Rethinking Fidel Castro (continued)

Transportation services have been drastically reduced, and so has the use of electrical appliances, even television. Serious shortages of medical supplies in hospitals and pharmacies are common. One reporter (Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1991) discovered that meat was available to most residents of Havana a total of just four days in the first ten months of 1991. And availability of consumer goods is likely to get worse, not better. Thousands of urban Cubans have been sent on rotation to the countryside, where inexperience and a lack of agricultural machinery, sufficient fertilizer of any kind, and insect control result in low yields of food crops. At the same time, heroic efforts are required to maintain normal production in the all-important sugar industry. Meanwhile, visible political discontent and attempts at illegal emigration have been rising.

In a major speech on December 27, 1991 (Granma Weekly Review, December 31, 1991), Castro himself summed up Cuba's economic predicament by explaining that while the value of annual imports from the Soviet Union usually amounted to $5 billion, "this year the figure, up to this moment, is one billion, 673 million. Can you imagine a more drastic reduction? . . . Add to this the disappearance of trade with the socialist camp, not counting the Soviet Union, beginning in 1990." And now, to make matters worse, the Soviet Union has actually disappeared. "It does not exist!" He particularly stressed the critical situation of fuel imports, revealing that 530,000 single-gear, hard-to-pump Chinese bicycles were in use on the streets of Havana. Anticipating that 1992 could be an even more difficult year, he nevertheless promised that "we will continue to defend the Revolution, to defend socialism."

Castro's expectation about the decline of the Cuban economy was later confirmed. As reported in the Economist (April 24, 1993), an "unusually frank study published in Havana by the Centre of American Studies, a Communist Party think-tank, reckons that the island cannot generate even 40% of the income needed to buy essential consumer goods abroad. . . [In addition] a leaked Cuban government report . . . discloses that Cuba's total reserves in hard currency and precious metals fell from $102m in 1991 to $12m in 1992. Of 515 items defined as essential for domestic production, 226 were not available last year. Of the others, availability wavered between 5% and 26% in the 1980's, when Soviet aid still flowed."

For a time, Castro could hope that the old guard hard-liners in Moscow, sympathetic to maintaining the traditional Soviet-Cuban alliance, would regain control of the Kremlin. This hope vanished with the failed Moscow coup in August 1991, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Communist party to which Cuba's Communist party could look for fraternal support. Finally, at the very end of 1991, the Soviet Union itself disappeared, with no indication that the remaining hard-pressed independent states had either the interest or the economic capacity to come to Cuba's rescue. Since then, political uncertainties in Moscow in early 1992 and after may have revived a glimmer of hope in Havana. Some fifteen thousand pro-Communists demonstrated in Moscow on February 9, shouting "Yeltsin the Judas," and waving pictures of Lenin, Stalin and Castro" (New York Times, February 10, 1992).

As Castro's economy crumbles and the Soviet Union dissolves--leaving Cuba without its economic and military protector--Cuba's isolation grows increasingly untenable in a world that has largely rejected communism, including the Cuban model. The exceptions are Vietnam (showing a certain amount of flexibility), North Korea, and China in its political, but not economic, structure. Vietnam and North Korea are in deep economic depression, and China's capacity to solve Cuba's problems is negligible. Nelson Mandela's and the South African Communist party's undiminished infatuation with the Cuban Revolution can be of only small comfort to Castro. The Cuban role in the Third World, excepting Latin America, has been reduced to the vanishing point.

Socialist Cuba's many years of isolation from the rest of Latin America have ended. Nearly all countries now maintain diplomatic and commercial relations. The reasons can be summed up as follows: (1) With the failure of Marxism in Nicaragua and a peace settlement in El Salvador, Cuban support for leftist insurgencies there and in other countries has dried up; (2) in Latin America, renewing relations with Cuba has become a symbol of opposition to past and possible future violations of sovereignty by the United States; and (3) as Cuban isolation in the rest of the world has grown, Castro has increasingly invoked common language and history to promote the acceptance of Cuba in the fraternity of Latin American nations.

Castro's presence at the First Ibero-American Summit, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in mid-July 1991, was hailed by Havana propaganda as a great moral and political triumph for the Cuban Revolution. It was something less than that, although still noteworthy. The meeting was attended by twenty-one heads of state from Latin American countries, as well as from Spain and Portugal. Castro was invited by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico and not by a consensus of summit participants. Mexico is the only Latin American country that never broke relations with Cuba, a concession to pressures from the Mexican anti-imperialist left.

In his speech, Castro appealed for Latin American investment and increased trade. With respect to "joint ventures," he offered "preferential treatment for our Latin American partners. . . including Latin American capital contributions greater than 50 per cent." Concerning trade, he suggested "new means of compensated bartering" (Granma International, August 4, 1992). If he intended to reveal a new pragmatism, he was unconvincing. He made no concessions with respect to moderating his dictatorship and denounced the United States with his usual vigor: "We [Latin Americans] have been divided, attacked, cut in pieces, occupied, kept underdeveloped, plundered." Practically all the other countries at the summit were committed to democratic and capitalist development. They were eager to improve economic and political relations with the United States. Thus, in addition to the unacceptable business risks, they could scarcely find it prudent to accept Castro's overtures.

In any event, there was no public response to his appeal. Privately, President Felipe González Márquez of Spain poked fun at the bearded Cuban leader for wearing his military uniform at the meeting, the only leader not in civilian clothes. (Castro has not been seen in civilian dress since late November 1956, when he sailed from Mexico to begin his insurrection.) Portuguese President Mario Soares (like President González, a moderate socialist) told journalists that Castro was "a dinosaur, respectable only because he is prehistoric" (Globe and Mail [Toronto], July 27, 1991). As Mark A. Uhlig of the New York Times (July 28. 1991) concluded, "The participating heads of state invariably looked straight past Mr. Castro's national predicament, focusing instead on the hardheaded business of building a new global negotiating block that could unite the markets and policies of their nations. . . . In the conflict of Latin American politics that he helped provoke and define, it appeared that Mr. Castro would even be denied the honor of a final losing battle."

The First Ibero-American Summit could have been a strategic opportunity for Castro to offer an initial indication of Cuban reform, or at least some hint of a new ideological, political, and economic pragmatism. It might have improved the reception of his plea for joint ventures, which was unattractive, among other reasons, as long as it involved partnership with a repressive Marxist-Leninist regime that was clearly destined to die. An unspoken assumption at the summit was that only a miracle, such as a major shift in American policy, could prolong the life of socialism in Cuba, but that such a shift was most unlikely to occur as long as Castro remained in power. Castro, on the other hand, expected no miracle. The signal he appeared to send from Guadalajara in July 1991 was that if his ship was destined to sink, he intended to go down with it.

Castro sent a similar signal from the United Nations in mid-December 1991. Cuba was one of the few states that voted against revoking the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, which Cuba had originally supported. In so doing, Cuba found itself aligned with Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Vietnam, and a few other unreconstructed centers of autocracy and bigotry. Deciding not to give Zionism a clean bill of health, Cuba could have abstained, as Ethiopia did, or might have been absent at voting time, as in the case of China. But for Castro there was no compromise with imperialism on this issue, indeed suggesting no compromise on any other.

Personally, Castro has never been anti-Semitic. At one time he claimed to be descended from Sephardic Jews¹⁵, who were victims of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century and among whom Castro was a common name. Castro refused to follow the lead of the Soviet Union in breaking relations with Israel after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. When he did break relations in 1973, it was purely an opportunistic decision to appease the Arab states. It paid off because he gained their support in being elected leader of the Nonaligned Movement in 1979. At the end of 1991, he was still in no mood for reconciliation with Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, he preferred a stubborn affirmation of cold war doctrine, a foreign policy decision that matched the rigidity of domestic policy and a defiance of pragmatic rationality.

Castro is intelligent and well informed. He must realize that the odds are overwhelmingly against him. In the past, he has occasionally showed surprising flexibility. For example, in 1964, he offered to abandon Cuban export of revolution to Latin America in return for normalization of relations with the United States but was rebuffed by Washington. Then again, in 1970, he acknowledged defeat of his ultraleftist deviations from Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism and accepted the Stalinist model in return for the Kremlin's rescue of Cuba's bankrupt economy. It is significant that in both cases his flexibility posed no threat to his personal power. However, in the post-cold war crisis, he apparently fears that any modification of Cuba's command economy or liberalization of control of the state by the Cuban Communist party would initially weaken him and eventually eliminate his monopoly of power. That glasnost and perestroika, after some five years, led to the dissolution of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and then the dismantlement of the Soviet state itself undoubtedly reinforced his antipathy to "reform."

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5