Cuba And Venezuela

Long-time Latin America correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian, Richard Gott, first visited Cuba in 1963, where Cuba: A New History first began to take shape. By 1999 he was in Venezuela to write what is still the best introduction to Hugo Chávez’s “Bolívarian revolution,” In the Shadow of the Liberator [Verso, 2001]. In the intervening years he traveled ceaselessly throughout theAmericas, studying the region’s guerilla movements and revolutions. In December, 2004 Gott participated in an intellectual conference organized by the Venezuelan government, where he spoke to Venezuelanalysis.com.

As Gott notes, it is exceedingly difficult to compare the Cuban revolution and the social and political transformation that Venezuela is currently experiencing under Hugo Chávez.Nonetheless, it is a comparison that is quite common, and one made by both Left and Right. The conservative weekly the Economist recently argued that Venezuela is becoming “a second Cuba,” while Chávez himself often situates the Venezuelan ‘proceso’ in a historical context in which Cuba is the regional protagonist. Though the two ‘revolutions’ are undeniably distinct, as are Gott’s books dealingwith them, the reader is inevitably drawn to the specific areas in which they appear to coincide. In the back of the reader’s mind is also this implicit parallel linking the two: Gott’s own decision to make each the subject of his journalistic and historical focus. Certainly the two represent central poles of Latin America’s experience with revolution. One because it defined and inspired theregion’s most sustained revolutionary period in the 20th century, and the other because it has in many ways been passed a torch that most other countries in the region have shunned, just as its flame appears to be burning brighter. In the words of British historian E. H. Carr, “History is movement; and movement implies comparison.”

Why has this book, Cuba: A New History, come out now—as you arewriting the second edition of your last book In the Shadow of the Liberator, which was about Chávez and Venezuela? Do you see a reflection of some elements of the early Cuban revolution in the Venezuelan?

I think that is probably what is behind it all. Curiously enough I was commissioned to write a history of Cuba. I hadn’t thought of doing it myself. But, I thought, since I’ve followed theCuban revolution over the decades and since I’ve been rather revived by the excitement of what’s going on in Venezuela, I did think that it would be quite interesting to look back at the Cuban revolution. And also, I had been excited by Chávez’s invocation of the 19th century and I thought it would be really interesting for myself to learn about 500 years of Cuban history that had led up to thisextraordinary revolution and so I felt almost privileged that I had this opportunity to look back over 500 years and see what had happened.

It has been fascinating to be allowed to write what is inevitably a bit of a revisionist history because at the end of the 20th beginning of the 21st century, things strike you about the history of Cuba that wouldn’t have struck people writing 50 years ago.Of which the argument about the indigenous people, the argument about the blacks, the argument about the nature of white settler society and its peculiar form of racism are some examples. This peculiar form of racism, in my view, makes Cuba quite similar to Algeria or South Africa, where white settlers came quite late and changed the nature of the country and introduced a terrible racism whichlies beneath the surface of Cuban society and many other societies in this region.

It is extraordinary when one realizes the longevity of Cuban history. You have this struggle between the United States and Cuba, for example, where Cuba is a far older country, a far older civilization than the US, and Americans are always amazed to find out that there was a university in Cuba before there was...