Monday, December 20, 2010
Quo Vadis Fidel? Where Are You — and Cuba — Going?
By Irving Louis Horowitz
The enormously talented and courageous woman, Yoani Sanchez, summarized the meaning
of the forthcoming April 2011 Conference Guidelines for the Communist Party's Sixth Congress in her biting blog called Generación Y. On November 9th, 2010, she wrote "not a single line refers to the expansion of civil rights, including
the restrictions suffered by Cubans in entering and leaving our own country. Nor is there a word about freedom of association
or expression, without which the authorities will continue to behave more like factory foremen than as the representatives
of their people."
However, other than castigating
the "bloodsucking character" of the thirty some odd pages of text containing economic proposals, "more appropriate for the
Ministry of Finance than for the compass of a political party," she treads lightly on the bureaucratic contradictions that
drive the Cuban Communist Party at this critical point in time. The emotional turmoil of present day Cuba she gives voice
to as a "detective of the unexpressed." She rarely is excelled by anyone in an overseas context. However the political economy
of the moment remains fair game for foreign policy analysis.
Other than those who remain dedicated
to the cause of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, I suspect that most serious analysts would correctly claim that the forthcoming
assembly can only seek to preserve and protect the Communist Party apparatus. To expect it to declare itself out of business
and defunct is too much to imagine from a single party that monopolizes every organ of public opinion and political mobilization.
But this very domination of politics is a source of deep weakness; it demonstrates the absence of legitimacy in the Castro
brothers' regime. It may rotate leadership elites, but it cannot change the course of totalitarianism.
In a system of dynastic communism,
practiced to a fine art in North Korea, but mocked everywhere else, its impact beyond the 800,000 members of the Communist
Party ranges from negligible to indifferent. The decision of the Communist Party to reform the economic system from within
is faced with a cul-de-sac from which it cannot readily extricate itself. Reduced to a political faction of less than ten
percent (closer to seven percent) of the population, and faced with a variety of cultural distancing from the regime-ranging
from rebellious youth to religious revivalism as a mobilizing device — the system at the level of ideological superstructure
is a ghost of what it was in earlier periods of Cuban communist history.
Turning toward the political
economic base, the system seems even more vulnerable than in the past. The natural history which transpired in 2010 augurs
poorly for a party conference scheduled for late spring 2011. Even the supposition that the actors in this drama will remain
the same is dubious. Leaders in their eighties cannot presume immortality.
1. First, there is the strange
September 8, 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the national correspondent for The
Atlantic in which Fidel Castro admits plainly that "The Cuban [Communist] model doesn't even work for us anymore." Castro's
post-interview shifts and qualifications hardly constituted damage control.
2. The government apparatus of
Raul Castro declares a reduction in the size of the central bureaucracy by at least 500,000 to 700,000 individuals. The size
of the public sector was thus reduced from 85 percent to somewhere between 75-70 percent.
3. The problem is that there
is no private sector available to absorb such a huge exodus from government employment. Not only is this population redundant
within the bureaucracy, it has little tooling or educational retraining in the largely pyrrhic private sector.
4. Often overlooked is that the
culture of communism strongly discourages business skills and private sector initiatives. Those who engaged in such practices
in earlier decades were rapidly forced to surrender its activities; or failing that, pay exorbitant taxes for the privilege
of embracing the private sector as small time entrepreneurs.
5. The swollen public sector
exiles thus must turn to the black market or gray market in order to survive. Already rife with a myriad of widely reported
illegal activities in the black market, from stealing of any moveable parts, to services rendered "off the books" in repairs
and services, the situation is grim.
6. The currency situation created
by the new edicts will do little to strengthen the value of Cuban currency, certainly neither abroad and probably not within
Cuba itself. What it is likely to accomplish is the further flight from the Peso Cubano (moneda nacional) into convertible
currencies such as North American dollars and European Euros.
7. The trade unions mandated
by the government now stand exposed as the ideological voice of the Communist Party and its edicts, or must face the prospect
of opposition to the regime itself. This is a situation strangely parallel to Poland during the founding of Solidarity in
the Gdansk shipyards in September 1980 where Lech Walesa and others formed a broad anti-Soviet social movement ranging from
people associated with the Catholic Church to members of the anti-regime Left.
The larger, external macroeconomic
factors for Cuba offer little comfort — dependency on Venezuela or at least on Hugo Chavez parading about as the savior
of the island for providing petroleum products at reduced rates and bartering professional personnel in exchange for such
assistance. This offers little succor to either the Party or its leadership. The declining markets for sugar and tobacco produced
as a result of stiff competition from other nations and regions also have become part of the permanent Cuban landscape. The
island is unable to compete, and even less able to revitalize established industries much less institutionalize new technologies
that have become routine even in less democratic parts of the world. The pressures from the embargo by the United States (which
are real, despite Fidel's repeated past blaring that they counted for little) do weigh heavily on the regime. Add to this
Russia's loss of support on a variety of finished products, the Castro brothers are faced with impossible choices. Not even
Chinese goodwill can bail out the system.
The Castro entourage would be
wise to retool the getaway airplane used by Fulgencio Batista, and try for January 1, 2011 as a fine one-way departure date.
And so might this prove to be the peaceful end of the Communist regime in Cuba: not in a thundering manifesto of historical
absolution, but as a quiet departure of a frenetic politburo that should have taken place years ago. The Cuban people will
have to figure out who to punish and how to move beyond more than a half century of authoritarian rule. They will also need
to examine options and alternatives before them in the torturous road of reentry into hemispheric civilities and global economics.
But this upcoming event — Proyecto
de Lineamientos de la Política Económico y Social —
far from alleviating the situation will only exacerbate matters. It will focus attention on systemic failures, and add substance
to Fidel's off-handed remarks in the Atlantic interview. In this way, Fidel may
yet prove a prophet of doom, rather than a harbinger of the future.
——————————
Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt distinguished
professor emeritus of sociology and political science at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is the author of The Long Night of Dark Intent: A Half Century of Cuban Communism, and co-editor with
Jaime Suchlicki of eleven editions of the "bible" of Cuban studies, Cuban Communism.
"Quo Vadis Fidel? Where Are You Going?" was first published in "E-Notes" (December 2010), of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). Reprinted with permission.
