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In print | Published February 7, 2008

Prior to his talk this past Wednesday (“Wither the Cuban Revolution?”), Phoenix reporter Mary Prager sat down with Latin American historian Barry Carr. Oxford-educated, Carr is the author of eight books on the history of Communism in Latin America, labor movements in Cuba and Mexico and the trends of numerous other “popular” movement phenomena that have occurred throughout the Americas.

Carr is currently in the final stages of publishing a manuscript detailing the lives of Cuban sugar industry workers.

Could you tell me a bit about yourself, about your background?

Sure. I was born in London, in Britain, but I went to Australia in the early 1970s and since 1972 I’ve been a professor at university in Melbourne, which is the second largest history department in Australia, it’s called Latrobe University, and I teach Latin American history there.

And I have a special interest in agrarian and labor history, and in the history of social movements of the left in Latin America, and in terms of regions I’m particularly interested in Mexico and Cuba.

What led you to Latin American studies?

Well, I began to be interested in Latin America in the 1960s. In Britain, where I was born, the interest in Latin America was much less developed than it was in the Untied States.

But the British government in the mid-1960s set up a committee called the Parry committee, named after a man called John Parry who was a famous British historian of Latin America, to try and find out why Latin American studies were not highly developed in Britain and what to do about that.

And the Parry committee report concluded that the only way to rebuild Latin American studies in Britain would be to set up Latin American centers in six universities, and one of those universities was Oxford, where I was a student.

And the idea was that by promoting the study of Latin America in universities this would enable Britain to recover its economic role in Latin America which they’d lost during the period after the first World War. So it was a very naïve 1960s idea that somehow trade would follow the academic flag.

So, these Latin American centers were set up with money and with scholarships and with airline tickets to Latin America, so I said, sure, why not?

So I joined the brigade and that’s how I began to study Latin America, although like virtually all my fellow students, none of us went on to become business men or traders or investors.

I mean, that particular aspect of John Parry’s ideas never came to fruition, and in those days, in the 60s, you can well imagine, most of us who began to be interested in Latin America.

An awful lots of us were children of the 60s, and our interests were often very much with moments of national liberation …

Rather than trade?

That’s right, so I think we must have disappointed the people who had that rather naive initial idea.

What else will you be talking about in your speech?

I’ll be talking about, you know, the impact of the collapse of Cuba’s familiar world in the late ‘80s, early ’90s, and the background to that crisis, what it has meant to Cuba, and I’ll be talking about the United State’s response to Cuba, is it changing, what is it at the moment and is it likely to change.

And I’ll say a few things at the end about what I think the options are that Cuba might take, because there are a number of scenarios that Cuba-watchers.

It’s a bit like the old Soviet Union or China today, there are people whose living, I’m not one of those, who spend their entire lives coming up with scenarios, for their political or intelligence or their economics clients.

And there are scenarios that people have come up with, and one of the scenarios I remember is that Cuba will implode or collapse, which is most unlikely.

But then there are other scenarios such as, “Will Cuba take the China, Vietnam route” for instance, one of the big questions that’s asked, partly because Raul Castro, head of the armed forces, is somebody who in the past has shown an interest in the Chinese experience of maintaining a fairly rigid authoritarian political system, but letting the market rip …

So the questions is: will Cuba go down that path and remain a fairly tightly closed centralized political system but nevertheless open to foreign investment and encouraging the development of privately-owned business, not just tiny little enterprises with enough food for six people — you know, patriotic capitalist — especially since China is emerging as a very important trading partner of Cuba and Latin America as a whole.

This will be my final question, but after all your years of study, what is something you strongly believe in about Cuba or about Latin America?

For Cuba … One point I’ve really made is: be suspicious, immensely, about facile, simplistic predictions of radical change. What strikes me about Cuba is continuity rather than changes, and the resiliency of its structures and institutions.

The second one would be that, in the case of Cuba, it’s important to remember that, one it’s a Communist country, and it’s ideological and economic basis is set up by various traditions of socialists.

And it’s also, the Cuban revolution was a nationalist revolution, and so it’s very important.

And most people don’t understand about Cuba, or fail because of this mistake, that they don’t understand that the Cuban Revolution was as much in the beginning, and also during a large part of the revolution—an attempt by Cubans to gain control over their own destinies and identities as it was a program for radical social and economic reorientation.

So it’s very important I think, not to lose touch with this powerful sense of identity, which I think will mean that whatever changes happen in Cuba, politically and economically, those changes will have to adjust to this powerful search for Cuban identity, to maintain it.

Whatever it is, there’s not real one identity, and to recreate new identities, but to have Cubans control it.

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