Marifeli Perez-Stable

Published in The Miami Herald
October 25, 2007

Time may be or may not be running out, but the Cuban regime chugs along as if it isn’t.
In early September, the Communist Party called on Cubans to discuss Raúl Castro’s speech last July 26. Spain’s El País labeled the assemblies ”a national catharsis” while Mexico’s Reforma noted a mood of ”exhaustion and skepticism.” Some spoke up emphatically on an inexhaustible list of complaints. ”After a timid start, people are emboldened and can’t seem to stop talking,” wrote a Cuban columnist in Encuentro en la red, a Madrid-based digital newspaper. Cubans under 40 were mostly disengaged and uninterested.
Anger, resentment

Raúl’s speech raised economic issues that resonated with ordinary Cubans and announced ‘’structural changes” without giving specifics. In 1990, the party convened a similar round of assemblies; the hot topic then was the crumbled Communist world and what Cuba might do to avoid the same fate. The leadership didn’t need these assemblies to take the public’s temperature, then or now. For decades, they have conducted periodic polls — like the comandante’s health, a state secret — that give them the unvarnished truth. But, the ”consultation” ritual worked 17 years ago, so why not now?

The catharsis this time may be working against the regime. In 1990, enough Cubans still believed that things could change for the better. Today, anger, resentment and disbelief have overtaken a good many of those who still held out hope after the Berlin Wall fell. Ordinary Cubans are outraged at the galloping corruption, the time-warped doublespeak that flies in the face of reality and the material hell of their daily lives.

Enter Hugo Chávez

Raúl and others are talking of slow, cautious changes. That, apparently, is not where the public mood is. Most Cubans seem unfazed by the prospect of swiftly discarding the comandante’s bromides in favor of reality-based policies that begin to tackle the nearly bottomless well of economic problems. With the elder Castro still around, Raúl and the generals are hedging their pace. Even after Castro is gone, their pace may still be more hesitant than the citizenry expects. And, mind you, I’m only talking about economic changes.

Enter Hugo Chávez. During his Oct. 13 to 17 trip to Cuba, he held a four-hour meeting with the ailing Castro, broadcast his weekly Caracas program, Aló Presidente, from Santa Clara, Cuba, and announced new agreements to abet the ”unitary project” between Venezuela and Cuba. Chávez’s visit supports the comandante and the hard-liners who are more interested in ideological struggles than in tending to ordinary people’s needs.

By all accounts, reforms will start (soon?) in the agricultural sector. Raúl’s maxim more than a decade ago — ”Beans are more important than cannons” — is even more salient today. Chávez mentioned food production as an area of renewed cooperation, perhaps a sign that the topic came up in his long conversation with the comandante. What comes after efforts to promote agricultural productivity are in place is the crucial issue.

In the mid-1990s, the elder Castro stopped and then reversed the modest openings. Once in place today, there’s no going back but — even after he’s gone — Cuban-Venezuelan ties could be a brake on the economic front. A comprehensive restructuring proved to be incompatible with the Fidelista political ways which Chávez so admires. Raúl and the generals know their ways can’t be the same, which may be why there’s no love lost between them and Chávez.

Nationalism is supposed to be the comandante’s forte. Yet, he is again steering Cuba down a path of dependence on a foreign power.

Messianic politics

Still, ties with the former Soviet Union happened at a time when many deemed socialism a viable alternative to capitalism. Chávez’s 21st-century socialism is a rehash of the tried-and-false ideas of economic statism and messianic politics. History repeats itself — first time as tragedy, second as farce.
Been there, done that, Castro’s successors could say. Still, they are caught between a rock and a hard place: being faithful to Fidel Castro’s legacy, which carries a continued disregard for the economic well-being of ordinary Cubans, or truly burying Castro by embracing an economic restructuring that may open a Pandora’s box