CUBA: Hoping for Change, Cuban-Style

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jan 3 2003 (IPS) - Many in Cuba would like to find a truly ”Cuban” model of social development, markedly different from the systems found in the rest of Latin America, but also unlike socialism, the model which this Caribbean island nation stuck to strictly until the mild economic reforms of the 1990s.

”The least difficult thing in a dynamic of change is to make a total break with the past. But that would be an oversimplification,” said Cuban sociologist Aurelio Alonso in an interview published by Enfoques, a news bulletin produced by the IPS bureau in Havana.

”We could talk about ‘a Cuban way’, which would have in common with the current socialist regimes in North Korea, China and Vietnam the fact that it has withstood (the international crisis that brought down the east European socialist bloc) without generating a transition to capitalism,” he said.

These systems ”are not models of a rupture with the past. Their dynamics of reform contain a large element of preservation of essential aspects,” said Alonso, an expert with the governmental Centre of Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS).

Speculation that President Fidel Castro and the socialist system were about to fall in Cuba was rife during the 1990s, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union.

”He can’t possibly last beyond this year,” people said in the most diverse circles both in and outside Cuba. But the years passed and Castro, who took power in Cuba’s 1959 revolution, is still here.

In the meantime, Cubans suffered an unprecedented economic crisis, and saw social differences grow, to the detriment of the country’s much-touted ”equality.”

But the collapse that many people in the world believed was inevitable due to the loss of Cuba’s trading partners – the east European socialist bloc – and the stiffening of the four-decade U.S. embargo against the country, did not occur.

Those predictions were replaced by forecasts of a so-called ”biological solution,” whose proponents argue that Cuba is merely waiting for Castro’s death to take ”the big leap” from socialism to a form of capitalism similar to that seen in neighbouring countries.

But observers note that Cuba’s unique reality is very difficult to understand from the outside.

In a survey carried out by independent pollsters, a majority of respondents agreed that ”this has got to change.” But most also expressed the desire that the social advances made by the socialist system would not be lost.

Those ”who wish for radical changes in Cuba’s sociopolitical and economic system are not necessarily calling for an ultra- liberal market economy,” argued Roman Catholic priest Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

”Just as a small minority of people supports the continuation of the system without any changes, an equally small minority would back a kind of regime that is diametrically opposed to the current system,” he said.

Any analysis must take into account the fact that this nation of 11.2 million ”is neither typically Latin American nor typically Caribbean,” the priest wrote in an article published last month by the local Catholic magazine Palabra Nueva.

On the other hand, Cuban socialism differs from the systems that arose in eastern Europe or those that continue to exist in North Korea, China and Vietnam, Céspedes underlined.

Castro ”can be classified as a heavy-handed president,” but he should not be compared ”to well-known (former) Latin American dictators,” nor to the former communist rulers of eastern Europe, he argued.

Castro’s leadership ”emerged out of a genuine people’s revolution,” and the fact that ”he is who he still is in Cuba” is due in large part to ”the will of the majority of the people,” and even ”many of those who desire substantial changes,” he maintained.

Dissident leaders like Elizardo Sánchez say that any process of change in Cuba would be preferable under Castro’s leadership.

Sectors of the so-called moderate dissidence – opposition is illegal but tolerated to a certain extent in Cuba – have expressed on more than one occasion that they would be willing to contribute to ”an agreed-on and coordinated transition to democracy,” with the participation of the current government.

But it is clear that no such alliance will arise as long as the Castro regime maintains that the opposition groups only exist on the island thanks to the moral and financial support they receive from the U.S. government.

If Cuba wishes ”to redesign or reformulate its socialist model, it is essential to define new spaces for private and public economic, social and political initiatives, and take the utmost advantage of them,” said Alonso.

The socialist systems in eastern Europe ”did not explode because someone strangled them from outside,” but because ”they burst on the inside,” he pointed out.

Those who governed the east European socialist bloc tried ”to compete with the West with the same patterns of Western efficiency, and on the economic front the patterns of capitalist efficiency have an unquestionable advantage: they follow the logic of profits, and it doesn’t matter who sinks,” said the sociologist.

”That is where our ethics differ: we do care. Thus, our standards cannot be the same” as in a market economy, he argued.