SIPANEWS - SIPA - Columbia University

The name of ailing Cuban president Fidel Castro is seen written with fi reworks on January 8, 2008, in celebrations
marking the 49th anniversary of Castro’s return to Havana after years of exile in Sierra Maestra, eastern Cuba.
Even before the transition, a new U.S. policy
toward Cuba was long overdue. For years, the personalized
animosity governing U.S.-Cuba relations
has only served to elevate the regime’s symbolic
predicament as an “underdog” in the international
arena. Now, the pieces required to enact a reorientation
of U.S. policy may finally be in place: a Cuban
regime undertaking tentative economic reforms,
expanding its international outlook, and diversifying
trading partners; a new U.S. administration taking
stock of a subcontinent moving ever further from
Washington’s orbit; and demographic and ideological
shifts inside Miami’s Cuban-American community
whose vote is increasingly turning blue.
Politics as Usual?
The transition from Fidel to Raúl has resulted in
a shift away from one-person charismatic leadership,
to one with wider institutional buy-in from
the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and the
Communist Party (PCC), the guardian institutions
of the Revolution. According to a Brookings
taskforce on Cuba, Raúl’s operating mode will be
calculated pragmatism—liberalizing within bounds
and undertaking reforms in a stop-and-go fashion
while avoiding disruptive structural reforms.
Disseminating and enforcing the current reform
process through the PCC and FAR will be important
in an environment where increased economic
openness may create new, unpredictable challenges
to the status quo.
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Under either Castro, Cuba remains a dictatorship.
To the wide acclaim of the international
community, Raúl ratified the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the
International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights. He also released 15 political prisoners
(with 219 remaining), effectively removing
attention from the increase in short-term detentions
and intimidation of dissidents and human
rights activists. Marifeli Pérez-Stable at the Inter-
American Dialogue says that neither brother has
anything but disdain for civil liberties, nor brooks
political opposition. State security maintains a
close check on all Cubans, not only on potential
political threats. As a result, Cuban civil society
has not been granted the space to develop. It
lacks broad-based networks and the capacities
to organize and develop cohesive movements
for change.
The Challenge of Reforms
Since assuming the presidency, Raúl has implemented
widely publicized reforms to address
economic grievances, raising the bar of popular
expectations to unprecedented levels. He removed
restrictions on cell phone and computer purchases
and allowed Cubans access to tourist facilities.
While mostly cosmetic in nature, their psychological
impact should not be underestimated: reforms
will elevate purchasing power and consumption
and increase access to communications and
contact with the outside world. More recently,
reforms to lease idle state lands to independent
cooperatives and lift wage caps on state salaried
professions—the latter put off in the aftermath of
last summer’s hurricanes—are intended to create
much-needed labor and productivity incentives,
and ease burdening food imports in light of soaring
global prices. Cuba currently imports 80 percent
of its food.
The regime’s fundamental challenge will be to
respond to popular expectations for improved living
conditions without undercutting the authority
of the state. Will partial economic liberalization
simply reduce the pressure for political change, or
will it create pressures for broader and more rapid
change, possibly forcing the Cuban hierarchy to
move beyond its comfort zone?
Such reforms, in either case, do little to
address empty state coffers and the public perception
of a revolution whose social achievements
are crumbling away to reveal rising inequalities.
Severe economic distortions linger from
the “Special Period”—the term in Cuba for the
economic crisis that followed the fall of the
Soviet Union—when a dual currency and multiple
exchange rates sustained a thriving black
market and forced some state-owned industries
into bankruptcy. Further, with a global downturn
likely to affect the island’s principal sources of
hard currency in tourism and nickel, and with
productivity shortfalls particularly acute in agriculture,
the cash-strapped regime’s shortcomings
in providing the hallmark goods and services of
Cuban children attend a computer class at a school in
Havana. Cuba recently legalized the sale of computers,
microwaves, DVDs and other appliances, so long as sales
are in state-run stores that only take hard currency.