After the Castro time warp, Cubans fear the same old regime
Cubans hope for change but fear it will be the same old regime.
As the sun sets over Havana, Victoria Garcia sits along the city’s crumbling waterfront and ponders what will happen in April when, for the first time in her life, Cuba will no longer be ruled by a dictator named Castro.
“Our generation is ready for change, we want more capitalism, we want more freedom” says the 28-year-old shop assistant. “But is my country ready for this? Or will it just be the same socialism?”
The answer to that question will determine whether Garcia — and a new generation of young Cubans — stay to build a life in Cuba or flee to the US and elsewhere, like so many before them.
Cuba now finds itself at a new and historic crossroads as young Cubans like Garcia wait anxiously to see which path it will take. They are about to witness something that was once unthinkable — the end of the Castro era after almost six decades. It comes at a time when the island is involved in yet another Cold War-style stand-off with a US president — this time Donald Trump — amid bizarre claims of spy novel-style sensory attacks on US diplomats in Havana.
On April 19, Raul Castro, the 86-year-old brother of the late revolutionary leader Fidel, is expected to step down and hand power to a new president.
This alone is no guarantee of change. Castro is expected to remain as the powerful first secretary of the ruling Cuban Communist Party and his nominated replacement, 57-year-old Vice-President Miguel Diaz-Canel, may prove to be little more than a Castro puppet.
But many young Cubans such as Garcia cannot help but hope that the post-Castro era will somehow produce a Gorbachev-like figure to walk their broken nation across the ideological divide and into the 21st century.
“I love my country, but living here is such a struggle,” says Garcia, who grew up on a farm and moved to Havana 11 years ago. “The government says we are free here, but are we really? How can I be free when I cannot stand in the street and say, ‘I love my country but I don’t love my government and I don’t want to be a socialist’?”
The Australian visited Havana and interviewed business owners, economists and ordinary Cubans about their hopes for post-Castro Cuba. Most asked that their names not be used for fear of being arrested by the government, which keeps close tabs on the people, stifling any sign of dissent or even open criticism of the regime.
“There is no free press here and there is no tolerance for views that are not in line with those of the government,” says one business owner, who says he cannot speak publicly without risking the future of his small business, which supports his wife and two children.
No one who visits Cuba today can fail to be confronted by the tragic political and economic time warp to which the Castro years have condemned the country.
Havana is a city where the pause button was pressed in 1959, the year Fidel Castro took over. The mostly American cars that still dominate the road date from that era, chugging around the city emitting plumes of black smoke. The city’s once grand colonial structures from Cuba’s heyday in the early 20th century are crumbling and untouched, state-run grocery stores are nearly empty, the internet barely exists, ATMs remain a novelty, and vast numbers of ordinary citizens live in undisguised squalor.
Government employees receive salaries equivalent to barely $31 a month, putting modern-day amenities such as microwaves and washing machines beyond their reach.
“Raul Castro’s 10-year presidential rule has been utterly disappointing,” says Richard Feinberg, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “Cuba’s economy is stagnant and economic reform has stalled. Political power remains highly centralised and secluded. The island’s educated youth are fleeing in droves for better opportunities abroad. And the Trump administration is renewing US hostility.”
No country will be watching the transition of power in Cuba more closely than the US, where debate continues to rage over the best way to help overturn Havana’s failed socialist revolution.
In June last year, Trump partially reversed the tentative steps taken by his predecessor, Barack Obama, to bring Cuba in from the cold. In 2015, Obama restored diplomatic ties with Cuba and the following year became the first US president to visit the island since 1928. Obama loosened longstanding US commercial and travel restrictions with Havana while still maintaining the overall embargo put in place by president John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.
Obama’s thinking was that capitalism in Cuba would be best encouraged by infusing more American commercial and social influences into the country.
In 2016 in Havana, with Raul Castro in attendance, Obama said he intended to “bury the last vestige of the Cold War” and “leave behind the ideological battles of the past”.
For many young Cubans such as Garcia, it was a moment that made them wonder whether their government might finally be encouraged to loosen its repressive control over Cuban life.
“For the first time I felt hope about our situation,” she says. “I felt I could almost touch it and that we had this path forward, a chance to get a better life.” But US Republicans saw Obama’s detente as an undeserved reward for a brutal regime. It was also deeply unpopular with the fiercely anti-communist Cuban refugees in the US who fled the Castro regime, and who mostly live in Florida. With an eye to winning the votes of the large Cuban demographic in that key election swing state, Trump campaigned hard on reversing Obama’s Cuba policy.
When he signed his new restrictions on travel and trade last June, Trump said: “We do not want US dollars to prop up a military monopoly that exports and abuses the citizens of Cuba.
“To the Cuban government, I say: Put an end to the abuse of dissidents. Release political prisoners from jail. Stop jailing innocent people. Open yourself to political and economic freedoms.”
Trump said his administration would “never ever be blind” to the misdeeds of the Castro governments under both Fidel and Raul. “We remember what happened,” he said.
Garcia understands that America wants to topple the Cuban regime, and she herself wants Cuba to abandon socialism and embrace capitalism, but she says Cubans like her are the victims of this ongoing ideological battle. “Donald Trump and those Cubans in Miami including (senator and former presidential aspirant) Marco Rubio say they are fighting for the people of Cuba. But in the end it is us — the people — who are most damaged by this fight between the two governments.”
Ricardo Torres, an economics professor at Havana University, tells The Australian that Trump’s policy towards Cuba is all about US domestic politics.
“Trump does not care about Cuba, which is not a priority for US policy,” Torres says. “The partial reversal was a concession to the Cuban-American hardliners, whom Trump needed in congress for other reasons.”
Matthew McLaughlin is a Havana-based American who works for Cuba Educational Travel, which facilitates visits by US citizens to Cuba. He says Trump’s partial reversal of Obama’s policy has opened the door for Russia and China to increase influence over Cuba at America’s expense.
“Since Trump’s new policy, Russia and China are signing trade deals with Cuba and have gained stronger influence,” McLaughlin said in an interview in Havana.
“Trump may have been trying to win Florida in 2020 but China and Russia won 2016 as far as Cuba goes.”
Since Trump’s inauguration, relations between Washington and Havana have sunk further with the mysterious sonic-style attacks on US diplomats in Cuba. The attacks left 24 people associated with the US embassy in Havana with medical problems including hearing loss, vision problems and memory issues.
US investigators initially suspected a futuristic sonic weapon was involved but the FBI says it cannot properly identify the nature of the attacks and who was behind them. Even so, the US has blamed Cuba, claiming that if Cuba did not carry them out, then it must know who did.
“I still believe that the Cuban government, someone within the Cuban government, can bring this to an end,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last week.
The US has expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington in reprisal and has drastically reduced staff numbers at its embassy in Havana. Cuba denies any involvement in, or knowledge of, the attacks, describing them as “science fiction”.
The governments of both Fidel — who ruled Cuba from 1959 until 2008, and who died in 2016 aged 90 — and then Raul Castro have tried to place the blame for Cuba’s economic woes squarely on the US economic embargo. Cuba claims it has cost the nation about $US130 billion since it was imposed in the early 1960s.
In Havana’s government-owned Museum of the Revolution, room after room is devoted to Cuba’s struggle against the “imperialist” and “colonialist” American oppressors and their war on Cuba’s socialist dream.
But Cuba’s economic decline parallels that of other communist and socialist regimes around the world and are largely self-inflicted.
As communism and socialism declined internationally, Cuba has progressively lost the benefactors that helped to keep it afloat.
The country slumped economically in the early 1990s after the collapse of its main financial backer, the Soviet Union, in 1991. More recently, the decline of its socialist ally Venezuela has robbed Cuba of vital trade and oil revenue, tipping the Cuban economy into recession in 2016.
Under Raul Castro, Cuba has flirted with private enterprise, allowing privately owned restaurants and other selected businesses. But even this limited privatisation is viewed suspiciously by many of the ruling cabal.
Castro has complained about the burgeoning wealth of these few private enterprises and he recently warned that “the concentration of property and wealth shall not be allowed to go against the principles of our socialism”.
“Cuba’s problems are the result of a combination between the flaws of its economic system and the US sanctions,” says economist Torres. “The (US) embargo is actually a complex set of measures aimed at undermining the Cuban system. It should not be underestimated — the cumulative impact of the sanctions on a small, developing country lying 90 miles (145km) away from US shores.”
The question is whether Castro’s stated successor, Diaz-Canel will have the courage to expand rather than repress this nascent private sector in Cuba.
At face value, it does not look encouraging. Although he was said to have been a long-haired Beatles fan in his youth, Diaz-Canel’s resume shows him to be a loyal communist apparatchik. A trained engineer, Diaz-Canel has spent more than 30 years in the Communist Party and three years as minister for higher education.
In August last year, those hoping that he would prove to be a more liberal leader were disappointed when he made comments that indicated he was opposed to the normalisation of relations with the US.
“The US government ... invaded Cuba, put the blockade on, imposed restrictive measures,” Diaz-Canel said. “Cuba did none of that, so in return for nothing they have to solve (this) if they want normalisation of relations.”
Some of the more optimistic Cuba watchers believe this could be a ruse and that Diaz-Canel will say what the Communist Party wants to hear until he settles in as president. Then he may feel better able to chart a new course for Cuba. But Torres believes the new president will be reluctant to change course quickly.
“I do not think most Cubans believe there will be a radical change even after Raul steps down,” he says. “The successor comes from the party, and there are key documents passed by the last party congress that more or less set the direction for the next five years, and there will be plenty of orthodox officials around.”
“Victoria Garcia” — who asked that her real name not be used for this article — is also concerned that Cuba will not change fast enough for her.
“I am worried that even if he is not a Castro he will not change the direction of this country,” she says “If he did that then the party might lose power, and that is what they fear more than anything else.”
She adds: “I am going to wait and see what happens, but I can’t stay in Cuba and raise my children here unless things change. It breaks my heart because I really love my country.”
Cameron Stewart is The Australian’s Washington correspondent and US contributor for Sky News Australia
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