ABSTRACT
Cuban short-term aid to its Caribbean neighbors is obvious. The future historian of the Cuban revolution and its Caribbean significance may have to conclude that its influence, for good or ill, has been ideological rather than practical. There is the new ideology of Cuban social justice, based on the socialist principle of organized production for community consumption. There was a third force of democratic socialism existing in the Caribbean long before 1959. "Marxist theory," wrote W. Walker Thomas, "has always been explicitly based on the creative interaction of socialism and political democracy. Correspondingly the Cuban revolutionary appeal is limited. Cultural dependency continues: In higher education the Puerto Rican graduate student goes to the United States just as the French Antillean student goes to France. All in all, the picture of heroic Caribbean masses rising up in revolt against colonialism and imperialism is, sadly, a myth rather than a reality.
