what is the situation in cuba now in terms of the freedoms
or lack thereof that people enjoy in some instances um you know there's a lot to be that
we're skipping over in terms of like the a lot of the the gains in terms of literacy and medicine
um and the ability of people to live in housing there's also a lot of been a lot of political
repression uh over these years as well where are we now and where do you anticipate things going
i'm a historian so i'm always going to take you back there's no way to understand where we are now
unless you understand the effects of the fall of the soviet union in cuba so basically
in 19 in it from the early 90s you had this this horrible economic crisis that just changed daily
life in cuba and in some ways the government dealt with that by increasing tourism and
allowing foreign direct investment things like that but really the country
never recovered and so we're 30 years into that so the economic situation never recovered it's
worse now uh with the pandemic which has been had a horrible uh effect in cuba of late and you have
growing repression the repression's been there pretty almost from the start and
the new president diaz canel has given no indication that he's going to let up in
fact it's been the opposite so he's put in new laws really limiting artistic expression people
artists can't exhibit or perform unless they have expressed approval from the government some
young artists have called for negotiation some cultural figures wanted to do that the president
said nope no negotiation they're all terrorists and then we saw it after the protests which were
uh you know which were unprecedented they occurred all over the island more than 50 locations
uh many young people many black cubans many many artists and so on and the president went on tv and
basically said um they're all terrorists they're paid for by the u.s and he sent people out to to
crush them and beat them and arrest them so the the political situation is um is is terrible and i
really think that a majority cubans are 30 years 30 years more tired of economic crisis they're
30 years more tired of being told to wait and of having to sacrifice and i think the new president
does not have the historic relationship to the country or the people that the castros did and i
the majority of people don't trust him to know how to overcome the the deep crisis of the present
um it's a fascinating stuff i wish we had uh even more time and perhaps we'll have you back for
um you know to cover those those years and to uh to get a sense of where we're going
this special period as they call it then after the fall of the soviet union
um and the the military the the economic deprivation and of course it's enhanced by
the embargo from the united states absolutely um uh significantly um but uh the book is uh cuba
an american history hey adam furr thank you so much for your time today i really appreciate it
thanks for having me thanks so much i mean it is really amazing just sort of like
the you we could probably have a variation of that interview about haiti many ways would be
a lot of the patterns reproduce themselves yeah yeah you know uh guatemala and nicaragua uh i mean
there's you know some places it becomes more murderous our involvement but
the i mean you talk about like the legacy of decisions that we made in this country
and of of our imperialism from 200 years ago it's not a lot you have to do 200 years later
if you do it if you do it right the first time in terms of like making countries um
really inhibiting the uh development of self-governance it's the good neighbor policy
yeah i mean if you if you if you really i mean like you know you only have to intervene a couple
of times before you ensure that um these countries you know back in the day if you do it enough
or whenever there's a there's a inkling of some type of democratic control or impulse
if you do it enough you can really screw up a country for decades to come right
right so congratulations to us congratulations to us i would also argue probably that there is
um that to the extent that you can do that with the sort of the the culture of
democracy you probably also can do that with like you know sort of cohorts of of people
like the you know implications of slavery in the context of where you then also have like a
series of rolling uh initiatives to continue to keep a lot of people as second-class
citizens yeah and then you can just change the justification every time right it's communism
it's trying to stop a tyrant it doesn't matter you can right you can just interchange them pick them
pick one of them out of a hat although the they're not too creative with the imaginary boogie men
well you don't you know i don't need i guess you can just yeah well
the hit was yeah this guy is a threat to democracy and by democracy there's a little asterisk that it
says the interests of global capitalists exactly right um i've told this story before but um
i um uh worked on my then wife's uh well i guess she wasn't my wife at that time uh documentary
that was shot in cuba in 2002 and one of the subjects was one of castro's photographers
who castro understood that he was dealing with a country that was uh had a high illiteracy
rate at that time before castro came in they have very high literacy right now
um and so he wanted to tell the picture the story of the revolution in pictures
and um this one guy raul corrales uh who i believe has since passed um
i would imagine he must have um traveled with castro in his first trip to the united
states uh to speak at the u.n and apparently castro's uh cia nickname or security nickname
sugar one gives you a sense of what the uh of what the you know who he was to the united states
i don't know how much