Fidel Castro Redux: Old Revolutionaries Resisting New Revolutions (continued)

The character of neo-Stalinism as an independent element in Communist survival cannot be overlooked. One must emphasize the term "neo," in that the genocidal potential of the Castro regime was rarely impressed on the Cuban citizenry. I pointed these out in my article on "The Stalinization of Castro" in 1964, and Alexander Groth has done so more recently. Neo-Stalinist elements in Cuba include lawlessness of the system, lack of accountability (both to its own people and to outside powers), and secrecy in decision-making. In the absence of public accountability, actual policy decisions come as surprises to the outside world.

The idea that Stalinism is simply bare-boned repression misses the sophisticated nature of what I call neo-Stalinism. This is a Stalinism that has all the elements of the repression without the necessity for physical dismemberment. Symbolic terror, and the everyday social force of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, are adequate to the task. It might be added that such neo-Stalinist cadres make it more likely that a bitter civil struggle as in Romania, rather than the benign outcome as in the rest of Eastern Europe, probably is the best, or at least most likely, scenario to anticipate.

Dynastic communism as such enters the Cuban equation. While it shares many at the properties of neo-Stalinism, the familial feature of the Castro regime has long been recognized as an element unto itself. In classical political science descriptions of fascist Italy, this pattern has been called clientelism. In the absence of formal structures that tend to make public actions predictable, the state is displaced by the person as the dominant force in public actions. Private gifts and factional intrigue become the dominant mode. Fidel, Raúl, and Vilma become Cuban equivalents to Richard, Henry and Elizabeth--monarchs who sit unsteadily on their thrones.

As Douglas Payne recently pointed out, capriciousness plays a role: "Castro's career has been marked by numerous sharp turns in both domestic and foreign policy. The possibility cannot be excluded that he might suddenly declare himself a champion of perestroika and swear, in typically egotistical fashion, his perestroika is the best. He would then demand immediate concessions from the United States, including an end to economic embargo, and would have the full support of Moscow." This is, of course, a possible, not inevitable scenario. Nonetheless, it indicates the hazards of even informed guesses in a political environment of near-total political illegitimacy. Perhaps a new law of political science or better, an equation, is that levels of predictability are a function of democracy. This is so because the caprice of a single individual is checked by the caprices of others. But in the absence of checks there are no balances, and without the latter, prediction becomes plausible in therapeutic rather than analytic terms.

Cuba at the Breaking Point

What then pushes the Cuban political process to the breaking point, but prevents it from going to pieces entirely^? Primarily the foreign, overseas conditions in which Cuba finds itself: total, dependence upon Soviet economic support, declining interest on the part of former Eastern European allies like Czechoslovakia, the willingness of the United States to let Castro simply continue to twist in the wind, and a near breakdown in Cuba's ability to meet its own basic trade and sales obligations, even at the bartering levels. There is an increasing urgency, even stridency, in forcing the United States to say "what if. . ." with respect to a post-Castro Cuba. But thus far, and I think wisely, this tendency to announce scenarios in advance of actions has been resisted, and properly so given the past exaggerations and expectations in policy responses.

The critical factor is the continuing support by the Soviet Union for the Castro regime, atbeit in a much lower ideological key. Despite the widely heralded hostility between Castro's Proceso de Rectificacion and Gorbachev's perestroika, prospects for an open rupture are slim. The two nations are in a condition best described as a marriage of convenience, a state of shared needs rather than private affections. Let me noutline at least a few of these, since this relation between Cuba and the USSR is the critical pivot on which all prognosis for the regime stands or falls.

First, the Soviet Union has so many problems within a European context, that it will not threaten its stable relations with Cuba unless absolutely forced to do so. Similarly, on the Cuban side, with the enormous shrinkage in aid and trade with Eastern Europe, Cuban dependence on Soviet aid is higher than ever. And with debt repayment at a veritable standstill, neither side is prepared to cancel the debt nor put an end to continuing supports--especially with outstanding debt standing at seventeen billion in U.S. dollars by 1988. To be sure, Castro will seek to replace the fall-off in trade with Eastern Europe. He will do so by appeals for hemispheric solidarity. But even if he is likely to find ideological support in this, the sad state of so many Latin economies will restrict his acute sense of continuing functional dependence upon the Soviet Union.

Second, continuing aid and trade is the best way for the USSR to move Castro from his current fanatic anti-private sector position. This is to be done by compelling Cuba to deal with autonomous Soviet factories rather than with a centralized agency as in the past. Such bilateralism will have the effect of imposing economic rationality on Cuba by forcing a balanced trade and decreasing subsidies as such. The Cuban edge will be in the prospects for getting world market prices for its sugar exports, of which eighty percent goes to the Soviet Union at present. In any event enterprise to enterprise arrangements are inherently more balanced than small nation to giant nation bilateralism.

The Cuban Military System

Third, the Cuban military system remains entirely a creature of Soviet hardware and logistics. It is simply impossible for a complete shutdown in hardware aid to lead to anything other than a complete rupture. And for a variety of reasons, ithis is not in the cards. Indeed, in 1990 Cuba is completing a large missile battery project on the outskirts of Havana that will deploy Soviet-made SA-2 Guideline missiles. U.S. satellite photos indicate that these missiles are already in the early stages of deployment. The missile can strike aircraft flying at up to 50,000 feet. And given Castro's conviction that an invasion from the United States must come sooner or later, he is in no position to do without Soviet hardware--even if it be of a late 1⁹50's vintage. By the same token, with the loss of Nicaragua to the Communist bloc, Cuba remains the singular bastion that the Soviet Union has in the Western world. Such a bargaining chip will not be given up cheaply.

A new, potentially explosive factor in this overseas equation, and closer to home, is the emergence of Nicaragua as a Gorbachev-type Latin American state, which functions in bold relief to the Stalinist system to be found in Cuba. Daniel Ortega, and the Sandinista National Liberation Front took its appeals to the people, and lost decisively to the broad democratic coalition headed by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, leader of the National Opposition Union. The Nicaraguan election campaign was conducted on broadly multi-party terms. The electoral process, which is a harbinger of things in come throughout Eastern Europe no less than Latin America, served to institutionalize political legitimacy. The regime and opposition alike in Nicaragua can now chart a democratic path, in a way that communism in Cuba has never been able to achieve, or even to imagine.

Beyond the political, Nicaragua never did completely destroy the private sector. Hence it was, and remains, in a position to change the economic "mix" without a sense of severe rupture. These developments in Nicaragua have taken place in the bitter chagrin of Fidel Castro, perhaps the last collectivist purist in the Western hemisphere. In brief, neither Castro nor Gorbachev is likely to miss the continuing significance of Nicaragua, albeit for quite opposite reasons.

These developments indicate a continuing round of instabilities in Cuba until some form of opposition can crystallize. And that some opposition is now fusing becomes evident when reports indicate that Cuban youth are talking of political change openly and defiantly for the first time since the 1959 revolution. This is after all a situation best described in processive terms of when and not the structural terms of whether. It takes little to recollect that the late premier of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, mustered a massive if sullen public rally one week before his demise. He had to face that same crowd in total opposition one week later. And one week later still he was tried, convicted and executed for crimes against the people.

Still, we must remember the dangers in the Cuban situation. In Spain, Francisco Franco retained political power long after any measurable utility. Further, there was a monarchist tradition which provided a key element in the transition to Spanish democracy in the 1970s. Such an element does not exist within Cuba proper. It is, however, possible that the exile community may function in such a restorationist capacity, at least to cushion the shock of transition during the early stages of a return to democratic norms and free market relations. Cuba is a nation in which both a welfare-oriented left and a free-market right will have to be recreated. Both elements will be needed to insure durability and stability.

That we are talking in these admittedly speculative terms nonetheless indicates that some form of closure to the Cuban dictatorship is near at hand; if not in 1990, then assuredly in the decade of the nineties, and probably in the early years. Castro is down to the bare bones of the family. His administrative infrastructure is demoralized, the earlier passion among the military cadres has been sapped by battles in Africa and trials in Cuba, and the energy of the best and brightest has long ago migrated to points North and West.

A Post-Castro Cuba

There is a broad consensus on how a viable economy can emerge out of the rubble of a post-Castro Cuba: a renewed emphasis on tourism; the opening of the agrarian sector to private initiative and distribution; and the sort of crop diversification long promised but never delivered by the tyrant. There is substantially less agreement on the sources of Cuban political renewal. Its society has been so dismantled that few independent forces can be identified, much less predicted to play an important role. The military are so constrained by Soviet patterns of professionalism that they can hardly be counted on for probing, much less bringing forth, democratic options. The Catholic Church is not in the position to exercise supreme authority as it is in, say, Poland or even in Nicaragua. In this Cuban context, unlike Eastern Europe, it might well turn out that the most serious problems of reconstruction will be political rather than economic.

Under such circumstances, what we have is best described as a continuing political tragedy, slightly lessened by an end to the tyranny in sight. Any rejoicing should be muted in the face of the calamitous outcome of this revolution; one begun in high expectations and concluding with the near total paralysis of a major Caribbean nation. The great length of time under which Cuban people suffered tyranny will make the task of democracy harder and the potential for disillusion greater. Fortunately, the quality of Cuba's people, and the good will they have engendered by their diligence and patience everywhere from Miami to Caracas, should serve to cut down the retooling time of the society in its effort to return to the family of democratic nations. Still, we would be well advised to think carefully on the heavy price paid by blind passions and a revanchist spirit in past efforts to improve the lot of the Cuban people and system. In so doing, we must start with curbing our own euphoria while passing along our current wisdom, without laundering our past follies, to the next generation. If we walk out from under the shadows of the past, we can then hold open the prospects for meeting in the broad daylight of the future.

The Cuban people deserve nothing less from the academic intellectuals and federal policy-makers than a proper display of candor. Cerebral types have made terrible mistakes in the past, starting with empirical miscalculations on the nature of the regime, and ending with renewed appeals for reconciliation at the moment of the dictators' final years. For these reasons, we must greet the coming democratization of Cuba with joy in our hearts, tempered by modesty in our analysis and recommendations. To do otherwise is to run the serious risk of repeating errors rather than locating truths of this special moment in history.

Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous works on Latin America and Comparative International Development, including Cuban Communism, which is now in its seventh edition. This article originally appeared in the July/August 1990 edition of Freedom at Issue, Freedom House's bimonthly journal of opinion (now Freedom Review). Copyright 1990, Freedom House.

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