What does “non-governmental” mean in a country with a statist tradition? Would not a better criterion for evaluating associations be the nature of their participation, especially the way that they promote community participation?

María López Vigil²

In recent years, Cuba has expanded participation within associational space, contributing to the gradual process of democratization within local government entities. This process has not been exempt from contradictions and setbacks stemming from exogenous (the U.S. threat) as well as domestic variables (legacies of underdevelopment and a statist tradition) that reflect a dynamic tension between the tradition of left democracy and the bureaucratizing tendencies typical of a state socialist regime. The organizational and representational traditions of these collective groupings can be analyzed by their political nature, by the type of nexus established with state institutions, and by their capacity to create autonomous discourses for constructing paradigms that are alternative or functional to the dominant paradigm in each social context.

The study of the participatory culture of experiences within associational space is a fundamental element of this analysis. This is understood as the social dimension that takes on (relatively) autonomous forms of assembly and collective action outside political and economic institutions which channel voluntary activity of citizens in diverse spheres of specific interest characterized by logics of reciprocity, solidarity, symmetrical interaction and defense of common identities. These actors include: 1) traditional forms of mutual aid (religious and charitable organizations, local community networks); 2) social movements (unions, feminist and ecological organizations, etc.); 3) civil associationalism (neighborhood, sports and leisure associations, etc.); 4) non-governmental organizations; 5) foundations and philanthropic research centers.³

The rebirth of associationalism in the 1990s arose from the simultaneous crises of the collapse in Eastern Europe, the retreat of the state as a socioeconomic agent, and the ideological and practical discrediting of state socialism. Additionally, decentralization on a global and regional scale increased with a proliferation of Cuba solidarity movements, and the emergence of new issues and popular demands around environment, gender, ecumenicalism and popular religious expression, and urban participation. At that time, the combined forces of communities, diverse foreign actors and the state eased the effects of the crisis, supporting the associational boom. The current associational space can be classified according to several typologies, depending on the variable employed. I propose the following four groupings: para-statal associations (PA), anti-systemic associations (ASA), sectoral or professional associations (SPA) and territorial or popular associations (TPA).

The Para-Statal Associations (e.g., Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, Cuban Workers Union, Cuban Women’s Federation) have structures, missions and symbolic repertoire heavily identified with the institutionality of the state and include all the large social groups in the country. As is typical of experience under “state socialism,” they are national in scope and monopolize the representation of certain associational interests and identities, to the exclusion of alternative structures of the same type. They operate in ways that are functional for the political system but they also provide an important form of social organization that formally is supposed to represent the interests and the opinions of their members before the State. At the same time, these organizations serve as mechanisms for transmitting official policies and propaganda and for social mobilization around these, while constituting spaces that provide some degree of social welfare. A degree of rigidity, uniformity and inertia have become embedded in the styles of some of these organizations. Some have greater legitimacy and reformist potential (such as the Federation of University Students), depending on their ability to represent the differentiated and autonomous discourses of the sectors they represent.

Anti-systemic associations, such as opposition groups and some organizations tied to the Catholic Church, are considered “political opposition” and their membership and internal influence are as often exaggerated as undercounted. Nevertheless, we have a different understanding of their position than we did of the counterrevolution organized in the 1960s and ‘70s. In the latter case, the groups involved illegitimate remnants of the old order committed to stopping the transformative wave of the revolution, and thus were opposed to the progressive movement of history. The current opposition is more complex in that it represents disagreement of a sector of society in an environment that restricts any form of organized dissent at the same time that it embodies the subversive project supported ideologically and materially by Western governments, which delegitimizes it for the majority of the population.

The research on which this paper is based focuses on sectoral and professional organizations and their territorial or popular counterparts. There are about 2,200 civil associations of the first type. These organizations are characterized by a tendency toward professionalization and institutionalization, they have significant budgets and the ability to obtain external funding, and they tend to be stable and selective in membership. These associations develop complex programs and projects in a variety of areas and have formalized leadership with significant levels of professional training.

Territorial or popular associations, in turn, are made up of neighborhood movements affiliated with structures like the Workshops for Comprehensive Neighborhood Transformation and a variety of community projects supported by Cuban and foreign NGOs. They have a local identity and essentially do not build networks, tending toward informality and territoriality. They have limited access to resources and depend on exogenous funding, which they seek to self-manage with the goal of comprehensive transformation of communities rooted in socio-cultural concerns. They have a modest agenda characterized by focalized problems and their membership is loose and mass-based, with diffuse coordination and activism, unlike the leadership and membership found in more formalized spaces; women and professionals are frequent protagonists.

The state has played a contradictory role in the formation of popular associations. On the one hand, it supplies technology and material resources, such as organic urban agriculture and alternative construction, provides specialists in these and other fields (psychologists, planners) and pays salaries to members of the leadership team. Yet although the state implicitly recognizes the existence of these movements, it impedes their legal recognition, rejects the emergence of popular economic activities and attempts to absorb local productive initiatives. Nonetheless, these groups have created reciprocal relationships, such as neighborhood assistance, food distribution and school donations, encouraging voluntary community contributions from some self-employed workers and modes for cooperation when their services are contracted for the projects.

Observations of both the professional and popular organizations show how the political culture of associationalism often reproduces traditional patterns of authoritarianism, restrictions on democracy and clientelism. This is so even though the organizations incorporate practical alternatives, such as popular education, participatory planning and communal work, and seek to promote a more participatory and democratic society. In reality the relationships in these associations are as complex as the rest of the components of the social system, with collaboration, competition and conflict in the development of their interactive processes.⁴

All forms of collective action have participatory frameworks of their own, expressed in structures, dynamics and cultures and constructed from particular forms of organization and identity. For our purposes, citizen participation is understood as a process that, emerging from pre-political levels of collective action, assembles the activity of conscious and active involvement of the subject(s) in sociopolitical phenomena related to the constitution, exercise and ratification of power in institutional and associational spaces, and in the distribution of resources derived therefrom.

There are diverse visions of the opportunities and challenges for participation in Cuban associational space. According to Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, the veteran president of the National Assembly, “these organizations and others, such as peasant, professional or neighborhood associations, play a vital, organic role in society. They propose candidates for national representatives and provincial delegates. They are not only listened to, they directly intervene in decision-making. For example, the Tax System Law was widely reviewed by unions, yielding important modifications to the original text before it was presented to the National Assembly; the Agricultural Cooperatives Law was an initiative presented by the National Association of Small Agricultural Producers—it was debated by hundreds of thousands of members in all the cooperatives and from that debate emerged the final version of the project that was considered and approved by the Assembly.”

However, as pointed out by the sociologist Juan Valdés Paz, “advances in decentralization of powers, resources and information in favor of non-state sectors and local State entities have been more than insufficient. The institutional order is highly centralized in all facets; this is partly due to the environment in which it develops and partly due to institutional design and highly centralized political power. (…) The objective of growing and expanding popular participation in decision-making is hindered by the bureaucratic tendency of institutions in both systems, not only an excess of officials and procedures, but also decision-making without democratic accountability. Advances in decentralization and rationalization in institutions in the political and economic systems have been insufficient to bring about a greater retreat from bureaucratism.”⁵

However, as pointed out by the sociologist Juan Valdés Paz, “advances in decentralization of powers, resources and information in favor of non-state sectors and local State entities have been more than insufficient. The institutional order is highly centralized in all facets; this is partly due to the environment in which it develops and partly due to institutional design and highly centralized political power. (…) The objective of growing and expanding popular participation in decision-making is hindered by the bureaucratic tendency of institutions in both systems, not only an excess of officials and procedures, but also decision-making without democratic accountability. Advances in decentralization and rationalization in institutions in the political and economic systems have been insufficient to bring about a greater retreat from bureaucratism.”⁶

Mobilization and consultation are basic components of participation in Cuba within both institutional and associational spheres. Even though the associational universe is seductive as a space for democratic communication of demands and concerns, given the deficiencies in socio-political institutions, everything is not idyllic. In many cases the leadership is elected by the base but, once in place, becomes highly personalistic and largely unaccountable, leaving the members in a passive role of beneficiaries. At times leadership positions are the object of attention from state entities that express support or disagreement, even in some cases pressuring against the election of undesired candidates and marginalizing those who, once elected, are critical and autonomous beyond “officially admissible” levels, which are generally rooted in traditions of uniformity and monolithic rule.

Other factors that shape or limit popular participation include the nature of state institutions that orient, control and supervise the actions of NGOs, the ideological foundation of their discourse, the intellectual leanings of the leadership and the role that they play in the official intelligentsia, etc. Every association faces the challenges of defending contested and always precarious margins of autonomy, negotiating nonessential issues and principles, building bridges and making alliances within the associational spectrum and with foreign counterparts, and obviously, given the Cuban institutional reality, mobilizing local and global public opinion around decisive conflicts. True participation and commitment from members is a precondition for the vitality and respect that associations enjoy, but this is also true in the inverse.

Different cultures of participation exist in Cuba today without any of them being intrinsically “bad” or “good,” since they simply have different referents—historical, class or cultural—including the more traditional “passive” mode (I inform you, educate you and mobilize you) preferred by many of our institutions for historically valid reasons. Despite the need to move beyond the passive mode, in practice it still has a lot of strength. At the same time we find instances of “active” participation, which occurs on those occasions when the community assembles, identifies its concerns, defines an agenda of priorities, makes a plan, delegates someone to carry it out and then controls its execution.

At times the membership of associations is unaware of its participatory potential, adopting a passive attitude of waiting for material, cultural, identitarian, social or other types of benefits and sanctioning a wide range of barely democratic behavior from leaders. The actions and characteristics of these leaders depend on their personal trajectories, educational levels, and individual traits. It is important to deconstruct dangerous myths such as the proposition that there are specific profiles (age, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, etc.) which lead to, for example, the assumption that a young environmental leader who is black, poor and lesbian is an intrinsically emancipatory subject, since a large number of contextual and personal factors can bring forth a gamut of undesirable surprises.

Participation in associations satisfies individual interests identified with the central uniting issue of a group’s agenda and with a wide range of personal expectations involving quality of life as well as professional, affective, and communicative needs. Members remain active in their associations despite external difficulties, such as material hardships, legal limitations and institutional impediments. This engagement reflects commitment to the group. Significantly, this is true despite the effects of excess participation, or “multiple militancy,” that is common in Cuban society: citizens involved in para-state associations and party institutions may find themselves engaged in an array of meetings and assemblies that overlap with one another and that wear out their participants, in the process losing their potential effectiveness.⁷

Several approaches to participation currently coexist and are developed in participatory projects.⁸ One approach identifies participation with mere mobilization and defines its subject as the masses, which reduces its function to implementing State-designed policies. The other projects an image of a professionalized NGO, urban and efficient, that provides services to client populations and masters the sophisticated language of project management and the agendas in fashion with international development agencies, such as gender, violence, local development and environment, participation and citizenship.

Finally, there is a third appoach that equates participation with being in solidarity, autonomous and self-directed.⁹ This approach defines its actors as active citizens and expands the vision of a responsible associational space that shares and co-manages activities with state institutions from the perspective of a critical commitment to the socialist project. These positions have very complex generational, territorial and cultural correlates that locate them in diverse points of our spatial and human cartography. Their ideas are expressed, implicitly or explicitly, in texts, debates and processes deployed in diverse scenarios throughout the country (see table).

What I have very imperfectly described in these pages forms part of something greater. There is a shared ethos among popular and middle sectors, marginalized groups and emerging identities throughout Latin America, who through participation propose new modes of doing and living democratic politics. They all strive for the ideals of autonomy by defining their space and norms of action, and of self-direction through the control and management of their own resources, and they deploy forms of horizontal organization in neighborhood committees, sectoral movements, capacity-building centers, and collective analysis and memory. They all seek forms of authentic and sustainable solidarity that respects diversity, and they choose development strategies that oscillate between distancing, collaboration or rupture with the dominant institutional framework in each country.¹⁰

In Cuba the game is not decided beforehand. Everything will depend on our ability to deploy the potential for creative citizenship that we used to survive the most difficult years of the crisis; it depends on the true commitment, wisdom and exemplary behavior of the political class, on the degree of exhaustion or vitality that the project accumulates and the realization of necessary corrective reforms capable of connecting the epic narrative with the demands of the people. In effect, the importance of the debate and action that is now unfolding transcends the mere exercise of elegant rhetoric, the rejection of mercantilist assistance and the defense of communitarian redoubts. This combination of factors will determine the destinies of the Cuban people for the next half century and the actions in train (and those that are possible) will decide which scenarios—dependent peripheral capitalism, bureaucratized statist socialism or libertarian socialist¹¹—will be the triumphant project that the future generations of Cubans will experience.

Notes

1. This essay summarizes research carried out with support of a grant from CLACSO-ASDI in 2006-2008. The original text and valuable contributions from colleagues can be found in Armando Chaguaceda (ed). “Participación y espacio asociativo”, Ediciones Acuario, La Habana, 2008.
2. “Sociedad civil en Cuba: diccionario urgente.” Envío [Managua], (184), June 1997.
3. Maritza Revilla Blanco (ed.) (2002). Las ONG y la política. Madrid, Ediciones Istmo.
4. Based on my own observations and exchanges with interviewees, I have defined a typology of probable conflicts in associational space: associations with or without institutional support vs. state institutions; associations with or without state support vs. market spaces; associations vs. state-market alliances; associations vs. national or foreign associations with or without the support of other actors; and associations vs. unorganized communities where the associational actors insert themselves.
5. See “La democracia cubana no se agota en la representación formal, sino que incorpora mecanismos y formas de la democracia directa”, interview of Ricardo Alarcón by Pascual Serrano, www.rebelion.org, 6/12/2003.
6. See Juan Valdés Paz, “Desarrollo institucional en el “Periodo Especial”: continuidad y cambio”, in “Cultura, Fe y Solidaridad: perspectivas emancipadoras frente al neoliberalismo”, Armando Chaguaceda y Gabriel Coderch –Comp.-, Ed Félix Varela, la Habana, 2005
7. See “Poder más allá del poder: reflexiones desde la experiencia cubana”, Elena Martínez Canals in “Cuba: sin dogmas ni abandono, Armando Chaguaceda (comp.), Ed Ciencias sociales, la Habana, 2005.
8. See Dagnino, Evelina, Alberto J. Olvera, Aldo Panfichi (eds.) (2006). La disputa por la construcción democrática en América Latina. México, D.F., Fondo de Cultura Económica/CIESAS/Universidad.
9. D’Angelo, Ovidio (2005). Autonomía integradora y transformación social: el desafío ético emancipatorio de la complejidad. La Habana, Publicaciones Acuario, Centro Félix Varela.
10. See Hans Jürgen Burchardt (2006). Tiempos de cambio: repensar América Latina. San Salvador, Fundación Heinrich Böll, y Christian Adel Mirza (2006). Movimientos sociales y sistemas políticos en América Latina. Buenos Aires, Programa de Becas CLACSO/ ASDI.
11. For an analysis of libertarian socialism that I share see Jorge Riechmann and Francisco Fernández Buey “Redes que dan libertad. Introducción a los nuevos movimientos sociales,” Ediciones Paidós, Colección Estado y Sociedad, Barcelona, 1994, pp. 152- 153.

During the summer of 2006, a month before Fidel Castro stunned the world by temporarily stepping down from his responsibilities as Cuba’s head of state after 47 uninterrupted years at the helm, a companion and I traveled back roads of the Western Cuban province of Pinar del Rio. We picked up dozens of hitchhikers, from many walks of life. Our passengers—students, police officers, homemakers, retirees, farmers, a geologist, veterans of missions to Angola—shared with us their perceptions of everyday existence in their country and their hopes for the future. With nary an exception, we encountered deep frustration, bordering often on rage, among people struggling desperately to move from town to town in the absence of a functioning system of public transport, and lacking reliable access to such necessities as food and basic medicines amidst the ruins of a socialist economy run aground. An abandoned sugar mill near the coastal town of Mariel, empty except for a solitary metalworker crafting tools on a creaky lathe in a dilapidated outbuilding, weeds breaking through its rusting skeleton, provided an archaeological metaphor for a society in protracted decline. Yet along the roadside there arose from time to time an incongruous billboard: a graying but spry Fidel Castro, gazing benevolently toward the horizon and stating, reassuringly, that “Vamos bien,” Things are good.²

Today, during the Spring of 2008, this particular sign is nowhere to be seen, although most of the still ubiquitous billboards proclaim slogans unchanged from those of two years ago. Che is ever-present, Hugo Chávez’s portrait accompanies celebration of a Bolivarian project for Socialism, and Yanqui imperialism and the bloqueo are condemned time and again. My own personal favorite depicts George Bush with a Hitler moustache. Among the few new images occupying roadside space that in the capitalist world would be rented out to commercial advertisers vying to sell wares that nobody needs, we are struck especially by one of Raúl Castro declaring—shades of Deng Xiao Ping?—that “To Have More We Must Produce More.”

Our present excursion took place in the wake of the Comandante’s definitive retirement, announced in February 2008 and followed immediately by the ascension to power of his 76 year-old brother, who pledged to carry out his responsibilities in close consultation with Fidel. Rolling our way beyond the outskirts of Havana, through Matanzas and on to Cienfuegos, we encountered much of the Cuba that, in its antiquated cars as in its traditional cuisine, gives the misleading appearance of time standing still.

By placing in service a thousand or so buses purchased on generous terms from China, the government has gone a long way toward addressing a core grievance expressed in 2006 by our admittedly biased sample of interviewees. Improvements in the transportation system are especially evident in the still not-quite-bustling capital. In the countryside, by contrast, hitchhikers continue to wait for hours on end in hopes of catching a ride in a passenger car or on the back of a truck.³ Around noon on Easter Sunday we picked up a ten year old and her great grandmother who, sheltered from the sun under an overpass, had been waiting since six in the morning for a ride to take them the more than 200 kilometers to their home in Havana. The elderly woman was effusive in her gratitude, thanking us for acting as Christians, who she distinguished as having empathy for others, unlike practitioners of satanic witchcraft, la brujería satanica, who, she explained, lack the good will to help people stranded by the roadside.⁴

One interlocutor after another—a hospital janitor living in rural Cienfuegos, a beachfront innkeeper operating a bed and breakfast catering to foreign travelers, a law student in the Capital—alluded to the imminence of change, even while its nature and scope remained uncertain.⁵ Part of what we heard concerned economic and social conditions, but more than I can recall from any of a dozen or so previous visits over the past 15 years, Cubans I spoke with conveyed a yearning for greater political space, and particularly for free access to information. Pleas for greater openness may result in part from Raúl’s invitation to Cubans to speak their mind and to criticize weaknesses of the system, but I suspect that something deeper is at work. Time and again the desire for news from abroad, for exposure to the mass media now available primarily through clandestine satellite dishes—clearly widespread despite the crackdown announced by Raúl Castro a year or so ago—arose as a central demand of a population aware of its exclusion from global culture and from reliable news about its own circumstances.⁶

*****

That some shifts are underway is already evident. On March 28 the government announced a decision to legalize cell phone use, though for some time now de facto access has been available to the small minority of the population able to pay for it. That same week the government decreed that Cubans will be allowed to stay in hotels that until now have been restricted to foreigners, though this will largely be an empty gesture given that a night’s stay in such lodging costs the hard currency equivalent of several months’ earnings. And the buzz among graduate students in Havana is that it will no longer be necessary to get authorization in order to travel abroad for business or pleasure: all one will need is a passport and a visa from the country to which one is traveling. Of course, few Cubans will be able to get one or the other, not to mention both.

But symbolic gestures may matter, and not all of the changes that loom are merely symbolic. Perhaps most important, thanks to timid reforms in pricing for agricultural inputs and products over the past year, farmers are bringing more food to market and consumers are accessing it at relatively more affordable prices. A rumored revaluation of the peso would boost purchasing power. The aforementioned improvements in transportation are also significant, as are efforts to ramp up construction of new housing units and accelerate renovation of the country’s terribly decayed housing stock. A Mexican economist studying the sector indicated to me, however, that progress on the latter during 2006 was not matched during 2007 owing to shortages of essential building supplies, an obstacle that seems as much institutional as material in nature.

The degree to which the new leadership can or will make good on pledges to overcome those bottlenecks remains to be seen. Conventional wisdom outside Cuba holds that Raúl is intrigued by the Chinese and Vietnamese models of stable Communist Party (and military) hegemony buttressed by reliance on market mechanisms to foster rapid economic growth, whereas his older brother saw such strategies as a betrayal of the Revolution’s ideals and a threat to the egalitarianism for which it stood. There may be some truth to this distinction, but it is probably overblown. Fidel understood that the remarkable social achievements of the Revolution were inconceivable absent resources—regardless from where these were generated—and Raul surely is well aware that the degrees of inequality that have characterized market-oriented “socialism” of China and Vietnam could themselves prove destabilizing in a country that takes its commitment to equality seriously. It is clear that, historically, the revolutionary leadership has put the brakes on market-oriented reforms whenever they seemed on the verge of engendering a class of private producers, thus threatening the emergence of alternative centers of power.

The consequences of this conservatism for productivity and social welfare have been devastating: today two thirds of food production is generated on the small fraction of farmland cultivated privately, while roughly half of the arable land remains fallow, left unattended by farmers who see no benefit to planting crops.⁷ Thus, Cuba devotes an estimated $2 billion annually to food imports—roughly a quarter of that paid in cash to U.S. agribusiness—when food self sufficiency should be well within reach.⁸ It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the decades-long obsession with the specter of kulaks is directly eroding social welfare, diminishing system legitimacy and fueling an underground economy that fosters corruption and inequality, all at a cost of $2 billion a year. Socialism or Death, goes the famous saying; perhaps it would be more apt to proclaim Orthodoxy or Penury.

In agriculture, as in other spheres, the persistence of multiple, overlapping systems of hierarchical organization poses the most serious obstacle to prospects for economic advances that could salvage at least some of the social gains that remain from the heyday of the Revolution. That the government recognizes this at some level is evidenced by Raúl’s references to decentralization as an urgent priority. From improvements in the supply and quality of housing to the invigoration of industrial production, vertical structures rooted in the centrally planned model adopted during the heyday of Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union stifle innovation. If such vertical arrangements were conducive to mobilizing resources for rapid industrialization, they are ill-suited to carrying out complex tasks of resource allocation and technological upgrading that require horizontal structures of decision-making, implementation and monitoring.⁹ Yet to unravel these hierarchical structures is to diminish the central authorities’ control over important domains of social and economic life. Whether this proves palatable is among the major unknowns concerning prospects for meaningful reforms under the leadership ratified during the February 2008 National Assembly.

Raúl’s decision on that occasion to bypass younger candidates such as Vice President Carlos Lage and to instead elevate the 75-year old military leader José Ramón Machado Ventura to the position of First Vice President has been greeted by widespread dismay among reformers throughout the Island. For the most part this and other appointments announced last month are seen as a sign that the old guard is circling the wagons, although in a spirit of irony one Cuban economist I consulted suggested that Machado’s ascension reflected Raúl’s decision to play a game of “Nixon in China.” Intriguing though this hypothesis may be, the more frequent interpretation is that a cohort of octogenarians, associated most closely with the military, will seek to temper tight control over the political sphere with symbolic openings—access to cell phones and hotels and doing away with travel authorizations, for example—and with cautious economic reforms that will boost growth rates in order to generate revenues that can buttress the teetering social welfare system and improve living standards. Perhaps this is what will constitute the “transition” from Fidel’s rule to that of his immediate successors.

*****

Witnessing first-hand a process of leadership succession in a longstanding authoritarian regime, one is tempted to look to precedent elsewhere for hints as to how events might unfold. My own first instinct, rooted in superficial similarities between the two cases and in long-past academic concerns, was to venture a comparison between the sorts of reforms being articulated by Raúl Castro and those introduced by Carlos Arias Navarro, Spain’s Prime Minister at the time of General Franco’s death in 1975. It was Arias whose timid gestures toward apertura were embodied in the 1974 Ley de Asociaciones Politicas, a measure which relaxed constraints on speech and assembly but stopped short of authorizing political parties. This would-be liberalization was short-lived, and gave way amidst popular protests to the king’s fateful decision to appoint as prime minister Adolfo Suárez, a mid-level bureaucrat from within the regime, to do away with a closed system which had nurtured his own career but seemed to have exhausted its economic and political possibilities and to have left Spain a pariah in a region where the Third Wave of Democratization had begun with the fall of the dictatorships in neighboring Portugal and Greece.

Cuba today finds itself in a somewhat analogous status as an outlier in a region of democratic polities, yet no Suárez figure appears over the horizon, and countless important features, beyond their ideological orientations and historical contexts, distinguish the Spanish and Cuban cases from one another. By the 1970s Franco’s regime was one of limited pluralism, to cite Juan Linz’s insightful formulation,¹⁰ whereas the Cuban system today remains politically monolithic.¹¹ The legalization of opposition parties is unfathomable, and unlike the situation in late-Franco Spain no such parties operate as de facto players. Opposition to Franquismo was widely tolerated during the waning years of the dictatorship—albeit with important exceptions—and the international context, in hindsight so important to the Spanish transition, differed radically from that of contemporary Cuba. Instead of the prospect of integration into a European Community comprised of prosperous, socially egalitarian democracies, Cuba faces an antagonistic neighbor with no record of commitment to social welfare in its client states and with a rapacious exile community obsessed with dismantling the revolutionary order and replacing it with a savage, colonial capitalism akin to that put to rest by the Revolution itself.

But turning our gaze beyond Cuba’s borders may be useful in another respect: just as the Cuban Revolution itself impacted the geopolitical order, particularly during the Cold War, how events unfold on the Island during the coming years will surely be conditioned by the international context.¹² It seems to me that four aspects of the international environment deserve mention. A first set of issues, not surprisingly, concerns the influence of the United States. Unattenuated hostility toward the U.S. government and its efforts to starve the Cuban system through a draconian and senseless embargo have long provided a rationale for Cuban authorities to govern as if the country were in a permanent state of war: hence the de facto state of exception that has prevailed in Cuba for decades, and the designation as state secrets such matters as the nature of Fidel’s illness or the findings of academic research about social conditions on the Island. If Cubans are in agreement about anything it is their resentment toward U.S. aggression, a consequence of which is likely to be an enduring opposition to American intervention in Cuban affairs. Yet how those in charge of the Cuban system would respond to a unilateral abandonment of the blockade by a new administration in Washington is an intriguing question, and one that might be put to the test in the early days of an Obama presidency that could actually take seriously the motto of “change.” How the Cuban population would react is of equally uncertain, and significant, import.

Another factor related to the potential impact of the U.S. on Cuban affairs is the declining credibility of Washington worldwide, a loss of hegemony that stems in part from the catastrophic effects of its policies in Iraq and elsewhere throughout the Middle East, as well as from the generalized incompetence that has characterized the current administration. To the eventual benefit of much of the planet, and certainly of Latin America, the ineptitude of the Bush regime may have ensured a geopolitical era of multipolarity. For Cuba, this could have consequences for a number of reasons, including the possibilities it opens up for engagement with influential nations outside of as well as within the Western Hemisphere.

The three further dimensions of the international context that hold relevance for Cuba all stem in part from the trend toward multipolarity. First, China offers a model for economic reform alongside continued party hegemony—Vietnam may provide such a referent as well—and looms large as a source of material support, including but not limited to trade and investment.¹³ While the economic impact of China is of growing significance throughout much of Latin America, in the specific case of Cuba one can emphasize its importance in the provision of buses, investment in natural resource extraction, and its potential as a vast market for health services.

There are also two developments in an increasingly autonomous Latin America that bear monitoring during the years ahead. The first is Cuba’s engagement with the emerging “Bolivarian Matrix.”¹⁴ Anchored by Venezuela and buttressed by the addition over the past year and a half of Bolivia, Nicaragua and perhaps Ecuador, the rise of this counter-hegemonic alliance in Latin America testifies to the decline of U.S. influence throughout the region. The impact of Cuba’s ties to Venezuela should not be underestimated, although it would be a mistake to equate it with the subsidization associated with COMECON participation prior to the collapse of the state socialist bloc. Contrary to the claims of critics who portray an unviable Cuban economy being propped up by Hugo Chávez, by some accounts Cuba’s trade balance with Venezuela may actually be in surplus, though it is difficult to say in that the price assigned to the services of Cuban health professionals is negotiated at the top levels of government, rather than through market mechanisms. Be that as it may, participation in the Bolivarian project has provided a lucrative if not competitive market for health services, an area where Cuba’s decades of investment in education and health turn out not only to have improved human development indices to levels typical of a developed country but also to have translated into export revenues. At the same time, Venezuela’s provision of energy has meant the end of electricity blackouts in Cuba, while diminishing the drain on foreign currency reserves associated with Cuba’s lack of energy sufficiency.¹⁵

A second feature of the regional landscape at the moment, and one that is more likely to endure, is the increasing assertiveness of South American diplomacy with regard to issues of Hemispheric importance, particularly with regard to the strengthening of democracy and the prevention of armed conflict.¹⁶ Articulation of Latin American perspectives, diverse though they may be, is encouraged by the boom in South American economies which afford governments unprecedented room for maneuver in domestic and international affairs alike. The success, temporary though it may prove to be, of mainstream Latin American democracies in defusing the recent crisis between Colombia and Venezuela over the former’s incursion into Ecuador in pursuit of FARC rebels testifies to the growing capacity of the region’s diplomats to take on the most vexing of Latin American security issues. That Washington played no role whatsoever in that diplomatic effort hints at the degree to which its influence in the region has declined. Should internal Cuban affairs become conflictual, the U.S. is unlikely to represent the major international player in mediating the results. Quite the contrary, it is likely to be a marginal player, with major South American governments stepping in to play central roles in avoiding severe conflicts.

Empty signifier though it tends to be, change is the word for the season, as much in Cuba as in the United States. In the former, part of the population of 11 million people yearns simply for a ride, whereas others of their compatriots aspire to a transformed country; for one group as for the other, Things aren’t so good. Their bus cannot arrive too soon, but one suspects that it will be delayed for considerable time to come, and that the route that it might follow is a mystery, perhaps even to its drivers, whose course will be shaped by forces located outside as well as within Cuba.

Notes

1. Max Cameron and Sarah Doty offered observations and corrections in response to an earlier draft of this essay. The opinions presented here are solely my own.
2. Alternatively, “We’re going well.”
3. One of our passengers, from a village in Cienfuegos, attributed this urban-rural divide to the fact that Havana residents were “mas bravos” and were perceived therefore as a threat to socio-political stability, whereas country folk were seen by the authorities as more docile.
4. It is my strong impression, based on a dozen or so trips since the early 1990s, that the religiosity of Cubans is increasing substantially. Casual conversations with people from various walks of life frequently turn to an emphasis on the importance of Christian faith, values and practices. I heard this from people who identified themselves variously as Methodists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Catholics, most of whom, when asked, complained of discrimination in schools and in their places of employment.
5. Parallels are inescapable with the contemporary U.S., where even Presidential candidates who embody continuity, or a dynastic return to the 1990s, vie with one another to grab the mantle of “change.”
6. Asked by my companion how the neighborhood-based Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) and the police dealt with the illicit satellite dishes, one passenger contended that they were as eager as anyone else to peek surreptitiously at the offerings from abroad.
7. These estimates are based on a recent presentation by Armando Nova, of the Universidad de la Habana, and on consultations with economists at the Mexico City headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
8. See Anicia García Álvarez, “Sustitución de importación de alimentos en Cuba: ¿Necesidad o posibilidad?” in Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, ed., Reflexiones sobre economia Cubana. Havana: Editorial de las Ciencias Sociales, 2006.
9. I am grateful to Rick Doner and Valeria Fargion for sharing reflections on this topic in conversations on March 25, 2008.
10. See Juan J. Linz, “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” in Nelson Polsby and Fred Greenstein, eds., Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Pennsylvania: Addison Wesley, 1975). For a review of developments in the two years following Franco’s expiration, see Raymond Carr (with Juan Pablo Fusi), Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy (London: Unwin Hyman, 1979). A more obscure analysis of the period can be found in chapter 2 of Eric Hershberg, Transition from Authoritarianism and Eclipse of the Left: Toward a Reinterpretation of Political Change in Spain (PhD. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989).
11. A significantly different reading of contemporary political landscape of Cuba is presented in Armando Chaguaceda, ed., Participación y espacio asociativo (Havana: Publicaciones Acuario, Centro Felix Varela, 2008). While the empirical material contained in the volume is quite useful, it does not undermine the notion that, as practiced in contemporary Cuba, participation reflects mobilization through structures dictated from above rather than the articulation of interests in civil society and their transmission through autonomous representative institutions.
12. Laurence Whitehead has edited the authoritative work on the topic. See his International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
13. For a useful summary of China’s growing economic and diplomatic ties with Latin America, see He Li, “Red Star Over Latin America” in NACLA Report on the Americas, Special Report on “The Multipolar Moment: Latin America in the Global South,” Vol. 40, No. 5 (Sept-Oct. 2007).
14. To the best of my knowledge the term was coined by Pedro Monreal. See his “La globalización y los dilemas de las trayectorias económicas de Cuba: matriz bolivariana, industrialización y desarrollo,” in Omar Everleny Perez Villanueva, ed., Reflexiones sobre economia Cubana (Havana: Editorial de las Ciencias Sociales, 2006).
15. Chávez’s defeat in the Constitutional reform Referendum of December 2, 2007, and subsequent sharp decline in public opinion polls, calls into question the permanence of the Bolivarian revolution in its country of origin. This is a subject of increasing concern in Havana, where observers are all too well aware of the potential consequences of reliance on external actors who can disappear all of a sudden.
16. I refer to South America because Central American countries carry virtually no weight in Hemispheric affairs and because it is unclear whether Mexico, under the contested, conservative leadership of the pro-U.S. President Felipe Calderón, will exercise influence with regard to developments in major countries to its south. With regard to Cuba, however, signs suggest that Calderón does intend to deepen Mexico’s involvement, a function, perhaps, of its greater proximity to South American as opposed to North American positions toward relations with Cuba. Personal exchange, Andrés Serbin, March 23, 2008.

MIAMI — Unpredictability has long been the hallmark of social change in Cuba. Just when you think you know what’s going to happen, you are invariably surprised by the twists and turns of a revolution that has always had its own logic, or lack of it.  The application of models from somewhere else, the attempts at predictability by looking at the experience of this or that other nation, have long frustrated the forecasters of the island’s future. The appeal, and the agony, of studying the Cuban revolution is precisely its extraordinary, even surreal, nature.

Who would have predicted that a Caribbean island would deploy its army throughout Africa, successfully engage South African forces, and become a factor in drawing the political map of that continent? Who would have predicted the storming of an embassy by more than ten thousand people and a resulting boatlift that chaotically brought more than 125,000 Cubans to the U.S.? Or that a little boy would capture the attention and emotions of two nations or that Fidel Castro would welcome a Pope to Havana? And who could have possibly predicted that Cuban exiles, the pawns of the CIA in a failed invasion, would someday hold the key to U.S. policy towards the island?

Seasoned observers of Cuba have therefore long learned caution in anticipating the future and have become inured to the inevitable surprise. Take, for example, the events of last February 24. The newly-elected Cuban National Assembly was scheduled to meet and vote on the members of the Council of State, that is, the President and Vice-President of the government, among others. Fidel Castro had already taken himself out of the running. Would Raúl Castro, his brother, send a message of change by allowing someone else to take the presidency while he and Fidel retained the all-important top positions in the party and the military? If not, then the choice of Vice-President would surely signal change. In the end, however, the old guard retained control of the government. There would be no symbolic tokens of change.

But to those of us who have long been observing the politics of the Cuban American community with respect to its homeland, what was most surprising about the events of February 24 was not what was happening in Havana, but what was happening in Miami. Cubans here were very interested in what the Cuban National Assembly would do. It was the talk of the town. Miami’s Spanish-language media stood ready to broadcast the news emerging from the Palace of the Conventions in Havana, where the Assembly was in session.  At first glance, that may not seem extraordinary for an exile community that retains a vital interest in the affairs of the homeland. But it is unprecedented for this exile community. What in effect was happening was that attention was focused in Miami on a process occurring within Cuba’s political institutions.

That had never happened. Elections, meetings of the Cuban National Assembly or the Congresses of the Cuban Communist Party were usually noted in Miami only with a sneer. The exile view has always been that only one man with absolute power has ruled Cuba, and the institutions are mere window dressing. For exiles, their enemy, the one who drove them from their homeland, wasn’t a party or a movement or an army or a government or communism or the Soviets. It’s always had a name and a face: Fidel Castro.

That highly personal view of the revolution’s political system has invariably shaped the exiles’ perception of how change will occur in Cuba. For nearly five decades, opponents of Fidel Castro’s rule have stubbornly held on to a single vision of how the much-desired demise of his regime will occur. It stands to reason that if only one man holds power, then when that man somehow disappears everything will crumble. It is the caída or rupture scenario: Castro will fall and his government along with him. It will happen suddenly, on a given day, wiping out entirely the existing order and ushering in a new era. It is a view of change with historical precedents. Previous Cuban strongmen have all ended their rules that way: Gerardo Machado in 1933 and Fulgencio Batista in 1959. They were compelled to abandon power and flee the country.  They did not leave behind any remnants of their regimes. The church bells rang out the following morning and it was a new day for Cuba.

Ever since Fidel Castro became ill in July 2006 and ceded his official duties to others, the rupture scenario has been in crisis. Admittedly, he has not disappeared from the scene, but what evidence has surfaced since his illness that the political system has been even remotely in danger of collapse with his physical incapacity to rule? Instead, we have witnessed a seamless transfer of power to his brother and to others, a transition made official on February 24. The process of replacing Fidel Castro has demonstrated something that had heretofore not been contemplated by the exiles and others outside of Cuba: the possibility that Castro’s perennial one-man rule is backed up by individuals and institutions with the capacity to stay in power and indefinitely prolong the regime in the absence of the leader.

Why such stability, in defiance of the predictions that the regime could not survive Castro? The more immediate answer may lie in the institutions themselves, which were created in 1976 during a long-overdue process of institutionalization that seemed to confirm Max Weber’s argument that there are limits to charismatic authority and that such authority eventually must be institutionalized. In the Cuban case, those institutions did not replace the undeniable personal authority of Castro, but they did provide a vehicle for succession. The focus on Fidel Castro has frequently served to take attention away from the fact that Cuba does have a constitution, and while it may well have been window dressing, the institutions did kick in at the critical moment.

Another explanation for the stability of the system rests on the fact that little has changed in the military and the internal security apparatus. Those elements of social control have shown their loyalty to the continuation of the political system. That loyalty, however, has profound historical roots. The Cuban revolution’s ability to consolidate and retain power has been due largely to its success in making itself the trustee of political values and ideals that were part of the process of Cuban nation building and that have long been central to national identity. But there is no need to expand here on those historical conditions. The reader can find them elegantly presented in Louis A. Pérez, Jr.’s essay in this SSRC website.

Obviously, then, the prospects for a rupture scenario appear to be dimming. It looks as if, contrary to the expectations of many, we are in for an evolutionary change that is likely to take place within the country’s existing institutions. But old ways of thinking die hard, especially among exiles.  Many here in Miami still wait for the day, the precise day, in which we learn of a sudden and total change in the island’s future. Despite the interest in the National Assembly’s deliberations, the news of Fidel Castro’s replacement was greeted here with the response: “nothing has changed.”  There is an incapacity to even consider viewing changes in Cuba as an evolution in which replacing Fidel Castro is an essential step in that process.

The possibility of a gradual change based on the country’s current institutions and leadership is a bitter pill for many exiles. It would mean that they may have to renounce one aspiration that all exiles usually hold dear: forming part of the destiny of their homeland. A rupture scenario represents the best chance for the participation of the exile community in the future of the island, especially if it is a chaotic and violent one in which U.S. may have a role in resolving. A gradual and evolutionary process, on the other hand, would not create much space for participation from the outside, especially from those exiles long hostile to the government. In other words, many in Miami cannot see the emerging reality of change in Cuba because but they do not want to see it.

The implications of this myopic vision extend beyond Miami, all the way to Washington, and therein lays the importance of looking at the exile community in this process of change. It is no secret that for nearly twenty five years Cuban exiles have exerted a major role in shaping U.S. policy towards the island. Various initiatives by Cuban exile organizations and by Cuban American members of Congress have resulted in not only maintaining the U.S. embargo on the island, but also in strengthening its scope and provisions. Those initiatives have invariably been enacted by the U.S. during election years, as politicians from both parties have sought to make largely symbolic concessions to what traditionally has swayed the Cuban American voter in a critical electoral state: supporting a tough-on-Castro policy.

Part of the influence of Cuban Americans on U.S. Cuba policy has been to sell Washington on the rupture scenario. The 1996 Helms-Burton Law, passed under considerable pressure from Cuban Americans after Cuba shot down two civilian planes from Miami, explicitly prohibits the U.S. from changing its policy while Fidel and Raúl Castro are in power.  The lengthy 2004 Report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, drafted under the direction of former Under Secretary State for Inter-American Affairs, Otto Reich, a Cuban American, and adopted by the Bush White House, is essentially a blueprint for detailed U.S. involvement in administering a Cuba emerging from a total rupture in its institutions. Plans are outlined, for example, for “responding rapidly to changes on the island” including mobilization of humanitarian emergency relief efforts, such as the distribution of nonfat dry milk, immediate immunization programs for childhood illnesses, making sure schools stay open, and provisions for public security and law enforcement during the “initial stages” of a transition.

It is therefore not surprising that Washington’s response to the replacement of Fidel Castro echoed Miami’s: “nothing has changed.” To be sure, little has changed thus far. But the U.S. is clearly unprepared for dealing with the scenario we are facing. Its only plan calls for waiting until some precise moment when change is total, involves conditions required by the U.S., and, of course, with no Raúl Castro.

Change in Cuba has been unpredictable, but it has become evident that Washington and Miami have based their responses to events in Cuba on a prediction that now seems unlikely to happen. The Cuban government seems poised to survive Fidel Castro. Now what? That is the question many Cubans would like to ask their new President as his government eventually and inexorably moves away from the long shadow that for decades was cast by the historical leader of the Cuban revolution. And that is the question that both Cuban exiles and Washington should ask themselves if, as they have long maintained, they have the best interests of the Cuban people foremost in their minds.

Although the forces of stability and continuity are strong not only in Havana, but also in Washington and Miami, there are glimmers of hope. Just as the replacement of Fidel Castro opens the possibility of change in the island, so too does the possible replacement of leaders in Washington and Miami. For the first time in decades a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States has voiced a willingness to fundamentally change U.S. policy. In Miami, two of the most recalcitrant Cuban American members of Congress are facing tough reelection battles from Cuban American opponents who have challenged them precisely on their support for hardline policies towards the island.

As is to be expected, however,  in all matters having to do with Cuba, what will happen in Havana, Miami, or Washington is, of course, unpredictable and likely to surprise us.

I

We will ponder the meaning of the Cuban revolution for decades to come, and after us, others will reflect on its meaning for many decades more. At present, attention has been given more to predicting the Cuban future (what will happen after Fidel) than to understanding the Cuban past (what happened in Cuba), a tendency that fails to appreciate the ways the latter serves to inform the former. In fact, the question of the future of Cuba evokes a problematic far too speculative and far too imponderable, and is perhaps best left to those who dwell in the realm of contingency. To contemplate the future of the Cuban past, however, perhaps more precisely, to reflect on the historical context from which the Cuban present has emerged, cannot but contribute to a deeper understanding of the circumstances that act to shape the options available to the Cuban people.

Many factors have played a part in maintaining the Cuban leadership and the government over which it presides in power. Certainly the oft-cited resort to repression is not without some basis in fact. The system has indeed relied on an extensive and efficient intelligence apparatus. It acts on authoritarian reflexes, and has been neither slow nor unwilling to apply repression as a means to maintain internal consensus.

But repression alone is not an adequate explanation for the endurance of a government that has persisted under extraordinary circumstances, during years of enormously difficult internal conditions, compounded by five decades of external pressures–active and passive, principally from the United States. The Cuban government had its origins in an enormously popular revolutionary upheaval, a process in which the claim to power and the legitimacy to rule were initially never in question. Much in the capacity of the Cuban leadership to survive even under the most difficult circumstances has been related to the larger logic of patria as a place-bound source of self-identification, specifically the degree to which the idea of nation and the purpose of revolution fused to form a larger metaphysics in which the value of nationality was invested in the virtue of sovereignty.

II

The proposition of patria acquired meaning around an emerging nineteenth-century ethos, and thereupon acted to inform belief systems, shape canons of self-representation, and convey modes of conduct, central to which was the premise of self-determination as the minimum condition of self-fulfillment. To the degree that Cubans invested selfhood into nationhood, the former could not be imagined without the latter. Formulations of nationality reached deeply into the sources of self-representation and self-esteem. The plausibility of “Cuban” as a transcendental category of identity was contingent on possession of place, unmediated and unencumbered, a condition vital to the very sustenance of the logic of a separate nationality.

The premise of Cuban–what made Cubans Cuban–was invested in the promise of patria, without which the proposition of nationality possessed neither reason nor rationale. Patria and pueblo joined together to give meaning to nationality. Central to this construct was the very vindication of patria, without which nothing remained and for which, hence, no sacrifice was too great, no struggle was too long.

No other aspiration has so profoundly shaped the formation of Cuban national sensibility as the pursuit of national sovereignty and self-determination. The Cuban sense of self had its origins in the nineteenth century, when Cubans arrived to the conviction that they too had a destiny to pursue, that they too had a claim to self-determination, that they too had a right to sovereign nationhood. The liberation project of the nineteenth century summoned three generations of Cubans to four decades of warfare against Spain under the inspiration of the lyric of the national anthem “To die for the Patria is to live.” Cuban aspirations to sovereignty were thwarted by the United States first in 1898 by military occupation and thereafter by the Platt Amendment, repeated armed interventions and political inter-meddling, and possession of the national economy.

Cuban aspirations of the nineteenth century persisted into the twentieth as hopes unfulfilled and goals unmet, but most of all as ideals that retained the capacity repeatedly to summon Cuban mobilization. These were not sentiments invented by the revolution–they formed part of the larger political culture to which Cuban leaders after 1959 were heir and in which they themselves had been formed.

Whatever else the Cuban revolution addressed, whatever else the revolution sought to remedy, at the core of its mystique was the logic of patria. It was central to the purpose of the revolution, and indeed in no small way accounts for Cuban endurance through the past five decades of political isolation and economic sanctions.

The Cuban leadership subsumed into the project of revolution a historic mission: the redemption of patria, which implied above all defense of sovereignty, specifically from the United States. Within the logic of the Cuban historical experience, both as a matter of popular memory and a learned past, confrontation with the United States was perhaps not only inevitable, but necessary–possibly even desirable. “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” celebrated the headlines of the newspaper Revolución in January 1961 when the United States severed diplomatic relations.

The confrontation released powerful nationalist sentiments, revived long-standing historical grievances, which in turn contributed to a national unanimity of purpose perhaps unattainable by any other means. The Cuban confrontation with the United States drew vast support across the island and–certainly initially–this support cut across racial categories and transcended class lines, among men and women, young and old, in the cities and in the countryside. All through the decades that followed, confrontation with the United States served as a powerful catalyst of national mobilization. “Señor Imperialistas,” taunts the well-known Havana billboard. “¡No tenemos absolutamemte ningún miedo!”

III

The Americans’ response to the revolution was unambiguous. All through the early decades, the United States sought successively by way of invasion, assassination plots, covert operations, political isolation, and punitive economic sanctions, to overthrow of the Cuban government. With the loss of Soviet patronage in the early 1990s, Cubans found themselves increasingly isolated and beleaguered, faced with dwindling aid, decreasing foreign exchange reserves, and diminishing resources: a good time, the Americans persuaded themselves, to expand the scope and increased the severity of economic sanctions as a way to hasten the “transition to democracy.”

The Torricelli Law (1992) and Helms-Burton Law (1996) were particularly harsh and mean-spirited, both in timing and in kind. To mischievous intent was added malevolent purpose, for the new sanctions were directed against the Cuban people, to make daily life in Cuba as difficult and grim as possible, to increase Cuban suffering in measured but sustained increments, at every turn, at every opportunity.

The Americans sought to deepen hardship as a means of provoking the Cuban people into rebellion, to politicize hunger as a way to foment popular disaffection in the hope that, driven by want and motivated by despair, Cubans would deliver the political outcome desired in Washington: the overthrow of the Cuban government.

These developments had far-reaching consequences. The defense of the nation became indistinguishable from the defense of the revolution and, in fact, acted at once to accelerate the centralization of power and facilitate the curtailment of civil liberties–all in the name of the defense of patria. The American intent to provoke the Cuban people into rebellion was transparent, and readily understood by Cuban leaders. They responded accordingly. If indeed the survival of the nation was at stake, what mattered most was unanimity of purpose and an unyielding course of action, neither of which admitted easily political opposition and internal division. It was the height of cynicism for the United States to condemn Cuba for the absence of civil liberties and political rights, on one hand, and, on the other, pursue policies variously employing sabotage, subversion, and sanctions to obtain the overthrow the Cuban government.

Internal security developed into an obsession in Cuba. Opposition was portrayed as tantamount to treason. Dissent was perceived as a process that was both pernicious and perilous to the survival of patria. The North American call for oppositional space within Cuba, in the form of an opposition party, for example, or for an opposition press, could not but arouse suspicion and raise the spectre of subversion. The emphasis was on the unanimity of the nation, at whatever cost, for however long required. The leadership has been ill-disposed to tolerate political opposition in the face of an implacable adversary from without and a battered economy from within. That the United States acted to provide moral support and material assistance to dissidents groups served further to cast a pall over the legitimacy of critics of the government. The emergence of political opposition was denounced as divisive and subversive and characterized as a stalking “enemy within.” This was the obvious purport of Raúl Castro’s shrill warning in late 1992: “Those who act as a fifth column of the enemy can expect nothing else but the crushing blow of the people, the weight of our power and our revolutionary justice.”

A policy professing to promote a “transition to democracy” had the opposite effect. To varying degrees, the Americans did in fact achieves their purpose: conditions in Cuba did indeed worsen. Cubans faced mounting shortages, increased rationing, deteriorating services, and growing scarcities, circumstances in which the needs of everyday life in their most ordinary and commonplace forms were met often only by Herculean efforts. But circumstances of dire need and urgent want were hardly conditions conducive to contemplate a “transition to democracy.” A people utterly prostrate, preoccupied with matters of survival as the overriding reality of day-to-day life, were not readily disposed to think about elections. Vast numbers of Cubans chose instead to emigrate. Others burrowed deeper into the nether world of the black market in search of ways to make do and carry on. Many committed suicide. Nothing perhaps could have more effectively arrested and reversed a “transition to democracy” than the grim and relentless urgency with which Cubans faced daily life. As one Cuban colleague confided to the author: “Primero necesidades; después democracia.”

IV

U.S. sanctions challenged the Cubans on the grounds that the leadership was best prepared to defend: the ideal of nation, free and sovereign, the defense of which the Cuban leadership could claim a historic mandate to uphold. The Americans challenged the Cuban revolution at its most credible point and its most defensible position. U.S. policy was received as another maneuver to exact Cuban acquiescence to North American power, another attempt to remove a government in Cuba dedicated to the defense of patria, another way to punish the Cuban people for their affirmation of national sovereignty.

The duty of struggle and sacrifice to redeem the patria was a matter of historical legacy, to be assumed and discharged by successive generations of Cubans. As conditions deteriorated during the 1990s, efforts to raise flagging morale appealed explicitly to patria. “Todo por la patria,” proclaimed one Havana billboard, and another: “Ante todo, tenemos patria.” Across the island, on streets and highways, in schools and at workplaces, and in all state offices, billboards and posters alluded to Cuba as an “eterno Baraguá,” metaphorical reference to Antonio Maceo’s refusal to surrender to Spain in 1878 and the Cuban determination to prevail. “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” There was no compelling repository of patriotic morale than the words and works of José Martí. During the 1990s José Martí was everywhere, evoked to remind Cubans of their duty. The meaning of Martí’s oft-quoted passage was unambiguous: “For me, patria will never be triumph, but rather agony and duty.” It is unfortunate that most North American politicians and policymakers have never read Martí. The proposition of patria has loomed as large in Cuban survival strategies during the post-Soviet period. If in the end the invocation of patria had been the last and only rationale through which to defend the revolution, the Cuban leadership would still have retained a powerful claim on the allegiance of vast numbers of Cubans. It has been a sentiment of enormous vitality and resonance, one that could be defended without compromise, no matter what its defense may cost.

The Cuban condition has been in varying degrees historically a function of its relationship with the United States. It could hardly be otherwise. That the Americans chose to array themselves against the full logic of Cuban historical sensibilities was to go up against propositions that transcended the specific claims upon which the Cuban leadership based its claim to rule. The Americans failed to appreciate adequately the power of the appeal to historic notions of patria as a source of internal cohesion and national consensus. The imperative of patria offered very few choices: “¡Patria o muerte! ¡Venceremos!”

VI

The invocation of patria as a strategy of political survival and source of morale and means of sustenance is not without risks, and indeed may have far-reaching and unforeseen consequences. For more than 150 years, the proposition of patria has implied the promise of uplift and upward mobility, Cuba for Cubans as a place of security and well-being. The idea of nation was conceived as a means of self-fulfillment and a source of self-esteem, always with the promise of a better life as reason to struggle and sacrifice. Much had to do with the egalitarian vision contained within the nineteenth-century project of liberation, from the populist impulses that evoked social justice, racial equality, and economic opportunity as the purpose to which patria was to be dedicated. Aspiration to nationhood was about making life better for all Cubans. That was the point: the creation of a nation entrusted with the defense of Cuban interests as the reason for being.

The experience of the last twenty years has had a withering effect on the moral premise of power. For decades, the collective resolve to persevere and persist has drawn upon the proposition of patria as a mean of sustenance and a source of solace. But it is also true that the defense of patria has be accompanied by deepening impoverishment and unrelieved adversity. The implications of this experience for future renderings of nationality are far from clear, and it may be among the most lasting consequences of the revolution. A shattering of the bound between patria and pueblo cannot bode well for a people whose historic sense of self has been contingent on a historic notion of nation.

VII

Decades from now future generations of historians will no doubt look back upon these years with a mixture of incomprehension and incredulity at the utter cynicism and the poverty of imagination with which ten successive U.S. presidential administrations have engaged Cuba. Historians in the future will surely come to understand that U.S. policy served to sustain the very conditions that it purported to remedy. Within the context of Cuban historic sensibilities, U.S. policy has not only contributed to Cuban intransigence but, more important, has lent credibility to that intransigence. Rather than weakening Cuban resolve, sanctions have strengthened Cuban determination. U.S. policy has served to bring out some of the most intransigent tendencies of Cuban leaders in the defense of some of the most exalted notions of Cuban nationality.

The United States has been less a source of a solution than a cause of the problem. It is difficult indeed to imagine a policy so exquisitely suited to the political needs of the Cuban leadership. Future historians will also no doubt demonstrate what we today can only suspect, that the Americans lacked confidence in the ability of the Cuban people to resolve their own destiny. Or–perhaps–future historians will reveal that the Americans really did recognize the Cuban capacity for agency, and that the prolongation of the status quo was far more preferable than a Cuban reaffirmation of national sovereignty and self-determination. And surely future historians will arrive to an appreciation of the greatest irony of all: that in the end, the biggest obstacle to the “transition to democracy” in Cuba was the United States itself.

“If there is food for the people, risks do not matter.”
- Raúl Castro. 09/18/1994

“We will do what is best for each sector and place, and we will not unleash processes that could escape the control of the socialist State.”
- Carlos Lage. 12/19/1994

“I strongly believe that the answers to the current problems facing Cuban society . . . require more variables for each concrete problem than those contained in a chess game.”
- Fidel Castro 02/18/08

The e-mails have been coming in the last few hours, primarily from print or radio journalists and North American social scientists. They claim that Raúl Castro, who replaced his famous brother in the new government, has appointed a hard-line anti-reformer to be the next person in line to succeed him. Why was José Ramón Machado Ventura selected instead of Carlos Lage? Have the “hardliners” won? Are the “reformers” in retreat?  Is Machado Ventura more important to Raúl than Carlos Lage?  What evidence, in fact, is there that political and economic differences exist within the new Cuban government?

These are the wrong questions. Instead, we ought to pay attention to the comparative advantages and experiences of each member of the political team, and to the functions each could perform. In the Cuban political context, political leaders cannot be separated from their overall political environment and institutional linkages.

However, since foreign journalists and some scholars have made an issue of the selection of Machado Ventura over Carlos Lage, it is useful to compare the service history of each.

Machado Ventura was born in 1930—which makes him 19 years older than Lage. He is one of the few educated people that fought with Raúl in the guerrillas. He was a founder of the Frank País Second Front guerrilla region. He served as the guerrillas’ physician. By 1959 he had become comandante, the highest rank within the Cuban guerrilla forces. Lage was eight years old when the guerrilleros seized power.

Machado Ventura also became Minister of Health at age 29 (1960-1967). He helped conceive, create and run the Cuban medical system that has made the island famous. He excelled in organizational skills. Carlos Lage graduated as a physician but did not have a military background.

Machado Ventura was a founder of the Communist Party (PCC) in 1965; Lage at the time was 14 years old.

By 1968, because of his organizational skills, Machado Ventura was given the responsibility of cleaning up the serious problems that the Cuban Communist Party confronted in Matanzas province. (At the time, a pro-Soviet faction, led by Aníbal Escalante, had engaged in political and intelligence activities that the Castro brothers considered dangerous and treacherous.) Also, in 1968 he had become a member of the Central Committee.

From that point on, Machado Ventura’s work concentrated on the one-party organization. In 1971, he had the post of first party secretary of Matanzas province. He was then given responsibility for rebuilding the party system in Havana. In other words, he did NOT remain within the ministry of the Armed Forces but left in order to be a civilian organizing the Communist Party ranks. But he had the political credentials of having participated in the guerrilla war. Since 1974 he has been the person in charge of the organization department of the PCC.

He played a fundamental role in implementing and institutionalizing the revolutionary process initiated by Raul Castro in 1976—first in Matanzas and then in the rest of the country. This was a very important experience that might become useful. He was brought into the Political Bureau and the Secretariat of the Communist Party due to his work in the province of Matanzas. In 1976, Machado Ventura was elected to the new National Assembly [the legislature] and selected as a member of the Council of State.

Meanwhile, Carlos Lage was elected to the National Assembly and also became an alternate member of the Central Committee. At the time, Lage was a very successful and influential university student leader.  The following year, he became a leading member of the Union of Young Communists.

When in 1980 Lage was selected to be a deputy member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Machado Ventura had already been a full member of the CC for 15 years.

The following year, Lage became secretary general of the Union of Young Communists, the highest position anyone could attain within the junior parallel organization of the communists of Cuba.

In 1986, Lage was selected to be a full member of the Central Committee. He also joined the “Grupo de Coordinación y Apoyo del Comandante en Jefe,” Fidel Castro. This was the inner circle staff. Lage became the key coordinator within the Group.  That same year, Machado Ventura was promoted to one of the vice presidencies of the Council of State.

When in 1990 Lage became a full member of the Political Bureau, Machado Ventura had already been one of its members for 15 years. Machado Ventura, at that time, took on the responsibility of organizational secretary of the Central Committee. Thus, while Lage was addressing matters of state policy and its implementation, Machado Ventura addressed personnel and cadre questions within the state, the government and the party.

As the economic crisis hit Cuba in 1991 due to the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, Fidel Castro and the Grupo de Apoyo y Coordinación took on many economic and political responsibilities and Carlos Lage was in the middle of it all. In 1992, he became secretary of the Council of Ministers and the following year he also assumed the responsibility of vice president of the Council of State. Lage is, without a doubt, brilliant, dedicated and disciplined.  The Cuban people certainly know and respect him. Machado Ventura is not as well known by the Cuban people, despite his long record.
But there is one sector of the society that knows “Machadito” very well—the PCC membership.

Machado Ventura and Carlos Lage shared a number of positions: both were members of the Political Bureau and of the Council of State. However, Machado Ventura’s political career had been longer than that of Lage. Moreover, Machado Ventura had been closer to Raul Castro in his daily work. Carlos Lage’s ascendancy had been associated with close working relationship with Fidel Castro. Lage, moreover, had worked as a physician abroad.

Nonetheless, both men have worked together in numerous tasks. In his inaugural speech as Cuba’s new president, Raúl Castro announced upcoming reforms to economic and political policies that will impact on Cuban people—issues that have concerned Carlos Lage. However, Raúl said, it is profoundly important to recruit the proper personnel and cadres, without which these new economic and political policies will not be viable.

Moreover, he specifically stated that the Cuban Communist Party had to become absolutely democratic in its internal work. He noted that there should be no fear of discrepancies and differences of opinion—that there should be no fear. As there is only one political party in the country, that party has to reflect the diversity of opinion. The party, he noted, had to be “more democratic;” it had to be perfected. As far as he is concerned, Cuban society does not have “antagonistic contradictions.” The most important thing is that discussions should be handled in a mature manner and that the Communist Party is cohesive, objective, and responsible. Questioning what is done and how it is done should become normal and natural. Last but not least, any substantive economic or political reforms will be preceded by significant changes in state and government institutions.

Raúl Castro also said that Cuba’s state institutions had gone through three major periods:  1) 1959 to 1976, when ad hoc changes were made on the basis of revolutionary necessity and without any real formalization of procedures; 2) 1976 to 1991, when the revolutionary regime was formalized and institutionalized, although some of the state apparatus resembled Soviet experiences; and 3) the period after the demise of the Soviet bloc.

He went on: “Finally, in 1994, the most critical moment of the Special Period, considerable adjustments were made leading to the reduction and merging of institutions as well as to the redistribution of the tasks previously entrusted to some of them. However, these changes were undertaken with the rush imposed by the necessity to quickly adapt to a radically different, very hostile and extremely dangerous scenario. In the 14 years that have passed since then, the national and international scene has noticeably changed. Today, a more compact and operational structure is required, with a lower number of institutions under the central administration of the State and a better distribution of their functions. This will enable us to reduce the enormous amount of meetings, coordination, permissions, conciliations, provisions, rules and regulations, etc., etc. It will also allow us to bring together some decisive economic activities that are presently disseminated through various entities, and to make better use of our cadres.”

For such all-encompassing tasks the first vice-president has much experience behind him, for he was a major player in an earlier effort in what was then named the “institutionalization of the revolutionary regime.” José Ramón Machado Ventura, Carlos Lage, and others will have their work cut out for them.

All the talk about hardliners setting the tone of the new Raúl Castro administration is too simple and naive. In fact, the revolutionary regime confronts a variety of problems; and as everyone in the leading positions acknowledges, diverse approaches will be necessary depending on the level of difficulty. Raúl Castro has made it clear in numerous speeches that his administration intends and will insist on airing differences and arriving at consensual decisions. That is neither the mentality nor the approach of a phalanx of troglodytes. There is a collegial system in place. It will be further elaborated and institutionalized.

The question, in the final analysis, is not what role each person plays but in what direction the Cuban revolutionary state moves. Such tasks will not depend on just a few individuals, but on their inter-connections and effectiveness.

To search for the “leading personalities” that promote “openings” and “liberalization” overlooks the real revolution that is taking place, as announced by Cuba’s new president.

Notes

José Raúl Capablanca, Cuban born, was a world chess champion from 1921 to 1927.

I want to thank my colleague and friend Robert Sandels for his corrections, comments and suggestions.

Editor’s note

The above first appeared in the online political newsletter Counterpunch (March 1–2, 2008). It is republished here with the author’s permission.

The election of Raúl Castro as president by the Cuban National Assembly did not have quite the same level of tension associated with the Oscars.  Nor did it merit anywhere near the same amount of press coverage.  Yet the fact that there was even some uncertainty before it and that the results merited front page news indicated that something has happened in Cuba.  The question is, what?

Well, Fidel is gone.  Maybe.  While he now lacks any official position, he remains the core of whatever Revolutionary legitimacy the government still possesses.  His is the one voice that all sectors of the regime would still obey.  It is likely, given his semi-divine status, and the brothers´ close friendship, that Fidel still has something of a veto power over decisions made at the very top.  Raúl said as much as he assumed power, but then he would have done so no matter his real intentions

One thing we know did NOT happen.  A democratic election.  The election of Raúl would not meet the electoral standards of Belorussia.  The electors did not even have an opportunity to hierachize the leadership as in the PRC.  The ballots did not offer any choice and the results had been determined before any of the legislators put pencil to paper.

So, we can be reasonably certain that the election of Raúl and José Ramón Machado Ventura as first vice-president was a decision made by the two brothers, perhaps with some element of elite consultation.  The selection of Machado Ventura had something of a Spiro Agnew quality (who knew?), and his two surnames must have already produced a few jokes about the return of history (Gerardo Machado was a dictator deposed by the 1933 revolution, while Colonel Esteban Ventura was one of Batista’s most disreputable thugs).

As to the remainder of the Council of State, not much has changed.  The central role of the military is more obvious than ever as the only new Vice-President, General Julio Casa Requerio, is also the new defense minister.  The generational shift that some were expecting has not happened as the average age of Cuban vice-presidents is 71.

But the absence of events can be as illuminating as their occurrence.  We know now that Raúl is not about to make a dramatic break with 50 years of history nor is he about to broaden the top layer of the elite.  Whatever transitions Cuba might make over the new few months or years will be at least partly shaped by the still smoky rooms of the historic Revolutionary leadership.

This does not necessarily mean that Raúl has no new vision for Cuba (he must….only a fanatic or a fool would consider that Cuba can keep going the way it is and Raúl is neither).  What it means is that Raúl is going about whatever changes he envisions in his own slow and methodical way.

Despite the romantic allure of a dramatic declaration of democratic opening, this road seems a sensible one.   There are many factions in Cuba that fear any change and even more who disagree about what should happen.  For Raúl to announce some dramatic reorientation of the regime would have meant his losing his capacity to manage that change.  As long as he maintains the status quo, he can better plan and manage new stages.  The danger is, of course, that he might wait too long, but I don’t believe that Raúl had any choice.

Whether consciously or not, Raúl might be following the model of arguably the most successful transition to democracy of the past quarter century: Spain’s.  In 1975, no one expected much of Juan Carlos (and he was dogged by the same kind of underestimation of his charisma and talent as Raúl).  Certainly his first few months did not signal any dramatic change and his selection of Adolfo Suarez as head of government was widely derided as a disaster.  In retrospect, it is clear that Juan Carlos and Suarez followed a brilliant strategy of using the ancient regime’s own laws and institutions to bury it.  Rather than challenging the rightist “bunker” by repudiating Franco, they adroitly suppressed his legacy with remarkably little conflict.  A few years after the death of the dictator, the Socialists had won power.

Spain was lucky.  The right wing abided by the letter of Francoist law even as it saw its spirit undermined.  When it didn’t obey, it was remarkably ineffective.  Leaders on the left also demonstrated great discipline in going along with a strategy designed by representatives of a regime that had literally done its best to kill them.  The historical moment was also auspicious in innumerable ways.  Finally, Spain was lucky in its choice of neighbors as the rest of Europe managed to be supportive while non-intrusive.

Will Cuba be as lucky?  There are really two questions here: What might Raúl et al want, and what can they actually do?

As to the first, the group around Raúl knows that the Cuban economy is essentially hanging by the thread of Venezuelan oil subsidies.  Having opened up the economy to tourism and mining transnationals beginning in the 1990s, the easy solutions are no longer available; there is little the government can do to improve the economic situation without radically transforming the domestic sector.  The decade long decline in the quality of health and education is simply the most obvious indication that the Cuban model no longer works (if it ever did without external subsidization).  What goods do exist are distributed in an extremely inegalitarian manner. As recent popular critiques have emphasized, one cannot have a socialist regime relying on the monetary apartheid of the Convertible Peso.  Politically, the population is now expecting some reform.  As long as Fidel was in charge, many were willing to postpone their desires.  Now that the historical shift has come, few will be willing to remain patient.  After 49 years, the joke is just no longer funny.

Politically, socially, and economically, the regime is facing immense pressures to do something.  In terms of preferences, they are probably most ideologically committed to the model espoused by Deng Xiaoping: good mice-hunting cats, no matter their color.  The experience of the military over the past decade offers a beguiling model: autocratic management of capitalist enterprises.  None of the Cuban leaders has ever espoused the remotest faith in the power of democracy.  They are no doubt convinced that opening up the political arena would lead to disorder and disaster.  They will essentially attempt to create enough medium-term stability for the next generation to handle the long-term challenges facing the island.   I suspect that what they will try to do is to offer the Cuban people the prospect of more money and goods in exchange for acquiescence.  Raúl´s critiques of the agricultural sector would, for example, point to a freeing of constraints on farmers, if not necessarily a full return to small holdings.

Will Cuba work as a sort of tropical Pearl River Delta?  For the immediate future, it just might.  I was one of the many who discounted Raúl, but the last year has demonstrated that Fidel was not necessarily as central to the regime as everyone (including, no doubt, Fidel) thought.  Raúl has preserved the institutional capacity of the military and has assured the loyalty of much of the officer class through the potential participation in the for profit sector.  The military as well as the internal security services are with Raúl and should remain so for the foreseeable future.

One challenge may come from the particrats who have benefited less from the economic openings of the past 15 years and who may take their commitment to “socialism or death” more seriously.  It is difficult to not read the composition of the vice-presidencies without thinking that the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) is not where the action will be: the promotion of a general, the retention of technocrat Carlos Lage, and the non-promotion of the ideologue Felipe Perez Roque.  A major question here is whether there is enough popular leadership in the provincial capillaries of the PCC to challenge Raúlista reforms.

An even larger question is whether the next few months will see any form of spontaneous social or political protests.  Thanks to the efficiency of the police and the delegitimation of the embargo, the Cuban dissident movement is small and disorganized.   But people living on the equivalent of $17 a month and sceptical of another Castro could take to the streets as they did in 1994.  At that time, Fidel opted to use the brigadas of party thugs rather than the military to impose order.  Raúl might have no choice but to order soldiers and there is no way to know their willingness to support a Tiananmen on the Malecon.

Then, there is always the U.S. factor.  Raúl might actually appreciate the Bush stance of no negotiation as it frees him from having to deal with yet another set of players while also helping him to maintain the nationalist chops of the Revolution.  An Obama-led opening would probably be a disaster for the regime.  A gusher of tourists and exiles and the opening of new business opportunities would dramatically weaken the capacity of the establishment to control the process of change.  The only bright side in this scenario (from Raúl´s point of view) would be if the Miami right-wing attempted to use an opening to exert their influence.  The Cuban population might be sick of the Castros, but being largely young, of color, and poor, they have no need for yet another generation of old white guys telling them what to do.

Assuming for the moment that Raúl can survive the next few months and that the Cuban government does retain control of the situation (and the odds might be at least even on this), what can they do?

1. Certainly the first step has to be freeing the agricultural sector.  For a country with as rich a soil as Cuba’s to import 70 percent of its food is patently absurd.  The opening up of an agricultural market would not only increase the flow of food to the cities, but also provide new opportunities for export (mangoes can be the new kiwi).
2. Another possibility is to free the tourist market from the monopoly of Spanish, Mexican, and Canadian chains.  There is a massive global market for the kind of unspoiled beaches and mountains that Cuba can offer, plus it could do so following a paladar model of small entrepreneurs.  Lots of Cubans would be happy to make money off Europeans seeking a Graham Greene experience.
3. The third option is to tout the attractions of Cuba’s highly educated labor force and the government’s success in health care.  The deal that Cuba struck with Venezuela (doctors for oil) could be replicated in different guises.
4. Finally, and politically most difficult, the government must take apart the massive and inefficient state sector that absorbs far too much of Cuba’s money.  But, the fact that government salaries have declined so precipitously might actually make it easier to get rid of them.

These changes will bring new tensions.  First and foremost, inequality will get worse before it gets better.  But, one of the Revolution’s greatest legacies might be to have freed Cuba form the historical stranglehold of race and neo-colonial class.  Cuba remains in many ways an anachronistic racist (and extremely sexist) place.  But, one does not see the caste-like divisions of a Brazil.  There is the potential for the inequities of the market to actually improve the distribution of goods and services and to free the population.  If this transition can be managed without creating a new class of have-nots (thereby requiring the maintenance of a police state), Cuba might have a bright economic future.

Then what?  When might Cubans be able to elect their own government?  In the absence of organized opposition parties and the penetration of the PCC into everyday life, Raúl´s successor could probably win at least the first democratic election.  There will always be the risk of losing the next one (that is why they call it democracy), but I cannot imagine Cuba being able to follow a Chinese road in the medium to long run.  First, the economy will not be large or significant enough to give the regime the kind of global waiver enjoyed by Beijing or Riyadh. Second, the set of international players, from Latin America, Europe, and Florida, will not acquiesce to a too long democratic apprenticeship.  Third, the Cuban people have witnessed what the absence of democratic accountability can bring; they won’t be fooled again.

This leaves Raúl with a difficult, but not impossible, challenge.  He is now captain of the ship.  It is not taking on water yet, but the storm could hit anytime.  He has a little time and not much leeway and all we can hope for is that he’s better than his brother at letting go and trusting the crew and passengers.

Bien underground cubano casi sin
posibilidades,
pero con lo poco q’ tenemos no
somos gusanos
y hago tanto como muchos q’ no
hacen lo q’ hago yo.
Me siento un mago cuando estoy
en la tarima,
levantan de un público muerto hasta
lograr q’ rian de alegria
desapareciendo su agonia y
melancolia,
tan solo, representando a mi forma
a la patria mia.

Real Cuban underground almost without
possibilities,
but though we don’t have much, we ain’t
dissidents,
and I do a lot more than others, who don’t
do what I do.
I feel like a magician when I’m
on stage
raising a dead public, until I make them
laugh with happiness,
making disappear their agony and melancolia,
sadness,
so alone, representing in my own way
my country.

“Mi patria caray” (My country damnit!), Explosión Suprema, 2001.

In May 2001, the Cuban rap group Explosión Suprema performed their song “Mi patria caray” at the annual Cubadisco music festival. The rappers, from the Alamar housing projects just outside of Havana, did not sugarcoat the tough realities that they were living through as Cuba transitioned away from a Soviet-subsidized socialist model towards greater dependency on tourism, foreign investment, and remittances. Seven years later, they are living through yet another transition, as Fidel Castro steps down and his brother Raúl is named president of the country by Cuba’s parliament. And as before, the recognition that these are hard times has not provoked the kinds of mass uprisings many had predicted would accompany the exit of Fidel from the political scene.

Political commentators expressed surprise at the relative calm on the streets of Cuba’s main cities, both in July 2006 when Fidel temporarily stepped down from the presidency while recovering from emergency surgery, and last week, when he resigned. Perhaps a clue to this uneventful transition lies in the nature of contestation in Cuba and, as the rap song illustrates, the public disavowals of dissident politics by critical sectors of Cuban civil society. Dissident groups and autonomous organizations have not managed to build a base in post-1959 Cuba – partly due to their association with and reliance on US-funded programs and the success of the Cuban government in exporting its critics. While the changing tides of Cuban politics have tended to be viewed through these polarities of quiescence or dissidence, I propose rather that we look at the trajectory of sectors of civil society working in collaboration or negotiation with the state, especially within the arts. This can help us to understand the forms of social agency exercised by ordinary Cubans as they shape, contest, and bolster an emerging post-Fidel political order.

Redimensionalizing of the Cuban state during the 1990s

For some three decades of the Cuban revolution since its inception in 1959, it was difficult to speak of a lively and active civil society, since all mass organizations were closely tied to the state. Beginning in the 1990s, some Cuban scholars observed a “redimensionalizing” of the state, as the state withdrew its monopoly over social groups and organizations. This was due to the opening up of Cuba to a global market economy, the lack of resources available for patronage or sponsorship, and the crisis of legitimacy that the Cuban state faced as new social forces entered the arena.

Mass organizations and institutions previously under the tutelage of the state began to attain a degree of autonomy. The Center for the Study of America (CEA), had originally been established by the Communist Party in 1997 as a way of tackling theoretical problems as identified by the leadership, but in the mid-1990s they were given nongovernmental organization (NGO) status and began to project a more independent image. The Center for Psychological and Social Research, the Center Félix Varela and journals such as Temas launched debates about the viability of state socialism. For the first time in the post-revolutionary context, an independent women’s organization Magín emerged alongside the official Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). In 1995, dissident leaders formed an umbrella organization known as the Cuban Council, that united groups across the country by the following year. These expanding spheres of public life were not comparable with, nor did they identify with, the dissident human rights and pro-reform movements that emerged in Eastern Europe prior to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. However, they were creating spaces for reflection on the challenges that Cuba was undergoing in a period of severe crisis.

During 1996-97, there was a bureaucratic offensive that would shut down many of these groups and define the future terms of engagement between state and society. The offensive was prompted by the limited economic recovery of the country due to rising foreign investments and new trade links, and the tightening of the embargo through Track II of the Torricelli Law in 1995 and the Helms-Burton law in 1996. In February 1996, the Cuban government arrested over a dozen leaders of the Cuban Council. In a speech in March 1996, Raúl Castro criticized the CEA academics for abandoning class principles and pandering to U.S.-based Cubanologists. In September, the Central Committee of the Communist Party advised the leaders of Magín that they presented a threat to the unity of Cuban society and would have to be disbanded. Following a series of discussions in which they strongly defended themselves, both CEA and Magín were dissolved. The events made clear the parameters of contestation in post-Soviet Cuba. Although the state was willing to permit a degree of critical activity, there was little space for independent organizing and none for dissidence.

“That which is hidden is seen by all:” A Critical Race Politics Surfaces

Even as organizations such as CEA and Magín were shut down, new social forces were already emerging, this time from among the ranks of those who had been most loyal followers and beneficiaries of the Cuban revolution – Afro-Cubans. “My skin is the color of night, it reveals secrets already known,” the female rapper Magia rhymed. “To show that which is hidden is seen by all.” Through rap music, young black Cubans began to speak about race, breaking silences that had existed for several decades. Black youth were feeling the brunt of the economic crisis, as they were concentrated in the poorest quality housing, the lowest income brackets, and were excluded from the most lucrative sectors of the economy such as tourism. At the same time, as the Cuban economy was opened to global consumer markets, Afro-Cuban themes were increasingly visible, with the development of a folklore tourism, and – its unintended consequence – a critical race politics among Afro-Cuban youth involved in hip hop culture.

The issues of racism and inequality were also being addressed by visual artists. In 1997, Afro-Cuban artist Alexis Esquivel organized the exhibition Queloide I (Keloid I), bringing together various artists who had been working on issues of race. Queloide, meaning raised scar tissue, refers back to the scars left on the skin of slaves from whippings by foremen. At the end of 1997, the artists organized another exhibition entitled, Ni Músicos, Ni Deportistas (Not Musicians, Nor Athletes). The title referred to the social stereotypes that confine the cultural contributions of Afro-Cubans to music and sports. The exhibitions looked at race relations in Cuba from a critical and analytical socio-political perspective, not only cultural and religious. As before with CEA and Magín, visual artists provoked a backlash from state officials and the art establishment. Esquivel recalled that, “We were accused of being ‘radical blacks,’ resentful, and opportunists, in what was an intent to avoid airing an issue that seemed to have awakened contrary opinions.” Artists and rappers responded to these kinds of attacks by defending their revolutionary credentials and patriotism.

Although rappers and artists faced obstacles in promoting their critical race politics, their message was being carried forth by academics and writers, including the former members of Magín. Professor Esteban Morales, an Afro-Cuban intellectual, argued publicly that the theme of race in Cuba has many silences. In writings and public forums during the early to mid 2000s, Morales asserted that dogmatic marxism had subsumed questions of race and marginality in the category of class. The revolution had made the claim that by eradicating the structural bases of racial inequality, racism ceased to exist, and what was left over was the remnants of racial prejudice. By contrast, Morales argued that structural racism did exist in Cuban institutions, organizations, and in the street. It was also re-emerging in the new mixed economy of joint enterprises and tourism. Academic interventions, together with the voices of rappers and visual artists in the artistic public sphere, helped to sustain a critical engagement about race within a changing Cuba. Regardless of the ebb and flow of tolerance and censorship, initiatives from civil society continued to surface.

Post-2006: The Debate over the “Quinquenio Gris”

On July 31, 2006, Fidel temporarily relinquished power. Incapacitated with severe intestinal bleeding, he underwent emergency surgery and Raúl assumed the post of temporary president. Just five months later, the state television channel began airing programs featuring three cultural officials who had presided over the “quinquenio gris,” a five year gray period of censorship and repression during the 1970s that actually lasted closer to fifteen years. Luis Pavon, who was president of the National Culture Council from 1971 to 1976, appeared on television three times, and was credited with leaving his stamp on Cuban culture. The Cuban writer and cultural critic Desiderio Navarro responded to the broadcasts, saying that they were an indication of the resurfacing of “neo-Stalinist” elements seeking to usurp political terrain in the vacuum left by Fidel’s sudden departure from the scene. Navarro started a debate on the internet among prominent intellectuals by sending out an open letter through e-mail.

In response to the storm of debate caused by the e-mail, the official daily newspaper Granma published a letter by the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) supporting Navarro’s criticisms. Four hundred writers and artists were permitted to hold a meeting to discuss the legacy of the gray years on artistic and intellectual life. The debate was picked up by Raúl Castro on his 26 July speech, when he called for a frank appraisal of the problems facing Cuba and the need to adopt new methods and reforms. He asked Cubans to debate in their workplaces and local committees and to propose solutions to issues such as low wages and agricultural shortages. Then, in November, on the television show Diálogo Abierto (Open Dialogue), former director of the Cuban Film Institute Alfredo Guevara made an appeal for a nation-wide debate along the lines of what Raúl had proposed. He also commented on the gray years, and the recent intellectual debate that had developed around it. The initial absence of Fidel seemed to spark not chaos and disorder, as some expected, but a fruitful moment of rethinking and intellectual dynamism reminiscent of the early years of the revolution.

Transitions from Below?

Right now, the world is focused on a historic transfer of power, as Fidel steps down and his brother Raúl assumes the presidency. There are many questions – will Raúl pursue market reforms, will he engage in diplomacy with the new president of the U.S, who will replace the 76-year old Raúl when he steps down?

But we cannot view the situation through the lens of Raúl’s motives and internal party dynamics alone, as this is not the only arena where these questions will be decided. Civil society, even during the stifling gray years of the 1970s and early 1980s, has always been a factor to take into account. And intellectuals such as Navarro still speak of the survival and revival of socialism. Perhaps to the chagrin of some dissidents and pro-market reformers, the terrain of much of Cuban civil society revolves around socialism, albeit a socialism with a real culture of collective debate and criticism, something lacking in Cuba. Over the coming months and years, different factions and tendencies will continue to struggle over Cuba’s future. And just as there are those who will fight to prevent a return to the exclusions and inequalities of a pre-Castro era, others will defend against a resurfacing of the authoritarian impulses of the gray years.

When Fidel Castro announced that he would not continue as President of Cuba some saw the end of an era and others said little had changed. To be sure, Fidel was succeeded by his brother Raul who promised great continuity. But in fact, it would be a mistake to think Cuba hadn’t changed during the four decades of Fidel’s leadership. And the patterns of previous change continue and shape Cuba and its context today.

Refugees fled Cuba – and from Miami and other centers Cuban expatriates seek to shape a new phase in Cuban history. They also participate in ongoing change as easier family visits and financial remittances suggest. The US government remains intransigent about recognizing Cuba’s still-communist leadership, but has of course taken different approaches to its close neighbor at different times. Cuba was changed by the collapse of the Soviet Union which had severe economic as well as ideological consequences. Cuba’s context is changed yet again by the