Intriguing parallels

Co-editor Jean Stubbs uncovers some unexpected links between Cuba, the UK, Churchill and Castro as she provides an overview of the first issue and the rationale behind the choice of our first classic paper.

From the outset of our many editorial deliberations in shaping the new International Journal of Cuban Studies, there have been no doubts as to the nature of the challenge that lay before us. In the current highly polarised US-Cuba world of politics and scholarship, our UK-based journal must realise its potential to broaden out the debate on and in Cuba, bringing new insights by contributors from Cuba and across the world, and from all disciplines, especially those beyond the humanities and the social sciences. Readers of this and subsequent issues will be the judge of how successful we have been in rising to this challenge.

An early decision we took was to include a 'classic paper' on Cuba in each issue: editor-in-chief Patrick Pietroni's suggestion for this first issue to include the 'Cuba' chapter from Winston Churchill's My Early Life (published in 1930) is particularly apt, possibly more than we first thought. The chapter itself is telling, reflecting a curiously 'golden moment' in Churchill's early career in the military and as a war correspondent, when he asked to be sent to Cuba in 1895. It is said to have been typical of ambitious military officers of the time to seek out combat, reports of which filed home helped boost promotion, while newspaper and magazine articles were lucrative business. Churchill had heard of the Cuban revolt, and this, combined with curiosity about his mother's birthplace, drew him across the Atlantic. Despite his English aristocratic origins (his father was Lord Randolph Churchill), he was half-American: his mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of New York lawyer and financier Leonard Jerome, founder of the American Jockey Club and part owner of The New York Times.

Before leaving England, Churchill contracted with the London Daily Graphic to publish his dispatches from the front, gained accreditation with the Spanish Army, sailed from Liverpool to New York, and from there travelled by train to Key West, to embark for Havana. The British Consul-General in Havana arranged an audience with Spain's Captain-General, Marshall Martínez Campos, and Churchill spent a couple of weeks with Spanish troops down the island, observing the war at first hand. His views on Cuba, expressed in contemporary and subsequent reports, as well as this chapter, were quite contradictory. On the one hand he sympathised with a people seeking liberty from corrupt Spanish government but on the other was dismissive of them, and, while later expressing the hope that the United States would not force Spain to give up Cuba, he eventually came round to the view that the United States itself would bring Cuba peace.

Those were momentous times. The year 1895 witnessed the outbreak of Cuba's final War of Independence against Spain, simultaneous with fighting in Spain's other two last remaining colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Two years after Churchill left, the sinking of the US battleship, The Maine, in Havana harbour, took the United States and Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt's 'Rough Riders' into a battle which culminated in the end of the Spanish Empire in 1898 and the start of the 'American century'. It was also the eclipse of the British Empire, and in this context the wars Churchill encountered, starting with Cuba, deeply coloured his military outlook and strategic thinking. In 1897, while the Cuban war was still raging and as Britain celebrated Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Afghan rebels on the North-West Frontier of India threatened British control of the Malakand Pass, and Churchill was swiftly on the scene. In 1899, he was in South Africa, in the thick of British fighting in the Boer War, when his daring escape from capture made headline news, This, combined with growing his fame first as a war correspondent and then author of fiction and non-fiction based around campaigns, catapulted him into Conservative Party politics back in Britain.

Churchill and Castro

After a chequered political career, Churchill came into his own at a later age as British Prime Minister during the World War II years of 1940-45. His wartime speeches inspired the embattled British, and he has been long remembered for his famous words: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat". On Victory in Europe day, he broadcast to the nation that Germany had surrendered and afterwards told a huge crowd in Whitehall: "This is your victory." People shouted: "No, it is yours".

Back in the 1890s, Churchill was struck by the parallels of the British 'frontier' wars with that of Cuba, and many other intriguing parallels can also be drawn, suggestive of the often hidden historical links between places, in this case the UK and Cuba. The 1890s and the 1990s might be said to herald the rise and fall of the 'American century'. Both during that century and before, Britain has played an at times catalytic, at others mediatory, role in key moments of Cuban history, from the 1762 occupation of Havana to its 1905 and 1934 special treaties, from its significant investments and its presence in Cuba today. Cuba and the UK have also played a role in world history that is in no way commensurate with their small geographical size, and Churchill and Fidel Castro are both heralded as strong statesmen of small island nations with world stature, similar in character and resolve, if not in political persuasion. It was no coincidence that when Cuba took a nosedive in the crisis 1990s, cast adrift as the USSR disintegrated and the US tightened its now almost 50-year embargo of Cuba, that the Cuban government took a special interest in Churchill's strategy and tactics in carrying isolated Britain through the war. Those familiar with Cuba's 1990s strategy (from underground cabinet rooms to city allotments to 'dig for victory' ) and with Castro's speeches of the time - cannot fail to see the connections.

Churchill took other lessons from his 1895 time in Cuba. He learnt to enjoy rum cocktails, siestas, and Havana cigars. Today, he is probably most associated with Cuba for the fact that he was an inveterate smoker of Havana cigars. Symbolically, a wartime cartoon of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta has them all smoking Havana cigars. Churchill's only return visit to Cuba was immediately after the war in 1946, when a cigar vitola was named after him, something about which I, as a historian of Cuban tobacco, am constantly reminded. In Churchillian tradition, the UK is currently a prime importer of Cuban cigars, through the joint venture agreement between the Cuban state cigar exporting company Habanos S.A. and the London-based Hunters & Frankau (once owner of the H. Upmann in Havana). Moreover, British Imperial Tobacco, through its recent acquisition of Altadis (itself formed out of the merger of Tabacalera Espanola and the French SEITA), now holds significant shares in Habanos.

Alternative paradigms

Castro shared Churchill's love of cigars, but gave up smoking for health reasons in 1982. Health, along with education, has, of course, been a pillar of the Cuban revolution, drawing in part on the UK post-World War II experience of building up free state provision of the National Health Service and education system. It is fitting therefore that health and education should feature prominently in our first issue. Two lead articles on health, one by Margaret Blunden, who is based in the UK, and the other by Robert Huish and Jerry Spiegel, based in Canada, interrogate Cuba's international health policy and practice as a possible alternative paradigm - not only to an imposed model of Westernised medicine but also to the Western rhetoric on human security. These arguments are complemented by two other health-related contributions. The viewpoint expressed by Stuart Jeffery highlights lessons that can be learned from Cuba's 1990s approach to protecting her people's health in the midst of an economic crisis of similar proportions to the one the world will face from peak oil. Finally, the essay on Cuba's current anti-smoking campaign by UK student Rishabh Singh explores some of the contradictions Castro himself embodied on giving up cigars a quarter of a century ago, when Cuba is par excellence a tobacco-producing and tobacco-smoking nation.

Science, education and culture are brought together in a number of contributions. Cubans Oriela Pino Pérez, Fanny Jorgé Lazo, Ondina León Díaz, together with UK-based Christopher Branford-White and Bhupinder Khambay, draw on their research collaboration between the Centre for Plant Protection in Havana and London Metropolitan University, to report on Cuban flora as a source of bioactive compounds, an untapped resource with commercial potential for plant, human and animal health. In her report on the 2008 Gender, Science and Technology Conference, Mavis Dora Álvarez highlights an aspect of Cuban society we hope to cover in future issues of the journal, that is, a gender perspective on the transformations that have taken place - including the contribution of women to social change as well as the constraints that have been placed upon this.

Two further articles focus on the role of higher education in sustainable social development, both of which have wider interest for discussion as possible models outside Cuba itself. In the first, Luís Montero Cabrera reflects on the nature and organisation of scientific research as 'the creation of knowledge and knowledge creators' in emerging countries, while the second, co-authored by Jorge Núñez Jover, Francisco Benítez Cárdenas, Dimas Hernández Gutiérrez, and Aurora Fernández González, analyses the recent policy of universal access to higher education through localised university sites. From the arts, one of Cuba's early filmmakers, Julio García Espinosa, challenges definitions of cinema while reflecting on the development of the film industry in post-revolutionary Cuba and its influence throughout Latin America. Film reviews by Ann Cross, Graham Kirkwood and Mike Carter in turn signal how film retains its importance in Cuba and as a source of information on Cuba. Book reviews by Camillia Cowling, John Kirk and George Lambie cover, respectively, a Cuban historiographical work revisiting gender and the agency of slave women in nineteenth-century Cuba; a new US reader on contemporary Cuba - which does not seem to question the assumption that Cuba's future lies within the globalisation paradigm; and the latest offering in English language translation of a Cuban detective fiction sequel, a murder set in 1989 and the edgy portent of massive dislocations in the crisis years to come.

Harbinger of peace?

In this year of significant changes taking place in Cuba, with presidential elections in the US, it was important for this first issue to reflect on the potential ramifications of both for Cuba. Rafael Hernández takes an introspective look at Cuba today, to argue that the emphasis on education and culture in Cuba has created a civil society with a capacity for critical thinking. This in turn has generated new potential and new contradictions among a people today able to fully debate and decide their own future.

The context in which they must do this is, of course, highly constrained by what transpires in the US, and this is tackled head on by Stephen Wilkinson, who concludes that the outlook is likely to be positive for Cuba. Neither of the two authors would have had reason to make any connections with Churchill when they were writing, but their conclusions uncannily resonate with the 1890s Churchill - who recognised the intrinsic worth of, and support for, the Cuban rebellion and also saw the US as the harbinger of peace for Cuba. I make the point as a historian in the knowledge that these, as well as all the other contributions to this issue, will stimulate debate, both in the form of readers' responses and future contributions to the journal - which we hope will be quickly forthcoming.

Jean Stubbs is Professor of Caribbean Studies at London Metropolitan University and founding director of the Caribbean Studies Centre.


Leave comments

Copyright

Copyright for this work is held jointly between Jean Stubbs and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence
IJCS Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2008