04 ISSUE II
JANUARY 2025
JANUARY 2025
Why is Cuba dangerous?
Cuba is a threat to the US government not because of socialism or the leftovers of the Cold War but because it points
to political alternatives.
to political alternatives.
By Gabriel Vignoli
Cuba is in crisis. Energy, infrastructure, services, food, money. Ten percent of its population has emigrated in the last 3 years. Yet, United States policy frames the island as a strategic threat.
The US has done so since the 1960 Mallory Memorandum, one year after the Cuban Revolution, when Lester Mallory, deputy assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote to his immediate boss, Roy Rubottom, that US policy should be based on the pursuit of “a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Since then, regime change has been the consistent US policy, whether soft (President Barack Obama) or hard (President Donald Trump).
Why? Is it the threat of socialism or a legacy of the Cold War? No.
The Cold War, and with it the ideological and geopolitical relevance of socialism, is dead and buried; the dialectical security of contraposition between a first (capitalist) and a second (socialist) world is substituted by a multipolar and progressively unintelligible reality. That past of socialism and the Cold War is more of a cage than a useful explanatory framework for the fraught relationship between Cuba and the US.
Why then? It is more the case that it is because Cuba is dangerous. It points to an alternative way to exist in the world.
On January 1st this year, the Cuban Revolution turned sixty-six years old. Since 1959, Cuba has posed a strategic challenge to the US, not because of socialism but because it challenges the narrative upon which US self-fashioning and its primacy in the Americas are built.
When, as a result of the Haitian Revolution (the first large-scale revolt by enslaved people), the Spanish empire in the Americas began to crumble (1810-1825), the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—“America for the Americans”—established the principle of European non-interference as a precondition for US manifest destiny and civilizing mission. And it made all the Americas the canvas upon which these were to unfold. Yet the turning point was Cuba.
After the mysterious explosion of the USS Maine in Havana’s harbor in the spring of 1898, the US declared war on Spain. In just three months, the Spanish-American War changed the meaning and purpose of US power. It sanctioned the handover of empire, with the Spanish crown’s last colonial possessions—Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico—becoming US protectorates. Direct US intervention in Latin America was feasible and advantageous.
The Spanish-American War was the precondition for the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, through which the US arrogated the right of direct military intervention in Latin America based on its own volition. While the “direct” part has gone back and forth since “intervention” remains a cornerstone of US policy in the region. There has not been a single country in Latin America where the US has not intervened directly or indirectly since 1904.
The challenge in the rest of the Americas was, and remains, that “the colony lives on in the republic,” as the Cuban poet and independence leader José Martí wrote in “Our America” (1891)—Cuba’s and possibly the Americas’ most important 19th-century essay. How could newly independent republics articulate their own political discourse and destiny when their institutions were colonial and their self-determination was premised upon US benevolence?
It was in Cuba, in 1959, that the legacy of the Roosevelt Corollary—intervention—was successfully challenged for the first time in the Americas. The Cuban Revolution was originally a nationalist, not socialist, upheaval (Fidel Castro declared the socialist character of the Revolution more than two years after, on April 16, 1961, the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion). And it transformed Cuba: the meaning of words like race, gender, money, nation, and revolution would no longer be the same.
This is the reason why the Cuban revolution must be silenced because it forces us to re-politicize events and therefore threatens the normative order of things: the meaning we give to freedom, democracy, property, agency, citizenship, and consumption—away from the meaning ascribed to them by or through the US. Capitalism and Freedom are not synonyms, pace Milton Friedman.
The Cuban revolution must be silenced because it challenges the authority of the “single story”. As the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie notes, the danger of the single story is that it reduces reality to a set of stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but rather that they are incomplete. Despite its many limitations, Cuba challenges the single story of the US in Latin America and by extension in the Postcolony. It challenges US orientalism in the Americas. Change the word “Orient” for “Latin America,” and Edward Said’s Orientalism (an argument he made in his seminal book in 1978) provides the rationale for US intervention in the region since 1823. “The Orient was not a free subject of thought or action. It was instead a set of references that defined the Orient as the other, inherently inferior and backward.”
No other country in the Americas has been able to address its colonial legacy and subvert the imperial ambitions of the US at the same time. The price has been and remains very high; but it leaves us with a unique gift: another story, a different perspective. Framed like this, Cuba is counter-hegemonic: in 2025, this is a scarce resource. And a crucial one. It allows for opening the future to multiple possibilities.
Yes, Cuba remains a threat. Because it allows us to think about the meaning of the political differently. I hope you’ll get to Cuba one day: if you look well enough, the mirror reflects a different self.
Gabriel Vignoli is a part-time Associate Teaching Professor at The New School and leads a New school International Field Program in Havana, Cuba.