Fidel's Cuba is a case study in the tragic waste of opportunity and life that is inevitable under a Caudillo Messiah with a paternalist utopian domestic agenda
By William Ratliff
Is Raúl Castro
simply a clone of his elder brother Fidel? Answering that question is a step
toward ending what may be the most prolonged and divisive dispute in the
history of modern U.S. foreign policy.
During the Cold
War, trying to isolate Cuba served American security interests since Cuba was
an ally of the Soviet bloc. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. policy
toward Cuba has focused on "nation building" and mild agitation to
eliminate the Castros. Analysts who reject these as adequate grounds for
foreign policy can also critique the current policy on its own terms. In other
words, has it been successful in nation building? And more importantly now,
have Raúl's reforms since taking the top office in 2006 really begun to change
conditions in the country?
Distinguished
analysts differ on the merits of Raúl's reforms. Economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago
calls them "the most extensive and profound" changes on the island in
decades, though still inadequate, while Carlos Alberto Montaner calls them
"token gestures." In May, I made a two-week visit to Cuba, my sixth
since 1983 as a journalist and lecturer, to see what I could learn on the
ground. I found the prospects for meaningful reforms were encouraging but
preliminary.
Conditions and
Changes
I surveyed Raúl's
specific responses to Cuba's challenges last January in an essay titled
"Cuba's Tortured Transition," so here I will focus on the individual,
cultural, and institutional factors that now complicate substantive reform on
the island.
Raúl and the Cuban
Communist Party speak of "updating the economic model," which is
either a feel-good phrase devised to mask criticism of Fidel's economic
failures while changes are slipped through, or an admission that those in
charge are not serious reformers. Changes are explicitly made in the service of
"socialism," which begs the question: Despite some promising new
policies, will change still be inhibited by Cuba's official ideology and
ideologues?
Former high-level
Cuban officials who worked closely with Raúl and coauthored articles with me
note his early interest in serious, systematic, long-term economic reforms like
those that have been undertaken under authoritarian regimes in China and
Vietnam. If Cuban leaders were free to think outside the socialist box, their
best reform model would be Taiwan, which is a democratic market economy.
Realistically, however, Cuba will not now move toward democracy and thus it's
more likely China and Vietnam are models for its future. Raúl's current
presumptive heir apparent, Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel, visited both China
and Vietnam in June.
The Castros have
never respected individual rights, though they claim to do so with education
and preventive health programs for all. But in these and other socio-economic
fields, Cuba ranked high among the Latin American nations before the Castros
hit the scene, and this was despite an imbalance between urban and rural
sectors. Since then, Cuba has fallen in the rankings. The United Nations
Development Programme's 2013 Human Development Index rates Cuba fifty-ninth in
the world and sixth in Latin America, a respectable but not stunning record.
The 2013 Human Rights Watch World Report concluded that Cuba "represses
virtually all forms of political dissent." Economic freedoms are just beginning to sprout.
Frankenstein in
Havana
Cuban professor
Carlos Alzugaray has underlined the gravity of Cuba's economic problems today
by using what he calls the "Frankenstein metaphor." Speaking recently
at Stanford University, he said Fidel's economic policies were meant to be a
gift to mankind, like Frankenstein's creature. But like the scientist's
creation, they turned out to be "monsters." Though Alzugaray did not
openly criticize "Father" Fidel, he noted the latter's flawed insistence
on state control of all economic policy and his long opposition to the free
market, individual initiative, and entrepreneurship.
Fidel's freely
chosen economic plan was, over the course of a half-century, uniformly
disastrous. From the Revolutionary Offensive in 1968, with its crushing of even
one-person private businesses, to the fanatical 1970 sugar program that
destroyed the then-fairly balanced Third World economy, to the quick reversal
of earlier concessions to individual initiative in times of economic collapse,
Fidel's policies have paralyzed the nation.
Fidel was one of
modern history's most arrogant and inflexible leaders. He would not learn
anything from anyone or anything. He never learned about economics or human
nature from his own disastrous failures nor from the collapse of the Soviet
bloc. He did not even learn from the experiences of China and Vietnam, clearly
"revolutionary" governments that finally saw the necessity of market
economics.
Fidel's Cuba is a
case study in the tragic waste of opportunity and life that is inevitable under
a Caudillo Messiah with a paternalist utopian domestic agenda, an expansive
revolutionary international policy and a totally closed mind. The key question
is, what direction will the country take now that Fidel's role is over or, at
least, much reduced?
Raúl on Fidel's
Monsters
The most
influential expert witness on Cuba's economic condition today is Raúl,
historically the more pragmatic of the brothers. Raúl has often focused on the
problems of deeply ingrained attitudes that keep people from recognizing,
openly confronting, and resolving problems. In 2011 he said bluntly that
changing Cuba will depend on "transforming erroneous and unsustainable
concepts about socialism, deeply rooted in broad sectors of the public for
years, as a result of the excessive paternalistic, idealistic, and egalitarian
focus that the Revolution adopted in the interest of social justice."
After a visit to Cuba last year the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party, one
of Cuba's oldest and closest allies, said publicly that what the Cuban people
need most is "a change of mentality at all levels, from the highest level
to the grassroots."
At the same time,
there are many obstacles that stand in Cuba's way. Raúl has hinted at but
downplayed the massive impact of Hispanic tradition. Fidel and his late
acolyte, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, are just the most recent in a
centuries-long parade of Latin American caudillos or strongman dictators.
Increasingly over the centuries caudillos acted like Messiahs and were thus
welcomed in societies that seem to expect paternalistic leaders. The Messiahs
rant at the Devils around them (i.e. America), promise miracles they cannot
deliver and leave a mess behind when they finally go.
Another of Raúl's
most revealing critiques emphasizes the challenge of simply getting things done
when people have little motivation and a weak work ethic. He relates that
decades ago Vietnamese leaders asked Cubans to teach them how to grow coffee,
which Cubans did. Vietnam soon became the second-largest coffee exporter in the
world and a high Vietnamese official asked, incredulously, "How is it
possible that you taught us to grow coffee and now you are buying coffee from
us?"
As soon as he took
over in 2006 Raúl warned, "We're tired of excuses in this
revolution!" Cubans, he said, must "erase forever the notion that
Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working."
Shouting slogans and scapegoating will no longer do, he has said repeatedly.
The farmland is there waiting to be cultivated and jobs of all sorts are
waiting to be created and done. These needs and problems were reiterated at
party and National Assembly meetings in early July.
The Independence
Fetish
One of Fidel's
most spectacular claims was that of Cuba's independence. True, Cuba broke
politically with the United States and he sometimes bit the Soviet hand that
fed him. But economically he was almost always on the dole to foreigners who in
various forms sent Cuba a quarter of its annual GDP. The Soviet bloc subsidized
Cuba throughout the Cold War and when the aid stopped in the early 1990s Cuba's
economy crashed utterly.
Thereafter Fidel
arranged heavy support from Chavez and even indirectly-after passing through
individual Cuban recipients-from the United States. The latter came from
Cuban-Americans-Fidel always called those exiles "worms"-who sent and
still send remittances that, according to differing calculations, are today
either the main source of foreign exchange revenue for the state or greater
than all other sources combined.
Despite Raúl's
rhetoric, the official vocal enthusiasm for socialism seems as alive as ever in
Cuba. Buildings and roadsides in the cities and countryside are plastered with
slogans like: "The Revolution Moves Ahead, Vigorous and Victorious";
"This is the Hour of Our True Greatness" and "United, Vigilant
and Combative in Defending Socialism." Stultifying Cuban publications
constantly rehash the great "triumphs" of the Old Guard revolutionary
heroes decades ago. This kind of puffery is particularly pathetic these days
given the depth of Cuba's economic and political problems resulting above all
from Fidel and the Revolution itself.
As in the past,
the most common, cloying, and counterproductive image in Cuba is that of Che
Guevara, the supposedly selfless "new man" who lauded moral over
material incentives and was often even more violent, stubborn, and utopian than
Fidel. The image of him appears all over the country, in posters, postcards,
and a jarring 120-foot-high "silhouette-outline" of him on the
Ministry of the Interior building in Revolutionary Square.
The truth is-as it
has long been-that Che was far more useful to the Revolution dead than alive.
First, he was not around long enough to threaten Fidel. Second, like the men
and maidens on Keats' Grecian Urn, Che "survived" not as the arrogant
loser he so often was but in the unchanging glamorous photos of the forever
macho young man in his prime.
So contradictions
and inconsistencies abound and Raúl and his cohorts send mixed messages to the
Cuban people and the world. Does Raúl really support serious reform; is he
being sabotaged by mid-level bureaucrats and surviving ideologues, including
Fidel; is he being thwarted by rampant corruption at all levels of society; are
enough of the Cuban people willing to work hard and long enough to build and
sustain a new economy and life? Perhaps.
Raúl's reforms to
date fall far short of what China and Vietnam have done and what is needed to
bring Cuba into the economically developing world. Even so, more Cubans are
moving in the right direction now than at any previous time in the past
half-century. The bottom line for U.S. policy should be to let Cubans resolve
their own domestic problems as best they can without frictions deliberately
generated from abroad.
No comments:
Post a Comment