Upstream - Cuba Pt. 4: Counterrevolution w/ Renzo Llorente

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

In this episode, part 4 of our ongoing series on Cuba, we're joined by Renzo Llorente for a conversation exploring the counterrevolution to Cuba's 1959 revolution and the various forms it took. Renzo Llorente is associate professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University-Madrid and the author of the books, The Political Theory of Che Guevara and The Political Thought of Fidel Castro.  The conversation begins with a look at the current assault on Cuba from the Trump administration and situates it within the context of a long counterrevolution which has been by and large a bipartisan project since the revolution's inception. We then discuss why counterrevolution occurs in socialist societies and the toll that it takes on the revolutionary ambitions of societies attempting to lay the foundations for socialism. We look at examples of sabotage—from assassination attempts to economic disruption, examples of outright military excursions like the Bay of Pigs invasion, and more.  We then look at how Cuba has been forced to respond to these perpetual attempts at counterrevolution often fueled and resourced by the imperialist powers, and why the degree of repression seen in Cuba can be understood as a direct and dialectical response to the United States' never ending quest to return Cuba to what it was before 1959. Specifically, we examine the concept of political prisoners and explore ways in which we can view political prisoners in Cuba as counterrevolutionaries. We examine multi-party versus one-party systems and discuss their potential for representation and democracy. And we explore the concept of a free press and how this is weaponized by the imperialist powers in not just Cuba, but in all states where imperialism is seeking a foothold. Finally, we discuss how counterrevolution has served to strengthen Cuba's resolve and determination to continue their long-fought battle for sovereignty.  Further resources: The Political Thought of Fidel Castro, by Renzo Llorente The Political Theory of Che Guevara, by Renzo Llorente Related episodes: Listen to our ongoing series on Cuba Listen to our ongoing series on Iran Listen to our ongoing series on China Listen to our ongoing series on the Alliance of Sahel States Intermission music: "Celos eternos" by Roberto Carcasses Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

After a revolution, there's always resistance and there's always opposition. This has been the case with every revolution, the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution, and after the Cuban Revolution. And often, their opposition takes very, very violent forms. There was sabotage, there were incursions, there were attempts at economic destabilization, there was an insurgency. And it was a very, as I said, violent kind of revolution. I think it was dangerous above all because it had so much support,

ideological support, financial support, logistical support from the United States, from the most powerful country in the world. That was a problem in part because it meant that Cuba had had to and has to divert an immense quantity of resources just to combating people who's in its overthrow the government and basically to return Cuban society to what it was before 1959. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society

that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. The imperialists may put a man on the moon, but they'll never put a man in Havana. These are the words written atop a 1971 Cuban propaganda poster commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The poster features a burning tank, an image representing the United States' attempt at overthrowing

the government of Fidel Castro in 1961. But it wasn't just military equipment which was hurled at Cuba after the revolution. It was a perpetual onsla of a wide variety of different kinds of counter-revolutionary activity that continues to this day. But still, even after almost 70 years, the imperialist, have still failed to put a man in a manner. In this episode, part four of our ongoing series on Cuba, we're joined by Renzo Larente for a conversation exploring the counter-revolution to Cuba's revolution and the various forms which it took.

Renzo Lorette is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University, Madrid, and the author of the books, The Political Theory of Che Guevara, and the Political Thought of Fidel Castle. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this

whole project go. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund. So thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Della in conversation with Renzo Laurenti. All right, Renzo, welcome to upstream. Thanks for having me. We always start with having our guests introduce themselves. So I would love it if you could introduce yourself and share your connection with Cuba and the impact Cuba and the revolution in general has had on your life. Sure. Well, my name's Renzo Laurenti, and I am a professor of philosophy on the Madrid campus of State Louis University. It's an American university that has a campus in Spain, and I've taught here for about 27 years now, I think. My connection with Cuba is personal and political, and also, I guess you could say intellectual, academic,

scholarly. As for the personal connection, my father was Cuban, he's from the city of Santa Clara, in the center of the country. He immigrated to the United States after college in the early 1950s, and I also had relatives who remained in Cuba after the revolution, as well as a fair number of relatives who left the country both before and after 1959, which is with the revolution triumphed. As for the political connection, I became interested in kind of left-wing and radical social ideas while in college. At the same time as I was interested in Latin American solidarity work, this was the late 1980s, mid to late 1980s. It wasn't long after the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and also at the time there was a revolutionary struggle in El Salvador.

door. And that eventually led me to take more of an interest in Cuba. While in college, I also met some students who were quite active politically, totally committed to the Cuban Revolution. They knew a lot more about Cuba than I did. And that also kind of increased my interest in the country. But it wasn't until 1995 that I actually visited Cuba for the first time. In regard to the intellectual or scholarly interest, that I suppose grew out of the political and personal interest. I started studying the ideas that had inspired and shaped the Cuban Revolution. And that led eventually to a book on the political thought of Che Guevara, and now the book that's going to come out next month, which is about Fail Castro's political thought. In terms of the impact of Cuba on my life, leaving aside the personal

and kind of cultural connection, I think the revolution's had a fairly profound impact on my life. I see revolutionary Cuba, with all of its shortcomings and flaws, as embodying or at least striving to embody a lot of the values and ideals that I think a really desirable human society ought to represent. It's a very egalitarian society that prioritizes solidarity and cooperation and also really prioritizes the needs and interests of ordinary people. And that's what I think the good society ought to do. And that's what it ought to look like. And that's what ought to be. Thank you for that introduction and those connections. So I'd love to contextualize our conversation in terms of what's happening right now.

So we're going to go back into history. But before we do, give us a picture in your understanding of what's happening in Cuba right now as we're having this conversation. Sure. Well, the current situation is very serious. The current crisis is very serious. There's no doubt about it. I think that President Trump is essentially trying to starve Cuba into, or the Cuban people into submission. He's using coercion, using threats, using economic warfare, ignoring the UN charter. Cuba was already in a fairly difficult situation even before Trump decided to basically prevent any oil from reaching the country. he'd already tighten the embargo, he'd added more sanctions, there were more punitive measures in above all during his first administration.

But the inability to import oil has been absolutely devastating, as anyone who's kind of followed the news knows. And I think it would be devastating to any country that had to import fuel or oil. So although I think in the media, it's often framed as in some way a kind of reflection of Cuba's reflection of dysfunctional society or something like that, any society that were subject to these kinds of constraints, this kind of pressure would, I think, find itself in the same situation. So I think it is a very serious situation. I think the Cubans are well aware of that. I think it's causing a lot of distress and a lot of hardship and a lot of desperation,

which is, I think, precisely what it's intended to do. I would make three points, however. First, what's happening now is, in some sense, just a continuation of American policy or what has been American policy since the early 1960s, which has basically been economic strangulation with the aim of inspiring Cubans to revolt out of desperation and overthrow the government or to somehow radically change Cuban society. What's happening now, I think, is more extreme and it's more brazen, I suppose, than this policy's ever been. the threat to Cuba is a lot worse than it was before, but in essence, it's the same policy. So the first point, the second point that I wanted to make is that I think the U.S. is able to apply this pressure on Cuba and is succeeding to a certain degree in achieving its aims because there's been so little resistance on the part of countries that are really in a position to do something to help Cuba or to, at any rate, keep the U.S. in some sense. And I'm thinking above all, not just of people think, why isn't China doing more, why isn't

Russia doing more, that sort of thing, but even the European Union, for example, which has expressed kind of mild condemnation above what Trump's doing, but hasn't really taken any measures to say this is intolerable, this unacceptable, or we don't support this. The other point I wanted to make is that in some sense, I think Trump's policy is succeeding, partly because President Biden did not return to Obama's policy toward Cuba, as he promised during his campaign or before becoming president. As listeners may recall, Biden said that he would reverse Trump's decisions during his first presidency, during his first administration, and basically restore President Obama's policies toward Cuba, which certainly did benefit Cuba. I don't think Obama's ultimate goals were that much different from any of his predecessors, but certainly he had a much more reasonable approach to a much saner approach, a much more humane approach, I think, to Cuban-American relations.

And I think his relatively minor changes to American policy really were at least establishing a framework for normal diplomatic relations in the future and kind of a healthy relationship between the two countries. I think if Biden had restored or returned to Obama's policies, it would be much more difficult for President Trump to be doing what he's doing now. And I think there will also be much easier for Cuba to resist some of the pressure that it's now kind of being subject to. So I think it's important not to overlook that because it was another missed opportunity after the disastrous four years of Trump between 2017 and 2021. Yes. And so in addition to the intensifying economic strangulation, I'll also add for right now, I've also seen intensifying solidarity or calls of, you know, willingness to. help, whether that's flotillas or people traveling to Cuba, bringing aid and supplies, and also putting pressure on countries and governments to really support Cuba right now and really the revolution. Absolutely. And I think it's important not to underestimate the importance of that,

absolutely. The trouble, and again, I don't know, it's hard for me to have a sense of what the response has been in the United States, other than what I read. But in Spain, I think the response has been disappointing. Kind of solidarity groups are doing a lot in terms of fundraising, in terms of donations, of medical supplies, organizing, kind of solidarity regates and so on. But up to now, hasn't really registered, I think, in terms of kind of mainstream politics or kind of mainstream political discourse, you might say. And the news, you know, the news on television and in the major media is almost consistently negative. There's some acknowledgement of the main source of the problem, which is, of course, Trump's prohibition of importing oil imports into Cuba. But for the

part, the focus has been on the misery and a very kind of sensationalistic treatment of the hardship and the blackouts and the scarcity of food and basically the problems that Cubans face on an everyday basis. But I agree with you, absolutely. The solidarity is absolutely essential. So in our series so far in Cuba, we've explored before the revolution, the revolution, and then the transition from capitalism to socialism in the early years. So in this episode, I'd love to bring us up through time following the thread of counter-revolution, which unfortunately has been a consistent theme and also has taken many forms, right? Economic, which you just shared, but also military, sabotage, and ideological. So just to introduce us to the theme of counter-revolution, I'd love for

you to share, you know, what does that mean in general and why it's important to have the this conversation. Now, before we do, two quotes that I pulled out from your book, both from Fidel Castro. One, Castro either said or wrote, a revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past. So that just really speaks to him, you know, acknowledging how difficult the ongoing revolution is going to be and the force of the counter-revolution. And so the second quote is Castro observes that there's the historic. law that either the counter-revolutionaries destroy revolutions or the revolutions destroy the counter-revolutionaries. So with that being said, introduce us to the theme of our

conversation, counter-revolution, and share why is it important to have a conversation about this topic right now? It's a great question, and I love both of those quotations. The first quotation of the battle between the past and the future, the past resists change, which is one of the reasons that the counter-revolution has been so strong and so such a problem in all revolutions. After a revolution, there's always resistance and there's always opposition. This has been the case with, as Fidel points out in one of the quotations you mentioned, in every revolution, the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution and the Nicaragum revolution, and certainly in Chile in the early 1970s and after the Cuban Revolution.

And often that resistance, often that opposition takes very, very violent forms. It's opposition essentially to the changes that the revolutionaries are trying to introduce, basically opposition to and resistance to the creation of a new society. This was a problem in Cuba from the very outset. There was resistance from the very start, although practically everyone supported the Cuban Revolution, supported the overthrow or the ouster of Fulchencia Batista in 1959. People supported for very different reasons. and many people, I think, at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, didn't realize that Fidel and the other revolutionaries intended a kind of radical transformation of Cuban society.

And many people weren't prepared for that. Maybe people were in favor of a transformation along those lines, and many people certainly weren't prepared for it. So there was a lot of opposition early on, mainly from Cuba's privileged classes, who lost privileges, most of their privileges, lost their political power. And it began, as I said very early, the Cuban Revolution triumphed in January, 1959. And by the end of that year, there was already significant kind of revolutionary activity. There was actually kind of revolutionary activity from day one. There were people who were closely connected to the Batista regime, who certainly were opposed to the revolution from day one. At any rate, there was a great deal of resistance, as I said, from early on.

it was very violent, often very violent and unremitting. There was sabotage. There were incursions. There were attempts at economic destabilization. There was an insurgency in central Cuba in the Escambadai Mountains and so on. And it was a very, as I said, violent kind of revolution. I think it was dangerous above all because it had so much support, ideological support, financial support, logistical support from the United States, from the most powerful country. in the world. And of course, the United States is only 100 miles from Cuba. And I think that's what made the Cuban counter-revolution especially dangerous and especially problematic. It wasn't just that you had a small minority of Cuban society, but people of considerable means and wealth and power, but a kind of revolution supported by the United States. And so that made it combating the counter-revolution priority for the Cuban revolutionary government. That was a problem in part.

because it meant that Cuba had had to and has to divert an immense quantity of resources just to combating people whose aim is to overthrow the government and basically to return Cuban society to what it was before 1959, or at any rate, to recover some of the privileges and power of the people who lost that privilege and power as a result of the Cuban Revolution. The latter part, I can remember the latter part of your question, sort of a digression there. Well, that was great. The latter part of the question was, why is it important to have this conversation on the topic right now? Sure. Well, the major issue is because the counter-revolution continues. It's certainly true that after the defeat of the insurgencies

in basically by 1965 and 1966 in the Escomodai Mountains, the armed internal insurgency or the armed internal counter-revolution had basically been. defeated. But there continued to be regular incursions from Southern Florida. There were terrorist groups. Miami exile groups. It was a minority within the exile community. But there were a number of terrorist organizations, such as Alpha 66, operating essentially out of Florida. And they continued to practice sabotage and try to infiltrate the country and smuggle arms in and basically destabilize the country. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and it essentially continued on and off through the 80s and 90s and continues today.

Most of the counter-revolution activity, the activity of kind of revolutionaries today, doesn't take the violent form it did in the maybe in the early 1960s, mid-1960s, and through the early 1970s. But that doesn't mean that it's come down in by any means. I think there was a change in tactics for a number of reasons, although there was a return to bombings in the late 1990s. 1997, there were a number of hotels were bombed in Havana. But the counter-revolution persists and remains active. I think much of the energy of counter-revolutionist today is really focused

on the use of social media and the internet to destabilize Cuban society, to spread counter-revolutionary propaganda, to disseminate misinformation, to if possible, going to be so chaos, economic chaos in Cuba, currency manipulation, that sort of thing. So it remains very, it's still a problem today. And since Cuba is more vulnerable today, probably than it has been at any time in decades, I think it's as important as ever to talk about the kind of revolution. What's more, as we all know, President Trump has been threatening more or less openly to, if not invade, conduct some sort of operation which would involve aggression against Cuba. and I think members of the counter-revolution to his speaker,

counter-revolutionaries certainly are making the most of those threats and I think want to do everything possible to kind of emboldened President Trump to undertake an operation maybe along the lines of the operation to kidnap President Maduro and Venezuela. So I think it's as much of a problem today, even though the shape that the counter-revolution is taken is very different from the shape or the expression, the forms that took in the 1960s and so.

70s. Yes. So, yeah, counterrevolution has been a thread throughout its history. It persisted today, although it's taken many forms. And yeah, it's very important to have this conversation to see how has Cuba resisted counter-revolutionary activity in the past and how might they and we as people in solidarity respond to what's happening right now. And I want to just uplift one thing you said. I think it'll be important point throughout this conversation. A country like Cuba after Batista that had to really deal with everything that it was left with, right? Like so much fleeing of capital and destabilization and kind of having to do this transition from capitalism to socialism and having to face so many really deep inequalities, right? Economic, racial, etc., couldn't put most of their energy attention

capital towards that transition because they had to divert so much of it towards facing the counter-revolutions, right, militarily and otherwise. So yeah, that's certainly a threat and it's important to know as we look towards the quote-unquote success of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Just to add that people often criticize Cuba for what they think of or view as the kind of excessive militarization of the country. And as though Cuba had devoted all of those resource of defense as a matter of choice and freely decided to prioritize investing in arms and guns and weapons and so on, which wasn't the case at all. I mean, it has invested in defense out of necessity and it's represented an enormous drain on a country with so few resources and underdeveloped

country, which really did want to use those resources for more kind of useful purposes like education and health care and culture and infrastructure and so on. An agrarian reform, right? A grand reform, absolutely. So, as we said, counter-revolution has taken many forms, sabotage, military operations, assassination attempts, economic warfare, ideological warfare. Let's start with the overt counter-revolutionary efforts that took the form of sabotage, military operations, and assassination.

So tell us how these have shown up in Cuba's history, and particularly the two early instances of La Cuberra explosion in 1960. and the Bay of Pigs invasion. What can we learn from him? What was the significance and meaning of those events? Sure. Let's see. We could start with the assassination attempts.

There have been more than 600 documented, or there were more than 600 documented assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, and more than 150 of them actually reached the execution stage. They're close to actually trying to carry out the assassination. That's probably, I suppose, the most noteworthy of the best known, maybe instance of counter-revolutionary violence. Before you go on, just to say, Che Guevara was assassinated. And I mean, others, like Camilo

Sanfuegos, I know he died mysteriously in a plane crash, but, you know, it's not just Fidel. The whole administration has been attacked militarily. No, absolutely. And to the credit, I suppose, the Cuban security services, none of the assassination attempts were successful. But there were many And if the counterrevolution didn't succeed, it's only due to this extreme vigilance on the part of the Cuban authorities. And again, that takes resources and research would be better spent elsewhere in agrarian reform and industrialization of agriculture and so on. So the assassination attempts, as I said before, there was a counterrevolutionary insurgency in central Cuba until about 1965, 1966. At one point, Fidel Castro gave a figure of 400, there's approximately 400 counter-revolutionary groups active in Cuba in the early 1960s, just to give you some of the sense of the extent of their activity. In addition to the assassination attempts and the insurgency in central Cuba, during the literacy campaign in 1960, 1961, a number of young volunteers were murdered by their counter-revolution.

These were basically high school students, young college students who went out and volunteered to go into the countryside and try to teach illiterate Cubans how to read and write. And they were often targeted by counter-revolutionary. Girl is essentially for assassination. There was a bay of pigs invasion. Maybe we could come back to that in April, 1961. Department stories were regularly bombed in the 1960s. There were the hotel bombings that I mentioned just a moment. moment ago in 1997. They were organized by, I believe it was Alpha 66, a Cuban exiled terrorist organization

in the my area, essentially above all. There was also the La Cube, which will come back to that. It was in a moment, the French freighter, which was blown up in Havana Harbor in 1960. There was also the bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight in October of 1976. There was a civilian airline, a civilian plane, and more than 70 people were killed, as was leaving Barbados. There have been countless attempted infiltration, smolding of arms into the country. As recently as last month, a group of 10 Cuban exiles living in the United States attempted to infiltrate Cuba. I believe that five, they were actually caught by the Cuban Coast Guard. When they were not far from Cuba, there was a shootout. I believe that five of them were killed. The other five, a couple were wounded. They were captured and taken to Cuba and treated in the hospital. They were apparently, they attempted to smuggle 13,000 rounds of ammunition into Cuba, along with rifles and pistols and so on. So it's been really endless, the amount of kind of counter-revolutionary warfare since the very early days of the revolution.

Two of the most dramatic instances of that were the La Cobra explosion and the Bay of Pigs invasion. The La Cubre was a French ship which was loaded with carrying Belgian arms to Cuba. This was in March 1960. I believe there were two explosions. And as a result of the explosions, while it was actually docked in Havana Harbor and they were unloading the arms, the weapons. as a result of the explosions, more than 100 Cubans were killed, and at least 200 were injured. And it was a horrific, if you see photos of the scene, it was a horrific explosion. The Cubans were never able to prove that it was sabotage, but it's pretty clear that it was,

given the timing of the explosions, given the nature of the explosion. and it was an absolutely, as you can well imagine, a completely traumatic experience for a revolutionary Cuba. I think that explosion only intensified their sense of vulnerability, which once again led to further kind of investment in every sense in defense and security. It's maybe a topic we can come back to later, but many of Cuba's security precautions, quite apart from the investment in defense, have to do with a very real committed to preventing terrorist attacks and terrorist activity. I know some people often are surprised when they visit Cuba at the level of security,

coming through the airport and in general of the country. But there's a very sound basis for that, and that is this a country which, I think it was Noam Chomsky, who once said, has been subjected to more terrorism than any other country in history, which is probably true, since it's really lasted now since 1960. Anyway, to come back to the consequence of that explosion, to the consequences, which may not be, which was certainly important on a symbolic level, is that during the funeral for the victims of the explosion, Fidel said for the first time, homeland or death, Patriot Muerre. And that became, of course, part of his signature slogan, essentially. It was also at the funeral for the explosion that the famous photograph of Che Guevara was taken, the most famous photograph. which has been reproduced, reprinted endlessly.

In terms of the Bay of Pigs, the Bay of Pigs invasion took place in April, 1961, essentially 1,500, roughly 1,500 mercenaries, human error in exiles. In many cases, the sons of very prominent Cubans who had left Cuba, wealthy Cubans, tried to invade Cuba. It was an invasion which was organized and financed by the United States. They failed. They were defeated in less than 72 hours. That was from April 17th to April 19th and 1961. That was a very momentous event for a number of reasons. For one thing, it in some sense kind of led to a kind of official recognition or acknowledgement of something which is obvious to all observers of Cuba, which was the radicalization of the revolution. As a matter of fact, the day before the invasion, Fiel Castro proclaimed publicly for the first time that the revolution that he was leading in Cuba was a socialist revolution or that they aimed to create a socialist society. It was fairly clear to most people or many people well before that, that the ultimate goal was a socialism or socialist society.

But that was the first time that Fielcaster had publicly announced that. And he did it the day before the first American invaders landed in Cuba. but after some of the initial strafing had begun, some of the initial bombing had begun. And that was important symbolically and important in terms of motivating the troops to, as Fidel would later put it, fight for socialism. They knew what they were fighting for before the battles began. The Bidipal was important in a number of other, a number of their respects. For one thing, it was important because the U.S. was defeated or the troops who were supported by organized and supported by the United States were defeated. and afterwards, Cubans would say this was the first defeat for imperialism in Latin America,

first defeat of American imperialism. It was important because it led, once again, to kind of heightened concern with security and an awareness of the vulnerability of Cuba, given the strength and the power of its adversary of the United States. I think it was important in that it led the U.S. to change its focus, the United States, It changes focus in terms of its aim of destabilizing Cuba or overthrowing the revolution. There continued to be a very strong commitment to economic destabilization and so on, but afterwards they seemed to realize that armed intervention was probably not going to work. It was clear that the revolutionary government had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Cuban population.

And the American intelligence community acknowledged as much. I think it also was important in that, as many people know, the Cuban-American exile community was deeply disappointed with the role of the American government in the Bay of Pig's invasion. Many were very critical of President Kennedy for not backing up the or supporting the mercenaries with American air power and American troops and so on. And that, of course, had some important domestic consequences in the United States. So it's important at many different levels, precisely because, Fidel did say on the eve of the invasion that this is a socialist revolution.

I think that some humans in Cuba, who may have still harbored some illusions, that the goal was anything other than a socialist society, kind of forced to see the truth or reality. In the Bay of Pigs, can you tell us about the story of the man who used his own blood to write Fidel on his cabin door? Right. Don't recall his name offhand. I think it may have been Garcia Delgado. I have it in the book. At any rate, this was the night before the invasion, the day before the invasion, there was strafing and bombing, and he was one of

the victims of these initial strikes, which are intended basically to facilitate the invaders work. And so he was mortally wounded in one of the strikes, one of the attacks. And as he was dying, he wrote the name Fidel in his own blood on the door of the cabin or the watch post, I suppose, where he was located at the time. And this door was photographed after he died, and it became one of the most famous and well-known photographs from that period of the Cuban Revolution. And it's a very striking photograph. It's a very unsettling photograph. And it certainly, among other things, attests to the level of kind of commitment to and faith in and identification with the leader of the Cuban Revolution. At the time, there were still, this is April 1961, it's pretty clear that at the time

most people, most Cubans still supported the revolutionary government, in part because people who were absolutely opposed to what the revolution was doing, it already left the country. But there were still, there were people abroad who thought that many people were already disaffected and that those who supported Fidel and the rest of the revolutionary government constituted a minority of the Cuban population. And so in some sense, this was kind of confirmation of the degree of identification with the revolutionary leadership and the revolution. I should also add that as a result of the Bay of Pigs, I think the level of commitment to and of adherence to the revolution only grew in Cuba, if only because Cubans were defending their country.

country from an external aggressor. And certainly it was a very impressive victory. Again, it's a small underdeveloped country defending itself against forces, which are backed by the strongest and most powerful country in the world. Yeah, I'm already hearing another insight from this conversation is that counter-revolutionary activity can demoralize and cause great chaos and, you know, strife for a country. And it can also unify. And it can also unify. And it can actually make the response stronger. Like you said, it was after these momentous occasions of counter-revolution that socialism was named and that there was kind of this bringing together of the perseverance and the need for the revolution itself. So again, a possible insight for this time,

how can the intensification of the economic, you know, strangulation actually, you know, unite Cubans uplift the Cuban Revolution ideals and principles and also really bring us together in terms of solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. So another insight there. I think that's a very important point. And I'm glad you you underscored it. And I do think we are seeing some of that. I did recently see an interview with a so-called independent journalist in Cuba. Some of them, I think, truly are independent. Some seem to be primarily funded by the U.S. government. But he was critical of the government, but one of the things he said is that there's very little uncertainty in Cuba as to what the main cause of the current hardships is. So that even people were very critical

of government policy and the management of the economy and specific decisions made by the current Cuban government were well aware of the fact that the current crisis has been caused by President Trump's decision to basically prevent any oil from reaching the country, which is very striking. I think it does help to kind of solidify the unity or make people aware the fact that they quite apart from their kind of political views, they're Cubans, and some sense, kind of their national independence really is on the line and their dignity. So another insight that I really felt from your book, your book that's coming out soon, was the reframing of political prisoners to counter-revolutionaries. And this is huge. This is huge. And I can think

about times that I've seen, oh, Cuba has so many political prisoners. And when you just reframe it as counter-revolutionaries, wow. So tell us about that reframe and give us some examples. Sure. The topic of political prisoners is interesting me for a long time. It's interested in a kind of philosophical level as well. And I've written a little bit about it for kind of an academic philosophical audience. I'll just say briefly, I don't think it's a very useful concept in general, quite apart from the Cuban case. I don't think it's really a meaningful concept. I don't think We have very clear criteria for what a political prisoner is. I think it's a concept or an idea or a category that's used really for kind of political purposes.

In any case, as you say, people often say, critics of Cuba or critics of the Cuban Revolution often say or a claim that the Cuban government has hundreds or thousands of political prisoners in Cuban jails, prisons and jails. I recently heard, it was just this week on a newscast. that Cuba, according to human rights organizations, has 1,200 political prisons, which I found striking because I, from time to time, I do actually look at the human rights organizations' lists of political prisoners, and I hadn't seen that particular statistic or number. At any rate, most of the people, not all of the people, as far as I can tell, just about every person who's identified as a political prisoner has not really been a political prisoner in the sense of which most people use the term.

I think most people, when they use the term casually, are thinking of someone who has been imprisoned because of their political ideas or political views or something they said in public or something along those lines. The people who've been imprisoned in Cuba and are routinely called political prisoners are people who have committed offenses under Cuban law. It could be disorderly conduct,

or it could be something like illegal possession of arms or explosives or something along those lines, or the kinds of activities which are prohibited or sanctioned in all countries, trying to overthrow the government even peacefully, or trying to destabilize the government or perhaps spread false information one sort or another. At any rate, I mentioned this, or discussed this in the book, in part because Fidel was very intent on clarifying the difference between a political prisoner and a counter-revolutionary prisoner, or rather explaining that all the prisoners who are considered political prisoners by critics of Cuba are, in fact, what he calls counter-revolutionary

prisoners. There are people who have been imprisoned because of what they did, not because of what they said or thought. And there are people who would be imprisoned in most countries of the world if they had committed the same offenses elsewhere in other places. They are people who committed crimes under the Cuban Penal Code that are prohibited by Cuban law. So I think it's important to make that distinction because people often try to discredit Cuba by saying it has all these political prisoners. But if you look at what they've actually been tried and sentenced for, they are offenses that would be punished or sanctioned in other countries as well. Phil often gave the examples of terrorist groups in Europe whose members had been captured and imprisoned.

and no one would call them political prisoners because they were imprisoned, not because of their views or their ideas or their beliefs, but because they had committed violent crimes, were engaged in activities which were clearly illegal and impermissible and so on. The same is true in Cuba. So that political prisoners are typically people who are engaged in counter-revolutionary activity of one form or another, actions which were intended to destabilize Cuba, destruction of property, attempts to challenge the government in ways which would be sanctioned in any country, anywhere, essentially. And just to add, because I think it's a really important point, the way that I am sensing it, is that when we frame people as political prisoners, we really frame them as a victim. But when we frame them as counter-revolutionaries, we reframe what they're doing, whether it's their speech, their sabotage, their action. as damaging, harmful, and a threat to the revolution.

And we have to remember what it is that they are, you know, counter to and what it is they are advocating for. So not all dissent, not all agitation is created equal. They are advocating for capitalist restoration. They're advocating for restoration of imperialist domination by the U.S., which is harmful to, you know, all the Cubans, but also human beings. in general. And the other point is, if people were just dissenting on their own, they're just disagreeing with the revolution or the changes that are happening, that's one thing. But we have to

remember that the U.S. has actively looked for and is currently actively looking for people who are in disagreement and people who are dissenting because they want to resource them and they want to amplify the dissent and they want to support the dissent so that it can actually destabilize a country like Cuba and actually encourage and make successful the counter-revolution. So, you know, it's important to, again, and we've made this point before, see that, you know, U.S. intervention and U.S. sanctions and just in general, the constant threat of U.S.-backed counter-revolution, both support and counter-revolution from itself, ultimately shapes the degree of repression that these revolutionary societies have to undertake. So in this way,

It's almost as if we have to see that, you know, it's not that Cuba has too many political prisoners, and we have to be mad at Cuba for having too many political prisoners, but we have to instead see that, you know, the criticism ought to be directed towards the United States, not the Cuban government, that it is the constant threat and resourcing from the United States that makes dissent and sabotage and counter-revolution so dangerous to the revolution itself and the government. And of course, this reminds us of what's happening and what has happened recently in Venezuela and Iran, right, where dissenting voices were amplified both by U.S. media and by politicians in the United States, which then were used to justify military intervention, right? And I really encourage folks to check out, if you haven't listened to our episode with Alina Zanafantos, particularly on dissent in Iran and the role of the Mossade agents, escalating and egging on the protesters and this idea of, you know, repression in Iran and how that's actually connected with the years of economic and military sanctioning and warfare from the

U.S. So, yeah, let's go to another way that Cuba has responded to counter-revolution. Very clearly, right? The creation of the committees in the defense of the revolution. This was another response. So tell us about these committees and how they evolved over time. Right. Well, the committees for the defense of the revolution were created in September 1960 by Fidel and presumably some other members of the revolutionary government. But it was Fidel who announced their creation. He had just come back from New York and his speech at the UN General Assembly. And he announced that the government was creating these special committees, which were initially going to be committees to protect neighborhoods and protect

the revolution, starting at the neighborhood level. And they were going to be organized, essentially neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block. And it's quite interesting in that the speech in which he announced their creation, bombs actually went off in Havana. And the bombs obviously served to underscore the need for something for an organization along these lines or some sort of institution to help the government and help the police and help the other security services to keep the counter-revolution in check. So initially it was a kind of neighborhood watch organization in some sense. And many people, again, who are critical of the Cuban revolution think that that's kind of a symbol of the tyranny or the totalitarian character

or something like that. But in reality, their creation, I think, represented an attempt to deal with a very real problem, which was counter-revolutions were wreaking havoc in the Cuban economy and Cuban society and causing a great deal of disarray in general and really preventing the revolution from moving forward. So initially they began as a kind of neighborhood watch, but eventually they evolved into a very different kind of institution, one which in addition to preventing the counter-revolution from making inroads and destabilizing Cuban society to one which was a kind of really civic organization, you might say. They helped with blood drives and they helped with certain agricultural initiatives, neighborhood organizing in general, recycling campaigns,

vaccination campaigns, this sort of thing. So they never cease to be organizations charged, with ensuring that the counter-revolution would not prosper, but they came to represent much more than that. And I think critics of the CDRs often fail to, on the one hand, appreciate the need for that kind of organization, especially in the 1960s, but well into 1970 as well. On the other hand, the fact that they've involved to become something much more than just a kind of self-defense organization or something along those lines. Yeah, the history of that that really stood out to me was that, yeah, initially they were more defensive and kind of protective, but then they became kind of like offensive, meaning like the promotion of the revolution in these more social and community-oriented sense, right? Like contributing to society, not just defending against society.

No, absolutely. It's a good way of putting it. I was coming from a more kind of negative role to a more kind of positive role. And I think, you know, by and large, I don't think Cubans on the island view them in a way which resembles or has anything to do with the way they're viewed by many of Cuba's critics as this kind of almost a big brother type institution within Cuban society. Yeah. And even just the name is interesting. Committee is in defense of the revolution, right? Like that that work, again, if we're thinking about this theme of counterrevolution, really needs to be throughout the entire country, right, at a block by block. level. Absolutely. And the defense involved, and not merely armed defense or defending against kind of the armed resistance or armed opposition, but defending the goals of the revolution and the projects and the social initiatives and the attempts to restructure Cuban society and really make progress and advance toward the goals that they all embraced.

You're listening to an upstream conversation with Renzo Laurenti. We'll be right. back. That was Celos Eternos by Roberto Carcassiz with Renzo Laurenti. So another response to counter-revolution, or perhaps I would frame it that way, I don't know if you would, was the decision to have one party in Cuba, so the Communist Party and also to forego elections until 1976, which was 17 years after Batista was overthrown. So I'd love to hear about this decision from your perspective and also in terms of this frame of, you know, defending the revolution or defending against counter-revolution. Before you do, I do want to share two more quotes from

your book. So one of them, this is a quote from your book, you say, sociopolitical divisions represent the greatest enemy of a revolution, as Fidel would say, in his July 26, 1961 speech. And this is why the preservation of unity would take precedence over opposition's groups right to meet and agitate for their anti-revolutionary programs and, more generally, why he thinks a one-party political system is justified. And then the second quote is actually a Trotsky quote

that you quote in your book, Welfare of the Revolution is the Supreme Law. So break that down for us. Tell us about this idea of response to counterrevolution being the decision to have one party in Cuba and to forego elections until 17 years after Batisto was overthrown. Right. I like the way that you framed the question or the direction of the question because I think it's important to understand the decision to have one party as a response to the concern with disunity. and the problems that disunity had caused over the course of Cuban history. This is a theme which comes up time again in Cuban history. It started with Jose Marti at the end of the 19th century. We also favored a one-party system.

And the idea was essentially that the greatest weakness in Cuba historically had been disunity and division, that it had been easy for foreign powers to dominate and control and subjugate Cuba because the people were disunited, because the people were not united. And Fidel certainly shared that view, and that's one of the main reasons that he supported the creation of a one-party system. It was one way, among others, of achieving unity and ensuring unity, and in that sense, protecting Cuba against the kind of vulnerability which had led to foreign domination in the past.

It's far easier to dominate and control a society which is disunited, and fragmented and atomized and so on. So that was kind of one of the main rationales or motivations for adopting a one-party system. Fidel did not think that it was incompatible with democracy, that you could have democracy and a one-party system. As Cuban sometimes point out, having many parties or a multi-party system

is no guarantee of democracy. There was a multi-party system under Batista, for example. And as many theorists or some theorists have pointed out at least, a one-party system does not preclude democracy or is not completely incompatible of democracy so long as certain conditions are satisfied. I won't go into all of that. I'll talk a bit about that briefly in the book. So that was the main motivation for having one party to try to preserve and promote unity. And it certainly makes sense when you think about how vulnerable Cuba has been, given its size, given its relative under. development, given its proximity the United States in the past. First, it was obviously vulnerable to Spanish domination, then domination by the U.S. In terms of the delay in holding elections, it is true that elections were not first held until 1976, and the first elections were very relatively limited. The early elections, certainly were still related to experiments with

electoral politics. Fidel gave a number of justifications for that, for one thing, He and other Cuban leaders said that the country needed time to really develop the kind of institutional framework, the needed time to achieve a certain kind of stability. Certainly, as we said, as we were saying before, a lot of energy and time was taken up just protecting the revolution, protecting Cuban society, protecting Cuban life, trying to ensure the viability of the revolution. It's also true that the political framework was evolving relatively slowly. The Communist Party, which would become the only legal permitted party. It wasn't actually created until 1965. That was a six years after the election. And they certainly did take their time after that. But again, there were lots of other challenges,

lots of more urgent needs in many respects. The Cubans desperately wanted to achieve a certain degree of, this demotum of economic independence. And that was kind of the focus. There also, I don't think, was all that much kind of pressure within the country to have elections and have elections as soon as possible. And so it was a process that took time. The new constitution wasn't passed until the 1970s. And of course, all of the kind of juridical framework within which elections would take place

was not really established until the new constitution came out and was approved. So 17 years or a long time. Finally, I should mention that Fidel often pointed out that it was important also to kind of democratize Cuban society and raise the kind of educational level of Cubans so that they're in exercising their political rights and exercising their right to vote and voting, it would be more meaningful than it had been in pre-revolution in Cuba.

Finally, I should probably add that he himself points out that elections were not held in the United States until 12 years after the Declaration of Independence. Although 17 years may seem like a very long time, it's comparatively not as long as some people might think. Yeah. And, you know, as we're having this conversation, you know, I don't mean to just only, kind of celebrate and uplift everything about Cuba. I actually think it's important for us to, you know, question, challenge, critique, etc. And so that's really why I'm asking. And what I really found helpful in your book was just, you know, looking at Fidel's explanations and response to this. So in continuing with this theme of, is Cuba a democracy or has Cuba been a democracy,

one thing that you wrote about was his efforts of direct democracy. And I've watched a couple of documentaries about Cuba where Fidel goes and he just talks to people and he asks them, you know, what's your challenge? Like, is it transportation or livelihood or, you know, food? Like, what is what's going on for you? So we can see that as kind of a direct democracy model. But also you write about how he questions or critiques this idea that the U.S. is democratic, right? So you have this one quote that he brings about the Marxist perspective on the nature and function of the state where he writes, look upon. on the state as an instrument of the ruling class to exercise power. What you call representative

democracy is in our opinion the dictatorship of the capitalist, and the North American state is an instrument of that class domination. And so you really, you know, you highlight that Fidel rejects what he would see as capitalist democracy, which is what we have. And I can really feel that, you know, right now in California, where I am, we're coming up to a gubernatorial race. And it's so interesting the candidates that get all the attention and that are really like the ones that are deciding between are so similar, whereas things like the socialist candidate, the Green Party candidate, do we really have a democracy where we really truly get to choose? We want to represent us in our state and beyond. And then one more quote from your book on this, you wrote,

true political democracy presupposes social equality and social justice. It makes no sense to speak of democracy in countries in which we find hunger, unemployment, major inequalities, and distribution of wealth, and similar systemic injustices. So that prerequisite of political democracy actually includes culture, education, national dignity, and independence. So, yeah, just say a little bit more about this question of Cuba as a democracy and kind of what we're comparing it against. And also any questions or challenges that you have at this time on this matter. Sure. And let me just add one other point in connection. with the, which is also related to democracy, the one-party model.

Cuba has also pointed out that if there were more than one party, it's that much more likely the United States would make use of that second party or the third party to somehow make inroads and somehow undermine the Cuban Revolution. So there's another kind of justification often given. Connected with democracy, it's a very important topic, obviously. One thing I think which is important to bear in mind is that it's a mistake to think that democracy is an either-or question. And I know that in the media you often see the issue of democracy presented as though a country is either democratic or it's not democratic. And usually the criteria, they're kind of implicit criteria or the implicit standard is Euro-American democracies and the kind of things we find

in the United States or in Europe. So one of the important ideas in Fidel is that there's no reason we need to accept that model of democracy, that there may be many different kinds of democracy, many different types, forms of democracy, and that it's a mistake or an error to simply assume that the kind of democracy that receives the most attention or the most highly celebrated in corporate media is the only model of democracy or even the best model of democracy. And certainly he did think that it's kind of a bad joke

to talk about a democracy in societies in which many people don't have their most basic needs met or satisfied and other people live lives of extraordinary privilege and wealth and comfort. One of the things he was getting, I think, is a kind of impoverishment of the notion of democracy or what democracy is or ought to be. So he was very critical of democracy as it's practiced in the United States, partly because he thought that it wasn't really democracy, or it was, as the quotation you read suggests,

something like controlled by a very kind of money-ed elite, which uses the window dressing certain apparently democratic institutions to conceal what is in fact just domination by a particular class or a particular group of people who represent certain socioeconomic interests. He thought that when we speak about democracy, it's just important to talk about empowering people in their everyday lives, which meant giving them the cultural and educational resources, giving them the material resources they needed to really have the capacity

to analyze issues, reflect on, issues, express their views, and then exercise political power. So what he offers really is a model of democracy, very imperfect, and I don't think it's been fully realized in Cuba, what they have in mind by any means. And as I say in the book, it's clearly an imperfect example of democracy, and there certainly have been authoritarian features in the Cuban system and authoritarian strains in Cuban politics. But I think there's a lot to recommend it in terms of both the actual procedures, the actual practices, and the goals in terms of a more authentic or more robust democratization of society and amortization of life and experience. And then again, that authoritarianism

that we can see is present in Cuban politics and history, it would likely dissipate if it wasn't for that unrelenting assault and threat by the United States, right? And then just to go back to that electoral part, there's a great quote from Julius Nairir who said, the United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them. And of course, he was referring in this quote to the one party being capital, right, that you can have as many parties as you like, but if all of the dominant ones represent capital, and, you're not, you're then essentially you do have just one-party system. And then if we look at communism, right, if we think about what Marx said, communism and the one-party system, like in Cuba, is a

dictatorship of the proletariat, right? So it's a system with one party, but that one party represents the people, the regular people. And so in this way, a one-party system in a place like Cuba under communism is infinitely more democratic than a system with multiple parties, but they are all represent the capitalist class. And then like you said, it is problematic to measure democracy by the standard of Western parliamentary democracies, right? Especially when we look at Western democracies, and we see that they've proven both through experience, right, our direct experience, but also through studies, that they're actually wildly undemocratic, right? And I'm thinking about our series on China where the perception of people in China of their so-called one-party system was that it was

wildly more democratic than our perception of democracy within the United States. So, you know, and that's just by people's self-reported feelings on how they're feeling towards their government. So just more to consider when we're thinking about this idea of one party versus multi-party and what is democratic. So let's let's continue. with this idea of counter-revolutionary activity in terms of the ideological. And let's go to a similar theme of the freedom of press. And I'm thinking about books, newspapers, etc., that are anti-socialist, anti-communist, critical of the government, right?

We can see those, too, as counter-revolutionary activity. And so tell us about Cuba and this theme of the freedom of press and counter-revolution. and how did Cuba decide to relate to this topic and what was their response? Sure. And again, it's another important question because people often criticize Cuba for the alleged lack of freedom of expression and freedom of the press and so on. In some sense, I suppose you could see the Cuban governments and the Cuban Revolution's attitude toward our policy on freedom of the press as one reflection or what application of a dictum that Fidel stated. early on in the revolutionist in June of 1961. There was a series of meetings at the National Library in Havana to talk about cultural questions and cultural issues

because artists, intellectuals were concerned that they might not be able to express themselves freely and create freely in this new revolutionary society. At the end of June, 1961, Fields spoke, the final kind of plenary session, so to speak. And during that session, he said, within the revolution, everything against the revolution, nothing. And this was in some sense the framework for Cuban cultural policy, which included Cuban policy with regard to freedom of

expression. And the idea was essentially, and it's important to bear in mind, this was only a couple of months after the Bay of Pigs invasion. So you can imagine that people in general were in a very kind of defensive mood, and the revolution's leadership was prioritizing defense of the revolution. But essentially that, in terms of freedom of the press, that seemed to employ. that they would allow in freedom of speech, all expression which was not clearly against the revolution aimed at undermining or discrediting the revolution or overthrowing the revolution. And most intellectuals and journalists and writers and at the time interpret that as a fairly liberal idea, fairly liberal kind of pronouncement. So certainly there have been restrictions on freedom of the press,

as Fidel often said, we're not going to allow overtly counter-revolutionary literature to be published in Cuba. And that may seem like an extreme restriction on freedom of oppression, but in reality, I don't think it's all that different from what most states do, when it's a matter of kind of the fundamental principles of the society, the fundamental assumptions or the fundamental values. And the quotation from Trotsky that you read a while ago, in some sense, is basically saying the same thing. there is a kind of ultimate value or an ultimate concern, which is the safety, the security,

the well-being, whatever, the revolution. And we're not going to allow people to express ideas, which are going to threaten the very foundations of this system. But within the system, we're going to allow freedom of expression and criticism. And I think for the most part, they've succeeded. There's certainly, you know, that policy has also evolved over time. Cuba is a much freer society with respect to freedom of expression and freedom of speech than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago for a variety of reasons. And it's still evolving. But I think in principle, it's a defensible position. And I don't think, as I said, it's all that different from what most states do in terms of protecting the most fundamental values. And all states prohibit some kinds of speech and expression and some political views. Yeah, and here again, I think it's important to remember that idea that not all dissent is created equal, like this idea, not all freedom of speech is equal. Descenting speech that is meant to destabilize or overthrow socialist or communist countries and restore capitalism is different than dissenting speech intended to overthrow capitalism and bring us towards a post-capitalist future, right?

the the capitalist have so much more power influence and you know propagandistic advantage over these small emerging socialist states that have barely established a foothold and are fighting battles on all fronts right so it's in some ways it's understandable that they're taking certain measures to kind of restrict the information within the revolution right that's being disseminated so that their fragile, you know, socialist states can actually work, you know, can take root. And I'm thinking about a couple of examples, right? Like the same thing that happened with what the Bolsheviks had to do or what Burkina Faso is doing or what China does with their great firewall or or the Islamic Republic and they're turning off the internet, right? It's to stop the counter-revolutionary Tsarist from poisoning the minds of

the people, right, to stop the Western imperialists from spreading disinformation, to stop the Mossad agents from sewing chaos and really agitating, right? And again, if the imperialists would stop trying to, you know, disempower and overthrow and destabilize these countries and turn them back into sites of extraction and capital accumulation, then the rights and the restrictions and the repression would look very different, right? And the only reason why we don't talk as much about restrictions on the freedom of press in Western countries or capitalist countries is because the capitalists own all the press, right? But it is true as we're starting to see kind of like the cracks in capitalist dominance and,

you know, dissenting voices against U.S. imperialism and capitalism more generally, like, really bubble more to the surface. we are actually seeing, again, that more repressive crackdown in ways that maybe they had done before they established total dominance. And I'm thinking about, you know, people being prisoned for speaking out against what's happening in Palestine or I'm thinking about the, you know, purchase of TikTok, right? So it's just so hypocritical to think that, you know, Western countries pretend that they care, so much about these freedoms abroad, like in Cuba, when they're actually violating these freedoms domestically. And yeah, it just shows how political it is and how manufactured it all is, right? So I want to stay with this theme of ideological warfare. There's another quote from Jose Marti

from his essay, Our America, where he wrote, trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone. Really interesting. And this brings us to another period in Cuba that really articulates this called the Battle of Ideas, which actually took place in the late 1990s to the early 2000s, but just so related to what we're talking about. And I think battle of ideas could be a frame throughout the Revolution history and particularly to today. But from your book, you write, Fidel describes the battle of ideas as the battle of truth against lies, the battle of humanism against dehumanization, the battle of brotherhood and fraternity against the crudest selfishness, the battle of freedom against tyranny, the battle of culture against ignorance,

the battle of equality against the most monstrous inequality, the battle of justice against the most brutal injustice, the battle for our people and the battle for other peoples. Because if we go to the heart of the matter, it is the battle of our small country and of our heroic people for humanity. Wow. And so tell us about this battle of ideas and both what sparked it, but also its legacy. Sure. The battle of ideas, more or less officially began around December, in December, 1999. It was in some ways prompted by or motivated by the Elian Gonzalez affair. This was a very young boy, I think he was six years old, who was on a boat of Cuban migrants, people who left Cuba, sat on a boat hoping to reach Florida. And the boat had sank, essentially, and the alien managed

miraculously to survive. He was picked up at sea by, I believe it was the American Coast Guard. And that led, as some people may, some of your listeners may recall to this long legal battle because his relatives in Miami did not want the U.S. government to allow him to be returned to Cuba, where his biological father was still living. His parents were separated or divorced, and his mother, unfortunately, died as a result of the shipwreck. At any rate, the Battle of Ideas began really the following month, and it was, above all, I think, an ideological battle. It wasn't just an ideological battle. It also was a very kind of practical attempt to remedy some of the problems in Cuba at the time, So a lot of youth people were kind of enlisted to try to make the economy more efficient.

But Fidel tended to emphasize the kind of ideological battle. It's basically an ideological battle against the United States or against the United States, as he sometimes said, arrogance and imperial ambitions and pretensions. It's very important, I think, to contextualize it. This is the late 1990s, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc states had collapsed basically the end of the 1980s. due 1989, 1991. And in some sense, the American capitalist ideology was kind of triumphant. And at the time, Cuba was still recovering from the loss of aid from the Soviet bloc countries. And Fidel thought that in addition to the kind of actual practical economic measures, it was important to recover a lot of the values and what you might call ideological commitments

that had made the Cuban Revolution what it was. So it was important to recover the commitment to equality and social justice and solidarity and to develop really a kind of counter-hegemonic message to promote a kind of counter-hegemonic discourse. And that's basically what the battle of ideas was all about. In some sense, it may have come too early, since I think it's even more needed now,

more necessary now for a number of reasons than it was at the end of the 1990s, early 2000. But it was an important, it was kind of, feels last major, I suppose, ideological contribution you might say to the Cuban Revolution, but it was important because there was a sense

at that time that some of the early, or the original kind of ideological fervor and enthusiasm for the revolution was ebbing or disappearing. There was more corruption in Cuba and a lot of, I suppose,

apathy. and disengagement. And that was his attempt to kind of, in some ways, kind of rekindle, he might say the revolutionary, forever they'd characterized earlier phase of the revolution. Yeah, definitely interesting to think about it today. I was also, well, heartened to read about Ileon Gonzalez eventually. He was returned to his biological father in Cuba, and then was actually very proud of the Cuban Revolution and even served in Cuban government. So that was great to read his like kind of the rest of the story, which I, you know, I only remember the first part. So that was great. And then also I mean, this is a longer conversation maybe for another time, but just thinking about social media, you know, and just the difference of a battle of ideas at that time and then a battle of ideas now. And also battle of ideas even within the left more broadly, right, in the U.S. and everywhere. It's the same battle. So. Absolutely. And I think. I think, I mean, to Philo's credit, I think he did anticipate around 1998, 1990, that the collapse of the Soviet Union, even for people, didn't agree with the system, didn't identify where they didn't think it was anything resembling what their model of socialism was.

I think it is true that there was a kind of demoralization, that the left in general suffered a kind of demoralization and disorientation, which is never really overcome for a number of reasons. and there is a much longer conversation. And this was attempt at least to contribute from Cuba to a kind of recovery of some of the kind of self-confidence of the left and the need to kind of do battle with this kind of prevailing ideology, which said there's no alternative. Basically, the Euro-American model is the only one. And sooner or later, everyone's going to have to accept it and embrace our values and embrace our way of life and our way of doing things.

So just to bring the conversation around rights and freedoms and all that to a close. I want to share one more quote from your book. You wrote, in restricting certain rights and freedoms, Cuba has, in short, acted the way most countries do when they find themselves under attack or faced with certain kinds of national emergency. And to the extent that the justification for restrictions prove valid in the past, they retain their validity today. So I think that's like a great way to kind of bring that part to a close. And yeah, so just to remind ourselves, we went through the assassination attempts, the military interventions, of course, not all of them, but some, the sabotage and now the ideological warfare, we have to return, as we had at the very

beginning, to this idea of economic warfare and the idea of counter-revolution through economic warfare to see what's happening as it is an attempt against the revolution. So just briefly, tell us about economic warfare in its historical sense. What is helpful to know in its history of Cuban Revolution, understanding economic warfare as counter-revolution for what's happening right now. So trace some of the moments throughout Cuba's history and bring us up to what's happening today. Sure. Well, first of all, before the revolution, the United States had committed itself to buying a certain quantity of Cuban sugar every year. It was called the Cuban sugar quota. And that was eliminated in July 1960. So that was one of the first measures. And that dealt a really

devastating blow to Cuba because Cuba at the time, it's changed a lot, but at the time was basically a one-crop economy. Most of its revenue came from, large percentage of revenue came from its sugar exports. Then a couple of years later, in February 1962, the trade embargo was imposed, which basically prohibited most forms of commerce between Cuba and the United States. And that was a further blow. That was the beginning of the embargo, as we know it today. then in 1992, so that was in place for 30 years. Then in 1992, there was another act. It was usually called the Torricelli Bill.

I think it was called the Cuba. I don't remember the Cuba Democracy Act, which I believe was the law, which sanctioned subsidiaries of American companies for trading with Cuba and imposed a number of other penalties and restrictions on companies doing business with Cuba. That was followed,

years later in 1996 by the Helms-Burtain Act, which further tighten the embargo, which made it a law almost impossible, very difficult to repeal or require an act of Congress to repeal it, impose certain conditions on any kind of quote-unquote transition in Cuba. It explicitly says that the Castro brothers cannot form a part of this in 1996 of any future government. And taken together, they essentially represented economic warfare and absolutely, debilitating, horrifically debilitating restrictions on Cuba's ability to trade

freely with the United States and other countries, not just the United States, but other countries. The reason many people call it a blockhead is because of its extraterritorial effects. It's not just, it doesn't just control trade between Cuba and the United States, but also affects third parties in other countries.

Some of the restrictions were relaxed with under Obama, but essentially it's been the same story up until today. In addition to that, Cuba was put on the state sponsors of terrorism list, which also discourages countries from conducting trade with Cuba because it will be subject to more sanctions and penalties. Cuba had been taken off the list and then was placed to be on the list again by Trump, I believe, during his first administration. President Biden waited until the last day or the last week of his presence need to remove Cuba from the list,

and of course President Trump put Cuba back on the list almost immediately. So the economic warfare has continued to this day. And one of the interesting things about what's happening right now is that you don't really need to read much or know much about Cuba to be aware of the economic warfare. Obviously, prohibiting Cuba from importing oil is a pretty blatant example of economic warfare. So again, you know, it certainly supports the kind of revolution. It's part of the counterrevolution. And it's basically continued since 1960 up until the present. And I think it's important to realize that the effect that those measures have on a country as small and relatively undeveloped as Cuba are absolutely devastating. They would have a devastating effect on any country. But we're talking about a very small country, 10 or 11 million people with few resources and which has been subjected to these measures already for several decades.

Absolutely. And yeah, thank you for bringing us up to today and kind of bringing us back for that. that very first question about the context of this conversation. So, you know, to close, I want to just revisit this idea of reflecting on all the ways that Cuba has addressed counter-revolution in its history. How does that inform what's happening in Cuba today? Like, what can we learn from that to inform or even guide or inspire what's happening today, both in Cuba and for those of us outside of Cuba, in solidarity with Cuba? So I just want to share the insights that I'm hearing, you know, one of them is for us to understand Cuba's militarism

or their promotion of, you know, military defense and defense of the revolution and even restrictions on certain freedoms, right, to see them in light of defense of the revolution, to see them as the counter-revolutionary activity. This reframing of, you know, political prisoners to counter-revolutionaries. I find that helpful. to see the potential that these moments can have. They can demoralize or create chaos or instability, but they also too can create unity and also a collective revisiting of the ideals

and principles of the revolution and a recommitment, right, as that man put in his own blood, Fidel, on the wall as he was dying, right? And then also to see this battle of ideas and this ideological warfare as ongoing and to see, you know, to read between the lines when we see the news stories or the framing of what's happening now and to really see the battle of ideas that's kind of behind or beneath what's happening.

So I just want to, yeah, share those insights that I'm really getting from you and from your work. And then I want to close with one quote before I hand to you. You wrote in your book his quote from April 1961. So this is Fidel. We must keep in mind that imperialism will not rest in its efforts at attempting to destroy the revolution, at attempting to create obstacles in our path, at attempting to prevent the progress and development of our homeland, or patria, we must keep in mind that this imperialism hates us with the hatred of masters towards slaves who revolt. So I'm going to hand to you

for your closing thoughts, closing words on, you know, what can we learn in general for how Cuba has addressed counter-revolutionary activity in its history, and how can we use that today for what's happening, both within Cuba and for those of us outside of Cuba? It's a great question. I think a couple of things you mentioned, unity, trying to really promote unity and not coerce unity into being, but promote it the way they've proven historically and by really kind of strengthening ties between ordinary Cubans. I think the egalitarianism is a big part of that, the sense of solidarity. I think, the returning some of the values that have made Cuba what it is today, I think the ideological

struggle is important as well. I also think something we mentioned at the very beginning, international solidarity. One of the reasons I think that we are seeing this outpouring of solidarity toward Cuba is precisely because one of the really kind of core commitments of the Cuban Revolution or one of the really distinctive commitments of the Cuban version had been international solitary toward other countries. It's in some sense countries are now giving back and people in other countries are giving back what they've received from Cuba. Their governments aren't, but the people are, but the governments aren't giving back as much as they ought to.

So I think all of those things, I think if Cuba can't tap into those resources, it will be able to at least counterpart of the counter or combat some of the influence of the counter-revolution. But it's very difficult. It's very difficult when ordinary Cubans are so demoralized because it's so difficult just to meet their basic needs and go about their daily lives because of Trump's current policies. But I think the sort of things that really enable Cuba to resist the counter-revolution or survive the kind of revolution historically are the things will enable it to resist

or enable them to resist and survive the kind of revolution today. The unity, the ideological struggle, commitment to those core values of the Cuban Revolution, the egalitarianism and solidarity, cooperation and so on. and ideological struggle. And I think we are seeing some of that among young Cubans, which is very encouraging. It's often pointed out that, I don't know, a very high percentage. I don't know if it's 80% of the Cuban population was born after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the East Block countries. So these are young people who don't know what Cuba was like before 1959,

don't know what the Cuban Revolution really accomplished when it had more favorable international circumstances and was helped by other countries to resist the American blockade. But some of those, many of these young people also realize what's at stake. And it's very encouraging to see them kind of engaging in this kind of battle to respond to the counter-revolution on an ideological level or in terms of disinformation and false news and attempts of kind of so in confusion and spreading lies about Cuba. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Renzo Laurent, Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University, Madrid,

and the author of the books, The Political Theory of Che Guevara, and The Political Thought of Fidel Castro. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Roberto Carcasses for the intermission music. The cover art for today's episode is from a 1971 Cuban propaganda poster commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, titled, The Imperialists

May Put a Man on the Moon, but they'll never put a man in Havana. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We could not keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes,

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