Comparing Cuba and Guatemala

By Alexander Nixon

I finished my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala a few months ago. When I got my assignment I secretly wished I was being sent to Cuba, a destination of long-standing interest.  I have a B.A. from Stanford in Cuban Studies and an M.A. from NYU in Cuban Studies. Growing up in Florida is to blame, I guess, where Cuba Cuba Cuba has been a non-stop conversation.

Prior to graduation and during the Clinton administration, I traveled to Havana three times armed with a license from the U.S. Treasury Department and an undergraduate research grant to conduct an honor’s thesis research about the country’s food security and the economic crisis.

At the time, Cuba was isolated economically because of the combined effects of the U.S. Embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Block. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was like a game of musical chairs and Cuba was last one standing. The island nation responded by investing heavily in tourism and sustainable development.

Anti-Castro forces in the in the U.S. weren’t pleased with the Cuban government’s recalcitrance and did whatever it could to tighten the imposed economic and political noose. Still, the Cuban government stayed in power. After September 11th it became almost impossible to go back to Cuba.  I remember watching on television the vigorous and false claim by anti-Castro Congresspeople that Cuba’s innovative bioengineering research was a façade for a chemical warfare.  Fortunately, better minds prevailed on that one.

In spite of this aggressive diplomacy and effort to restrict travel, I managed to go back to Cuba with an NYU research grant in 2007. The Herculean paperwork challenges required for authorization from the Treasury Department were analogous to cleaning the Augean stables.

When political currents changed in 2008, I became more optimistic about changes in our relationship with Cuba. It had been ten years since my first trip to Cuba in 1996 and no improvements had occurred between the US and Cuba! After a decade of working in New York City and waiting for an elusive Cuban glasnost, I decided to apply to the Peace Corps.

I was assigned to the Agricultural Marketing Program in in urban Guatemala. Although I had secretly wished for an assignment to Cuba, my experience in Guatemala led to unexpected discoveries about Cuba.

In terms of geography and population, Cuba and Guatemala are very similar. Cuba is 42,803 square miles in size and Guatemala is 42,042 square miles. The same holds true for population. According to Un estimates Cuba’s population is about 11 million people and Guatemala has about 12.5 million people.

Cuba and Guatemala also share a similar economic history: economies based on agricultural exports like sugar and coffee (as well as tobacco, in Cuba’s case). Up until the mid-twentieth century, a wealthy minority--both foreign and native—dominated in both countries and controlled all the good land. For example, The United Fruit Company produced bananas in Guatemala and U.S. Sugar controlled much of the Cuban sugar industry. The vast majority of the population in both countries lived in squalor, remained  illiterate, and worked as cheap labor for the rich landowners.

Population growth in the mid-twentieth century exacerbated this inequality and land reform became a rallying cry for populists and leftists. Unfortunately, the Cold War gave opponents of land reform on the Right cause to condemn such efforts as part of a communist plot to socialize everything.

This reactionary attitude towards land reform caused Guatemalan and Cuban history to diverge.

In Guatemala in 1953 the CIA intervened to topple the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, a leader who had waged a campaign for land reform. The result of this intervention was a protracted forty-year civil war that left two hundred thousand Guatemalans dead.

Compared to such genocide, Cuba’s record of human rights abuses seems over-exaggerated, but more on that later on.

Ever since the CIA invasion, Guatemala remains structured for the benefit the wealthiest members of society. About a dozen families in Guatemala control the sugar, beer, coffee, chicken, and other industries that comprise the lion’s share of Guatemala’s economic output. These powerful families pay very little taxes and, without a tax base, Guatemalan infrastructure, civil society, and education stagnate.

In many ways, post-Revolutionary Cuba is the inverse image of Guatemala.

In 1959 the Cuban Revolution recalibrated the government so that it benefited the weakest, not the strongest. Cubans live much longer than Guatemalans, Cuba’s literacy rate is 99.8%, and the life expectancy is 78 years.  By comparison, Guatemala’s literacy rate is 70% and the life expectancy is 70 years.  After the Revolution, illiteracy was one of the first targets of the Cuban government and the almost overnight “War Against Illiteracy” was immediately effective.

In Guatemala, domestic violence against women is rampant. According to Giovanna Lemus of Guatemala's Network to Oppose Violence Against Women (Red de la No Violencia Contra la Mujer), as reported in El País, Guatemalan society is an environment in which aggression towards women is perceived as "natural.” In Cuba, by contrast, The Family Code of 1975 decrees that men must contribute equally in household responsibilities. Thus, we see a different set of priorities between Guatemala and Cuba.

For further proof of this contrast in priorities, a focus on the amazing art produced by Cuban artists, and supported by the Cuban government, reveals the government’s interest in creating a society that values human resources. At the Center for Cuban Studies in New York City there is an enormous collection of extremely rare Cuban poster art and numerous works by Cuban artists that testify to the way the Cuban Revolution has inculcated Cuban society with a sense of solidarity and humanism.  In Guatemala this kind of expression is difficult to find.  

The following joke illustrates the situation in Guatemala: a fisherman is carrying two buckets of crabs, one with a lid and one without. A passerby asks the fisherman why one bucket doesn’t have a lid. The fisherman replies that the bucket without the lid contains Guatemalan crabs, whereas the sealed bucket contains Japanese crabs. The fisherman explains that the Japanese crabs must be covered-up because they will work together and form a chain and climb out one-by-one. The Guatemalan crabs, on the other hand, don’t need to be sealed-up because, as soon as one of the crabs tries to climb out of the bucket, the other crabs reach up and pull the crab back down. The point of this story is that Guatemalans do not work together.  In large part this relates to the failure of the government to engender civil society and high expectations of its population.

During my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer I saw first-hand how small coffee farmers pool their resources and efforts in order to be competitive with large landowners. There has been some success, but everything insurmountable challenges are associated with getting export licenses, for example, and fair trade certification.

 

The 2009 report about the Cuban economy by the Center for Democracy in the Americas is blunt about Cuba current situation: Cuba is crumbling under the weight of over-centralization and bureaucracy. After two hurricanes and the global financial crisis, Cuba is in dire straits.  As much as Fidel Castro would have us think otherwise, most of Cuba’s problems stem from inherent flaws of communism. Cuba is coming to terms with these flaws under Raúl Castro’s leadership and has embarked upon a course of unprecedented economic reform. It is a tropical perestroika (economic reform) without glasnost (political reforms). 

In spite of the challenges ahead, it is a testament to the Cuban government that everyone, both Cubans and foreigners, have such high standards for Cuba. This seems to relate in part to the dignity and sense of national determinism created by the Cuban Revolution and is expressed vividly in the arts the citizens have produced. 

After completing my Peace Corps service I have joined the Center for Cuban Studies/The Cuban Art Space in New York City. Our mission is to work toward normalization of relations between Cuba and the United State through people-to-people travel, artist residencies, and cultural exchanges.  Based on my own observations about Cuba and Guatemala, the value and importance of visual record keepers and storytellers can illuminate powerfully the circumstances of power and justice. 

                                              For there will be the arts

                                              and some will call them soft data

                                              whereas in fact

                                              they are the hard data

                                              by which our lives are lived. 

                                                                                 - John Stone

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Alexander Nixon is the Organizational Development Coordinator of the Center for Cuban Studies/Cuban Art Space in New York City. This article does not represent the viewpoints of the Center for Cuban Studies.