Listen, Yankee! Why Cuba matters
Based in part on conversations with Ricardo Alarcón By Tom Hayden,
Seven Stories Press, 2015
“With his close friend Ricardo Alarcón, we get a conversation reflecting on history, the Cuba-US relationship and international diplomacy”. See Review below
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Tom Hayden, a US political, environmental and social activist since the Cuban revolution, borrows the book s title from the 1960 work by radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. Then Mills had the foresight to see that tension between the United States and Cuba was due to the lack of truth about Cuba in the US and to an unwillingness to listen and respond meaningfully to Latin grievances. Fast forward to December 2014 and “The day they said would never come” and Hayden admits in a preface, as the book came out in 2015, that he foresaw “that normalisation...would take place in President Obamas second term of office”. But the book is also about Two old guys talking as the introductory chapter is called. With his close friend Ricardo Alarcón "Cuban ambassador to the United States who-might-have-been", we get a conversation reflecting on history, the Cuba-US relationship and international diplomacy. Alarcon is good value, an intelligent past statesman with real history. He certainly helps softens the stereotyped image of a hardline Cuban bureaucrat steeped in Russian marxism.
With chapters covering the Revolutionary war, its triumph, Cuban missile crisis and counterinsurgency, JFK s assasination, Regis Debray, Cuban internationalism, the Carter and Clinton years, Elián Gonzalez and the new left today across South America, it has a lot of information and anecdotes (24 pages of references and notes). It is not a history book though, and much is personal opinion or reminiscences. It was fascinating to read Alarcón describing how meeting officials at the US mission in previous backchannel talks meant “our people came by in a normal car, entered the garage to pick me up, and I would lie down on the back floor of the car. Then we drove to the Carlyle Hotel, and I could sit up”. Everything was about maintaining the impression that the US was being tough with antidemocratic Cuba. In reality state officials have been meeting from day one, which is why the 17 December 2014 announcement was inevitably going to come.
Whilst interesting and generally positive throughout Hayden does resort to criticising freedom of speech in Cuba and says that there "is no question that Cuba suffers what can be politely called a deficit of democracy." I personally find such statements unhelpful and unproven and he plays safe with his comment “after fifty years of failed democracy promotion another perspective is needed”. That may be the case but this book doesnt help shape a debate where the blockade still exists, regime change is still on the agenda, Guantánamo is illegally occupied and Cuba must be respected as an independent, sovereign state.
Bob Oram
