A memory from the Massapequa, N.Y., public schools of the late 1950s and early 1960s:
We had regular desk drills. The school alarm would pierce the air and teachers would instruct us to slide from our chairs, crouch under our desks facing the floor, and place our hands, fingers interlocked, over our necks. This was to protect our arteries from flying glass when the bombs hit. This went on for a few years. At some point I whispered to another student that it was pointless. “The glass won’t shatter, it will melt.” I’d been reading the newspapers about what happens when a nuclear weapon goes off.
The “duck and cover” drills are always treated as the baby boomers’ comic trauma, but it wasn’t so comic. In my case they contributed to a classic anxiety formation that lasted years. There was a popular song in the summer of 1961, when I was 10, the theme to the movie “The Guns of Navarone,” and I got it in my mind that when it played on the radio that it was really a secret code announcing “the attack has begun.” Around that time Long Island’s airspace started filling with commercial jets bound for LaGuardia and Idlewild (now JFK) airports. The jet age had begun. I’d feel dread when I’d see a plane far overhead: Maybe that’s the one with the bomb.
You would think that by the logic of such trauma I would have become a peace activist, but it became for me a predicate to conservatism. Because the experience implanted in me a hatred of well-meaning fictions—the glass won’t shatter, it will melt—and because, having grown up with World War II movies and TV shows and histories, I came to see war as pretty much the normal state of man, because there’s something wrong with us. In any case it’s a tough world and you’ve got to be strong in it.
I’m thinking of all this because when we remember duck-and-cover drills we think “Cold War” and “Russia,” but it had a lot to do with Cuba.
Which has loomed so large in the life of our country for 65 years. It has had a big effect on us that only 90 miles from our shore a dictatorship had arisen whose attitude toward us was aggressive animosity fueled by ideology, a state that was fully aligned with our great Cold War foe.
We struggled so hard to handle Cuba, and bobbled it so often. There was our halting, ambivalent leadership in invading it in April 1961, which produced the great foreign policy disaster of the Bay of Pigs. Then, in October 1962, the harrowing missile crisis and the president of the United States telling us the Soviets were installing missiles there aimed at the heart of our great cities. After that was resolved, 100 small disasters—Cuba encouraging terrorists and leftist revolutionaries, the Mariel boatlift in 1980.
And the figure of Fidel Castro himself—the handsome revolutionary of the mesmerizing rhetoric, a deeply clever young man who, when he led his cadres down from the Sierra Maestra, said he wasn’t a communist at all but a democratic revolutionary toppling a dictator, and the American establishment so wanted to believe him, and many did. When it became clear he wasn’t quite as advertised, they told themselves stories—he may think he’s a Third World socialist but in time he’ll change, because the facts of life change you. They didn’t change him.
Cuba has had an impact on us. And something big is happening there, some new moment in a long-running story, and I’m not sure we’re fully and completely noticing.
It’s possible the regime there is on the brink of falling, that the country is further along in societal collapse than it has ever been. Castro almost fell off a cliff in the early 1990s when he lost his Soviet patron, but he had moves then, and he made them.
President Trump’s removal of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela has left Cuba without that country’s oil. It is now swept by local and nationwide blackouts, a failing electrical grid, food shortages, rationing, shrinking services—famously, limited garbage collection. There has been a sharp degradation of everyday life, and there have been street protests, not many but some violent. The New Yorker this week had a reported piece by Jon Lee Anderson, who quoted a friend of his in Havana who was a “longtime Revolution loyalist”: “I don’t care anymore how it happens,” the loyalist said, “but this situation has to end.”
That statement stopped me in my tracks. We often speak of late-stage capitalism and its contradictions, but what is happening in Cuba is late-stage communism and its exhaustions.
The state continues to control all power, has all the guns—the military, the police, the spy structures. There is no known fully organized resistance.
But so many failures at the same time is a big thing, and again, for the first time the government looks to be out of moves. And if you believe people somehow know when they’re being lied to—that they organically comprehend the prevailing powers are lying to them, even when their life depends on ignoring what they know—then it’s obvious the force of communism as a belief system has dissipated. The old revolutionary story has grown brittle, feeble. And there is no fiery, romantic leader now who can convince you to believe him and not your lying eyes. Castro died at 90 in 2016. His place is taken by party hacks, whose mismanagement is endemic and likely not curable.
Maybe they’ll muddle through. Maybe what we’re seeing is the early stages of a nation settling itself into an even worse and impoverished—but continuing—reality.
Or maybe the whole thing is about to collapse. How would we know? The military wobbles in its support. Protests spread and intensify, and police are slow or refuse to crack down. The elite, such as it is, starts to fracture. A kid stands in front of a tank.
It feels dreamy to imagine a 67-year-old tragedy resolving itself in this way. But it’s possible.
You have to hope weighty things are being said behind the scenes in Washington, especially in the State Department headed by Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants. But the president’s recent public comments have been offhand, unserious, slobby. “Taking Cuba, in some form, yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it, think I can do anything I want with it.”
This crisis deserves more than that. What a thing it would be if America could see this story end happily, constructively.
Mr. Trump’s White House is a kitchen where there are always four pots at full boil on the stove, and the windows are misty from steam, and the cooks run around not knowing which pot to turn down or remove from the burner, and the mad chef says no, keep all flames high.
You’d like to see things cool down, the mist cleared from the windows so they can see what’s close by.