Looking through Paul Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias, I was moved by his criticism that the left had lost its ability to express any genunie empathy for the victims of Stalinism and had thus in pratical terms lost its raison d etre. The truth of the matter is that all Cubans must send their international letters open face; they must reapply for both a visa and passport every time they want to travel; they have had to concede the some of the most lucrative dollar trades to members of the military, e.g., the taxi services; control over the dollar trades has reintroduced a form of apartheid; there is only one newspaper; there seem to have been few strikes against state owned enterprises, only against foreign owned, e.g., Spanish, hotels. The liberalization in currency transactions has not been matched by political and civil liberalization and there is reason to believe that they may move in oppposite directions. None of us would accept such restrictions on our own lives, and I don't see why we should turn a blind eye to the unfreedom suffered by the Cuban people.
And yet the people of Cuba are tortured by US sanctions, militarism and threats. They have still won and maintained rights to health care and education which are inspiring; the Cubans are a brilliant people. Castro is no nihilist terrorist like Chairman Gonzalo;Castro had no fear of widely dispersing arms after the US invasion of Grenada, and this says something very important about the complicated relation of the Cuban people to the government, a govt which did not fear a people organized in well armed militias.
Puerto Rico is the correct comparison (Haiti has been tortured for too long and by too many for the brilliance of its slave revolt; one hopes Cuba will not suffer the same fate both in terms of the degeneration of its own revolution and centuries of punishment by imperialist powers) but there would have be no desperate attempts at development, no Operation Bootstrap (was that it?) without the Cuban Revolution, perpaps no Alliance for Progress.
All this said, the Cuban people are not free. Humanity no where has emerged from class society into history.
best, rakesh