As an old Cuba hand, I have no desire to defend the island’s communist government or make excuses for its dismal failures in the area of human rights and economic development, but with the news that Cuba is considering the release of yet another tranche of political prisoners, it’s increasingly clear something important is happening down there.
As usual, the media is missing the boat, and both the Castro apologists and the Castro haters mostly don’t get what the wily (and sometimes wacky) brothers are trying to do.
In interviews with Jeff Goldberg and my old CFR colleague Julia Sweig, as well as on other occasions, Fidel Castro has been sending up smoke signals. The Holocaust was both a real thing and a bad thing; homosexuals should not be treated brutally; the Cuban model is not working. Taken together with the policy changes on the island as the government tries to shift state employees into self employment and a larger private sector and releases political prisoners, something big is clearly going on — but what?
So far, American commentary seems to be running in the usual tired circles. The professional Castro haters see all this as yet another disingenuous attempt by the Bros to play the liberal card in American politics. By making a few fatuous remarks and token gestures, the Castros send their soft-headed liberal supporters in the West swooning for joy, rehabilitating the Cuban Revolution in liberal eyes and continuing the deceptive policies that have allowed them to get away with five decades of brutal tyranny on an island ninety miles from their shores. This time, they note, darkly, Castro is zeroing in on a very important liberal subgroup: American Jews.
The liberal Cuba sympathizers are too busy swooning with joy to pay much attention to the criticism of the Castro haters. Long ago most liberals (wrongly and unfairly) dismissed anti-Castro activists as a bunch of angry, revenge seeking pro-Batista oligarchs. Too often, the American left has overlooked the faults of Cuba’s revolution and made heroes out of the architects of Cuba’s disaster.
As usual, I’ve got a foot in both camps. I agree with the anti-Castro folks that the Cuban Revolution has been a horrible disaster: a costly failure accompanied by ghastly crimes. Fifty years after the Castros seized power, Cuba — once among the most developed and advanced of the Latin American countries — is now a regional laggard. While certainly there have been some accomplishments since the fall of Batista, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that the Castros shed immense amounts of blood, tortured uncounted numbers of Cubans, and drove many of the islands best and brightest into exile — for nothing. (To see what a successful authoritarian regime can do, look at Singapore: it was poorer than Cuba in 1960. If Fidel Castro had been as good an economist and as far seeing a statesman as Lee Kuan Yew, Cuba today would be as rich as most European countries.) The Castro brothers were both communists and nationalists; it turns out that communism weakens your nation. Their ideology has weakened and impoverished the country they thought it would save.
On the other hand, I agree with the liberals that US policy toward Cuba has accomplished very little. I once asked an official during the Clinton years what he thought 45 years of embargo had accomplished in Cuba. He thought for a moment, then replied: “Well, we are 45 years closer to the end of the Castro era.”
In my view, that about sums it up. I would like to see the embargo abolished completely; short of that, I believe that all Americans have a constitutional right to travel to Cuba and I think the travel ban is exactly the kind of big government assertion of power that civil libertarians should fight.
But the Castro brothers may be doing something bigger than trying to fire up the fifty year old American policy debate on Cuba. Just possibly, they are signaling their intentions for the next stage of what they hope will be a stage-managed, controlled transition to the post-Castro era in Cuban politics. And they are telling us two things.
First, (and this is the part that the media has largely gotten right) they are telling us that they will be looking for ways to follow something like a Chinese or Vietnamese path towards greater economic success. Raul Castro has generally been seen as more enthusiastic about the path of state-guided capitalism than his brother. He has traveled to China and seen what must look like a very desirable future: glittering skyscrapers with communists still running the show. The Cuban armed forces, Raul’s bailiwick, have very effectively managed to insert themselves into the tourist sector; many of the people in Raul’s entourage have the skills and the ambition to form the basis of a Chinese style communist system.
This is not a Gorbachev style drive for perestroika and glasnost; it is an unapologetic strategy to perpetuate the power of those who currently rule Cuba. It is also a strategy to hold the Cuban Americans at bay. Havana no longer fears that Miami will restore the ancien regime by armed invasion or by triggering an American attack on the island. But it does fear that as the Cuban economy gradually tracks back toward a capitalist model, Cuban American investors will simply buy the island back — investing in key industries and property. As far as I can see, the New Economic Policy now being formed in Havana is an attempt to prevent that from happening. On the one hand, island-based individuals and groups will have a chance to become rich and powerful as the economic controls are slowly lifted; on the other, the political authorities will still be able to control the ability of foreign firms and foreign investment to penetrate the island. Raul does not have his brother’s charisma and in any case the second Castro brother will likely follow Fidel into retirement in the not too distant future. Greater economic prosperity will be more important to the regime’s stability as the brothers fade from the scene.
Axis of Ankle-biters Loses a Member
At the same time, the brothers may be sending another message to the US: if we don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with us. They will cut back on the political repression to the point where it isn’t such a stench in our nostrils; more importantly, perhaps, they will distance themselves from Venezuela’s madcap foreign policy.
This is where all the talk about the Holocaust and homosexuals comes in. Fidel Castro wasn’t, I think, primarily talking to American Jews about Jewish (and liberal) issues. These remarks are aimed at Iran. Fidel is rejecting the A-jad. After all, who else both denies the Holocaust and hangs gays?
And by disassociating himself so clearly from the Iranian nastiness, Fidel is taking a swipe at Hugo Chavez, the “Bolivarian” revolutionary whose foreign policy involves not just a prominent friendship with the A-jad, but also, possibly, a quest to get nuclear weapons.
As I read the Cuban tea leaves, Fidel Castro could be signaling that Cuba might under the right conditions opt out of the Venezuelan-led Axis of Ankle-biters. At the very least, he’s telling Chavez not to take Cuba for granted; at most, he is saying that if Cuba can run its domestic affairs in its own (newly less repressive) way, it will get out of the business of making trouble for the US, and conceivably might even be willing to be helpful in a quiet, behind-the-scenes manner.
As always with Cuban foreign policy (and if Castro is a bad economic strategist he is an extremely canny and effective foreign policy thinker), there are several things going on at once. It can’t hurt Cuba to remind Venezuela not to take friendship for granted. Hugo Chavez is realizing that not even huge oil deposits can make socialism work. (Leonid Brezhnev could have told him this.) With domestic opposition growing, Chavez is scrounging around for money to paper over the cracks in his economy and rebuild his core support. Cutting the Cuban allotment must seem like a tempting option; Castro is reminding Chavez that Cuba’s love is a delicate plant that must be lavishly watered to bloom and grow.
But I think there is more. Castro has not survived for more than fifty years in a hostile world by ignoring power realities. It was one thing to count on the USSR as an ally against the US; Iran and Venezuela don’t really provide the same kind of long-term support as the old Soviet superpower. In any case, playing second fiddle to the obstreperous Chavez is not a lot of fun. More, Castro can count. He can see that Chavez’ economic and therefore political difficulties look set to grow; sooner or later Chavez will have to cut Cuba’s allowance to feed the beasts closer to home. And I think he’s a realist enough to understand that Venezuela’s love for Iran is a misstep.
One should never assume that one has gotten to the bottom of Fidel Castro’s mind. I’ve always thought that his core goal was to keep the embargo up, preventing US investors from buying the island out from under his feet and keeping a tight control over the Cuban economy — but that he wanted to make this look like it was America’s fault. He wants to have it both ways: uncontested economic and therefore political power on the island, while posturing as the poor victim of the great international bully — and blaming Cuba’s poverty on the evil Yanqui “blockade”. It’s possible that his latest steps are just variations on this old theme. With Republicans headed for big wins in the midterms, he’s not worried that the US might actually offer to normalize relations — so it’s safe to make diplomatic gestures that won’t be returned. He looks forthcoming and liberal; Uncle Sam looks stubborn and stern.
Most likely, he’s come up with a strategy that offers him three different ways to win. First, the US might actually bite, offering, in effect, to accept a gradual transition in Cuba to something less ugly and less poor that still leaves the core of Cuba’s current elite in place when the Castro brothers go off to meet Marx. Second, Venezuela might pay extra to keep him from bolting. Third, if all else fails, he’s at least convinced a Cuban elite audience who are eager for the kind of economic growth that will make them as rich as the communists in China and Vietnam that the Castro brothers are open to the kinds of changes they seek.
I think we should feel him out. Cuba inside the tent spitting out is better than Cuba outside the tent spitting in. It’s quite possible that Cuban intelligence knows some very interesting things about Venezuela, Iran, and others we would like to keep tabs on. It might be very healthy for some of the bad guys to think about what might happen if Cuba started whispering secrets in our ear.
Something worth considering: for all his shortcomings, Castro in the last analysis is a man of the west, on the side of the Enlightenment against superstition. His view that Marxism is the acme of enlightened thought and the culmination of western intellectual advance was a great and costly mistake; nevertheless he cannot think that he has more in common with adulteress-stoning bigots in Iran than with the bourgeois West. I think he may actually view Chavez’ Iranian connection as both a political blunder and a moral misstep and, all things being equal, he would prefer to keep Cuba out of that particular dead end.
If Cuba continues to release political prisoners — to the Catholic Church and social-democratic Spain rather than to the Yankees, if that is the way the brothers want to do business — then I think the time has come for some serious talks. There’s no guarantee talks will work, but in fifty years of power the Castro brothers haven’t sent this kind of signal. Let’s at least see what they have in mind.