127 convicted among the opposition in Cuba and the farce trial of Ferrer corner the “regime”

 

Toward a Cohesive Cuban Civil Society

 
In conjunction with the University of Miami, the Brookings Institution’s project on “U.S. Policy toward a Cuba in Transition” held its third simulation exercise on April 16, 2008, focusing on the dynamics, motivations, and decision-making processes of Cuban civil society groups. As Cuba moves toward an uncertain future, participants aimed to examine and better understand the interests, capabilities, and weaknesses of four key but overlapping sectors of Cuban civil society: religious groups, focusing primarily on the Catholic Church, youth, the Afro-Cuban community, youth, and organized opposition/pro-democracy movements on the island. Recognizing that the viability and sustainability of a successful transition in Cuba will depend on internal actors seeking change, in order to develop more effective policy, U.S. policymakers must understand the nature of Cuban movements for change: their strengths and weaknesses, the risks they face, their ability to act “for” something and not merely stand in unified opposition.

The exercise was divided into two parts. First, before beginning the simulation exercise itself, Brookings advisers and special guests assessed the motivations, visions for change, and obstacles confronting the four sectors of Cuban civil society in question. Second, organizers asked participants to put themselves in the shoes of a fictional list of civil society activists – representing a variety of actors and strategies – to discuss possible means for collaboration in order to mobilize membership, build horizontal and vertical linkages, and formulate a common agenda for change with mass appeal. Finally, a teleconference with Cuban activist Oswaldo Payá, widely considered to be among the most successful opposition actors within Cuba for his well-known Varela Project and associated initiatives, concluded the day’s proceedings.This summary endeavors to capture the critical issues and dynamics of the day’s discussions, including participants’ views of the capacity of civil society groups to mobilize, their rationales for action, and their converging/diverging interests. As our previous simulation exercises have explored, the Raul Castro regime has raised the bar of expectations for reform and has taken symbolic actions such as lifting restrictions on access to cell-phones, personal computers, and admission to tourist hotels. Importantly, he has also discussed measures to address productivity, slowly removing wage caps on certain state salaries and allowing for productivity bonuses, effectively refining Cuban Socialism as one of equality of rights and opportunities, not egalitarianism. Raul’s rationale in undertaking such reforms is most likely to release tension in Cuban society and to consolidate control by improving basic productivity and elevating living standards, rather than to grant space for the emergence of civic organizations. A key question for these civic groups is whether such incremental reforms will give space and impetus for political mobilization, or whether they will diminish incentives for civic engagement. In the short term, despite some increased space for criticism resulting from the national debate authorized by Raul Castro, dissidents and human rights activists and others who may think outside of a socialist framework continue to be marginalized.
The simulation thus sought to test whether Cuban civic organizations would unite in pursuit of common objectives, and examine potential points of divisions and motivating factors to establish a common reform agenda. Such analyses of the potential for action will be essential to crafting more effective U.S. strategies to support a peaceful transition in Cuba, with Cubans at the helm, defining the island’s future.
This overview does not represent the views of the Brookings Institution or a consensus view of those individuals who participated in the exercise. Text in italics highlights key conclusions or fulcrum points of discussion.
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The Last Communist

Consider for a moment the career of this Caribbean dictator: he takes office as a reformer, but quickly reveals a…

by Mark Falcoff

 

Consider for a moment the career of this Caribbean dictator: he takes office as a reformer, but quickly reveals a vast, indeed unlimited, appetite for power. He is able to sustain himself in this role partly through the support of one of the superpowers, which regards him—for all his faults and limitations—as a concrete geopolitical asset. At home, he eliminates all centers of independent life; abroad, he connives at the overthrow of neighboring governments, supplying local sympathizers with arms, money, and training. He runs his country like a private estate, overseeing every detail of its economic, political, and military life. In order to do this, he parcels out important responsibilities to his brother. His country—to quote a former American ambassador—is “a true modern totalitarian state, complete with racism, espionage apparatus, torture chambers, and murder factories.”
For three decades the dictator’s name is virtually synonymous with that of his country, and although his jails are full, spies and informers everywhere, and his people impoverished, he is often praised by foreign admirers and major world leaders. Then, one day, his throne is shaken by new winds of democracy and freedom blowing throughout his region and in the wider world. Yet in spite of all predictions—and dozens of assassination plots—he holds onto power, either because (as his apologists claim), in spite of everything, he enjoys enduring popularity among his people, or because (as his critics point out) his opposition remains weak and divided, dead or in exile. Only human mortality seems to limit his survival.
The dictator so described happens to be Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron hand from 1930 to 1962. But the reader who anticipated Fidel Castro instead would not have been off the mark: without a single alteration the same lines accurately summarize the career of the dictator who has just passed his 30th anniversary in power in Cuba. The difference—a crucial one, to be sure—is that Trujillo lacked an ideology—that, and a superpower ally willing to sponsor or countenance his activities outside of his own island-state. Now, however, that Castro has lost (or is in the process of losing) the support of the Soviet Union and what used to be called the Eastern bloc, and the international ideological movement of which he was a part is virtually decomposing before our eyes, he suddenly shrinks to his proper geographical and cultural proportions, and the phenomenon of Castroism threatens to become nothing but an unfortunate subcategory of Caribbean political folklore. Even then, however, we still may not fully grasp its meaning.
In truth, understanding Castro has always called for keeping both aspects—the folkloric and the ideological—in approximately equal focus. Failure to do so has led to some extremely sterile debates: whether Castro was “pushed” into the arms of the Soviet Union in 1960-61 or “jumped”; whether his export of revolutionary violence in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa was undertaken “at the orders” of the Soviet Union or on “his own initiative”; whether—together with North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung—Castro is the last serious, practicing Marxist-Leninist or merely a slightly extravagant Latin American nationalist.
These disputes probably tell us more about ourselves than about Castro himself—about our desire to find rationality in what is often an irrational universe, or (what amounts to the same thing) our need to trivialize volatile and unattractive political phenomena so that they can no longer threaten us. In the particular case of Fidel Castro, it could easily be said that, 30 years after bursting onto the screen of our own political consciousness, he still evades our deepest understanding. Part of the problem has been the sheer paucity of hard information. But part, too, has been the lack of a framework adequate to make sense of what we do know.
In both areas we are aided immeasurably by a new, major biography by Georgie Anne Geyer, veteran foreign correspondent and syndicated columnist, who has been covering Cuba and the Caribbean since the mid-1960’s.¹ Guerrilla Prince reminds us what journalism at its best once was and can still be—a combination of scholarship, reportage, analysis, and serious reflection. It also represents an exhausting backlog of journeys stretching over nearly two decades, not merely to Cuba but to dozens of other countries where Castro has had some claim to a relationship—to Spain (where his father’s relatives still eke out an existence in rural Galicia), to Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Venezuela; and also to the Soviet Union, Poland, Germany, Angola, Ethiopia, and India. In the process, Geyer interviewed more than 600 persons, including not only Castro himself (four times) and his Vice President, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, but people who grew up with him (Luis Aguilar), who taught him as a law student (Herminio Portell-Vilá), who knew him as a young politician and revolutionary (Melba Hernández, José Pardo Llada, Martha Frayde, Huber Matos), or who subsequently dealt with him as an ally (Nikita Khrushchev, Régis Debray, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Juan Bosch, Anastas Mikoyan, Eldridge Cleaver, Daniel Ortega, Jonas Savimbi²) or as an adversary (Richard Nixon, General Vernon Walters, William Colby, Robert McNamara). Some of her most dramatic information has been gleaned from high-level defectors from the regime (there have been many more of them in recent years than is generally realized): General Rafael del Pino, former head of the Cuban air force; Carlos Franqui, former editor of Revolución; and intelligence officers Juan Benemelis and Florentino Aspillaga.

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FROM PAGE # 4

Toward a Cohesive Cuban Civil Society

Key Fulcrum Questions:

• If Cuban democracy must emerge on the backs of Cuban actors, to what extent can Cuban opposition groups and civic organizations unite to create a positive movement for change?
• If the Cuban state accelerates its own reform process, will Cuban civic organizations use this space to coalesce and promote change, or will such incremental reforms dampen the impetus for deeper democratic change?
• To what extent can the Cuban Catholic Church infuse legitimacy into a broad-based civil society movement for change in Cuba? Conversely, to what extent would a civil society with strong strains of secularism be willing to grant religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, a substantial leadership role?
• How can nascent civil society networks constructively engage disaffected youth and mobilize their frustration into a push for reform rather than apathy?
• Do Afro-Cubans remain the loyal “foot soldiers” of the Revolution, as commonly described? Does the continued exclusion they face motivate a desire to push for greater reforms, or reinforce a fear of economic and political uncertainty in an environment of transition?
• Can emerging civil society actors in Cuba create a broad-based umbrella movement for change? What cultural strategies can be used to increase the mass appeal of concrete economic and political demands?
• What are the pros and cons for civil society actors to accept foreign support and what forms should such support take?

Prelimiary Assessment:
The four sectors of Cuban civil society under examination were: religious groups, youth, the Afro-Cuban community, and opposition/pro-democracy movements. While these certainly do not represent all relevant actors or groupings within Cuban civil society, they were identified by project organizers as sectors that deserved particularly close attention and study. Before assessing in the simulation exercise how representatives of each sector might attempt (or struggle) to collaborate with each other, it was important to first discuss each group’s own position and generalized point of view. Participants also interrogated the extent to which each of these four “groups” could be thought of as separate and distinct. Overlap clearly exists and perhaps presents conceptual difficulties, but does not prevent making broader evaluations of each group’s interests. Having a clear understanding of these overriding motivations would help participants more thoroughly analyze the constraints to transforming fractured desires for change into unified civic participation.
Religious Groups (esp. Catholic Church)
There was wide agreement among participants that the Catholic Church – based on its extensive, semi-formalized national network; its provision of relatively safe, protected spaces of expression; and its human and material resources to train young activists and leaders –could play a major role among civil society groups to infuse broad-based legitimacy into a future transition process. Indeed, today the Catholic Church represents the largest single civil society network on the island with connections to youth, Afro-Cubans, women, and human rights groups, as well as the international community. In recent years, as the state has found it increasingly difficult to provide basic services, grassroots, operationally independent sectors of the Cuban Catholic community – often with help from foreign donors – have stepped in to provide humanitarian relief. Cuba’s branch of Caritas, with 12,000 volunteers, can be considered one of the first national non-government institutions of sorts. Likewise, lower-level clergy have on a more limited but still significant basis helped to organize youth, cultural, and educational activities (Father Dagoberto Valdés well known Center for Religious and Civil Formation in Pinar del Río is one example, along with his publication of the magazine Vitral and the online forum Convivencia).
Questions, however, arose about the Church’s non-monolithic structure and its lack of a cohesive vision for change. Participants cited internal divisions between the Church’s organized hierarchy and some portions of the lower-clergy. For its part, the hierarchy remains hesitant or simply does not consider it in its best interest to express open sympathy for the organized opposition or dramatic political reforms, lest such a position provoke the state and threaten the Church’s hard-earned organizational independence. Participants noted that the Church’s low key strategy of co-existence with the regime resulted in the restoration of its position in Cuban society following decades of persecution that closed churches and expelled priests in the 1960s and ‘70s. Today, churches have been reopened and the state does not interfere in dogma or religious practice. For the leadership, the priority therefore appears to be not to reach an accommodation with the state per se, but to protect the Church’s ability to fulfill its fundamental mission: sharing the gospel in a safe, protected space of expression.
Some lower-level clergy are more inclined to stake out activist postures, while still for the most part remaining somewhat wary of openly affiliating themselves with the established opposition. Given the broad spectrum of opinions within the religious sector over the nature of the transition and the extent of the restructuring to be undertaken, participants wondered whether there could be a consensus inside the Church’s hierarchy to recognize and advocate for some greater political/economic reform process.
Similar questions informed the group’s analysis of Protestant and other faith groups on the island, including practitioners of Santería. Participants considered whether religious groups could facilitate the development of a common vision of change based on broader horizontal links and interaction among citizens and associations. Some efforts by various religions to provide humanitarian services and train community leaders, professionals, and youths to take a more active role in civil society are occurring, but there has been no coalescing of such individuals around a consensual agenda. With such forums still limited in size and scope, the potential for Cubans to acquire leadership skills within a religiously-oriented civil society framework remains weak in comparison to the strong influence of government-affiliated mass organizations.
Finally, while the number of those searching for a moral compass in faith has increased, participants highlighted the need to distinguish between nominal institutional religious adherence and the lack of traditional loyalty to organized faith groups. For example, while 60% of the population is baptized, only 1–3% of Cubans are practicing Roman Catholics, in contrast to 75-85% believing in the “divine”.
Looking forward, questions about the ability of religious groups to provide an impetus for change revolved around the following key issues: their relevance in light of low religious adherence and the prospect of improved living-conditions; and the willingness of the Church hierarchy and other religious leaders to step up to support a political reform agenda and lead cooperation between religious groups. Will a strongly secular (in practice) civil society look to religious groups, and the Catholic Church in particular, to play a leadership role in political transitions? Will the Church take such a role, or will the Church hierarchy block the Church’s formal engagement in political reform? Is there sufficient understanding and cooperation among religious groups to bring cohesion to a process of political transition? As Cuba’s macroeconomic situation improves (a possibility examined in the second simulation) are religious groups likely to retain their social relevance and influence?

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The Last Communist

FROM PAGE # 5

From these and others we learn many personal details that have gone unreported in the international press. For example: that Castro’s former wife Mirta has remarried and lives quietly in Madrid (on notice not to speak to any journalist about her former husband if she ever wishes to see her son again); that he has five illegitimate sons by a stunning Cuban beauty, Dalia Soto del Valle Jorge; that, like his son by Mirta, Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart (“Fidelito”), all have been educated in the Soviet Union; that in spite of his vaunted austerity, he has “an extraordinary range” of homes, including a hunting estate which bears a remarkable resemblance to the ones seized from the old aristocrats by the nomenklatura of Eastern European Communism (because the caudillo has a fondness for bowling, some of his residences even have alleys specially imported from Japan); that in spite of his alleged puritanism, Castro has had extensive dealings with the Colombian drug cartel, sometimes through the good offices of Panama’s General Manuel Noriega; that dozens of dummy Cuban “corporations” receive tens of millions of dollars in exchange for such shady transactions as false visas or the illegal use of dead bodies; that a “secret fund” of $4.2 million has been deposited in Swiss banks for the future discretion of the leader; and so on.
Yet it is not so much the individual pieces of information—startling as some of those are—which make Geyer’s portrait so compelling, but rather the way she assembles them. Her intention, she writes, is to provide a “psychologically definitive” portrait. “What,” she asks, is “the nature of the spell that Castro wove over his ‘masses’? How [is] it possible that a man from a small and powerless island should have been able to garner so much power that he could effectively challenge the American superpower itself?” And lingering in the background is an even more troubling question: what is there about Castro which—notwithstanding a suffocating authoritarianism, a failed economy, a record of political confinement for dissidents utterly unmatched in the history of Latin America—has made him an enduring cultural-political icon for so many in the democratic West?

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2.
Cuba is like other Latin American countries, only more so. It has always been a crossroads of two deeply antagonistic cultures—one with roots in the Counter-Reformation, the other in the Enlightenment. In some ways Cuban history is a replay in miniature of the Anglo-Spanish rivalries of the 16th and 17th centuries, with all that implies for religion, social values, and political institutions. The Spanish impress upon Cuban life has been extraordinarily intense: until defeated by the United States in 1898, Madrid had ruled the island continuously for 400 years, including three full generations after all the other Spanish-American societies had shed their colonial status. On the other hand, until the island was granted formal independence in 1901, the prospect of outright annexation to the United States was always a concrete possibility. Throughout Cuba’s history, the mere existence of the United States remained the most important single factor in its national life. Nor—with the best will in the world—could it have been otherwise; by reason of geography alone, the United States was simply too large and too close to be ignored. Another complication: though Cubans were always deeply attracted to the American way of life, it always lay just beyond their reach. This introduced a permanent frustration into Cuban politics, of which Fidel Castro has been the logical end-product and beneficiary.
His father, Angel, was an artillery sergeant from Galicia who fought against the Cuban insurgents in the war of independence (1895-98), then settled there and lived with a Cuban servant girl who was the mother of Fidel Castro and several other siblings. Starting as a day laborer for the United Fruit Company on one of its huge agri-industrial complexes, Angel Castro eventually became a wealthy landowner in his own right, with a 10,000-acre hacienda in the Oriente province. His children grew up economically privileged but socially dislocated, or at any rate “outsiders,” in a Cuban republic where one’s social status was determined largely by proximity to all things American.
In his intolerance, his dogmatism, his personalism, his penchant for individual acts of useless heroism, and his hatred of the United States, Fidel Castro is a legitimate product of his Spanish heritage—a heritage that he does not trouble to deny. As a matter of fact, until recently Spain was the only West European country to maintain a full-scale aid program to Cuba.³ This is not something to be credited only (or even particularly) to the existence of the current Socialist government in Madrid; as Geyer points out, Castro’s relations with the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco were extraordinarily warm, punctuated by the continued exchange of gifts and compliments. Both men yearned to meet (though they never did), but when Franco—scourge of his own political Left—died in 1974, Castro declared a full week of official mourning in Cuba.
This cultural tilt also explains much of Castro’s distaste for the Cuban middle class, which consciously modeled itself upon that of the United States, sometimes—as in the case of the family of his former wife—to the point of converting to Protestantism. Ironically, while Castro has destroyed and dispersed this class—once the largest and most successful in Latin America—he continues to prefer as companions women drawn from its ranks, always, Geyer says, “Americanized, English-speaking, beautiful (most, but not all . . . blond), and from ‘old families’ who had fought against the Spaniards.”

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3.
Although politics interested Castro from his earliest days in the university, there is nothing about this period which prefigures his present ideological attachments. One fellow student recalls his fascination with the European fascists of the 1940’s; another remembers him saying that he would like to be a Communist (“But only if I can be Stalin”). If Castro eventually declared himself a Communist, it was because, as his one-time associate and fellow revolutionary Huber Matos put it, of all ideologies Marxism-Leninism “offered him the [best] opportunity of becoming the undisputed ruler of the country for the rest of his life.”
Certainly the only constant that characterizes Castro’s early career is a relentless quest for power, and a willingness to use violence to advance his progress. At the university he enlisted in several of the “direct-action” groups that employed robbery and assassination in the service of some extremely vague ideological goals. Though he eventually received his law degree, he never actually practiced, and in fact throughout his entire life he has lived on the wealth produced by others. (Even his honeymoon to New York City in 1948 was paid for by, of all people, the then-ex-President—and future dictator—Fulgencio Batista, a friend of his new father-in-law.) Castro never lacked energy, but he has always been incapable of summoning up the discipline necessary for sustained and systematic work.
Two quite different factors made possible Castro’s eventual ascent. The first was Cuban politics, which in the best of times never rose much above a kind of gangster populism. For the first 30 years of Cuban independence, public life was little more than a pillaging of the public treasury, with different heroes of the war of independence taking turns distributing spoils to their followers. The system was broken in the 1930’s by a revolution led (somewhat improbably) by students and noncommissioned officers of the army, but what followed, if marginally more democratic, was profoundly uninspiring. Posing as men of the democratic Left (both had been radicals in earlier years), Presidents Ramón Grau San Martín (1944- 48) and Carlos Prío (1948-52) were unusually corrupt. Thus, when General Batista seized power on the eve of elections in 1952, there were few who thought the system worth defending. As for Batista himself, though once a reasonably decent President (1940-44), by 1952 he had become squalid and self-indulgent, and, as time went on, increasingly authoritarian. This unlovely combination eventually readied Cubans for a radical break—by the late 50’s it was simply a matter of someone emerging to lead them.
At the start there was no compelling reason why that person had to be Fidel Castro, who at the time of Batista’s 1952 coup had been a virtually unknown lawyer (and candidate for Congress in elections which had never been held). His hagiographers are fond of pointing out that Castro was bold enough to file a suit against Batista’s putsch at the Court of Constitutional Guarantees, and that in the following year he and a group of determined (or desperate) followers attempted to overthrow the government by seizing the Moncada Fortress in Santiago, Cuba’s second largest city. But the larger cause of Castro’s rise was the timely demise of others who might more properly have led the opposition to Batista—particularly Eduardo Chibás, a radio commentator who held all Cuba’s attention on his Sunday-night broadcasts until he overreached himself in his accusations, and committed suicide after leaving the air one night in 1951.
There is, in fact, an even more sinister pattern in Castro’s relationship to potential rivals. Some have disappeared under unexplained or doubtful circumstances: Frank País, the leader of the civic resistance against Batista, whom Geyer fairly well establishes was betrayed to the Cuban police by Vilma Espín, current wife of Castro’s brother Raúl; Camilo Cienfuegos, the most popular of the guerrilla commanders in the war against Batista, who perished in a mysterious aviation accident shortly after the victory of the revolution; or Ché Guevara himself, sent to a virtual certain death first in the Congo, and then in Bolivia. Others have been deliberately eliminated in spectacular show trials—Huber Matos, labor leader David Salvador, and, lately, General Armando Ochoa, the most distinguished soldier in Cuba’s army. Geyer is particularly strong in showing how Castro—secreted away in the fastness of the Oriente province, head of a tiny guerrilla “army” that rarely saw any real action during the late 50’s—captured the imagination of the Cuban public through the creative manipulation of the news media (first in Cuba, later in the New York Times through Herbert Matthews), and also by carefully playing different opponents of Batista off against each other. (Some, like País, perished in the real front lines of the war, which were in Cuba’s cities, particularly Havana.) By the time Castro entered Havana on New Year’s Day 1959, there remained no alternative to him, and the entire nation was ready to surrender itself to its new idol. The revolution was his to make—in any configuration he might choose.

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FROM PAGE # 16

Toward a Cohesive Cuban Civil Society

  Of a total population of 11.4 million, approximately 8 million Cubans were born after the 1959 Revolution. Of this group, the 2.2 million born after 1992 have only experienced Cuban “communism” under the austere conditions of the ‘Special Period’. As such, youth may be far less likely to harbor much enduring loyalty to Cuba’s revolutionary heyday and may be more prone to disillusionment and/or a willingness to push for greater openness.
Participants highlighted the crucial divide between youth not associated with government organizations and those working for or within the government or government-affiliated institutions. On the one hand, youth within the government or government-affiliated institutions may uphold basic principles of revolutionary ideology but, with little nostalgia for the past, may also be the single most important force for change in the future. On the other hand, the majority of youth on the island today are disconnected and disenchanted, posing a significant challenge for the government’s efforts to inject hope and revolutionary pride into a younger generation. Yet at the same time, nascent civil society networks also face significant difficulties in finding ways to constructively engage youth and mobilize their frustration into a push for political as well as economic change.
In contrast to older generations, for whom “change” may be more precarious and associated with a loss of stability, disconnected youth are less predisposed to behaving “inside the box,” focusing instead on immediate gratification in the informal sector and tourist economy to generate greater material well-being. Participants agreed that students in particular are more prone to disillusionment and restlessness, as the incentive for education is falling. Youth see no connection between their educational opportunities and career prospects. With high salaries promised by work in the informal or tourist sectors, university enrollment has declined 30% since 2005 across the island. Likewise, migratory outflows, perhaps the clearest indicator of youth disillusionment, are growing.
Participants considered the problematic nature of Cuban youth in light of the group’s discussions during previous simulations (simulation 2) of the effects of Raul Castro’s recent and future reform efforts on rising expectations. All agreed that recent changes may have elicited some hope among disaffected youth. But again, with generalized frustration among youth well entrenched and skepticism high, the costs of failing to meet expectations could even be broader among youth than within the wider population. The margin of error could be low, and a “tipping point” could be reached, pushing youth frustration into bold mobilization.
Whether that mobilization leads to destructive behavior or whether it can be channeled into peaceful movements for change will likely depend on the readiness of existing civil society networks to tap into the youth market, as it were. On the other hand, participants considered the possibility that not only disaffection but apathy are both widespread, which may lead youth to simply stand aside, expecting the state or other actors to fulfill their needs without seeking their own participatory role in a reform process. Or, given the chance, many may simply opt to vote with their feet and take to the seas in search of better opportunities elsewhere, as happens today.
Afro-Cubans
Afro-Cubans, defined as those of black (11%) or mulatto (51%) ancestry, make up 62% of the Cuban population today. Cuba is an extensively integrated society and due to equitable access to housing, health care, and education, it would be erroneous to speak of a single Afro-Cuban “perspective” as such. Still, several important general trends, motivations, and dynamics can be observed. First, all participants agreed that racial discrimination has limited Afro-Cubans’ (mostly those of black, not mulatto ancestry) access to employment compensated in convertible currency. Second, because most of those who have left the country are Caucasian, far fewer Afro-Cubans enjoy access to foreign remittances. Thus, the economic hardship of the Special Period has been disproportionately borne by the Afro-Cuban population.
Afro-Cubans have been traditionally thought of as stalwart supporters of the Revolution for the concrete benefits it had previously bestowed in terms of access to education, healthcare, material goods, and training. Yet the resurgence of racism in the Special Period and beyond, coupled with the degree to which Afro-Cubans have faced economic difficulties, may have undermined this linkage, increasing popular disaffection. Nevertheless, as key historic beneficiaries of the Revolution’s social welfare policies, participants felt many Afro-Cubans might understandably fear the consequences of rapid change and the strengthening of economic inequalities under a capitalist transition. Participants also highlighted the important regional dimensions that impact Cuba’s racial politics, with higher portions of Afro-Cuban citizens residing in Cuba’s eastern provinces. There, material difficulties over the past fifteen years have been particularly acute, and the government has stringently clamped down on any form of dissent emerging from these sectors.
In light of these dynamics, participants concluded that Afro-Cuban disaffection may perhaps represent as great a political challenge to the regime as that of the previously discussed estrangement of youth, requiring deep structural and institutional changes. Interlinked causes of disaffection are manifest in the intersection of racism with inequality, youth, and crime. Government-affiliated institutions seem to have recognized this problem and are granting the Afro-Cuban issue greater public attention. One participant noted that in April of this year, for example, a discussion of race was featured on the annual UNEAC (National Union of Cuban Artists and Writers) Congress’ agenda, and the new Academy of Sciences is incorporating the subject into its focus on youth, social disaffection, and crime. However, as low living-standards form the crux of Afro-Cuban disaffection, the regime may focus on short-term solutions to address immediate needs and concerns, delaying deeper structural and institutional reforms, asserting political control, and thereby rendering pressures from external civil groups representing this community obsolete. [Raul’s speech at the 55^th Anniversary of the Attack on the Moncada and Manuel de Céspedes barracks in Santiago on July 26, 2008, emphasizing the renovation of aqueducts to provide daily supply of water by 2010 across the mostly Afro-Cuban Eastern Provinces in Santiago, Holguín, Baracoa, Las Tunas and Camagüey, may serve this purpose well].
Examining the long tradition of horizontal civil society linkages between Afro-Cubans, combining religious identities with ties of community, culture, and common experience, participants concurred that such linkages are not heavily formalized, and remain encapsulated in loose organizations such as the Santería tradition. Participants agreed on the limitations inherent to these networks, which lack organization and structure. Vertical linkages are a work in progress, and the recent appointment of high-level Afro-Cubans to the National Assembly and Politburo, including three women, may assist in promoting affirmative social policies (access to welfare and economic opportunities) and anti-discrimination measures. Yet to date, few Afro-Cuban civil society organizations possess the adequate organizational capacity to make demands on and communicate with the state. While some Afro-Cuban voices have permeated the leadership ranks of the opposition movement, including the prominent imprisoned Oscar Elias Biscet, the activist Antúnez family, Félix Bonne Carcassés, and Vladimiro Roca, their reach to Afro-Cuban communities remain limited. Overall, whether in the government sphere, religious groups, or the opposition movement, few Afro-Cubans have obtained positions of leadership with sufficient organizational capacity and a clear alternate political trajectory. This reality, participants concluded, reflects the diffusion of the Afro-Cuban population across a wide range of competing occupations, positions, interests, and points of view.
It remains to be seen whether the Afro-Cuban community as such will cross a threshold and begin to operate as a distinct civil society actor in the public sphere. Some Afro-Cuban musicians and artists since the 1990s have more forcefully articulated a sense of “black” identity, but such expressions, despite their political overtones, remain in the cultural realm; while they may give voice to frustration, including to youth of all races, they do not seem to have inspired a strong desire for collective political action. Still, participants debated which, if any, “signs” might signal whether Afro-Cubans will remain resistant to broad change (fearing, for example, a loss of privileges under a transition scenario that sees the largely Caucasian Cuban American community exerting significant influence) or whether they too can find common ground with other sectors of civil society to push for sweeping reforms.
Organized Opposition
Participants considered the wide-range of actors that constitute the “established opposition” or dissident movement within Cuba today, debating whether these diverse groups could coalesce around a common denominator or vision. Despite the signing of several declarations of unity among leading opposition activists, for the most part, the three traditional political fronts – Liberals, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats – being shaped by the most prominent dissident groups continue to pursue their own uncoordinated and often conflicting visions of change. The question of leadership remains a problem, with most opposition groups known for their individual leaders rather than the movements they represent as such. Such personality-driven activism has had the tendency, many believed, to keep the opposition fractured.
Significant efforts have been undertaken to mobilize political opinion, the most well-known being Oswaldo Payá’s national dialogue Varela Project and its extension, the Todos Cubanos program. The Varela Project draws upon Article 88 of the Cuban Constitution of 1976, a provision that enables citizens to introduce legislation when accompanied by 10,000 signatures. The principles of the petition, demanding the rights to free expression and association, amnesty for non-violent political prisoners, free enterprise, and electoral reforms, were seen as the first steps to create the necessary space for all Cubans to freely participate in economic and political life on the island. The petition achieved unprecedented success in political organizing and was presented to the National Assembly with a total of 25,404 signatures in 2002 and 2003. The Cuban legislature rejected the project, and the Assembly’s Constitution and Legal Affairs Committee responded with its own counter initiative, providing that the Cuban Constitution be amended to make permanent the socialist nature of the Cuban state – the government claimed that it was met with 99% voter approval. To further crush the organized opposition, beginning on March 18, 2003 the Cuban government arrested, summarily tried and jailed 75 civil society leaders in Cuba, including independent journalists, librarians and trade unionists.
In spite of the continued existence of such mobilizations, participants disagreed in their assessment of the dissident movement’s level of impact within Cuba today. Most agreed that because of the opposition’s lack of access to the mass media and their constant vilification in the state press, few Cubans are likely to recognize the dissident movement as a true symbolic or practical alternative at this point in time. For some in the group, international support may be the only thread propping the movement up. Others saw the opposition as a weak but nonetheless substantive movement with significant roots.
The key issue confronting participants was whether a dissident-based opposition culture could provide the foundations for an opposition movement, or whether dissident groups in their current form would become less relevant in light of changing political and economic dynamics. In the end, participants’ remarks coalesced around a common concern: namely, that despite the long struggles and obstacles faced by opposition activists, with greater economic openings, more is now at stake for the dissident movement than at perhaps any other moment in its history.
For a “movement” to emerge, participants debated whether sufficient political space for engagement and dialogue among opposition leaders would be able to arise, and whether leaders would be able to refocus their attention from “opposing” to creating a positive message to unite together. To counter fading into irrelevance, groups would have to move out of their comfort zone and speed up their processes of mobilization.

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FROM PAGE # 12

The Last Communist

4.
And the choice was his alone. One of the most durable foreign-policy legends of all time is the notion that the United States, by its supposedly cruel and ungenerous response to the infant revolution in Cuba, forced Castro to align himself with the Soviets. Geyer patiently unravels all the details, exposing this story for the myth it is: outside the immediate circle of Ambassador Earl E.T Smith and his military advisers, most American diplomats in Cuba openly and enthusiastically backed Castro’s revolutionaries. Indeed, a former CIA agent recalled in 1987 that this even included his own station chief. The State Department—torn between Smith’s cables and all other information it was receiving—thrashed about in search of a “third force”—“a policy,” Geyer dryly observes, “that people who live in ordered societies so love to insist upon for those who live in disordered ones.”
In the end, in any case, the U.S. role was irrelevant, as it so often has been in Latin America. Batista fled, Castro assumed power, and Washington decided to do its best by him. When the new Cuban leader came to this country in 1960—contrary to the way he himself would later describe the trip—he was, writes Geyer, “feted, admired, and celebrated everywhere he went.” So favorable was the reception, and so evidently taken by it was its object that (Geyer reveals) during those heady days Fidel was getting repeated phone calls from his brother Raúl (who had remained behind) accusing him of “selling out to the Americans.” Teresa Casuso, now Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, even recalls that at one point Fidel “almost wept” at his brother’s accusations.
Try as they might, however, U.S. officials—including Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter, who convened an extraordinary high-level lunch to welcome Castro to Washington—could not get the visiting delegation to concentrate on serious economic talks. The reason was simple: the new Cuban leader had already decided upon a different course for his country. Here is the way that Geyer explains Castro’s apparent ideological conversion:

Fidel Castro never “became” a Communist as one becomes a Mason, a Catholic, an SS officer, a Hare Krishna, or a Zoroastrian. He did not adapt himself to an ideology; he found an ideology to adapt itself to him . . . he brought “Communism” to power through his own ego, instead of through an ideology imposed through a movement.
In fact, Castro never really became a “Communist” at all. The new thing in history that Castro did was to destroy the Communist party and create his own Fidelista party, which he called Communist in order to stand up to the United States and to gain backing and to borrow power from the Soviet Union. For the first time in history, a national leader converted the Communist party to himself!

As Geyer notes, there was a cold and implacable logic to Castro’s choice: a close relationship with the United States would have required him to conform to the notions of “bourgeois legality” and constitutional government, or at least would have subjected him to the kind of pressures from Washington which had circumscribed the power of other Cuban dictators. Evidently nothing of the sort would be forthcoming from the Kremlin.
Moreover, to become a client state of the Soviet Union—a vast Eurasian land mass itself imperfectly civilized, and incomparably remote—would insulate Cuba from countervailing cultural influences. At least until the advent of Gorbachev, there was nothing about Soviet society to invite Cubans to invidious comparisons; if anything, the attractions ran entirely in the other direction, at least at the beginning. (As Anastas Mikoyan remarked upon his arrival in 1960, Cuba’s revolution exuded “a sense of romanticism,” which, he added in a candid aside, “by that time had almost been lost in our country.”)
Much has been made by Castro apologists of the counterrevolutionary adventure sponsored by the United States in April 1961 and forever after known as the Bay of Pigs—the landing of several thousand anti-Castro Cubans on the southern coast of the island. What should be remembered best about that event, however, is the remarkable restraint which the United States showed: if it had really been determined to bring Castro down, it would not have denied the insurgents the air cover they required, or (in the final instance) failed to send in U.S. troops to keep the operation from collapsing altogether. One might well ask what President John F. Kennedy had in mind by picking a fight with Castro with one hand tied behind his back; whatever it was, it could not have been a commitment to overthrow the Cuban dictator at any cost.
The Kennedy-Khrushchev accords which concluded the missile crisis of October 1962 are another monument to American restraint. In some ways, indeed, the U.S. promise not to invade Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet nuclear weapons from the island could be seen as a victory for Moscow and Havana as well—since by installing the missiles in the first place, they obtained (admittedly, at very high risk) something they probably would not otherwise have obtained.⁴
As Geyer points out, Castro’s approach to the United States has been rather less restrained. Though the United States was finally persuaded to accept his regime as an accomplished fact, Castro has never quite returned the compliment: witness his unflagging support for Puerto Rican terrorists and black American “revolutionaries.” On a somewhat grander level of geopolitics, Khrushchev’s recently published posthumous memoirs reveal that Castro was urging the Soviets to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States in the event that it attempted to invade the island to disarm the missiles—a counsel which the Soviet leader quite properly regarded as suicidal (not to say apocalyptic).
Again, while we are often reminded of the numerous CIA plots to assassinate Castro (none of which ever got off the ground), Geyer lays out some rather disturbing evidence—not conclusive, to be sure, but too compelling to be dismissed out of hand—that Castro may have been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Nor has the Cuban dictator mellowed much with time; General del Pino told Geyer that after the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, Castro ordered his air-force fighter planes programmed to fly against the Turkey Point nuclear installation 24 miles south of Miami. Del Pino was shocked; didn’t the dictator realize, he asked, “that if this plant is destroyed, it would not only annihilate all the Cubans in Miami but . . . radioactivity would fall on Cuba?”

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5.
“Man, we’re strong and dangerous,” Che Guevara gushed to the Cuban army magazine Verde Olivo in 1960. “Oh, it is so great and comfortable to belong to such a strong world power as dangerous as Cuba!” The political scientist Jorge Dominguez of Harvard found a way of putting it more elegantly two decades later, when he described Cuba as “a small country with a big country’s foreign policy.” It is this, in fact, not police-state socialism, which constitutes Castro’s greatest political innovation, and to which he owes much of his appeal in the poorer, more wretched backwaters of the third world.
Cuba was always too small a stage for Castro’s ambitions, and almost from the very start he attempted to project his presence onto the South American mainland. (Aspillaga recalls him fantasizing even as late as the mid-1980’s about eventually becoming the President of “Latin America.”) The vision of Cuba as a potential great power—however outlandish to foreigners—has deep roots in the island’s political history; but without the economic, logistical, and political support of the Soviet Union, it could only have remained the daydream of a frustrated tropical politician.
With such support, however, Castro was able to leverage his way to quasi-great-power status. Geyer reminds us that at the height of Castro’s “military globalism” in the early 1970’s, an island with a population of eight million people had some 250,000 “internationalist fighters” deployed around the globe. (During the Ethiopian civil war, an entire Cuban expeditionary force was transported to Africa, there to fight under the command of a Soviet general.) In addition, Castro was sponsoring 27 active guerrilla organizations with 25,000 armed and trained members from other countries, backed up by an additional 20,000 from Africa and Nicaragua who had undergone political-indoctrination classes in Cuba. Havana became one of the two “polar centers” for guerrilla warfare in the world (the other being the Palestinian national movement in the Middle East).
Geyer is quite clear on just what all of this meant for international politics. Without Castro’s advice and support

there would have been no Nicaraguan Sandinistas, no [U.S.] invasion of Grenada, no guerrilla movements from El Salvador to Uruguay to Chile, no destruction of democracy in the Southern Cone [of South America], no Marxist Angola, Mozambique, or Ethiopia.
There would have been no new political, ideological, and strategic balance of power in southern Africa, and no super-national “drug state,” defended by the leftist guerrillas he had trained, spreading like an evil and consuming Rorschach blot across Latin America, with its own armies and borders.
There would have been no extension, for the first time, of Latin America’s reach within the United States, no first and second Marxist-Leninist state in the Western hemisphere. From 1959 on, wherever the United States had a watershed foreign-policy crisis, Castro’s formative hand could be found.

The motor of all of this was not Marxism as an ideology or the Soviet Union’s strategic designs, crucial as both of those were to Castro’s success. Rather, the foundation-stone of his career as a revolutionary in Cuba was resentment. “His was a politics not of interest,” she writes, “but of complexes.” He destroyed the old Cuba “not because the Americans turned their backs on him, but in order to avoid the wrenching feelings of inferiority, so as not to have to compete with a culture that was so unbearable exactly because the Cuban people wanted it.”
Castro’s foreign policy, then, was merely a projection of this attitude on a global scale: a military-political alliance with the other “losers” of history. Somewhere along the line, however, he lost sight of the fact that his global reach was almost entirely based on Soviet power and Moscow’s willingness (and ability) to project it. In some ways this was entirely understandable: the Cuban dictator did not always follow the Kremlin’s instructions, and sometimes rushed ahead of his patrons, forcing them to make good revolutionary accounts he had opened in strange and difficult places. As the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko later remarked, no client ever drew upon greater reserves of Moscow’s patience than the Cubans. As long as strategic bipolarity was a fact of life, Castro could successfully manipulate his sponsor. But who needs him—or his country—now that it is not?

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FROM PAGE # 19

Toward a Cohesive Cuban Civil Society

Simulation Exercise: Meeting of Grassroots Activists, July 26, 2010 

Concluding this broad discussion, participants moved on to the simulation exercise itself. As stated earlier, organizers asked participants to put themselves in the shoes of a fictional list of civil society activists as they meet to discuss common objectives and possible means for collaboration. Individuals representing the religious community, youth, Afro–Cubans, and dissidents had been called together by a Methodist Minister in Santiago de Cuba. It was assumed that the meeting takes place in 2010 within Cuba, in an environment characterized by significantly greater openness and potential for reform. Fidel and Machado Ventura had passed away, and Carlos Lage had ascended to the First Vice Presidency, raising hopes that further economic reforms would help open greater political space. Travel and remittance revenues are up after a new U.S. President has removed some restrictions. Uncertainty prevails, and while an increasingly wide array of civil society actors believe greater change is necessary, they are divided between those preferring to adopt a wait-and-see approach and those who believe that the time to push aggressively for reform is now. The group meets to discuss the viability of formulating a declaration of unity and begin exploring means to collaborate and mobilize peaceful civic action. They hope that the diversity within their own ranks will allow their movement to transcend the framework of established opposition groups, allowing them to appeal to a broader segment of the population.
As this suggests, rather than simulate a meeting of established members of the democratic opposition, the exercise sought to gather together fictional personalities who, for a variety of reasons, have come to the conclusion that greater changes in Cuban society are needed, but do not necessarily affiliate themselves with the existing dissident movement. Although it is possible that members of the existing dissident movement would participate in such a meeting, no individual or group was identified as such. More fundamentally, the exercise sought to address how civil society would contend with the Cuban government’s incremental reforms. Would civil society press for more political as well as economic openings, and if so, what might be the tools to do so successfully, or might such reforms diminish the impetus for deeper political openings and democratization?
Declaration of Principles
In their respective roles as members of diverse Church-affiliated, Afro-Cuban, youth, and other civil society groups, simulation participants immediately set out to establish consensus around a clear set of basic principles. Yet as discussions began, significant differences in perspective emerged. Some participants stressed the need to keep any consensual agenda strictly tied to political reforms and political themes: democracy, rule of law, freedom for political prisoners. Others were more wary of such a focus, as it would seem to ally their actions with the same basic tenets of the established dissident movement, thereby threatening their legitimacy as a supposedly “new voice.” Some lobbied for a strong focus on economic themes, connecting the idea of economic difficulties to the need for greater economic freedoms, which are in many ways inherently political. Once again, differences emerged, with those representing the perspective of Afro-Cuban activists expressing significant concern for any kind of economic platform that would threaten access to state-provided welfare services.
To the extent that any consensus did emerge, it was around general principles of patriotism, family, and justice, which would resonate even with the Raul Castro regime. Such principles included declarations on equal rights, a call on the regime to be held accountable to the people, the furthering of the cause of the “family”, and acting within the law. The purpose of such principles would be to reflect that there is a widening base of Cubans who seek change, and the first steps toward change would be to press the regime for accountability, and to make “advancing the family” a goal comparable to advancing the interests of the state.
Strategies for Civic Action
Simulation participants then began to explore how civic action could demonstrate or advance such basic principles, to begin to create confidence for public discourse and engagement. Participants considered a wide range of possibilities, from a proactive political campaign to popular public events around music or cultural themes. As participants tested the alternatives, they found consensus only around the latter.
Some participants emphasized that the time to act is now, as civil society had been unwittingly granted some space that should be seized to press concrete demands on the regime. One participant proposed finding ways to bring greater pressure to bear on government channels in order to push concrete political or economic demands (freedom for political prisoners, for example). Another strongly suggested convening a national non-violent strike of civil disobedience to symbolically commemorate the “Cry of Yara.” Yet in addition to the fear that such an action would provoke wide reprisals and sacrifice the space that civil society had already earned, serious questions about capacity emerged. Representatives at the table were forced to confront the fact that the organizations they represented did not have either the resources or the networking capability to pull off such a feat in the near future.
Broader, more sweeping proposals emerged, including building a wide national coalition of civil society groups to call for a constitutional assembly or a transitional government within one year. Alternatively, one participant suggested replicating Oswaldo Payá’s petition strategy, but depoliticizing its content to garner broader appeal. Basic demands could be as simple as: non-violence, respect for human rights, respect for free enterprise, and the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission. Issues of sequencing arose among the group, with some arguing that before calling for any such measures, key members of the National Assembly or Central Committee should be approached, perhaps with an open letter, to start a dialogue about representative government and thus lay out a course for a peaceful transition.
After extensive debate, the one course where consensus emerged was to host a series of events focused on music and culture. A celebration would draw a wide turnout, and could be focused on a positive message about what Cubans seek – the benign, but uniting principles the group formulated at the outset of the simulation. For example, a national day of prayer to honor the upcoming beatification of Brother José López Piteira, the first native Cuban to receive this honor, would be a powerful and “Cuban” means to demonstrate public awareness. Celebratory cultural events conducted in different parts of the country could become their own mobilizing force and this mobilization would in effect become the political message – perhaps as much to the Cuban people as to the government. For the Cuban people, the purpose would be to show that many are united in a common and positive pro-Cuban agenda that calls for more opportunity for the family, and greater respect for the law, including accountability for politicians. For the Cuban regime, the message would be the breadth of desire for change, where the same calls would demonstrate that reforms cannot stop at cosmetic change. Stifling the emergence of such a wide-based movement founded on “Cuban values” would be highly problematic for a regime redefining its Socialist base and support among the populace.
A Cultural Umbrella Movement
After assessing their own limited capacities as representatives of small movements and reviewing the plausibility of several strategies of civic action, participants gradually converged around two more fundamental conclusions: 1) Cuba requires a larger umbrella movement to unite forces for change, and 2) that movement will only succeed if it can promote cultural strategies that cut across societal cleavages.
Participants discussed the challenges and practicality of creating, leading, directing, and managing an umbrella movement. Great concern emerged about the inherent challenge of creating a truly social movement not centered necessarily around one individual leader (replicating the caudillismo in Cuba’s past), but with nonetheless a clear leadership structure and organizing capacity. Could Cuban civil society seek to build a series of interlocking networks, coming together around a broader agenda?
In particular, participants discussed how to engage youth. On the one hand, the disaffection felt by youth offers a vast store of potential to be harvested as a resource for change. Yet due to the general lack of a defined, nuanced long-term vision among youth for political reform and, more importantly, a general rejection by disaffected youth of any campaign that seems overtly “political,” participants again highlighted the need to articulate a platform of political and economic change through culturally appealing slogans and strategies. To this end, participants drew attention to the need to find means to bring together youth who may be too frustrated and apolitical and are therefore difficult to turn into agents of change with those who hold high demands for change but may be difficult to govern.
To successfully engage the Afro-Cuban community and address their potential anxieties regarding change, participants recommended that an umbrella civil society movement strongly emphasize an integrated approach, perhaps drawing on the nationalist legacy of the Revolution itself in order to avoid any racial tensions. Fears of change could also be averted by emphasizing a politically savvy and bridge-building social justice discourse that sits alongside calls for political liberties. Thus, an umbrella movement might pledge its commitment to guaranteeing a safety net and welfare measures (pensions) during a transition while also prioritizing the improvement of standards of living (including by way of access to convertible currency) and access to education.
Building off this discussion, some participants highlighted the importance of not defining a broad umbrella movement as diametrically “opposed” to the Revolution per se, as among Afro-Cubans and many other sectors of the population the nationalist symbolism and concrete benefits bestowed under the Revolution at varying points in its history remain important. Rather, an umbrella movement might position itself as a natural evolution, combining the rhetoric of the Revolution’s commitment to equality and social justice with a more realistic economic framework and political liberties. Of course, for some participants, such a strategy was problematic as it might isolate some more traditional dissident activists hoping for a cleaner break with the symbols and legacy of the communist system.
To assuage fears of simply being labeled “agents” of outside actors, a number of participants stressed the importance of maintaining a certain degree of distance from the rhetoric and activities of established dissident movements, emphasizing the desire to move beyond a framework of politicized “dissidence” as conceived today, and the difficulty of collaboration given the existing opposition movements’ own inherent fragmentation. Nevertheless, participants recognized the potential benefits of incorporating these actors and their traditional focus on human rights into a broader consensual agenda, as a cultural movement could draw on the demonstrated potential of dissident groups to organize networks, project coherent political messages, and mobilize citizens. Participants reiterated that dissident leaders will, however, first need the discipline to develop their currently competing platforms into unified proposals for a program of governance in conjunction with a broader set of civil society actors. A broader umbrella movement could then offer the potential for providing a bridge between dissident leadership.
Foreign Support
Another key point of discussion involved the willingness of activists in any future umbrella group to receive foreign support – especially U.S. financial support – if it were to become available. Though conclusions about direct funding ranged in this regard, all participants agreed that overt U.S. support risks any movement’s perceived legitimacy in a Cuban context where nationalism remains a prominent and vigorously-defended principle. Under such circumstances, multilateral aid would be more constructive and less threatening.
Stepping out of role to begin to frame U.S. policy, while direct financial support for opposition groups was deemed a problem, participants agreed that funding for humanitarian aid, and in support of families for human rights activists should be continued. Such funding should be accompanied by new non-governmental efforts to increase person-to-person contacts. To this end, the U.S. might support exchange programs bringing Cubans to the U.S. and vice-versa, and encourage the opening of U.S. civil society to the island, enabling civic groups to engage their Cuban counterparts, and effectively move away from current U.S. micromanagement of dissident actors on the island.
In the short- and medium-terms, a regional civil society fund managed by the Organization of American States (OAS) was suggested, whereby the U.S. could channel funds to support existing regional or international non-governmental organizations that provide technical training, grass-roots media and education projects, and public goods and services. Greater civil society involvement may also be directed through the activities of international networks with already significant presences in Cuba, such as the Free-Masons. Finally, relations with international organizations (the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the Council of Europe Venice Commission, for example) to assist Cuban civil society actors with consultative opinions should also be developed through such multilateral efforts.
Of course, the possibility of such initiatives is largely conditional upon the Cuban government’s openness to their existence, surely not an easy prospect. Nonetheless, in the medium-term, financial assistance for such schemes would perhaps be better managed via regional or multilateral cooperation, whether through the OAS or unique partnerships with other regional institutions and allies.

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The Last Communist

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6.
More guns, at home and abroad, have meant, inevitably, less butter at home. In effect, Castro has consolidated his power at home and extended it overseas at the cost of huge sacrifices from his own people. The point is worth dwelling upon only because it is so far from what he explicitly promised Cubans at the beginning. In his famous speech in 1953 (“History Will Absolve Me”), delivered at his trial for having assaulted the Moncada Fortress, the future dictator claimed that “Cuba can support splendidly a population three times larger than it now has. . . . There is no reason . . . for the misery among its inhabitants. The market should be flooded with produce, pantries should be full, all hands should be industriously producing.”
Today, however, Castro’s Cuba is an object lesson not in progress but in regression. Far from becoming an independent industrial power in its own right, the island found itself unable even to produce enough sugar, and from 1983 on had to resort to the open market to meet its export quota to the Soviet Union. One Cuban who returned from exile in Spain several years ago found that literally nothing had changed—“the same crystal windows . . . the [same] baths. The iceboxes were from the time of Humphrey Bogart.” In many other ways, too, the country is poorer than it has ever been. Instead of “markets . . . flooded with produce, pantries . . . full,” the population survives at a virtual subsistence level, with every article of prime necessity sternly rationed.⁵ A Cuban-American woman who recently visited her family there recalled one of her cousins saying, “Tell our relatives in the United States not to worry—we’re fine here in Cuba; the only thing we lack is food and freedom.” Suicide is now the principal cause of death of Cubans between the ages of 41 and 49—an affliction which, Geyer reminds us, has touched Castro’s personal entourage twice (his close associate Haydée Santamaría, and his onetime puppet President Osvaldo Dórticos).
There were still—there are still—those who lamely defend this state of affairs either in terms of the American economic “blockade” (actually, a trade embargo restricted to the United States; it does not inhibit Castro from commercial transactions with most of the countries in the world, though his inability to pay his bills has made him a most unappealing customer), or the regime’s supposed accomplishments in the area of education and health. Indeed, almost no report on the island these days fails to include a disclaimer of this sort: “No one in Cuba is starving or homeless,” Lee Hockstadter assures readers of the Washington Post (February 6, 1991), “and free health care and education take the edge off the scarcity of some foods and consumer items,”⁶
On the subject of health care, a rather different view comes from Dr. Maria Isabel Gonzalez Betancourt, former chief of the Cuban national hospital system, who defected to Mexico last September. She reports that in Cuban hospitals many patients perish needlessly from post-operative infections because surgeons are unable to wash their hands with antiseptic soap or distilled water—both articles being virtually nonexistent; and that kidney patients are expiring because of a shortage of spare parts for dialysis machines. Perhaps even more interesting is this comment:

It is not true that, as in Mexico, government hospitals provide their patients with medicine free of charge; in Cuba one receives prescriptions at the doctor’s office, and the patient then has to go out and try to buy his medicine in the street. This is so because the public pharmacies are lacking about 320 basic drugs, including penicillin, which we in the hospital system had to do without for various weeks at a time.

As for education, to judge by some remarks made in the U.S. print (and particularly electronic) media, one would have thought that there were no schools at all in Cuba before 1959, whereas in fact for more than half a century before Castro’s accession to power Havana was one of the two or three most important publishing, theatrical, and literary centers of the Spanish language. To be sure, there was a great disparity between city and countryside, but even so, Cuba ranked third or fourth among Latin Americans states in literacy. There is something slightly fraudulent about Castro’s claims in this area, as attested to by none other than Jacobo Timerman, who writes that “if it is true that [today] every Cuban knows how to read and write, it is likewise true that every Cuban has nothing to read and must be very cautious about what he writes.” And after twelve years of war in Africa, he adds, the Cuban experience there has not produced a single novel or poem “that goes beyond pamphleteering stupidity.” Not a single major Cuban novelist continues to live on the island.

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7.
How many times in this century have Marx’s predictions been turned on their heads by events! First, the great revolution he expected began not in the industrialized countries of Western Europe but in the barbarous reaches of the East. Then it was brought westward not by rebellious workers but by tanks, bayonets, and police technology. Finally, it spread outward to the margins and periphery of the modern world in the wake of decolonization. Now, the center of what used to be called the “socialist world” is collapsing, crucially endangering the survival of its peripheral tributaries. Who could have imagined in 1848, or 1917, or 1945 that the final redoubt of Communism would be a tropical island in the Caribbean?
For such a system, there can be no easy end, no soft landing. When and how it will happen no one can say, but neither a generational extension (with Castro’s son “Fidelito,” who has suddenly emerged as heir-apparent) nor a gradual opening (either at home or in relations with the United States, or both) seems likely. In recent months Castro has repeatedly insisted that regardless of what takes place elsewhere, Cuba will carry forward the banner of Marxism to the very end. No doubt that as long as he is around to determine the course of events, Cuba’s future will simply resemble its past. But over the longer term this claim is unlikely to withstand the larger currents of history, geography, and culture, all of which at last are converging to reduce the man and his country to a grotesque and unfortunate footnote.
¹ Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro, Little, Brown, 407 pp., $22.45.
² Cleaver, Savimbi, and Manley have since become adversaries.
³ This program has been temporarily suspended because of Castro's refusal to allow the Spanish embassy in Havana to harbor Cubans seeking political asylum.
⁴ This is, in fact, precisely how Khrushchev justified his agreement with Kennedy to Castro in the remarkable correspondence which Castro released to the French press last year (see Le Monde, November 27, 1990). Henry Kissinger has frequently remarked that while he considered the outcome of the crisis a victory for the United States at the time, since then he has come to see the validity of Khrushchev's point.
⁵ The self-styled “Latin American socialist” Jacobo Timer-man has just had the candor to observe that after 30 years Fidel “hasn't managed to organize a system for distributing bread and beer” (Cuba: A Journey, Knopf, 125 pp., $19.95).
⁶ Hockstadter seems unfamiliar with Charles Lane's report (New Republic, January 7/14, 1991) that Castro's farm officials have taken to breeding a kind of rat that lives in the cane fields “as a source of food.”

Mark Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute.

Wednesday, Apr 16, 2008 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM EDT

University of Miami , Florida

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FROM PAGE # 32

Toward a Cohesive Cuban Civil Society

Conclusion: Stepping Out of Role 

The underlying premise of this simulation exercise was that successful democratic change in Cuba must rest on the backs of Cuban actors. This analysis and the dynamics of the discussions demonstrated the complexity of that proposition, and hence the complications for U.S. policy. U.S. policymakers might choose to simultaneously address three avenues in the push for the opening of increased political and economic spaces on the island: civil society actors, the Cuban regime, and the momentum created by economic reforms.
Civil Society Actors
U.S. policymakers should recognize that principles which foster cohesion are general Cuban values, not a specific economic agenda – policy should consequently encourage the same principles to be strengthened in engaging civil society actors. Having examined the strengths as well as the limitations inherent to religious groups, the Catholic Church, youth, Afro-Cubans, and dissident groups, the U.S. will need to maximize the number of civil society actors and the base of society it engages in order to assist them to diffuse those principles, develop cohesive messages for change, and build capacity and networks.
To date, U.S. engagement of Cuban civil society hinges on USAID-supported programs that directly benefit key dissident leaders. Such a narrow focus jeopardizes the perceived legitimacy of these individuals and provides cannon fodder to the Cuban government’s nationalist reflex. But even more important, as the simulation exercise highlighted, financial support single-handedly directed toward the organized opposition can be perceived as a liability by other civil society groups who may otherwise collaborate with dissident leaders and offer more broad-based support and access to networks. By ensuring that U.S. support is more widely disseminated, it will avoid the risks of targeted support proving counterproductive.
Reflective of the group’s struggle in the simulation to develop consensus around what kinds of concrete strategies and actions with true practical possibilities might be taken by an emerging umbrella group, coupled with the importance that all participants gave to building movements of mass appeal, reinforce a point stressed in the group’s first simulation exercise in February. Clearly, civil society groups and networks must grow first and develop the skills and capacities to engage with each other. To better advance the prospects of political opening and democratic transition, the United States should avoid micromanaging civil society actors and pursue means to support and engage all potential actors involved in reform – both outside and within the Cuban government.
The Cuban Hierarchy
As the Cuban government can cut off the space for political movements to emerge, multilateral strategies will be necessary to maximize both access and political reach to press the regime to allow spaces for civic engagement. With limited U.S. leverage, the U.S. government should engage other actors – the OAS, Latin American governments, the EU, and the Vatican – who can exert such diplomatic pressure. Once again, participants emphasized the importance of the United States working constructively to engage the Cuban government on issues of bilateral interest (drug trafficking, migration, public health, disaster management, to name a few). Such relations, as well as contacts with government affiliated civil society organizations, would aim to generate information flows about the decision-making mechanisms of the regime, helping to develop trust and relationships that could provide a bridge in the future.
Economic Openings
Finally, the U.S. should consider how it could best address opening civic spaces in an economically increasingly viable Cuba. Should the Cuban hierarchy consolidate revenue growth from off-shore oil and ethanol in 3-5 years, state power will be reinforced through top-down revenue distribution mechanisms, bolstering the state’s ability to maintain political control. The U.S. might exploit the dichotomy between such discernible growth in revenue for the regime, and the lack of revenue diversification reaching the wider population. Policymakers should take creative steps to encourage the wider dissemination of wealth across the island, whether by lifting U.S. caps on remittances, supporting micro-finance institutions through regional or multilateral collaboration, or engaging multilateral actors to form micro enterprise development funds. Such measures should provide increased independence from the state for the Cuban people and prevent the possibility that incremental reforms diminish incentives for civic engagement.

FROM PAGE # 18

Laritza Diversent Speaks at 2020 Geneva Summit

Laritza Diversent, Cuban lawyer, journalist, and human rights defender who serves as Executive Director of the nonprofit Cubalex, addressed the 12th Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy — see quotes below.

For links to other speakers’ quotes, videos, livestream, and more, click here.

12th Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, Main Event, Tuesday, February 18, 2020
 
On lack of democracy in Cuba:
“The judiciary does not exist.”
“The state and individuals who lead the country control more than 80% of the country.”
On being persecuted by the Cuban regime:
“I was accused of being a foreign mercenary.”
“In 2013 our office was raided.”
“They confiscated our telephones and computers. They prevented us from eating for the 11 hours of the raid. Five of us were obliged to strip naked.”
“One month after the raid, the public prosecutor interrogated our clients. As if we were terrorists.”
“We feared having a trial without due process. We feared ending up in prison and not being able to do our work.”
“It has been 3 years. I haven’t been able to return, to hug my mother. I couldn’t say goodbye to my grandfather when he died last year.”
“My story is not exceptional. It is the same for all human rights advocates. The only difference is that many of them can’t escape or don’t want to escape.”

Full prepared remarks below (in Spanish):

You have surely heard that all human rights are equal, necessary and 

interdependent. You cannot restrict some to guarantee others. 

The political system or ideology in power does not matter.

 The states are obliged to guarantee, promote and respect all our rights

 without distinction of any kind.

You must also have heard that free education or health is an obligation 

of the states. In my country it is an achievement of the government and

 has been praised throughout the world by them. Also for having 

survived the actions of his northern neighbor, the most powerful, 

but all forget that there is a single party and a single ideology, 

where those who think differently have no chance to express themselves 

or participate in the government.

 There are periodic elections, but they are not free or transparent.

 A political group has remained in power for more than 60 years, without 

alternation. The same person holds political positions in several

 state organs. It participates in the formulation of laws and is also

 its execution. The judiciary does not exist.

The state and the individuals who run it have a lot of power. 

They control more than 80% of the land in the country, all hospitals,

 schools and the media. He is the main employer. No one can reveal himself.

Allegedly the criticisms are of people who receive money to represent 

the interests of a foreign power.

Publishing a journalistic note in an independent digital medium,

a comment on their social networks or meeting with people who think 

differently, is enough for them, in the name of national defense 

and sovereignty, to arrest, interrogate, threaten and take them to prison.

 They can even prevent you from moving within your country and leaving it.

In 2007 I published my ideas in alternative media. In 2010 I founded Cubalex,

 an office to offer free legal advice. Together with my team, we investigate

 and report human rights violations for 6 years. Yes, I became a 

human rights defender, but I was also accused of being a mercenary in

 the service of a foreign government.

On September 23, 2016, my house, the headquarters of the organization, 

was raided. They came as a surprise and with very bad intentions. 

They cut communications to prevent us from giving the alert voice. 

The order was illegal. They did not care that I appealed to 

my constitutional right of inviolability of domicile. I still resort 

to the pain in my jaws. I clenched my teeth so as not to react while they

 broke the doors and entered by force.

They confiscated our phone and computers. 

They took all the documents of our work, clients and property of the property. 

They prevented us from eating food during the 11 hours of registration. 

They interrogated us. Five women were forced to undress. On their faces 

I saw the pleasure of seeing ourselves humiliated. 

They took my fellow prisoner for a year. I still wonder what we did

 to deserve such punishment?

A month after the search, the Prosecutor's Office, an institution that is 

supposed to ensure the rights of citizens, interrogated several 

of our clients. Most of them deprived of liberty. They recorded them while

 questioning them for having required the services of "an illegal group",

 as if we were terrorists. Those who were in prison were offered privileges 

or benefits of release in exchange for declaring against us.

We were very afraid, to a trial without guarantees of due process,

 to end up in prison if we could not continue with our work. 

Anxiety and depression raged in our bodies. Nothing and nobody could 

protect us. Our only way out was to request shelter. They knew it and 

forced us to it.

They issued an alert to prevent him from leaving the country. The day before

I left, the prosecution informed me that I had evidence against 

me to take me to prison. Receiving resources from international cooperation 

and hiring people to offer our services violated internal legal regulations, 

they told me. Free legal advice is not among the 240 activities that 

the state allows citizens to exercise as a form of self-employment

They had a false invoice with the signature of the co-owner of the property 

that served as our headquarters. The document was allegedly used

 to legalize housing. In addition, they had the statements of a state employee 

who heard when other people commented that I had given gifts to state 

officials to expedite procedures. Those were his tests to accuse me for 

falsifying documents and bribery, crimes that assured him to punish 

me between 3 and 8 years in prison, in addition to confiscating 

the house where we operated. We will allow you to leave the country, 

but if you return we will reactivate the accusation against you, 

they warned me. I have not been back for almost

 three years, unable to hug my mother. I couldn't say goodbye 

to my grandfather when he passed away last year. I still mourn the absence 

of everything I knew for most of my life and was forced to leave. 

I don't know if I can come back, but I'm here precisely because I don't give up.

My story is not exceptional. It is repeated in each human rights defender, 

journalist, artist or writer who decides to express himself freely and publicly.

 The difference is that many of them do not want or cannot escape. Even so, we all want the 

same, respect for the fundamental rights and freedoms of all Cubans, no matter how they 

think or where they live.

We have many obstacles in our way. Prejudices that place us in ideological

 extremes and radical positions, without giving us the possibility to listen. 

We need all of you to fight silence and indifference.

You can help us change that reality. Help us promote the voices and narratives 

of journalists and human rights defenders. Take our messages and stories 

to every corner of the planet in different languages ​​so that the public 

knows the truth about the situation of human rights in Cuba.

Translated by Print-Shop Lighthouse Publisher Press Team 

 

127 convicted among the opposition in Cuba and the farce trial of Ferrer corner the “regime”

 Prisoners Defenders  2 marzo, 2020  Leave a comment

PRISONERS DEFENDERS UPDATES ITS LIST OF POLITICAL PRISONERS…
ESPAÑOL (PDF) / ENGLISH (PDF)

• From the 127, (see list) a new Convict of Conscience integrates our list: Luis Ángel Leyva Domínguez (UNPACU). In the last 6 months, 22 new Convicts of Conscience have entered the list of Cuban Prisoners Defenders.
• The reports and/or declarations of the UN, the Borrell team’s and the European socialists’, in recent weeks/days, aligning with the demand for human rights that drive regional organizations, such as are the IACHR and the OAS, corner the regime and empower government officials who disagree with the regime and its state of widespread repression which even affects the State to start developing changes.
• From Prisoners Defenders we see the message of the Socialists and the High Representative Borrell team’s message as a giant step towards the correct approach to solutions to Cuba’s problems: respect for human rights.
• It is therefore found that the EU and the United States have the same diagnosis, although they differ in the possible solutions, a fact that should not be an obstacle, now, to be able to carry out a more coordinated and joint strategy that offers the best results in the search for the aforementioned purpose, in a coordinated manner and in synergy with regional organizations such as the OAS and the IACHR.
• Since the end of 2018, there has been a marked increase in the repression, control and cold war rhetoric of the elements of the “regime”.
• Prisoners Defenders frames the increase in the repression of the “regime” as a sign of weakness of its apparatus as, while being well-known that it is the author of the ideological transgressions to an ideology that at the same time it promulgates, it tries to control an increasingly disaffected population of the prevailing system, even among the cadres, and an international public opinion that is less and less manipulable.

1. RECOGNIZED POLITICAL PRISONERS IN OPPOSITION TO THE CASTRO REGIME: MARCH 1, 2020

We recognize in CPD, as of March 1, 2020, 127 political convicts and condemned by opposition to the regime but, in addition, other 11,000 civilians not belonging to opposition organizations, 8,400 of them convicted and 2,538 condemned, both groups on conscience with average sentences of 2 years and 10 months, for charges referred to in the Criminal Code as “pre-criminals”, that is , without any crime, which we discuss in section 2 of this press release.
The 127 condemned among opposition organizations are divided into Convicts of Conscience, Condemned of Conscience and Political Prisoners of other categories. The classification of these is as follows:

A) 74 Convicts of Conscience

These are prisoners deprived of liberty solely for reasons of conscience, with accusations either completely and proven false or fabricated, or of a non-criminal nature and absolutely of thought. 6 of them have been named Prisoners of Conscience by Amnesty International in the last six months. They are Josiel Guía Piloto (PRC), Mitsael Díaz Paseiro (FNRC-OZT), Silverio Portal Contreras (previously linked to various organizations but now independent), Edilberto Ronal Arzuaga Alcalá (UNPACU), Eliécer Bandera Barreras (UNPACU) and Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces (lawyer and independent journalist). For Roberto Quiñones and Josiel Guía Piloto, in addition, the United Nations has highlighted the arbitrariness of their arrests in reports dated November 15, 2019 the first, and February 11, 2020 the second, indicating the need for their release, that of two other activists, Marbel Mendoza Reyes and Iván Amaro HIdalgo, and the cessation of the persecution to which both independent journalists and human rights defenders in Cuba are subjected, as well as the dependence of the legal profession and judicial processes to the executive power, as well as multiple mechanisms designed to prevent alternative expression (See UN report on Roberto Quiñones and see UN Report on Josiel Pilot Guide, Iván Amaro Hidalgo and Marbel Mendoza Reyes).
Finally, indicate that among those convicted of conscience are 4 inmates for whom the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has granted Precautionary Measures of International Protection: Iván Amaro Hidalgo, Josiel Guía Piloto, Jesús Alfredo Pérez Rivas and Edilberto Ronal Arzuaga Alcalá.
This month there was 1 new convict of conscience who entered prison, Luis Ángel Leyva Domínguez (UNPACU), whose case is especially tragic. He was arrested on February 12 when he was going to the hospital to visit his three-month-old daughter, who was dehydrated in the intensive care room of the pediatric hospital of Palma Soriano. The food he was carrying was seized and thrown away by the police. Six police officers arrested him, beat him and put him on patrol. He made a hunger strike for a week, demanding his release and in that state was taken to a summary trial. The trial was held behind closed doors on February 17, and he was not allowed to bring witnesses or the assistance of his relatives. The lawyer was ex officio.
Other prisoners served the sentence with integrity and were released (Misael Espinosa Puebla and Ovidio Martín Castellanos), and Francisco García Puniel was released on February 5 after the court ordered a change of cause.

B) 24 Condemned of Conscience

These ones suffer forced domiciliary work, measures of limitation of freedom or parole under threats, and that the regime, in addition, the State usually revokes and reinserts in prison if the activist does not cease in his pro-democratic activity. Those present on this list are, therefore, highly threatened and in the process of conviction again any time because of their manifestation of conscience or their activism. A new Convict of conscience has passed to this list as a result of his change of situation: José Luis Álvarez Chacón passed to house prison in a five-year sanction he began serving in December 2016. Salvador Reyes Peña, in turn, fulfilled his sentence on February 16 and has been removed from this list.

C) 29 other political prisoners

They are not in the previous categories, and from these there have been no releases or premature pardons, and among these there are the highest sentences and prisoners with longer periods of compliance in the prisons of the Cuban regime.

THE COMPLETE LIST CAN BE OBTAINED IN THIS LINK: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EPNm8n1TuNJx–qgDQDgVEtyz1aHu4QY

2. THE CASE FERRER APPROXIMATES DEMOCRATS: THE CUBA REGIME IS ISOLATING

The trial of one of the Prisoners of Conscience on the list, José Daniel Ferrer, appointed so in 2003 after the Black Spring of Cuba, founder and General Coordinator of the peaceful opposition Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) captured all the attention of different international organizations. This has had a disastrous collateral effect for the island’s regime: it has captured all the world’s attention at the time the largest number of resolutions in the last 15 years by the United Nations have exposed the gravest violations of human rights in Cuba. Cuba has taken a step whose reversibility passes through the inevitable freedom of Ferrer, but not only that will be enough.
Ferrer’s freedom is defended by, among others, the European Socialist Group of parliamentarians, who met last week with the Cuban government and the Legislative Assembly and later gave a firm press conference where they expressed concern about the Ferrer case and violations of human rights, at the same time that they exposed their position contrary to the United States trade embargo and support for the process of dialogue with the European Union, which leaves their position without criticism on the island. Ferrer’s freedom is also supported by the IACHR, which he recalled has precautionary measures that must be respected, his case is defended by the OAS, which defends his immediate freedom, by the UN, which has denounced very serious irregularities in his process, by the European Union, which has demanded its freedom both from the European Commission and from the Parliament, the United States, that have issued a statement for his release, and by numerous non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International, Freedom House or Civil Rights Defenders, among many others.
In fact, by this case, and as a result of the different human rights violations in Cuba that have gained unprecedented dissemination, there is a unity of diplomatic and political criteria on the globe, at the public level, as it has not been seen for many years about human rights violations in Cuba. All this together with a geopolitical situation of self-isolation and very negative confrontation for the “regime”.
The different solutions of some (the dialogue, in the case of the EU), and others (the economic pressure, in the case of the US), so far suffered from the exercise of the fundamental unanimous political pressure, firm but diplomatic at the same time, that must unite all those who, under minimums, know well, now encouraged even by the United Nations, that  the most fundamental human rights are violated in Cuba. The United States issued a diplomatic note for the freedom of José Daniel Ferrer who had the same format of respect, something that allows the message to penetrate among the Cuban State, as of demanding basis. Similarly, the European Commission statement was as respectful, because it did not express a threat in terms of dialogue (“a word to the wise in enough”), as well as firmness. Something he already did first, in a more subtle but very obvious way, King Felipe VI on his last visit to Cuba. The key to both messages now lies in the fact that certain officers and positions of the Cuban State, moderate and liberal, feel empowered to fight to decouple State decisions from the dark hand of the terrible repressive apparatus, the “regime”, whose sole purpose is its livelihood at the expense of any of the more than 11 million Cuban citizens living on the island, including any of the State officials.
The case of the top leader of the judiciary of Cuba, Edel González Jiménez, who belonged to the State apparatus but was against the interference of State Security in his social mission, allows us to foresee that in the State there may be similar initiatives that, without the intention of changing the system with respect to its roots, instead try to make it compatible with human rights, which all of them know that today does not happen.
Given this scenario, Cuba would face the situation not only of not having its own productive economy, but an inability to continue altering the image of what really happens on the island in the field of human rights, and a geopolitical situation that, for the first time in many years, does not favor it in any way.
The Cubans, tired of 60 years of sacrifices in pursuit of something that they already desmerit and most of them not believe anymore (the communist party does not stop having casualties among the population, and only a minor part of the mid-range officials are from the communist party) , begin to have spontaneous manifestations of confrontation with elite police and military forces, something that is not remembered had ever happen in many years.
For Prisoners Defenders, the obvious solution is to make progress and changes in human rights ostensibly and as quickly as possible. First, correcting, as an obvious demonstration, the great icons of this unreasonableness, such as the review of all judicial cases of political prisoners, which would result in their release not as hostages of a negotiation, but as the sovereign assumption of past mistakes, or as the economic freedom of the self-employed, to raise the economy of the country, or as the extension of the guarantees of right of the investments before the State in the Law of Foreign Investment that makes them really safe, or how to regulate the capacity that any organization of defense of human rights or different political ideology can be registered and operate legally without persecution and even be entitled to press and television spaces as long as it has and obtains followers or representatives in the elections at the local level. In addition, due to the current geopolitical circumstances, the withdrawal of Cuba from Venezuela as a minimum would be imperative. This aspect, the most delicate, because the Cuban economy depends on it, would have to be subject to frank and direct negotiation in the set of measures if one wants to expect a speedy transition supported by the economy of other much bigger countries.
But the “regime” should be in a hurry. After all, it seems clear that Maduro’s dictatorship is destined to fail, which would lead to an unprecedented crisis in Cuba that both “regime” and “State” in Cuba fear greatly, and against which the State should propose solutions above the criteria of State Security.
Indeed, Latin American, American and European diplomats, consulted by Prisoners Defenders, have stated that, in the face of any such real step, relations with Cuba and international credit and resources that would open would not have a precedent for its magnitude. “The economy of the island could multiply in just 5 years and be a paradigm of economic and political transition. We believe in the strength and the Cuban spirit, but this one is bound by a cell that is more repressive than ideological today. Almost no one in the State believes that repressive communism is a valid ideological path or political solution. The great future of Cuba is now being inhibited by its State Security apparatus and also, at this time, without this neither benefiting anyone from the State nor the nation. The damage is widespread. The tiredness of the solution based on confrontation and brutality is usually found among the members of the state apparatus. They themselves want changes”, a senior diplomat who has preferred to remain in a discreet plane told us in frank conversation.

3. PROVEN: 11,000 PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE FOR CONVICTIONS DEFINED IN THE CRIMINAL CODE AS “PRE-CRIMINAL”.

Prisoners Defenders also recognizes 11 thousand people who are Convicted or Condemned of Conscience for Pre-Criminal Security Measures, with penalties from 1 to 4 years. Prisoners Defenders, certain journalists and diplomats have the official documents of the government of Cuba that prove that there are 9,000 Convicts of Conscience in prison for these sentences and another 2,000 condemned to forced labor with, all of them, from 1 to 4 years’ penalties. In the very near future, and in collaboration with various organizations, these documents will be made public.
Prisoners Defenders made this report public on January 13 as well as supporting documents to press media and diplomats. Given the undisputed analysis of experts presented along with the documents, this information had a relevant impact in numerous countries (New York Times, Telegraph, ABC, Le Point…). As examples, also, Prisoners Defenders made public a representative part of the hundreds of conviction cards of said inmates (See actual examples of said files).
In all of them it is appreciated that the cases are not personalized, but qualified with exactly the same 3/4 sentences:
“PROVEN THAT THE ACCUSED WAS NOT FOUND LABORALLY LINKED OR BELONGED TO ANY ORGANIZATION OF MASSES [all the mass organizations are the ones subjugated to the Communist Party], IN ADDITION TO MEETING WITH ANTISOCIAL ELEMENTS AND ALTERING THE PUBLIC ORDER [however, there are no criminal offenses or court cases public order put in place,but it is only a police assessment] IN STATE OF INEBRIATION [in all 8,400 cases the phrases are similar, there are only a few models]. HE WAS INFORMED IN MANY OCCASIONS BY HIS HEAD OF SECTOR AND COMMUNITY FACTORS [leaders of the Communist Party organizations] THEREFORE IT IS PROCESSED TO THE MEASURE OF ASSURANCE BY THE MUNICIPAL COURT OF HAVANA CENTER. CONDEMNATION: 3 YEARS OF DEPRIVATION OF FREEDOM”
A simple police report with evaluative aspects, identical for all those convicted and condemned, and are treated in summary judicial proceedings, without any principle of contradiction, and with an inquisitorial form (without the principle of contradiction or the ability to present evidence to the contrary), it’s cause for 11,000 people, without any offense/crime committed, serve sentences of 2 years and 10 months of imprisonment on average.
Current situation These measures, up to 4 years in prison, are applied through articles of the Criminal Code that are infamous and violate the most basic principles of justice adopted by the entire International Community and explicitly prohibited in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The regime arbitrarily qualifies, isolates from the community and subsequently criminally condemns innocents by thousands each year, through the use of its Criminal Code:

1. Qualification:
   •  “ARTICLE 72. The special proclivity in which a person is found to commit crimes is considered a dangerous state, demonstrated by the behavior observed in manifest contradiction with the norms of socialist morality”
   • “ARTICULE 73.2. There are considered in dangerous state those who … disturb the order of the community…”
2. Isolation:
   • “ARTICULE 75. Who, without being included in any of the dangerous states referred to in article 73, for their links or relationships with potentially dangerous persons [those previously described as antisocial] … shall be subject to warning by the competent police authority … reflected in minutes …”
3. Condemnation with 1 to 4 years:
   • “ARTICULE 76. 1. Security measures may be decreed to prevent the commission of crimes or on the occasion of their commission. In the first case they are called pre-criminal security measures, and in the second, post-criminal security measures”
   • “ARTICULE 80. 1. The reeducational measures are: a) internment [prison] … b) delivery to a work group [forced labor] … 2. The reeducational measures are applied to antisocials. 3. The term of these measures is at least one year and a maximum of four.”

The legitimacy for the application of the previous precepts is determined arbitrarily according to the criteria of the judges and without ordinary criminal proceedings with the right to defense, summarily, according to the provisions of the Law of Criminal Procedure of Cuba, in its Article 404 and in its article 415, where it expressly indicates the summary process:
‘’ARTICLE 404. It is the responsibility of the Popular Municipal Courts to know the Pre-criminal Danger Indices and the imposition of security measures established in each case by the substantive Criminal Law. ’’
“ARTICLE 415. The declaration of the index of pre-criminal danger of antisocial conduct, is summarily decided …”
Measure as ultra-communist as Nazi and ultra-fascist, and which portrays the Castro regime
We reiterate that this measure, which was introduced in the 1979 Criminal Code, could well be described as ultra-fascist or ultra-communist, but not socialist, since it has its origin in Nazi and fascist laws, textually, of the Hitler and Franco dictators, in addition to the most radical communist legislative measures taken in Spain before the Spanish Civil War. The radical populist movements of the left and the far right tend to converge both in similar and shared methods to establish their power. Regarding both the radical ultra-right and radical ultra-left origin of these measures, it is enough to write down the evidence:

• Pre-criminal convictions for antisocials are inspired by those present in Nazi Germany, paragraph 42 of the Third Reich Criminal Code of 1937, calling offenders volksschädling (antisocial), a categorization that included, among others, prostitutes, homosexuals, beggars, mentally ill people, repeaters of jokes and comments against the Nazis, but especially those they called “lazy.”
• The Cuban law is a copy, textual in terminologies, and exact extracted sentences, to several Spanish laws, such as the “law of lazy people”, “La Gandula”, which was a law of the Spanish Criminal Order of August 4, 1933 approved by the Courts of the Second Republic, signed by Manuel Azaña as President of the Council of Ministers, and which was highly reinforced by the dictator Francisco Franco in 1954 and then in 1970 with the “law on dangerousness and social rehabilitation”, where in all they establish the terms “social dangerousness”, or “security measures”, exact terms and copied in the law of Cuba. The dictator Franco had the initiative to include homosexuals in the law, what Fidel Castro and his little brother Raul did through the Military Units of Production Aid (UMAP).

Previously in Cuba other measures were antecedents of the Criminal Code of 1979. The evolution of the Nazi and fascist copy is evident. In Cuba, before the “law on danger and social rehabilitation” it was taken the ” law of lazy people” as a model to inspire the “Law against laziness”. Later in 1979, they took the terminologies of the “law on dangerousness and social rehabilitation” from the dictator Franco’s legislation.
Also, the harassment of homosexuals was inspired by Cuba in the initiatives of the dictator Franco. The Military Production Aid Units (UMAP), for example, were labor camps that existed in Cuba between 1965 and 1968. There were about 25,000 men, basically young men of military age who for various reasons refused to do military service mandatory (members of some religions), were rejected in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba or, above all, for their proven or alleged homosexuality “bourgeois”, and they had to be “re-educated” by the revolutionary government. Simply disgusting. As are the words of Raúl Castro, then minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, in April 1966:

«In the first group of colleagues who have been part of the UMAP were included some young people who had not had the best behavior in life, young people who had taken a wrong path to society because of the bad training and influence of the environment and had been incorporated in order to help them find a successful path that allows them to join society fully» [1]
Raúl Castro

These words, together with the indescribable suffering of such people in these UMAPs, leave no doubt about the deep sociopathic and fascist personality that Raúl Castro suffered since 1966.
The Law of the Vague, or “Law against laziness”, Law No. 1231 of March 16, 1971 published in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Cuba in its ordinary edition of March 26, 1971, was a law similar to the pre-criminal, in fact, was its predecessor, and was established to solve a problem inherent in the legal and labor vacuum created by the dictatorship itself at the beginning. This law was repealed and replaced by the current Criminal Code of Cuba, which includes pre-criminal law, on February 15, 1979.
The Law of Vagrancy, or Law of the Vague, was born because the intervention of all private businesses by the revolution abruptly changed the order of things. The intervening forces came in the name of the “people” to appropriate the business and all its assets. The excuse was that business was left to the “people.” The problem was immediate: who would be responsible for everything to continue to work? Who had the knowledge and commitment to do so with adequate business knowledge and motivation?
Since nobody planned it, the results were catastrophic for productivity. Some of the workers kept jobs, which in number were diminishing day by day given the low productivity, but the owners were immediately unemployed. What would this people do, used to leading projects, that had also been stripped of their work without even having the right to manifest without disagreement? The State’s creative solution was that they had to work for the revolution or else they had to be applied the “Law of the Lazy.” Thus, the former entrepreneurs became defined as “lazy” if they refused to work in favor of the “revolutionary” State.
With coercive measures, therefore, the slavery of Cuban professionals began at the dawn of the “revolution”, slavery that prevails in the Cuban medical missions, but also with all qualified Cuban professionals on and off the island, including the artists who work on behalf of the State.
By this Law against laziness of 1971 thousands of people were forced to perform heavy manual labor that none of them wanted to do. The composition of the group that the authorities considered “lazy” was finally applied to a mass of very heterogeneous people. There were those who, for various reasons, had been unemployed for a long time, such as the aforementioned entrepreneurs. Also affected were some who were caught in transit from one occupation to another, those who were leaving the country, or those who had just finished Compulsory Military Service and had no work location. It was the beginning of the 70s and Cuba already had a massive slavery law in a society that was just 10 years before of an entrepreneurial nature.
Once in the labor camps, the subjects were considered prisoners: anyone who left the place without authorization would be arrested, tried and sentenced to serve up to five years in prison.
The law fundamentally considers laziness as a pre-criminal state and so that state is clearly determined. An interesting study of this Law, and from which we have taken some references, among many other sources, can be read in this link.

ABOUT CUBAN PRISONERS DEFENDERS

Cuban Prisoners Defenders is an independent group of analysis, study and legal action, which counts on the collaboration of all dissident groups on the island and the relatives of political prisoners to gather information and promote the freedom of all political prisoners and rights Humans in Cuba. Cuban Prisoners Defenders is part of Prisoners Defenders International Network, a legally registered association based in Madrid, Spain, whose focus of action is the promotion and defense of human rights and democratic values, and whose Internet address is www.prisonersdefenders.org.
The works of Cuban Prisoners Defenders are adopted by numerous institutions and are sent, among others, to the United Nations Organization, Organization of American States, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Civil Rights Defenders. Freedom House, European Parliament, United States Congress and Senate FNCA, ASIC, UNPACU, Government of Spain, Spanish Transition Foundation, International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights, FANTU, Party for Democracy Pedro Luis Boitel, College of Pedagogues Independent of Cuba and the Citizen Movement Reflection and Reconciliation, among many other institutions and organizations of equal relevance.
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[1] Homophobia map. Chronology of repression and censorship of homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals on the Island, from 1962 to date: https://www.cubaencuentro.com/cuba/articulos/mapa-de-la-homofobia-10736

https://www.prisonersdefenders.org

Cuba prevents protest over police killing of Black man

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Cuba’s Evolving Civil Society

Hobart Spalding

THE CHANGING DYNAMIC OF CUBAN CIVIL SOCIETY Alexander J. Gray and Antoni Kapcia, eds., 2008, University Press of Florida, 208 pp., hardcover, $59.95
Deep-rooted and meaningful debate has marked the course of the Cuban Revolution from its inception. Thus, discussions around “moral versus material incentives,” “the new socialist man,” and “rectification” (a reform movement begun in 1986, seeking to galvanize Cuban socialism, correcting abuses along the way) have reflected milestones in the Revolution’s development. The controversy about civil society is no exception: Does civil society have a place in socialist society, and if so, should it be independent of or dependent upon the state? Although the debate started in the late 1980s, it flourished during the Special Period after the fall of the Soviet Union, which rocked Cuba’s economy and society as GDP fell about 40%. This collection of essays examines that debate and the evolution of civil society in Cuba during the 1990s and early 2000s, marking a new stage of the Revolution.
The book’s central seven chapters, based on research that took place largely inside Cuba, look at the general situation and the political culture of the Revolution, the debate around civil society, the rise of the private sector, local actions, solidarity organizations and friendship groups, religion, and NGOs. Two essays by the editors complement these chapters. The first essay sets the larger historical stage; the second presents conclusions. The quality and density of the writings vary, ranging from mostly descriptive and informative to somewhat interpretative. Some selections include extensive interview material with actors on the ground, and all make broad use of Cuban sources. The writers are almost all academics residing in the United Kingdom, and their perspectives often provide a welcome relief from those of standard, polarized U.S. Cubanology.
For the most part, the book’s tone is academically neutral, which sometimes results in enough qualifying phrases to rob the material of meaning. By the end one almost wishes for some of the good old polemics that Cuba inspires in many authors. Nonetheless, politics inevitably creeps into the pages, ranging from covert hostility to cautious doubts about the Revolution. Although credit is given to the Revolution for its successes, more ink is spilt on the negative side of things throughout.
What emerges from the whole is a comprehensive view of the development of Cuban civil society in the 1990s. The revival or growth of civil society, largely as a humanitarian response to the economic crisis that hit Cuba after 1991, paved the way for future developments. As the island’s economic situation improved, new foreign (and some local) NGOs and solidarity organizations gradually moved into social development projects. This triggered an intense debate and several reactions from the state and others. Some saw NGOs as incompatible with Cuba’s brand of socialism, others conceded their value but only as a short-term expedient, and still others argued that they were totally consistent with socialism and even necessary. These contrasting positions resulted in a confused and often contradictory posture by the state toward these groups. Interviews with foreign participants in NGOs reveal that a great deal of fuzziness exists as to the exact role they play and the actual limits on their actions. Clearly, strict regulation is the norm (i.e., they cannot open bank accounts or use hard currency, and they must work through an approved Cuban partner). On the other hand, informal relations open the door to actions and inputs in gray areas, sometimes not officially sanctioned.
Civil society expanded in at least two other important areas. After the formal recognition of religious believers (creyentes) in the 1992 Constitutional Revisions, a number of religious organizations formed groups that eventually got state recognition. Among them were Catholics, Protestants, and African-based religious groups. As with the NGOs, these groups have enjoyed varied relations with the state and have voiced opinions ranging from critical to favorable. Also important has been the emergence of Cuban groups ranging from neighborhood-based associations to think tanks receiving support from a variety of sources outside the country. Here too relations with the state have taken several turns. In many cases the government gave encouragement and backing. This encouragement definitely had limits, however, as the closing of the semi-independent Center for the Study of the Americas (CEA) in the mid-1990s demonstrates. All Center members got new jobs, but the message rang clear.
The authors agree across the board that civil society has become an increasingly important part of the Cuban scene, although its scope and nature have changed over time. As the state contracted and resources became scarce after Cuba’s cutoff from the socialist bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and its forced insertion into the world market, civil society expanded to fill the gaps. Along with this came a new, if at times begrudging, tolerance for expanded activities in the social, economic, and — eventually — cultural areas.
The government always moved cautiously and suspiciously, careful to preserve the basic material gains of the Revolution at minimally acceptable levels. But this could only be done with outside help, either through NGOs, the growth of a private economy, or local empowerment. The central questions of control versus democracy and local and individual initiative versus mobilization from above (through the state-run mass organizations) remained fraught with difficulties. The United States’ open support for the expansion of a civil society that it brazenly endorsed as a vehicle to mold Cuban society in an image borrowed from Cuba’s past (see the Cuba Democracy Act of 1992, for example) only made the whole question thornier. But nevertheless, expanded civil society—despite all controls—has remained a permanent feature of the Cuban landscape.
As the essays in this book describe, the process of adjustment on both sides is a constant dance between top-down management and real autonomy and space for both organizations and individuals. The state continues to control resources and must approve all plans put forth by organizations. In fact, a state representative has the right to sit in on any meeting held by a recognized NGO. That this right is seldom if ever exercised makes little difference; its mere existence creates apprehension among NGOs. In addition, when an NGO-backed project gets off the ground, the state often moves in to take it over, sometimes with unfortunate results. The reluctance on the part of elements within the government to cede real power to locals and decision making to communities has proven hard to overcome, as has the vision of all NGOs as real or potential agents of imperialism.
The editors conclude that three possible outcomes exist for the new formations of civil society: (1) They will lead a revolution inside the Revolution; (2) they will become a force against the Revolution; or (3) they will work with the Revolution to strengthen it. This is not just idle speculation. By the first years of the 21st century, civil society had become a fixture on the Cuban landscape, one not likely to disappear. Further, it provided alternative spaces where people could act with fewer restraints than in official capacities. This does not necessarily imply, of course, opposition to the Revolution or the state, but may merely represent an alternative way toward jointly held goals. Nevertheless, elements within the new civil society connected to the emergent foreign sector or even to elements outside the country could turn into focal points for anti-revolutionary activities. Thus, the state maintains a watchful eye over the sector, even if this becomes counterproductive in many ways.
In all, this is a useful volume with good information for anyone wishing to look at the development of civil society in Cuba in the decade or so after 1991. It clearly develops two points. First, civil society and the state are not incompatible within the Cuban context. This contradicts some thinking on the part of those in Washington and Miami pushing for a “transition” in Havana. Second, again contrary to some writings about the island, the state has always supported civil society in some way or another. The scope and nature of that support has changed over time, and it will continue to change in the future. Civil society is not about to go away, and it will surely evolve along with the Cuban economy and society. It remains up to the Cuban people as well as the government to see that this process is one that reinforces and develops the goals of the Revolution without subverting them.

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Hobart Spalding is a member of the NACLA Editorial Committee.

Cuban civil society: survival, struggle, defiance and compliance

Guest article by Lennier López, Sociologist, Florida International University and Armando Chaguaceda, Political Scientist, Universidad de Guanajuato

Introduction: an obstructed civil society

In Cuba, the development and growth of civil society remains obstructed by existing law. Since 1997 the Ministry of Justice has blocked the establishment of new civil society organisations (CSOs) with very few exceptions while regulating those that already exist. Moreover, for each existing CSO, the government establishes a “linking organism,” a state entity that monitors its operations to protect “state interests.” At the same time, the traditional mass organisations, which are the basis of Leninist civil society, monopolise the way that entire segments of society are represented. This pattern makes it difficult for new organisations to emerge that could represent social groups such as women, lawyers, peasants, or others in a different way. On topics such as human rights and government accountability, the activity of officially recognised civil society is limited, mainly takes place at the local level and is closely supervised by the state.
The works of the sociologists Marie Laure Geoffrey (2012), Marlene Azor (2016) and Velia Cecilia Bobes (2007 and 2015) are among the most recent and complete analyses of Cuban civil society. The first two authors have developed rigorous studies of emerging social actors that oppose the government, outlining their resistance to the government’s attempts to control and co-opt them. At the same time, Geoffrey and Azor think that these social actors struggle to expand and connect their agendas with the expectations of a population that sometimes seems tired, demobilised and more focused on daily survival. Bobes, on the other hand, has carried out an exhaustive evaluation of Cuban civil society, linking it to the characteristics of the current participatory model, which we think is important to review here.
Bobes identifies a permanent model of militant citizenship in Cuba, loyal to the official project and dependent on the state, which is articulated around social rights and which subordinates and links civil and political rights to the construction of a socialist society. This model of citizenship relies on a homogenous and equalitarian society that today is changing due to an increase in economic inequality, poverty, territorial differentiation, identity diversification and different ways of living. Moreover, migration and massive corruption at all levels have altered over time the type of society on which this model of citizenship is based. While this model remains hegemonic in Cuba, during the last 50 years there has also been a process of discursive assimilation by the official sector - which has implied that the socialist-oriented traditional mass organisations and some non-governmental organisations are recognised as part of civil society in Cuba - and an emergence of social actors that openly present themselves as opponents of the government or alternatives to both officialdom and its traditional dissidents.

‘Official’ civil society

The official discourse in Cuba has presented, since the 1990s, a socialist civil society composed of mass organisations such as the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), the Workers’ Central Union of Cuba (CTC) and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). In all cases, these organisations represent the Leninist model of participation, which is vertical and limits tremendously these groups’ autonomy. This model frames and labels entire segments of the population and promotes both morally questionable political agendas - entailing the mobilisation and control of citizens - and positive communitarian activities such as donating blood, collecting materials for recycling and cleaning common areas in neighbourhoods. However, participation in these organisations has decreased. Attendance at activities managed by these organisations has become routinised, and thus people’s motivation has diminished. Nevertheless, this has not inspired action for change due to the lack of a legal framework to allow alternative groups to work without fear of persecution, very effective mechanisms of control and a well-established ‘survival mindset’ which makes civil society groups spend much energy and resources in solely keeping themselves functioning within Cuban society today.
In the CDRs, the broadest form of mass organisation, the leaders, for example, have held their posts for 10 to 20 years; young people do not seek positions of responsibility. This weakens the ability of the CDRs to exercise the kind of social control that previously allowed the authorities to prevent or solve common crimes and to reduce political criticism in public spaces (Salas 1979). CDRs rarely meet these days. The main function of the CDRs was to schedule and execute rounds of night vigilance to defend the “revolutionary process”; these night watches are not implemented today as they were in previous decades (Salas 1979). Even the anniversary of the founding of the organisation, on 28 September, is not celebrated in many neighbourhoods today.
The government uses the CTC as a channel to transmit the official line of action and as an instrument of control to keep workers politically neutralised. However, the function of the CTC as a socialiser of revolutionary values (Rosendahl 1997) no longer exists. Key points worth mentioning from the documents of the CTC 20^th Congress, held in 2014, are an emphasis on efficiency and productivity, the distribution of workers’ participation into local assemblies - fragmenting what should be a national movement - and the manipulation of the organisation’s history. There is no autonomous labour movement in Cuba, and thus there is no organisation that genuinely represents the interests of the Cuban working class. The role given to the CTC, however, is almost obligatory in each state-ruled enterprise and institution; employees are forced to affiliate with the mass organisation, which is supposed to represent them at large as a homogenous group with shared interests and problems. Very low wages - of a monthly average of 750 CUP (around US$30) in the state-owned enterprise sector - have come to diminish members’ interest in the functioning of the CTC, and this was reflected in changes that were made regarding the date of the 20^th Congress and the directors of the event.

More diverse and autonomous spaces of Cuban civil society

Since the late 1980s, some organizations have emerged that are opposed to the government. Some of them are associations that defend human rights, such as the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, and others arise from proto-political parties with different political orientations, from conservative to left-wing, while another segment of these organizations focuses on generating alternative channels of information that critique the Cuban reality (Dilia 2014).
The opposition was small and socially marginalized for a long period, due in part to government repression and in part to fragmentation among the groups that composed it. After 2001, the Varela Project, led by Oswaldo Paya from the Liberal-Christian Movement, made the opposition movements more visible, inside and outside Cuba. The initiative was strongly repressed and criminalised, and as a result 75 dissidents were incarcerated in 2003 during what was called the ‘Black Spring’. This event had three key consequences: first, it informed many inside Cuba about the movement, since official television had no choice but to cover the events, albeit with its own version of the story. Second, it triggered a negative reaction in Western foreign diplomatic bodies. Third, it led the mothers and wives of the imprisoned - known as the ‘Ladies in White’ - to mobilize and organize themselves to ask for the liberation of their relatives. The courage of these women, who resisted physical and verbal aggression in the streets and on national television, gained them the support of international organization including the Catholic Church, many CSOs, and groups from Europe, the United States and Latin America. Even in Cuba, despite the aggressive official propaganda, they gained some respect and were supported by emerging bloggers, artists and intellectuals.
In 2010 and 2011 the political prisoners were liberated thanks to the lobbying efforts of the Catholic Church in Cuba. This seemed to mark a new political era of openness and tolerance, but the repression merely changed its form. Since prosecuting political activists is costly for the Cuban government, given the adverse international reaction generated, it prefers instead to threaten, in different ways, those who attempt to exercise any sort of activism to transform their realities. In 2013, while dissident activism increased, with communication campaigns, public demonstrations and meetings in private homes, the repression also rocketed, with concentrated efforts to repudiate the political opposition, arbitrary detentions, house searches and forced evictions carried out by public authorities in the case of eastern Cuba. The Ladies in White and members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), civil rights advocates, were victims of these actions and thus gained the role of being protagonists in international media. Amnesty International, referencing data from the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), a human rights CSO, documented an average of 862 arbitrary detentions each month between January and November 2016. Another CSO, the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights. meanwhile identified more than 4,500 arbitrary detentions during 2017. Further, during the first half of 2018, the CCDHRN denounced 1,576 detentions; to this we may add dozens of activists who have been targeted, persecuted, incarcerated, or temporarily banned from traveling to prevent, in most cases, their attendance at international events where they could have been able to share an alternative and well-structured picture of the Cuban reality.
Artists and scientists have also experienced persecution. The authorities usually justify these arbitrary detentions on the pretext of prosecuting activists for committing a “common crime” rather than on the basis of their activism. Luis Manuel Otero, Tania Bruguera and the biologist Ariel Urquiola, among many others, have recently faced different forms of repression, including incarceration and threats. Mr Urquiola’s is probably the most well-known recent case of rights violations by the Cuban government, having been sentenced to jail in May 2018 for “disrespecting” state officials. However, due to a widespread international reaction and demands for justice on social media after he went on hunger strike to protest his “unfair sentence,” he was granted permission to serve his sentence out of prison.
New social actors, alternative to the establishment, emerged in the 1990s and initially did not have to deal with state control. This may suggest the appearance of an alternative civil society. New CSOs and communitarian movements, religious associations - of Catholic, Protestant, Hebrew, Orthodox and Afro-Cuban belongings - and independent cultural projects all expressed a major diversification of Cuban civil society, with new actors and agendas, even though this did not always translate into more popular empowerment. This was because the development of these new social actors was shaped by their relationships with - and the extent to which they were able to negotiate autonomy from - the state.
In this segment of civil society there are groups that continue to support a socialist model but propose significant, and many times also deep, reforms to the current structure. Hence, they try to work within the present socio-political framework but aim to restructure it. Projects such as Cuba Posible (Possible Cuba) and Red Observatorio Crítico (Critical Observatory Network) are part of this sphere, which is critical of the status quo without seeking to entirely break with it. Within this same spectrum there are also some open spaces in the Catholic Church in the form of centers for secular groups and the public, as well as websites, digital bulletins and magazines that embrace diverse ideas and debates - commonly held among socialist intellectuals, Catholics and social activists - regarding the future of Cuba. This relative freedom of the Catholic Church is connected to its determination to place itself between the government and dissidents, without wanting to decisively move closer to the Cuban political scenario (Farber 2012). This allows the Catholic Church, even though it does not have strong popular support - contrary to what happened in communist Poland, for example - to gain legitimacy and achieve public relevance in today’s and, most likely, tomorrow’s Cuba.

Final reflections and recommendations

Although increasing diversity is present in Cuban civil society, domestic politics continue to be overwhelmingly dominated by the party/state elite that rules the country. Hence, the political participation enabled by new spaces within civil society remains strongly shaped by the official framework. In Cuba, as has been pointed out by Bobes (2016), there is deep social erosion, in terms of citizenship, due to many factors: the obstruction of collective action, a lack of interest in politics, the corrosion of public policies and social rights, and the non-existence of any substantial progress on political rights. Moreover, without autonomous spaces that may articulate challenges to the state, the population is increasingly vulnerable to state power (institutions and bureaucrats, for example) at both the individual and social levels. Within this framework, as long as the relationship between the government and the governed remains unstable and unsecured, the opportunities for people to join in making public demands tend to be infrequent or non-existent (Tilly and Wood 2010: 267). Focusing particularly on Cuba, Tilly and Wood suggest that in one-party regimes the tendency to restrict civil society - including CSOs and social movements - is stronger than under other forms of authoritarianism.
Today, there is not yet a political atmosphere in which the state and civil society can create multidirectional flows of ideas and fertile spaces for dialogue. It seems that the government of the Cuban Communist Party is intensifying, as it has done before, the ideological battle and its determination to control all public spaces - including cyberspace - in order to exert its hegemony over discourse and dispute any narrative that may contradict the official project of the country’s future. We will see whether the still weak organisation and mobilisation capacities of the emerging actors of civil society make it possible, in the short term, to unlock and transform the current political scenario and its impacts on the daily lives of Cubans.
Cuban civil society is weak for two main reasons: the first is the lack of a legal framework that allows freedom of association and expression; the second involves a very shaky environment of collaboration and solidarity among different civil society groups. The only way to approach the first problem is by changing, substantially, the constitution and, subsequently, a great part of the current laws, and this will not likely be the case in the near future. Indeed, the present process of constitutional reform will retain the main articles that restrict any significant progress on political and civil rights.
This situation has forced civil society groups to live under a lot of pressure and constantly watch out for their own survival. However, the only way to approach such a precarious reality is by forming alliances and developing cooperation by exchanging all sort of resources and ideas. We are not referring here to a form of unity that frequently leads to homogenisation, but to a simple way to channel collaboration and support among groups with similar goals. This environment could be constructed by creating networks of people through the organisation of events during which different groups can get to know about each other’s work. Today, social media can be of great help to accomplish that.
Apart from collaboration, we think it is important to build a more fraternal and democratic environment within the broad and diverse spectrum of civil society in Cuba. It would not be enough simply to have a professional relationship with those groups that are closer to our principles and have common strategies and objectives with us; it would also be required to lend a hand to activists and CSOs that might differ from our mission and principles, but which to some extent struggle for survival and face forms of human right violations and abuses of power.
We think therefore that both professional collaboration and solidarity are the keys to strengthening civil society in Cuba.
References
Azor, Marlene (2016), Discursos de la resistencia. Los proyectos políticos emergentes en Cuba (Madrid: Editorial Hypermedia).
Bobes, Velia C. (2016), “Reformas en Cuba: ¿Actualización del socialismo o reconfiguración social?” Cuban Studies (Vol. 44, No. 1).
Bobes, Velia C. (2015), “Del hombre nuevo a una socialidad gentrificada. Impacto social de la reforma,” in Bobes, Velia Cecilia (ed.), Cuba ¿Ajuste o transición? Impacto de la reforma en el contexto del restablecimiento de las relaciones con Estados Unidos (Mexico: FLACSO).
Bobes, Velia C. (2007), La nación inconclusa. (Re) constituciones de la ciudadanía y la identidad nacional en Cuba (Mexico: FLACSO).
Dilla, Haroldo (2014), “Cuba: los nuevos campos de la oposición política,” Real Instituto Elcano, June 23rd.
Farber, Samuel (2012), “La iglesia y la izquierda crítica en Cuba,” Nueva Sociedad (Vol. 242), 123-138.
Geoffray, Marie Laure (2012), Contester à Cuba (Paris: Dalloz).
Rosendahl, Mona (1997), Inside the Revolution, Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Salas, Luis (1979), Social Control and Deviance in Cuba (New York: Praeger).
Tilly, C. and L. Wood (2010), Los movimientos sociales 1768-2008. Desde sus orígenes a Facebook (Barcelona: Crítica).

Cuba: battling economic crisis, escalating attacks on civil society

DemDigest    
 

                                                                            

Roberto Quiñones

Communist-run Cuba has imposed sweeping price controls on all state and private businesses as it battles a deepening economic crisis and mounting U.S. sanctions, Reuters reports:
Resolutions published in the official gazette banned all retail and wholesale price increases except for products imported and distributed by the state where already-set profit margins cannot be increased. “In effect they have suspended what there is of a market,” a Cuban economist said, asking not to be identified due to restrictions on talking to foreign journalists.
Economist Andrew Zimbalist, a Cuba expert at Smith College, said, “Such measures are usually okay for short periods of time, but if they stay in place they begin to create serious distortions in the economy.”

The economic crisis will undermine the regime’s efforts to establish “Market-Leninism” – a market socialist model with Cuban characteristics.

“In Cuba they’ve been thinking about transition and ‘the day after’ for a long, long time, but that debate has focused on to what degree to open up the economy and whether to go farther toward a Vietnam or China model,” says Eduardo Gamarra, an expert in Latin American democratization at Florida International University in Miami.

The U.S. is open to engagement with Cuba, but only if the regime “renounces its oppressive behavior,” said the U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.
“We’re doing everything we can here to support the Cuban people,” although “the list of challenges is long,” he said in a telephone interview with DIARIO DE CUBA, specifying the regime’s human rights abuses.
 

“You see with [journalist] Roberto Quinones (above) and his recent detention,” he said. “We know the story of the Ladies in White, right. This is a government that has denied these most basic freedoms to the Cuban people.” Quinones recently reported that How Night Fell by Huber Matos remains banned in Cuba.
It is also imperative to break the ‘Cubazuela‘ connection, Pompeo added. “Any new leader in Venezuela must get the Cubans away from the security apparatus,” he told Pablo Díaz Espí, Diario’s director.
“That connection, that link through the security team prevents the Venezuelan people from having the opportunity that they need to grow their economy and to restore democracy in their country,” he said. “That is not going to happen with hundreds and thousands of Cuban security officials, intelligence officials, military officials there with this very, very tight link.”
Pompeo’s comments come at a time of escalating repression of civil society activists and independent journalists.
 

The regime’s actions are generating an atmosphere of tension similar to that preceded by the raids of the Black Spring (2003), when 75 dissidents were convicted to long sentences in Castro prisons, Miriam Celaya writes for Translating Cuba. What stands out now is that the harassment remains constant, especially — although not exclusively — against the youngest and most active members of the emerging civil society, she adds.
Cuba this week relaxed controls on Internet access in an effort to defend the regime’s legitimacy both in the real and virtual worlds.

Sirley Avila Leon

The Center for a Free Cuba is assisting human rights activist Sirley Avila Leon, who lost her hand due to a machete attack by Cuban government agents in 2015. She recently spoke to a group of teachers at an event organized by Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and met with other human rights organizations.
The Human Rights in Foreign Affairs seminar, organized by the Václav Havel Institute of the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL, Argentina), was held on May 6-10, 2019, the NED’s International Forum adds. CADAL also organized a conversation Cuban historian and political activist Manuel Cuesta Morúa on “The Fight for Democracy and Human Rights in Cuba.”
Writing for the International Forum’s Power 3.0 Blog, Armando Chaguaceda and Maria Werlau examine “Cuba’s Efforts to Shape Debate in Latin America.”

‘The Totalitarian Regime Is Intact’: One Cuban’s Message to Obama

The U.S. is pressing ahead with its opening to Cuba. What does that mean for democracy on the island?

Uri Friedman

Rosa Maria Paya buries her father, Oswaldo Paya, in Havana in 2012.Reuters

Earlier this month, Ben Rhodes, the architect of Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening to Cuba, characterized the full restoration of U.S.-Cuban relations—in other words, Congress lifting the U.S. travel ban and trade embargo against the island—as inevitable and imminent. It would be the next domino to fall after the first U.S. presidential visit to Cuba in 88 years, the first authorization of commercial flights from America to Cuba in five decades, the first sales of Cuban coffee to the U.S. market, and so on.
“The fact of the matter is that the American people and the Cuban people overwhelmingly want this to happen,” Rhodes said. “Frankly, whatever the political realities in either country, for somebody to try to turn this off, they would have to be working against the overwhelming desires of their own people.”
As the Obama administration seeks to cement one of its principal foreign-policy achievements, it’s worth pausing to unpack that complex word: “desire.” Rhodes is right that the majority of Americans and Cubans support re-establishing ties between the two nations. Yet most Americans and Cubans don’t think re-established ties will bring more democracy to Cuba’s one-party state. In one 2015 poll, just over 50 percent of Cubans said they were dissatisfied with the country’s political system and wanted more political parties than the Castros’ Communist Party. But roughly the same percentage didn’t think their country’s new relationship with the United States would change the Cuban political system (Cubans were more likely to anticipate change in their widely despised economic system). They desire normal relations with America. But many also desire democracy. And they don’t expect the former to lead to the latter.
For Rosa Maria Paya, such an outcome is patently unacceptable. Paya is the daughter of Oswaldo Paya, a Cuban democracy activist who in 2012 was killed in a mysterious car crash that official accounts labeled an accident, but that Paya’s family, and the driver of the car, have condemned as a brazen assassination by the Castro regime. Paya is 27 years old, a recent college graduate who studied physics like her father and relocated from Havana to Miami after his death; she’s part of a generation of Cubans that is especially supportive of democracy, the United States, and emigration from Cuba. And Paya is an activist in her own right, continuing her father’s campaign for a national plebiscite on whether to overhaul Cuba’s political system.
Paya cannot be counted among the “overwhelming” number of Cubans who, according to Rhodes, are enthusiastic about Obama’s Cuba policy. She is not as quick as Rhodes to downplay the “political realities” in her country. At the Human Rights Foundation’s Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway, she offered sobering and, at times, searing commentary on what the Obama administration’s outreach to Cuba has produced—and, critically, what it hasn’t.
Paya said she’s in favor of countries engaging with and investing in Cuba, but argued that media coverage of the thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations, and the ways both governments have sold the rapprochement, have created the false perception that a political transition is underway on the island. That perception is in part the result of Cuban elites cynically exploiting the free market and the symbols of the free world, she said: “I’m talking about Mick Jagger in Havana, or Chanel [fashion shows], or a Fast & Furious [film shoot] taking place on the Malecon.”
“The totalitarian regime is still intact,” she told me. “Fundamental human rights that have been violated for 55 years are still being violated, and the life of the common Cuban hasn’t changed at all.”
Yes, more Americans can now travel to Cuba and more Cubans can now travel to America, Paya conceded, but the Cuban government still bars its critics from leaving the country by denying them passports. Recent visits by Obama, Pope Francis, and EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini, she added, have granted legitimacy to a government “that is not legitimate … that is not normal even if you normalize relations with it,” that relies on violent suppression and dynastic succession to maintain power, and that deprives its citizens of freedoms of expression, association, internet access, and multiparty elections.
She applauded Obama for emphasizing, during his March trip to the island, the right of Cubans to determine their own future. And she doesn’t believe it’s the U.S. government’s role to transform Cuba. What she wants from the United States is more coherence between its rhetoric and its actions on democracy and human rights: “Ask for Cubans the same things that you [would] ask for yourselves, and don’t allow for Cubans something that you would never allow for yourselves.”
Paya recalled Obama’s offers to extend a hand to America’s foes, including Cuba, and then cited a saying of her father’s: “If you are going to extend a helping hand to the Cuban people, you should first ask for the Cuban people to have their hands untied.”
I countered that for nearly 60 years, the U.S. government had largely followed her father’s advice, with little to show for it. Cubans’ hands remained tied, despite all of Washington’s asking and demanding and coercing. The Obama administration appeared to be rejecting that logic, prioritizing dialogue over democracy and betting that a hand extended might ultimately be more beneficial to the Cuban people than a hand withheld. A number of international-relations theorists believe engaging enemies is more productive than isolating them, I noted.
Paya bristled at my mention of theory. “We Cubans shouldn’t be the objects of any theoretical experiment,” she responded. “We are human beings. … Conversation [between countries] itself is not enough.” What matters is what’s being discussed. Ten years after the U.S. and China established full diplomatic relations, she pointed out, the Chinese government committed the Tiananmen Square massacre with impunity: “I’m a physicist. I know what [proof] you need to demonstrate a theorem. And we don’t have that. We cannot say that the process that has been started [between the U.S. and Cuba] is a process that is going to end in democracy.”
“What doesn’t need to be proved is that if people can decide [their future], you don’t have a totalitarian regime,” she added.
“Cubans are not less than Americans,” Paya insisted. “Why do we have to sit down and wait for a king to die? No. We can have rights today. There’s not a single reason to deny human rights to a whole population.”

I asked how that denial manifested itself in her daily life in Cuba. “You cannot choose how to live your life,” she said. “You cannot choose the work you’re going to have after university. You cannot choose the school you’re going to attend. You cannot choose your leaders. You cannot decide to move not even out of the country, [but] inside the country because you could be called—and this is a good one—an ‘illegal’ in your own country. National deportations [from Havana to other parts of the country] are taking place in Cuba.” And if you join civil society or oppose the government and political system, “then you could face prison, you could face isolation, you are definitely going to suffer the persecution of the state security [forces]. And if you succeed [in your campaign for political reform], like my father, then you could face death.”
Paya is now lobbying both Cubans and international actors to exert pressure on the Castro regime to hold a nationwide referendum on the Cuban political system. Such a vote, in her mind, could result in a constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution and a transitional government that organizes free and fair elections. U.S. officials, she reasons, should be talking to their Cuban counterparts not just about coffee sales and commercial flights, but also democratic reforms, like the plebiscite, that are advocated by Cubans.
But it’s far easier to talk coffee than constitutions. After all, the Cuban Constitution enshrines the country’s socialist system as “irrevocable.” And, as Paya herself admits, authoritarians don’t “commit suicide.”

This reporting was made possible in part with the support of the Human Rights Foundation.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Uri Friedman is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering national security and global affairs. 

DIARIO DE CUBA Journalist Jorge Enrique Rodríguez Detained and Awaiting Trial

Relatives of the reporter say that they have not been able to see him, and do not know what he is accused of.

DDC

Madrid 02 Jul 2020 - 10:23 CEST

Jorge Enrique Rodríguez. J.E. RODRIGUEZ (FACEBOOK)

DIARIO DE CUBA journalist Jorge Enrique Rodríguez Camejo has been detained since Sunday and is awaiting trial, to be held on Tuesday, July 7, on a charge that his relatives are still unaware of, his brother Leonel Rodríguez told DIARIO DE CUBA.
"He’s going to be held until July 7, when they’re going to hold his trial," said Rodríguez, who has not been able to communicate with the reporter to verify the details of his arrest.
"There are several versions. According to one it was 'disregard for authority'. In another he was supporting the protests following the death of the young Hansel Ernesto Hernández at the hands of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR). And another says that he was filming a video," he added.
"When I went yesterday to pick up some things to take to him, where he is being held, a neighbor told me that they had taken him from his house, so I don't know which version to believe, because I haven't seen him yet."
Leonel says that he was able to confirm that Jorge Enrique Rodríguez Camejo "was transferred to the criminal processing center known as the Vivac" in Havana.
The DIARIO DE CUBA journalist was subjected to an interrogation last April during which State Security agents accused him of "spreading false news" and told him that there were proceedings underway against him for this reason.
The Cuban regime's political police have gone after independent journalists during the pandemic, violating the government's own isolation measures.
Four other DIARIO DE CUBA journalists have received summons and threats since March: Yoe Suárez, Waldo Fernández Cuenca, Manuel Alejandro León and Boris González Arenas.
Several independent reporters have also been fined up to 3,000 pesos under Decree Law 370, including Camila Acosta and Julio Antonio Aleaga, with Cubanet, and Mónica Baró, with El Estornudo.
All have been threatened with retaliation for doing their jobs. Rodríguez Camejo's arrest came while all across the island a major police operation is trying to foil protests against police violence and racism, announced by activists and members of independent civil society outraged by the death of the young black man at the hands of the police.

The Failure of Communism in Cuba

On Principle, v7n5

by Glenn Sheller

On May 1, I stood in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución transfixed by my first in-the-flesh sighting of a communist autocrat. A few hundred feet away at the base of the towering monument to 19th-century Cuban nationalist José Martí, stood 71-year-old Fidel Castro.
Around me, thousands of people swirled, part of the giant street party that is the annual May Day parade in the heart of the crumbling capital of Castro’s decrepit worker’s paradise.
I felt I was experiencing something special, something that soon will be swept away forever. Castro was all of 31 when he seized power in 1959 and instantly became the symbol of youthful revolt that inspired the young leftists of the 1960s. His socialist Cuba was to be the model for a world that soon would be transformed by revolution.
But the young revolutionary had given way to the old man standing before me, and his revolution, once vibrant and new, was now shabby and exhausted.
Cuba no longer is a beacon to the future. Instead, it is a historical backwater in a world that has moved on, a relic of a bad idea whose time, whose century has come and gone.
The slogan “Socialism or death!” once inspired revolutionary fervor. Now it is more likely to elicit a tired and cynical, “What’s the difference?”
When Castro disappears into senility or death, so will his revolution go. It is slipping away from him already.
After spending a week in Havana this spring on assignment for my newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, I returned home convinced more than ever that the United States should lift the embargo against Cuba.
Not because I like Castro or Cuban communism, but because I think lifting the embargo would destroy Castro’s regime.
Without the embargo to inflame Cuban nationalism and to blame for the economic failures of his revolution, Castro would be stripped of the last excuse he has for the decades of unnecessary privation and repression he has inflicted on the Cuban people.
If the U.S. embargo were lifted, the full force of American culture and commerce would hit Cuban shores like a tidal wave, sweeping away whatever loyalty to Castro and socialism remains there.
In fact, this already is happening on small scale, and the results have so alarmed Castro and his inner circle that in the past year the Cuban government has significantly tightened the screws on dissenters and independent Cuban journalists and expanded the list of crimes punishable by death.
The irony is that it was Castro himself who opened the door just a crack to freedom and unleashed forces that are trying to push it open even wider.
When the Soviet bloc dissolved at the beginning of the 1990s, Cuba suddenly lost the $5 billion to $8 billion in annual Kremlin aid and trade that had kept the island afloat for three decades.
Unable to produce enough food, Cuba’s people began to go hungry. Without the generous Soviet oil subsidy, transportation and industry were paralyzed. Without hard currency to pay for them, no food, fertilizer or oil could be imported. Left to stand on its own for the first time in 30 years, Cuba folded.
Beginning in 1993, with people eating banana peels just to feel something substantial in their stomachs and with the populace suffering an epidemic of blindess and paralysis linked to vitamin deficiencies, Castro borrowed a page from Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s and turned to capitalism to save socialism. He legalized the U.S. dollar and opened the door to small-scale private enterprise.
Farmers markets, private taxis, auto repair shops and small restaurants sprang up. Just as it did for the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, this limited opening to free markets pulled the Cuban economy out of its nosedive. Suddenly, there was food again. Not much, but enough.
At the same time, Castro intensified efforts to lure joint ventures with foreign investors, with much of that investment poured into Cuba’s tourist industry, a generator of desperately needed hard currency.
Suddenly, Cubans could buy food and consumer products that hadn’t been available for years. Well, some Cubans could do this, those who had access to dollars, either from relatives in the United States, or who worked in the tourist trade, serving wealthy foreigners. These lucky folk, about 81,000 of the 11 million Cubans, often make more in tips in a day than most Cubans earn in a month. That’s not hard to do when the state-mandated salaries for all other Cubans, even doctors, range from $10 to $20 a month.
Those relying on such miniscule state salaries spend much of it buying food in private markets to supplement the inadequate rations the government provides to each Cuban.
American and European goods can be bought at special state stores that traded only in dollars. Those with only Cuban pesos in their pockets are left to press their nose against the window.
This dollar apartheid is carried further in the tourist industry. Hotels and restaurants catering to foreign tourists are off-limits to all Cubans except those employed there. Any Cuban caught trying to enter, even with an invitation from a tourist, gets the bum’s rush.
My tour group’s hotel, the Habana Riviera, built by American gangster Meyer Lansky in 1958, was hermetically sealed against unauthorized Cubans. Numerous security men stood at the entrance, thoughout the ground floor of the hotel and especially at the lobby elevator to ensure that no Cubans got in.
One even guarded the stairway to the lower level, where the hotel restaurant laid on a smorgasbord at breakfast and dinner that included food in a variety and quality that many Cubans haven’t seen, much less tasted, in years.
Naturally, the inequalities between those Cubans with dollars and those without, and between deprived Cubans and pampered foreigners, has provoked a lot of resentment in a society officially committed to egalitarianism.
Cubans squeaking by with government salaries—many of them highly trained professionals—resent their nouveau-riche comrades who earn fistfuls of precious dollars each day simply by driving a private taxi or cleaning toilets in a tourist hotel.
The incongruities that result have inspired some biting and bitter humor, such as the joke about the pathetic neighborhood blowhard who tries to impress people by telling them that he drives a taxi, when everybody knows he really is only a brain surgeon.
Alarm at this relative explosion of privately generated wealth extends into the highest reaches of the Cuban society. After Castro legalized small enterprises, the Cuban entrepreneurial spirit, crushed for more than three decades, ignited like a rocket. Soon more than 200,000 people were reckoned to be involved in private enterprise and many were making money hand over fist.
Hardliners in the Castro’s inner circle demanded that such shameless prosperity be reined in. The result was a sharp increase in taxes on private enterprise, driving thousands of entrepreneurs out of business. In a recent count, the number of people officially estimated still to be active in legal private commerce had been reduced to 130,000.
Of course, this small capitalist class is probably just the visible portion of a much vaster enterprise, the underground economy. Every socialist society that has ever existed has rested on a capitalist foundation. Socialism is so profoundly inept at meeting basic material needs that citizens are forced to resort to the black market.
In Havana, the fact that a cop is stationed on virtually every block is a tacit admission of this fact. Everywhere, police stop Cubans to demand their identification and to inspect the packages they are carrying, questioning them closely about where they’ve been and where they’re going. My tour group’s government-supplied guide explained that the purpose of the cops was not intimidation of the populace, but to stop black-market activities. Perhaps one has to be a communist to understand such distinctions.
The Cuba I saw is subsisting, not prospering. Foreign investment still is estimated at $2 billion or less since 1990. Cuba, with virtually the same land area and population as Ohio, had an estimated gross domestic product of just $16.9 billion in 1997. Ohio’s gross state product was $342 billion in 1998.
Castro likes to blame the island’s poverty on the U.S. embargo, as if Cuba cannot and does not trade with Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe and Asia. While it’s true that Cuba could import many items more cheaply from the U.S. than from more distant places, such as Europe, the U.S. State Department estimates the embargo only adds about 5 percent to the cost of Cuba’s imports. That seems a reasonable estimate, but even if the added cost is double that, it wouldn’t explain Cuba’s economic anemia. No, the real problem with the Cuba is socialism.
The condition of Havana alone speaks volumes about the bankruptcy of Castro’s centrally planned economy.
Collapsed buildings and heaps of rubble can be found in every other block. Estimates of how many buildings fall down each year range from 80 to 300. On one main street, a former commercial building six or eight stories tall is a gutted shell, its roof and upper floors gone. Only the second floor remains, heaped with rubble in which palm trees have taken root and grow through window frames.
Once-magnificent buildings are pocked and stained with rust and grime, while inside, their spacious interiors have been converted to warrens of tiny apartments to provide housing for the city’s 2 million residents.In many multistory apartment buildings, the elevators no longer work.
From formerly elegant balconies and windows, each family’s meager laundry hangs to dry, the banners of the enthroned proletariat.
The broad boulevards that once rivaled in beauty those of any in Europe are a grimy gray and fouled by auto exhaust, some from ancient American sedans from the 1940s and ’50s, the remainder from belching Soviet Ladas and Moskviches.
In a city that once was a vibrant 20th-century metropolis filled with lights and movie stars, it now is common to hear roosters crow and see wagons pulled by oxen.
In Havana and throughout the country, the infrastructure is ancient, decayed and inefficient. For example, the phone system, now being upgraded in a joint venture with an Italian company, is a relic of the 1950s, built and formerly operated by ITT.
The Partagas Cigar Factory, where some of the world’s most famous cigars are made, is an ancient multi-story firetrap where 600 workers labor by hand without air-conditioning and virtually no machinery. Granted, handrolling is a plus in cigar manufacture, but even in the accounting department, the only business machine in evidence was a scabrous typewriter that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. Production records were kept with pencil and paper.
The public transportation system is equally backward. Havana residents sometimes wait for hours for one of the peculiar Cuban buses, called “camels”—two semitrailers welded together and pulled by a semi tractor. There is no schedule. It is common to see scores, even hundreds of people sitting, standing and milling around a bus stop, waiting. And waiting.
Others ride bikes—tens of thousands were imported from China after the loss of the Soviet oil subsidy. Two, three, four people—in some cases an entire family—perch precariously on a single bicycle.
Cubans are proud of their ability to make do, and to repackage bane as blessing. Bicycling is not just an fuel-free form of transport, it’s good for you and doesn’t pollute. Lacking fertilizer, Cubans have discovered the holistic wonders of organic gardening. With medicines in short supply, herbal remedies are all the rage.
This make-do spirit is an admirable alternative to despair. And the fact is, however they may act when they’re among their own, toward guests Cubans are as sunny and warm as their island. They welcome visitors, even those who have been their enemies for 40 years.
In fact, the cheefulness Cubans display toward foreigners can have a curious effect. It’s easy to begin to think that perhaps things aren’t all that bad on the island. It can seem that despite the poverty and the political repression, that maybe the Cubans really do have something special, a way of life that emphasizes human connections, interdependence and egalitarianism. And if that’s the case, why fuss about the lack of basic freedoms?
But this attitude is condescending. It is the height of elitism for those who enjoy the freedom and affluence provided by liberal democracy and free markets to suggest that the people of Cuba or any other backward, repressive place are content with their lot and therefore have no need of the institutions of liberty.
Of course adversity can bring out the best in people, revealing unsuspected reserves of courage, resilience, ingenuity and generosity. Certainly this applies to the Cubans I met.
But it is altogether perverse to suggest that the political system that inflicts that adversity is therefore an agent of good. Castro is not a saint for imposing the privation that forces Cubans to discover the best in themselves.
And those who think Cubans are content with their lot are forgetting the tens of thousands who have set sail on rafts and inner-tubes through shark-infested waters to escape such a blessed existence.
Last year, the United States held a lottery to distribute some of the 20,000 visas allotted each year to Cubans who want to emigrate to the U.S. When officials were finished counting, they found they had 540,000 applications, equal to a quarter of the population of Havana, or one of every 20 Cubans on the island.
Yet Castro and his revolution still have a small cheering section, as I discovered after returning from Havana and writing a number of stories about Cuba for my newspaper.
Apologists for Castro take a few basic tacks. One is to divert attention to all the other nasty places in the world. One critic of my stories complained that I hadn’t noted the poverty, misery and violence in Colombia. True, but I didn’t visit Colombia, I visited Cuba. Beyond that, I have to wonder how the existence of nastiness in Colombia excuses the nastiness in Cuba.
The other tack is to excuse Castro because Cuba has literacy and infant mortality rates as good as those in the developed world. This is the familiar leftist double-standard. Collectivist regimes, which get most things wrong, are praised to the sky for getting a few things right. Liberal democracies, which get most things right, are utterly demonized for getting a few things wrong.
It is particularly ironic that Castro’s defenders should seize on literacy and infant mortality statistics in his defense. All those who survive infancy thanks to Castro spend lives stunted by poverty and repression, also thanks to Castro. The populace may be educated, but the regime tells them what they are supposed to think, read and write.
Most fascinating among the members of the Castro fan club here in the United States is an organization called Pastors for Peace, a subsidiary of the leftist Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization.
IFCO is headed by a Baptist clergyman in New York named Lucius Walker. According to Walker, Cuba is among the most democratic societies in the world, a place where human need is put ahead of capitalist greed. If human rights sometimes are violated there, it is only because Castro feels that he is under seige from the United States, which wants to reduce Cuba once again to colonial vassalage.
Not surprisingly, Walker and Castro are pals.
Pastors for Peace organizes nationwide bus caravans each year that travel city to city to collect medicines and medical equipment, clothing and food for Cuba. The caravans then push on to Canada or Mexico, where the buses are loaded on ships bound for Havana. The next caravan is scheduled to pass through Ohio in November.
Even though it is legal for Americans to send humanitarian aid to Cuba by applying for a license from the federal government, Walker and Pastors for Peace pointedly refuse to do so, deliberately flouting the U.S. embargo.
For Walker and his supporters, the U.S. embargo is immoral and the group’s disobedience is intended as a provocation to federal authorities, who so far have stopped short of prosecuting Walker or any of his followers for violations of the embargo.
Pastors for Peace relies on lefty activists and groups, some religious, some not, in scores of cities around the nation. In Columbus, where I encountered them, they met in a Presbyterian church.
There is much about the group that is admirable. They really have moved hundreds of tons of desperately needed supplies to Cuba to the undoubted benefit of thousands of ordinary Cubans, for whom toothpaste, soap and toilet paper are prized luxuries.
More than that, Pastors for Peace has done this in the face of harassment and threats from federal officials. One needn’t be a lefty to agree with the group that Americans have the right to travel and trade wherever they please, short of a declaration of war by the U.S. Congress.
But what is troubling about Pastors For Peace is its hypocrisy. On the night I visited with the local chapter to talk about my trip to Cuba, the members also were reverently marking the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, several provisions of which Cuba has violated routinely for decades.
Even more disturbing is a recent Pastors For Peace newsletter that defends, even lauds, Cuba’s recent imprisonment of four political dissidents who had advocated nonviolent resistance to Castro’s authority, just as Pastors for Peace advocates nonviolent resistance to U.S. authority.
The newsletter argued that the dissidents deserved their prison sentences because, among other things, they encouraged Cubans to “engage in civil disobedience against the Cuban regime.”
How dare they!
But I suspect Pastors For Peace will not have too many more years to exercise their political double standard. Castro is definitely old and definitely not immortal, and when he goes, everyone expects big changes in Cuba.
Cubans themselves seem to think that nothing can change until Fidel is gone. That prospect offers hope to many, but also fear that the immediate aftermath will be instability, perhaps bloody civil strife.
That’s a worry shared by American diplomatic officials I spoke with, whose nightmare is a civil war in Cuba that launches thousands of rafts toward Miami.
But whether it is bloody or peaceful, change is coming to Cuba. Castro himself has unleashed it, and he and his revolution appear too old and too feeble to hold it in check much longer.
Viva Cuba!

Glenn Sheller is an editorial writer for The Columbus Dispatch.
https://ashbrook.org