You find the original post here cuba.foreignpolicybl … | Melissa Lockhart

The photo above shows the counter at Coppelia, a Havana ice cream shop constantly crowded with people waiting to take advantage of one symbolic measure of the revolution: ice cream, a treat exclusively for the rich before, became accessible for all Cubans.*______________________________________________

I recently had the privilege of reading a 40-year-old piece on Cuba by Ronald Steel, a US scholar, historian and recognized expert on US foreign policy. His “Letter from Havana,” from the New York Review of Books of April 11, 1968, provides a revealing glimpse into the still-young Cuban communist state under Fidel Castro. I was struck by how many of his observations are highly relevant today.

Much of the argument of his “Letter” can be summed up in his final sentence:

[Cuba] is a country, an experiment, a state of mind, quite unlike any other; a seductive place that is perhaps dangerous to take at face value, but impossible not to admire for the courage of its people and the daring of its vision.

Cuba in 1968 was “the Cuban experiment,” a revolution in progress where trial-and-error was the order of the day and the great ambitions of the country were (1) to eliminate social inequities that had polarized the country for years and left many in poverty, (2) to survive the hostility of its closest neighbors, and (3) to mobilize the entire society in the task of economic development. First-hand witnesses understandably found it hard not to be seduced by the spirit of hard work and moral obligation to one’s neighbor that permeated the island and that, when coupled with a truly Caribbean passion and intensity, made it truly unique from the Eastern European communist states of the day.

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