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Frankenstein in Havana
The Independent Institute, November 25. 2013
Will Raúl Castro’s reforms do much good for Cubans? Experts disagree. Carmelo Mesa-Lago says the measures are “the most extensive and profound” policy changes seen in decades, but Carlos Alberto Montaner says they’re only “token gestures.” Carlos Alzugary gives the most vivid assessment of all: he likens them to Frankenstein’s monster. Raúl Castro himself, it’s important to note, has indicated that he wants only to “update” the dictatorship’s economic model—to mend it, not end it. Independent Institute Research Fellow William Ratliff traveled to Cuba this summer to try to make sense of it all.
No clear answers emerged. In large part this is because the situation is indeterminate. The prospects for significant economic progress depend on individual, cultural, and institutional factors—and these factors may be in flux—Ratliff explains in The Intellectual Conservative. Regarding the first component, individualism and individual rights have always ranked low on Raul Castro’s list of priorities. If real reform comes during his rule, expect it to look a bit more like that of China and Vietnam rather than, say, the economic transformation of the Baltic states after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Fidel Castro himself frequently promoted dependence on the government, and his legacy is deeply entrenched in Cuba’s culture and government, even if baby brother Raúl has made vague criticisms of the revolutionary government’s “excesses.”
“Raúl’s reforms to date fall far short of what China and Vietnam have done and what is needed to bring Cuba into the economically developing world,” Ratliff writes. “Even so, more Cubans are moving in the right direction now than at any previous time in the past half-century. The bottom line for U.S. policy should be to let Cubans resolve their own domestic problems as best they can without frictions deliberately generated from abroad.”
by William Ratliff (The Intellectual Conservative, 11/20/13)
The Debilitating Legacy of Fidel: A Report from Havana
Is Raúl Castro simply a clone of his elder brother Fidel? Solving that evolving puzzle may be a step toward ending one of the most prolonged and divisive disputes in U.S. foreign policy today, though neither a positive nor negative conclusion justifies a continuation of the current embargo.
During the Cold War, trying to isolate Cuba served American security interests because Cuba was the most important ally of the Soviet bloc in the Western Hemisphere. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. policy toward Cuba has focused on “nation building” and agitation to improve lives for Cubans and overthrow the Castros. Analysts who reject those as adequate grounds for a legitimate policy, as I do, can also critique what Washington is doing on its own terms: has it been successful in nation building or ousting the Castros? No.
The first challenge is to see if Raúl’s reforms since taking the top political offices between 2006 and 2008 have really begun to change conditions on the island. The best Cuban exile experts disagree. Economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago has called the reforms “the most extensive and profound” changes on the island in decades, though still inadequate, whereas journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner calls them “token gestures.”
Raúl and the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) speak only of “updating the economic model.” At best, this a ploy to mask criticism of Fidel’s decades of economic failures while undertaking serious reforms. At worst, it is a fraud for policies truly intended only to apply bandages to policies recently characterized as Frankenstein’s “monsters”; they are welcome but in the end non-starters.
Changes and Conditions
I surveyed Raúl’s specific policy responses to Cuba’s challenges earlier this year in an essay entitled “ Cuba’s Tortured Transition.” After a two-week visit to Cuba in mid-year, my sixth since 1983, I will here focus on the individual, cultural, and institutional factors that promote or impede substantive reform in the years ahead.
If Cuban leaders were free to think outside the socialist box, their best reform model would be Taiwan, where an authoritarian regime created a balanced and productive market economy and cultivated a democratic political system. Realistically, however, Cuba will not take this route under its current leadership, and thus its more likely near-term models are allies China and Vietnam. Former high-level Cuban officials who worked closely with Raúl and later coauthored articles with me affirm the younger Castro’s standing interest in systematic, long-term economic reforms in the direction of those undertaken by these Asian allies. Raúl’s current heir apparent, Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel, visited both countries in June.
The Castros have never respected individual rights, though they claim to do so with education and preventive health programs for all. But in these and other socio-economic fields Cuba rated high among Latin American nations before the Castros arrived, though with an imbalance between urban and rural sectors. Under the Castros Cuba has fallen in the regional rankings. The United Nations Development Programme’s 2013 Human Development Index rates Cuba fifty-ninth in the world and sixth in Latin America, a respectable but not stunning record. The 2013 Human Rights Watch World Report concluded that Cuba “represses virtually all forms of political dissent” and economic freedoms are just beginning to sprout in a system recently branded “handcuffed capitalism.”
Frankenstein in Havana
Cuban professor Carlos Alzugaray has underlined the gravity of Cuba’s current economic problems by using what he calls the “Frankenstein metaphor.” Speaking in June at Stanford University, he said Fidel’s economic policies were meant to be a gift to mankind, like Frankenstein’s creature. But like the creature they turned out to be "monsters." Though Alzugaray did not openly criticize “Father” Fidel, he noted the latter’s debilitating insistence on state control of all economic policy and his long opposition to the free markets, individual initiative, and entrepreneurship.
Fidel’s freely chosen economic plan was, over the course of a half-century, uniformly disastrous in terms of political freedoms and economic development. From the 1960s on, Fidel’s policies paralyzed the nation.
Fidel Castro was one of modern history’s most arrogant leaders. He never learned about economic realities or human nature from his own studies or disastrous policy failures, nor from the collapse of his late allies in the Soviet bloc or his current friends in China and Vietnam. Fidel himself sometimes acknowledged that markets could be more economically productive than socialism, but only at the expense of “social justice.” Yet as Juan Antonio Rodríguez Menier and I show in our book Inside the Cuban Interior Ministry, some of Fidel’s policies deliberately limited economic growth simply because that kept Cubans more dependent on himself and his government.
Fidel’s Cuba is a case study in the tragic waste of opportunity and life that is inevitable under a Caudillo Messiah with a paternalist utopian domestic agenda and an expansive revolutionary international policy. Thus a key question today for Cubans is, what direction can the country take now that Fidel’s role is at the least very much reduced?
Raúl on Fidel’s Monsters
The most influential expert witness on Cuba’s economic condition today is Raúl, historically the more pragmatic of the brothers. Since taking power he has often critiqued deeply ingrained attitudes that have kept Cubans from openly recognizing, confronting and resolving problems.
In 2011, he said bluntly that changing Cuba would depend on “transforming erroneous and unsustainable concepts about socialism, deeply rooted in broad sectors of the public for years, as a result of the excessive paternalistic, idealistic, and egalitarian focus that the Revolution adopted in the interest of social justice.” After a visit to Cuba last year the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party, one of Cuba’s oldest and closest allies, said publicly that what the Cuban people need most is “a change of mentality at all levels, from the highest level to the grassroots.” Colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have said the same for more than a decade.
As soon as he took over in 2006 Raúl proclaimed, ”We’re tired of excuses in this revolution!” Cubans, he warned, must “erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working.” Shouting slogans and scapegoating will no longer do, he has said repeatedly. The farmland is there waiting to be cultivated, and jobs of all sorts are waiting to be created and done.
One of Raúl’s most revealing critiques emphasizes the challenge of simply getting things done when people have little motivation and a weak work ethic. He relates that decades ago Vietnamese leaders asked Cubans to teach them how to grow coffee, which Cubans did. Vietnam soon became the second largest coffee exporter in the world and a high Vietnamese official asked, incredulously, “How is it possible that you taught us to grow coffee and now you are buying coffee from us?”
Raúl has not fully owned up to the depth of the country’s problems, however, for he has downplayed the impact of Hispanic tradition. Fidel and his late acolyte Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez are just the most recent in a centuries-long parade of Latin American caudillos or dictators who have proclaimed themselves Messiahs and thus been welcomed or tolerated in societies that traditionally looked to paternalistic leaders. But the Castros squandered a half century, during which the Asian “tigers” demonstrated development prospects in the mid-20th century, and like most Latin caudillos they left their “children” in most ways far worse off than they found them.
Fidel’s Independence Fraud
One of Fidel’s proudest, most widely accepted and dishonest claims was that he finally made Cuba independent. True, under his leadership the island became a militant enemy of its dominant neighbor the United States, and he even sometimes bit the Soviet hand that fed him. But economically Cuba was always on the dole to foreigners who in various forms often sent him a quarter of the country’s annual GDP.
Thus the Soviet bloc subsidized Cuba throughout the Cold War, and when the bloc collapsed and aid stopped in the early 1990s Cuba’s economy crashed utterly. Thereafter Fidel arranged generous support from Chavez, China, and even indirectly from the United States, the latter allowing extensive trade in foodstuffs as a humanitarian gesture outside the embargo. Direct “aid” came from Cuban-Americans whom Fidel always called “worms,” who sent and still send remittances that, according to differing calculations, are today either the main source of foreign exchange revenue for the state or greater than all other sources combined.
Slogans, challenges, and the future
Despite Raúl’s rhetoric, however, the official vocal enthusiasm for socialism is as alive as ever. Buildings and roadsides in the cities and countryside are plastered with slogans like: “The Revolution Moves Ahead, Vigorous and Victorious”; “This is the Hour of Our True Greatness”; and “United, Vigilant and Combative in Defending Socialism.” Stultifying Cuban publications constantly rehash the great “triumphs” and heroes of decades ago when in fact those events and people were the chief reasons Cuba now has so many seemingly intractable problems.
As in the past, the most omnipresent image in Cuba is that of Che Guevara, the supposedly selfless “new man” who lauded moral over material incentives and was often even more violent, stubborn, and utopian than Fidel. His image is everywhere. Almost all postcards for sale across the island feature Che, but the most absurd and jarring adulation is the 120-foot-high “silhouette-outline” of him on the Ministry of the Interior building in Revolutionary Square. In truth, after 1959 Che was much more useful to Fidel and the Revolution dead than alive. First, he wasn’t around long enough to seriously challenge Fidel, who never tolerated competition. Like the men and maidens on Keats’s Grecian Urn, he “survived” in mythology and the unchanging glamorous photos of the forever-macho young hero in his prime rather than as the loser he really was from Cuba to the Congo to his death in Bolivia.
So contradictions and inconsistencies abound in Cuba today, and Raúl and his cohorts send mixed messages to the Cuban people and the world about their intentions and the island’s prospects. Does Raúl really support serious reform? Is he being sabotaged by middle-level bureaucrats and surviving ideologues, including Fidel? Is he being thwarted by rampant corruption at all levels of society? Are enough of the Cuban people willing to work hard and long enough to build and sustain a new economy and life if given the chance to do so? In the words of one of the most popular pre-revolutionary songs heard around the island, “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.”
Raúl’s reforms to date fall far short of what China and Vietnam have done and what is needed to bring Cuba into the economically developing world. Even so, more Cubans are moving in the right direction now than at any previous time in the past half-century. The bottom line for U.S. policy should be to let Cubans resolve their own domestic problems as best they can without frictions deliberately generated from abroad.
William Ratliff is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and a Research Fellow and former Curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution. He travels frequently in China and Asia. His latest book is Vietnam Rising: Culture and Change in Asia’s Tiger Cub.
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Cuba’s Tortured Transition
America’s post-Cold War embargo on Cuba is a clear example of failed international interventionism. Making sanctions work, Henry Kissinger wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “depends on the ability to define an achievable objective.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States has not had such an objective in its policy toward Cuba. Our policy, intended to isolate Cuba, has isolated the United States.
This has been most blatantly demonstrated for the past twenty-one years by the United Nations General Assembly’s annual call to lift the embargo—which Havana demagogically calls a “genocidal blockade”—because it adversely affects Cubans and the freedom of international trade. (The vote in 2012 to condemn the embargo was 188 to 3.) Cuba today does not warrant this extraordinary isolation. In 2010, former Senator Richard Lugar, then the top-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, correctly noted: “We must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.”
The Original Embargo Re-tooled
The Eisenhower administration recognized Fidel Castro’s government in early 1959 but soon broke diplomatic relations and imposed an economic embargo—tightened in 1962 by President John Kennedy—because Cuba nationalized American properties and became an ally of the Soviet Union. The embargo was an integral part of U.S. Cold War strategy against the Soviet bloc and should have been lifted after the bloc collapsed, but wasn’t. Though some security concerns exist today, including the gathering of Chinese intelligence from the island, and extensive Cuban meddling in Venezuela, these challenges are not lessened by the embargo.
Post-Cold War embargo supporters included some in government and think tanks, but most were Cubans who had fled to Miami after Castro took power. It seemed possible that given Cuba’s economic crisis following the sudden end of massive bloc aid, a little more pressure might bring Fidel down, but that required shifting the embargo’s focus from U.S. national security to nation building in Cuba. The key document was the revealingly titled, Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996, which still forms the core of U.S. policy.
The embargo will be lifted only after decisive steps are taken toward democracy, respect for human rights, and a market economy. The departure of the Castros is also required. Only one of the six stated “purposes” of the Act referred (unconvincingly) to national security. One of the co-authors, Senator Jesse Helms, said that Fidel was sustained by foreign money and that his “Helms-Burton Act” would “choke off” the “life-support system keeping him in power.” He said that eighteen years ago.
President Bill Clinton signed legislation to tighten the embargo in 1992 and 1996 and President George W. Bush did so a decade later. But living conditions for Cubans did not improve. Instead Fidel used U.S. “proactive” measures to justify the further harassment and imprisonment of dissidents because of alleged traitorous links to Washington. The most dramatic instance was in 2003 when 75 were arrested and given long prison terms.
Conditions in Cuba Today
In 2006, sickness forced Fidel, now 86, to informally pass power to his brother Raúl. Raúl, now 81, became President in 2008 and head of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) in 2011. A source close to Cuban intelligence now reports that Fidel has Alzheimer’s and will not survive long. Fidel’s passing, analysts expect, will heighten domestic tensions and perhaps spark another mass migration by sea. Raúl has always been the more pragmatic brother and, unlike Fidel, is eager to learn from the serious and systematic economic reforms of recent decades in China and Vietnam. On taking power, he immediately highlighted some of Cuba’s critical but previously unmentionable economic disasters under Fidel, and set out to “update the economic model,” a feel-good phrase that masks criticism of Fidel. The CCP adopted an “updating” blueprint in 2011.
The dean of Cuban-American economists, Carmelo Mesa-Lago, considers these reforms “the most extensive and profound” ever undertaken by the government. And yet the author of Cuba en la era de Raúl Castro (2012) added that they fall far short of those in China and Vietnam. New York Times correspondent Damien Cave has characterized Raúl’s reforms as “handcuffed capitalism.”
Specific problems range from inadequate infrastructure and pervasive corruption to disincentives imposed by officials who don’t understand or really support the “updating.” Thus more than five decades of stagnation and atrophied ideological dogmatism still impede Cuba’s morphing from a retrograde family dynasty dictatorship into a more modern nation. In general the opening undermines CCP control, as would an absence of reforms. Castroite leaders also fear the loss of oil handouts if Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s cancer gets the better of him.
There have not been equally significant non-economic reforms, though there has been a drift to somewhat greater freedom of expression than during the Cold War. Most of Fidel’s political prisoners have been released, but government critics under Raúl are still harassed and arrested and pro-democracy advocate Oswaldo Payá died in an automobile “accident” last July. Still, some changes may improve life, the most recent being the liberalization of laws on foreign travel.
Castro’s Legacy
When Fidel seized power in 1959 he formed an anti-American, anti-capitalist regime that quickly twisted one of Latin America’s most relatively advanced countries into a repressed and economically stagnant backwater. The still iconic and untouchable caudillo is responsible for his own legacy, with the only exceptions to his miserable failures being somewhat impressive programs in education and health.
Fidel had an unfailing talent for choosing allies, ideas, and policies that inflated his own international image above the interests of the Cuban people or other nations. The head of Vietnam’s Communist Party zeroed in on Cuba’s basic challenge last year when he said his visit to the island had convinced him that Cuba’s greatest need is “changing the mentality [of the people], from the highest level to the grassroots.”
One tragic irony is that the Cuban exiles that hate Fidel have propped him up by supporting the embargo, providing him with a scapegoat for his failures. Younger Cuban-Americans, and recent arrivals from the island, are usually less supportive of sanctions than the earlier refugees whose compulsion to “get even” with the Castros has often seemed dictated more by vengeance than logic or reality. This is shown by the fact that while a majority of Cuban-Americans still support the embargo, almost 85 percent believe it hasn’t worked well or at all, according to a 2011 poll by Florida International University.
A New Policy to Cuba
Since the early 1990s U.S. “proactive” policies have done more to stoke than reduce domestic tensions in Cuba, though we profess to seek a “peaceful transition.” Most U.S. legislators have supported pro-embargo Cuban-Americans even though Gallup polls have long shown that most Americans favor diplomatic relations with Havana and lifting the embargo. On balance, politicians don’t think Cuba policy is important enough to be worth stirring up the hornets in the still fairly militant and well-financed pro-embargo lobby. Not only have all presidential candidates including Obama supported the embargo, most have resisted even seriously discussing it.
This U.S. commitment to a failed policy has given Washington a “special stake” in the island’s so-called “independent” sector whose goals appeal to Americans. But tragically, paraphrasing journalist Scotty Reston, Americans will do anything for these dissidents except listen to them. My talks with many in Cuba and abroad suggest that most oppose the embargo and three have co-authored articles with me saying so. If these dissidents come under focused government fire in the years ahead, many Americans will feel compelled to intervene even more directly—perhaps militarily—on their behalf.
Two points stand out: Cuba is not the security threat that our current policy treats it as; and our sanctions do not advance the desirable political, economic, and humanitarian improvements that we say we seek on the island. The bottom line is that we must base our policy on national security interests and realities, not unattainable dreams, however noble those dreams may seem.
During his second and final term, and after having drawn unprecedented electoral support as a Democrat from Cuban-Americans in Miami, President Obama is in a position to make serious reforms, if he has the will to do so. He might begin by resurrecting a 1998-99 proposal—then endorsed by former secretaries of state Kissinger and George Shultz, but killed by President Clinton—for convening a Presidential Bipartisan Commission on Cuba to seriously examine the pros and cons of the policy. It would certainly see the need for change and its findings would give Obama cover for action.
Many significant changes can be made now without the support of Congress, though since 1996 the latter’s backing has been necessary to fully lift the embargo. Immediate reforms should include: securing the release of Alan Gross, the American contractor arrested in 2009 for doing his “proactive” U.S. government-funded job; ending provocative “proactive” programs; allowing more visits to Cuba by all Americans, not just largely Cuban-Americans; expanding trade beyond the foods and medicines now allowed; bringing our Cuba immigration policy into line with our policies toward immigrants from other countries; increasing discussions with Cuba’s political and military leaders on affairs of mutual interest; and looking objectively at the reforms under way today and deciding how Washington can promote change while defusing rather than stoking domestic conflict and tensions.
Whatever else we do, we must jettison our quid pro quo approach that holds essential U.S. policy changes hostage to repeated “vetoes” by both Cuban-Americans in the States and Castroites in Havana.
William Ratliff is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and a Research Fellow and former Curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution. He travels frequently in China and Asia. His latest book is Vietnam Rising: Culture and Change in Asia’s Tiger Cub.
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