolution, Cuba’s medical system has developed tremendously. Cuban doctors are some of the best in the world, and the country even manufactured its own vaccine for the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortages of important medicines have forced medical professionals to adapt to tough conditions. Through impressive innovation in the face of these shortages, the Cuban system has developed advanced strategies for preventative care. Thousands of Cubans volunteer overseas in humanitarian aid missions after natural disasters; the Cuban government once offered to send medical personnel to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Unbelievably, and revealing the depth of its moral bankruptcy in a single decision, the George W Bush administration refused Cuban aid while the people of New Orleans were suffering.
Problems
If I speak very highly of the Cubans and the type of society they have built, it must be said that Cuba still faces serious problems. Finding basic foodstuffs on the island can be difficult; electrical blackouts are uncomfortably common. We experienced these problems firsthand on the island: in Havana, the power went out for a few hours while we were visiting; another time our Cienfuegos hosts went fishing in the morning to catch dinner for us that night. Cubans face these issues on the daily, and unlike us they have no retreat from them at the end of the month.
This scarcity has led some, such as our host Melba in Cienfuegos, to express disappointment with the current state of things in Cuba. Melba most clearly expressed this sentiment to me when she declared: “Che fue el verdadero revolucionario.” (Che was the real/ true revolutionary). Once, a faulty power line failed and the electricity went out. I remember Melba’s stressed reaction; she threw up her hands and declared, “Se me perdió todo.” (I lost everything). The power failure damaged Melba’s electrical appliances, some of them perhaps irreparably. One morning we were set to leave for a few days in Havana, and a pipe burst, leaving my space upstairs without water. I was lucky — the water flow was fixed by the time we returned from Havana, and I was not the one who had to deal with replacing the pipe.
Socialism and the revolution clearly remain the dominant ideological forces on the island, but for some ideology matters little. There was the hotel worker who complimented my Spanish when I struck up a conversation with him on the edge of a pool, who seemed to have little interest in political matters. There was Brayan, the English language student in Cienfuegos who mentioned little about politics but confided in me that he would like to live in the US someday. For some who deal more immediately with ideological matters, like the college professor entering her middle years, the island’s prevailing ideology might not suffice in the face of serious material shortages. I asked, “Do you consider yourself Marxist-Leninist?” Her response was ambiguous. (“What a question! That’s difficult to say.”)
Any socialist system must practice serious self-criticism. At least in one crucial case, the Cubans have done that — by all accounts, LGBTQ+ people were treated poorly in the years immediately after the revolution. Today, having corrected this, Cuba has adopted one of the most progressive family codes in the world. Criticism of political repression continues to be directed towards the island, a favorite talking point of the bourgeois press. One must point out that the imperial core, with its enormous gravity, constantly threatens to erode the self-determination of Cubans and pull the aspiring socialist nation back into a capitalist orbit. It is an express goal of the US to achieve regime change in Cuba. Still, within the Cuban system, valid concerns about imperialist counter-revolution and external threats should not lead to the reflexive denouncement of all internal disagreements as counterrevolutionary.
Cuba is not a paradise simply because Marxism holds sway; hundreds of thousands of people have left Cuba in the years since the revolution, some for ideological reasons, many more (perhaps most) simply because they seek better opportunities and less material hardship. It is important to note that migration is something of a regional problem across the Caribbean due to lack of opportunity and difficult living conditions; Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic all have large diasporas in the US.2 What cannot be ignored is that the US embargo — a series of ongoing sanctions against Cuba because the island’s people dared to chart a course of independent, anti-imperialist development in the 1960s — is probably the main reason for material hardship on the island today. The embargo has cost the island’s economy billions of dollars since it began. History has proven that the ruling classes of the world will never let socialist experiments develop in peace, because the success of socialism anywhere brings the death of class society and ruling class privilege everywhere ever closer. If humanity has a pleasant future ahead of it, it will only be a matter of time until the bourgeoisie is swept into the dustbin of history.
Defend the revolution
I left Cuba with countless fond memories, new friends and a better understanding of the island’s people. I left also with the firm conviction that the Cuban Revolution must be defended at all costs, not merely because the Cuban state is avowedly socialist or its intellectuals use Marxist language, but because in Cuba, society pursues concrete policies to improve the lives of its people. I had learned about Cuba’s bold initiatives in housing, medicine and education in books, but it was being on the ground in Cuba, witnessing what los logros of the revolution meant to the working-class people who had won them, which cemented my faith in Cuba’s brave social experiment. Being on the island showed me that a better world is possible.
The Cuban model is far from perfect — no revolutionary model is or ever will be. But the Cubans have taken a great stride towards human emancipation through their revolution, and we in the US would do well to acknowledge that.
I would like to thank Dairo Moreno and the other members of the Civitas Global Educational Services team for organizing our trip; their work is invaluable in that it fosters empathy and understanding between Cubans and students such as me in the US. The connections they help build are especially important when the hostile rhetoric of the US ruling classes towards Cuba — imperialist words cloaked in self-righteous sermons about freedom, when the only freedom the US recognizes is its freedom to intervene militarily in other countries — dominates and shapes the prevailing historical narrative about the island.
The US working class must oppose the criminal embargo against Cuba, which only Israel has not condemned at the United Nations in recent years. It must fight for gains like those the Cuban people have won for themselves, all while demanding that Cubans be given the right to live their lives and develop their society in peace. Perhaps one day, if we are lucky, US and Cuban students can study and learn together in numbers far greater than the US regime currently allows. Perhaps one day, a socialist US can stand together with socialist Cuba in fraternity and shared humanity.
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