OUTLOOK 2000/CUBA: Inconclusive Utopia

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Dec 19 1999 (IPS) - Cuba enters the new millennium with the revolutionary regime of Fidel Castro still firmly in power but caught between the decades-old conflict with the United States, an economic crisis and a future that seems uncertain for the majority of citizens.

The need for change is perhaps the only point of agreement between the island’s implacable enemies and the enthusiastic followers of Castro, intellectuals and academics from the broadest possible range of ideologies, backgrounds and religions.

A vast number of people, who never have been particularly involved in politics, recognise the need for economic and political transformation but encounter problems when they try to define how this should be accomplished.

The dream of being the “Switzerland of the Caribbean,” which managed to do business as usual without antagonising either capitalist or socialist countries, has been replaced by a communist utopia with a minimal state apparatus and social equality.

That “ideal” society would include the achievements of the past 40 years of Cuba’s communist regime along with a normalisation of ties with the United States and the Cuban exile community, private development initiatives, and freedom of expression and movement.

Castro, for his part, says that for the younger generation, “the revolution is just starting,” and patiently listens to the counsel of both friends and enemies regarding a democratic transition for the island similar to that taking place elsewhere in Latin America.

The Cuban president accepted criticisms by Pope John Paul II, who visited the country in 1998 and, in November of this year, tolerated meetings between Cuban dissidents and the various presidents and foreign ministers who attended the 9th Ibero- American Summit in Havana.

At 73 years of age – of which 40 have been Cuban President – Castro calls himself “a realist, dreamer and utopian,” still waging his personal crusade against the United States and perceiving any political opposition as a conspiracy by Washington.

Musician Silvio Rodriguez, who considers himself a “Fidelista,” says “Cuba, and the revolutionary Cuban are full of contradictions today…Quite often, we don’t even understand what’s going on ourselves.”

All in all, Rodriguez would rather “cut out his tongue” than betray the revolution, which, according to him, has been left to fend for itself.

“The revolution is practically all alone. I’m not going to tell you that nobody believes in it, but a lot fewer believe in it now than at the beginning,” he says in an interview published this month with the Cuban magazine Revolution and Culture.

The last decade of the 20th century brought profound changes to the more than 11 million inhabitants of Cuba.

The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance of the socialist bloc disappeared. Cuba was more alone in the Western hemisphere than ever before, with empty pockets and few friends.

The loss of its principal trade partners, and an inability to find alternative sources for the 13 million tonnes of oil that Moscow had guaranteed in the 1980s, pushed the island to the edge and into the worst economic crisis since Castro had come to power.

In practical terms, the 34.8 percent fall in gross domestic product from 1990 to 1993 translated into power outages that lasted more than 12 hours a day, food shortages, deficits in every branch of public service and unemployment.

“The worst of all was having to figure out how to put food on the table for my family every day,” says Eulalia Lopez, a 42-year- old woman who lives with her elderly parents and a young daughter.

In one year, the average daily caloric consumption fell from 2,845 to 1,863, according to expert sources. This poor diet, combined with toxic contaminants, caused the appearance of a neuropathic epidemic that affected more than 50,000 people in 1993.

With the advent in 1994 of the first anti-governmental disturbance of the Castro era, in which more than 30,000 Cubans took to the seas in an attempt to emigrate to the United States, the value of the US dollar soared to 150 Cuban pesos.

The “boat crisis” ended with a migration agreement between Havana and Washington, but it forced the Cuban government to introduce economic reforms – in many cases considered “undesirable, but unavoidable.”

Nearly a decade after the start of the recession, the main sectors of the economy are starting to get back on their feet. However, local economists say it will take the island another 10 years to return to the quality of life of 1989.

As 1999 came to an end, the per capita salary of Cubans is some 217 pesos per month; the dollar is trading at 20 pesos and shortages seem a thing of the past. But food prices remain high and some basic goods can be purchased only in dollars.

State authorities are putting their faith in the tourism sector, the recovery of sugar markets, the nickel industry, import substitution schemes and oil production through prospecting and reserves.

“The economy may improve, but there are things that will never return to the way they were,” said Ernesto Nunez, 46, who quit his job as a secondary school teacher to work 18 hours a day as a taxi driver.

Among the most immediate impacts of the crisis on the Cuban population has been the “inversion of the social pyramid,” according to various studies.

Doctors, teachers, engineers and other professionals, who until the end of the 1980s were found at the peak of the pyramid, have fallen to the bottom. Today, anyone who has access to foreign currency can be upwardly mobile.

Meanwhile, the peasants who sell their products in the agricultural markets opened by the state are getting the lion’s share of revenues, and professionals constitute the most impoverished class on the island.

Financial sources say that in the mid-1990s, 12.8 percent of bank accounts held 84.5 percent of deposits. At the same time, 67.2 percent of bank accounts contained just 2.4 percent of all savings.

If Cubans are asked about their personal life, their country, the economy, the price of pork, Christmas trees or New Year’s Eve dinner the reply is a phrase coined during the crisis years: “It’s not easy.”

Catholic priest Carlos Manuel de Cespedes observes that, if Castro has stayed in power for this long, “the internal support he has must be pretty solid.”

In his opinion, “one should not confuse the criticism of some state methods” or the decision of a significant number of people to leave the island “with the total failure” of the revolution.

“Even those who want very radical changes in the socio- political and economic system of Cuba do not necessarily recommend the installation of an ultra-liberal market economy,” Cespedes says.

An independent poll of 200 people carried out in 1998 in Havana revealed that the majority is satisfied with the health, education and social security systems, as well as with public safety and the reduction of racial discrimination.

They do find some faults after 40 years of revolution; the “dollarisation” of the Cuban economy, food stocks, transportation, housing, the strict migration laws and the need for greater freedom of expression.

“In spite of everything,” as a popular song goes, Vice President Carlos Lage remains confident that “within 15 years, we will have an even stronger, more organic and more just socialist system in Cuba.”

Dismissing those who are betting on a so-called “biological solution” to Cuba’s dilemma, Lage thinks that a socialist future for the island will certainly outlive the passing of its president.

Others are less optimistic, and fear that the physical vacuum left by Castro’s inevitable death will lead to a situation of near anarchy, or in the worst-case scenario, to a U.S.-led military intervention.

When his advisors talk to him about transformation, Castro assures them that “the biggest change that has occurred in a long time, and the most radical, is that Cuba has prevailed.”

In the leader’s judgment, the heroic thing has been “not simply to exist, but to resist,” in the face of the hostile policies of the United States which, far from easing the blockade, stiffened it with the Torricelli (1992) and Helms-Burton (1996) laws.

“There will be no stable domestic normalisation in Cuba without a solution that is satisfactory to all parties in the conflict with the United States,” says Father Cespedes.

That conflict, however, seems to have evolved into a vicious circle that vacillates between stability, hopes for better times and the lifting of the embargo, to renewed crisis, provoked by one side or another.

As business interests in the United States lobby to regain the slice of the market they lost 40 years ago, anti-Castro exiles are bringing all their political weight to bear against any normalisation of relations with Cuba.

In Miami, the “paradise” for Cuban migrants, a “biological solution” is also awaited. To many, only the disappearance of the oldest (and most hard-core) generation of exiles will open the way for tolerance toward Cuba.

On the verge of a new electoral year in the United States, authorities and experts on the island are ruling out any radical changes in Washington’s Cuba policy, including a partial lifting of the economic sanctions.

Cuban parliamentary president Ricardo Alarcon, told IPS that he is taking a “wait and see” attitude – even if there is an end to the blockade, there would not necessarily be an end to US hostility toward the island.

“Perhaps at some point in the next millennium” the normalisation of relations between Cuba and the United States “will take place, but it will be future generations who see it,” predicts Alarcon, who is Castro’s representative in negotiations with the White House.