Hipster Colonialism and

the Ruin of Cuba

A common sentiment about the countrys
development shows that some Americans see the
island as a tropical Cold War museum.
ByAndrs S. Pertierra
JULY 6, 2016

Javier Yanez stands on his balcony where he hung an American and Cuban flag in Old Havana, Cuba. (AP

Ramon Espinosa)

Photo /

ummer is here in Cuba and with it tens of thousands more American

visitors. More than 150,000 Americans visited in 2015, and this year seems
on track to surpass even that figure. The growth in American visitors is no
doubt related to the warming of relations between Havana and Washington
and the dramatic internal reforms that the Cuban government has
implemented, sweeping aside many of the Soviet-inspired economic policies
that dominated, and afflicted, the lives of everyday Cubans for half a century.
When you talk to enough Americans about Cuba, especially those on the
political left, someone will inevitably say those words that are like nails on a
chalkboard to Cubans and Cuban Americans alike: I have to go
before they ruin it. Admittedly, most who use the phrase are wellmeaning, and they do not represent the American left as a whole.
Nonetheless, it hurts to hear this phrase thoughtlessly repeated time and again
by people who should know better. A year and a half ago in The New
Republic, Ryan Kearney noted that such a use of the word ruin implies a
fetishization of Cuban poverty. But the sentiment also evinces a colonialist
vision of Cuba, revealing the underlying entitlement of those who see the
island as their own personal Tropical Museum of the Cold War.
To understand what is being ruined, you have to first understand what
came before. After Ral Castro became president in 2008 many Cubans
initially responded with skepticism to his promises of reform. Many had
spent their entire lives under the Soviet-inspired system that Fidel had built.
A mere eight years later, the difference is as stark as that between night and
day. Private businesses had existed under Fidel, such as family-run
restaurants known as paladares or some small landowners who had avoided
cooperativization, but these were small groups, difficult to join, and beset on
all sides by countless bureaucratic restrictions and onerous fiscal exactions.
Before the reforms, much of Cubas major cities simply shut down after five
or six in the afternoon, except for a handful of state-run venues directed
towards tourism or Cuban nightlife. Now there are pizzerias, sandwich shops,
hair salons, computer-repair shops, and people selling digital media by the
megabyte at every corner.
Rauls reforms are not unlike Vladimir Lenins New Economic Policy (NEP)
of the 1920s, aimed at reversing the near-complete negation of private
industry that characterized the war communism of the Russian civil war.

The NEP permitted and taxed certain forms of private enterprise, which
rebounded with economic growth, greater taxable income, and thus more
resources for the state to redistribute. The policy was reversed under Joseph
Stalin, but while it lasted it created its own small and medium bourgeoisie,
known as the NEPmen. Now Cuba has them as well, under the euphemism
of cuentapropistas (on-their-own-ists). While these fundamental reforms
have not been without their critics, many are simply the implementation of
long-held popular demands for greater liberalization of the economy and
attempts to push the gargantuan resources of the black market into the light of
day and the scrutiny of tax collectors.
Support for these changes has not been unanimous and even defenders of the
reforms will privately lament some of their unintended (but not entirely
unforeseen) consequences. Many bristle as they notice
that compaero (comrade) is slowly and quietly displaced by seor (the more
bourgeois sir). Countless more feel frustrated by the uneven way the
reforms are implemented, ignoring or doing too little for state employees,
such as teachers and doctors, while numerous policies help the growth of
Cubas new cuentapropista bourgeoisie. The results of the USSRs own
attempts at reform, which spiraled into the collapse of the Soviet State, is
present in Cubans minds every step of the way. This is especially apparent in
the case of President Castro, whose deliberate but measured pace illustrates
how much Havana wants to make sure that it is in full control of the changes
at all times.
Whatever concerns they may have, one thing that few Cubans contest is that
these changes were necessary. Fidels economic system was born broken.
Even some of the men and women who had helped implement it now
privately confess that they feel it has largely been a failure, though they are
proud of its achievements in education and health care. It is, indeed, the
failures of the old system that propel the current reforms.
Many on the American left share these concerns with their Cuban
counterparts. There is a real fear that in trying to break down useless walls
Cubans will accidentally bring the whole structure down, and with it all the
good that was achieved after 1959. Cuban education is free, of a surprisingly
high quality given its limited resources, and is accessible to an extent that is

almost without precedent for a developing country. Cubans enjoy health care
as a right, while a single illness can still spell economic ruin for many
Americans. Before 1959 Cuba was a center for pornography, while after the
revolution it began producing outstanding films, including Memories of
Underdevelopment (1968), which has been included in many lists of the
greatest films of all time. The governments support for sports has led to
countless medals in regional and Olympic events. Even the stains on Cubas
record, such as its deplorable record on LGBT rights, have of late been
reversed, in no small part thanks to the relentless efforts of Mariela Castro,
daughter of the president.
***
The problem does not lie with those who worry that in the push to modernize
Cubans will forget how precious these achievements are. The problem lies
with those who see Cubas leaving behind its economic backwardness and
relative isolation as an opportunity to plant their flag in its soil.
For these Americans, Cuba exists solely as an idealized socialist paradise, in
almost complete stasis since the Cold War, which has yet to be befouled by
the corrupting influence of other Americans. For them, the island nation is
the land of the noble savage on the verge of contact with the advanced but
impure outside world, sure to despoil its backward, but charming, ways.
These people dont want to see the real Cuba. They want to be able to say
that they were there before it got Americanized.

The idea that Cuba was isolated is a myth. It was only

isolated from the United States.
This hipster-colonialist vision of the island isnt new. Americans have been
projecting their vision of what Cuba is and should be onto the real Cuba for
centuries. Historian Louis Prez Jr. showed in his 2008 book Cuba in the
American Imagination how Americans viewed Cuba through the lens of
political cartoons, first as a damsel in distress to be rescued from vile but
ultimately masculine Spain, then as a small black child who needed to
educated and civilized by a paternalistic Uncle Sam. These depictions of
Cuba articulated the flawed and presumptuous way in which many
Americans perceived the island and reinforced such notions by giving them
form and reproducing them through mass media.

Today the American colonialist vision of Cuba is more tactful and therefore
more insidious than before. Instead of promising to fulfill the white mans
burden by elevating Cubans to the higher realms of civilization, it insists
that Cubans remain as they are, even as economic backwardness results in
immense human suffering. Because it views Cuba in terms of its own needs,
as an open-air Cold War museum, and not in terms of Cubans well-being,
the hipster-colonialist mindset resents that Cubans are working to change
their circumstances.
The idea that late-20th-century Cuba was isolated is largely a myth based on
the fact that it was isolated from the United States. It was quite wellconnected, however, with the rest of the developing world and especially
with the Soviet bloc until the 1990s. Since then, tourists from Europe and
Canada have regularly visited the island in the hundreds of thousands each
year.
While there is certainly a lack of personal experience of First World
capitalism on the island, this does not equate to an innocence of extreme
poverty. The so-called perodo especial (Special Period) that followed the
collapse of the USSR was characterized by rolling blackouts, near starvation
(vitamin deficiencies that led to blindness), and widespread scams. In the
early years of this century life had gotten better, but everyday Cubans without
family to send remittances from the First World or a job with access to tourist
money still had an extremely difficult time. Doctors in an ostensibly free
health-care system relied on gifts to supplement meager incomes.
Mathematicians and physicists became taxi drivers or began selling peanut
brittle as an illegal side business just to get by. Others lived by reselling
black-market cheese or meat at elevated prices, which benefited from and
worsened the already-existing misery and scarcity that characterized
everyday life. Sex tourism continues to plague Cuban society, with underage
boys and girls caught up in distressing numbers. Countless Cubans were
involved in scams, considered part of the lucha (struggle), which they
perpetrated on their fellow citizens and tourists alike; they were both victims
of poverty and participants in worsening the problem. All of these means of
survival carried the danger that on any given day they could get arrested,
their black-market income and property seized, and the possibility of years
behind bars laid before them.

Increasingly, private businesses (with state-mandated minimum wages) pay

employees enough to survive with no danger of arrest and no need to stoop to
prostitution or exploiting their fellows. This taxed income is now used to
raise the salaries of doctors and other state employees, though not quickly
enough. The state is even experimenting with increased cooperativization,
granting state businesses autonomy in exchange for higher fiscal exactions,
which can be seen as a late, partial fulfillment of what socialist societies were
supposed to look like: businesses in the hands of workers, not parasitic
bureaucrats. These changes allow the Cuban state to continue its social
programs, while also allowing its citizens the right to live with a modicum of
dignity and quality of life.
***
It is unreasonable to demand that Cuba stay as it was, yoked to a broken
system that has failed to fully serve the Cuban people for so long. To say that
Americans will ruin Cuba through tourism implies that the island had not
already experienced all the ills of tourism, when in reality it became more
than familiar with them during the 1990s. To say that the presence of private
businesses will ruin Cuba implies that the island should maintain giant
state-run and state-owned businesses that exploited their workers and
burdened public finances because of their dysfunction and corruption. It is
also unreasonable to oppose reforms that promise to provide the resources for
struggling education and health-care programs that have been functioning on
shoestring budgets for decades now. Hipster colonialism implies that Cubans
cant be trusted to decide what works best for themselves.
The reforms being implemented in Cuba are not the result of the US
governments imposing change on the island, as happened in Guatemala in
1954 or, less directly, in Chile after 1973. They are being implemented from
the top down; but as demands, they originated at the grassroots level.
If anything, these reforms are an attempt to preserve the best of the Cuban
Revolution and not to change the essence of the system. They are a tacit
admission that the old reality was unsustainable. Everything needs to
change, so everything can stay the same, observes a character in the classic
Italian novel The Leopard. So that education, health care, and other programs
may continue, the system must be reformed. It is possible to worry that

reforms could accidentally erase the achievements of the revolution without

fetishizing the poverty that resulted from the systems own failures or
viewing the process with a sense of entitlement about how Cubans should run
their own country. The future of Cuba is in the hands of Cubans.