A half-century ago, Comandante Huber Matos helped stop the Cuban revolution from turning into a bloodbath by persuading President Batista’s senior army officers to defect and join his comrades. On the evening of the accord, rebel leader Fidel Castro proclaimed the victory of the revolution, declaring “Never again will there be a dictatorship on Cuba!”
Shortly afterwards, Matos was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the new regime’s first show trial, with Castro turning against his former comrade to act as the main witness for the prosecution. Matos served every day of his sentence, leaving Cuba in 1979 for Miami where the 90-year-old former revolutionary now lives in exile.
Fifty years after the revolution, the regime’s seamless transition – or should that be dynastic succession? – highlights the tragic irony of Cuba’s democratic opposition: too weak to take advantage of the crisis precipitated by the collapse of Soviet communism, a more robust civic movement now faces an entrenched regime that is successfully managing a shift from charismatic to institutionalized rule.
The strength of the civic opposition lies in its multiracial diversity, its decentralized network model of organization and its potential appeal to three key groups of marginalized Cubans – youth, Afro-Cubans and workers. “It is more like a horizontal patchwork of overlapping centers of independent civic activity,” write the National Endowment for Democracy’s Carl Gershman and Orlando Gutierrez, cofounder of the Cuban Democratic Directorate.
Black and mixed-race Cubans comprise at least half of the island’s population and remain notably under-represented within the ruling white party elite, yet provide much of the opposition’s leadership, including Jorge Luis García Perez, aka Antúnez. One reason why foreign Cuba experts so readily dismiss the opposition is because it includes “too many blacks, too many workers and it is nationalist,” Gutierrez told a public meeting at the NED last week. It doesn’t fit their “politically condescending” ideological stereotype of Miami exiles and individual dissidents.
The event was organized by the NED and the Journal of Democracy to discuss the articles, “Tensions in the Regime” and “Ferment in Civil Society,” from the journal’s January 2009 issue.
Cuban workers’ alienation from the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ is evident in the regime’s consistent complaints of labor indiscipline – absenteeism, poor productivity and non-attendance at state-run union meetings – while independent labor unions like the United Council of Cuban Workers and Independent Workers Confederation are organizing work stoppages and demonstrations. It is critical that an imminent delegation from the international labor movement meet with the independent unions, Gershman told the NED meeting, citing the Curacao dry dock case as the latest instance of labor rights abuses by the communist regime.
Civil society had indeed made gains, said Eusebio Mujal-Leon, director of Georgetown University’s Cuba XXI Project, but the regime remained “world class” in its repressive capacities while still second rate in economic management. As with the GDR, the regime’s “Achilles Heel” lay in uncontrolled emigration, a challenge to an order-based regime that is already facing the long-term demographic problem of an ageing population.
“Stability sits alongside growing disenchantment, albeit not yet pressures for change,” he writes in the January 2009 Journal of Democracy. “The ubiquitous Comités de Defensa de la Revolución have begun to fray, but civil society and the private economy remain weak, dissidence and contestation are still limited, and people fear change. There is no visible alternative to the established order, but accumulated inefficiencies and incapacities have stifled hope for a better future.”
There is a compelling need to “strengthen those movements that can be a factor for change” on the island, according to Carlos Pascual, addressing a recent Brookings panel discussion. The challenge is to combine support for change with a policy shift from the failed policy of isolationism. The status quo is not feasible given the changes in leadership in Havana and Washington, the post- Fidel institutionalization of power in the party and the army, generational shifts in Cuban-American opinion, and the prospect of $5 billion p.a. oil revenues for Havana making the embargo even less effective than it is currently.
There is a need to engage a wide range of actors, including reformers within the regime, said Daniel P. Erikson, a senior associate for U.S. policy at the Inter-American Dialogue, and author of a new book on Cuba. But USAID’s top-down approaches had signally failed and U.S. policy towards Cuba had been plagued by the law of unintended consequences. Such programs have been “at best, providing high-priced and marginally useful support to worthy democratic causes on the island.”
“Cuba is a small island that raises big issues,” he told the Brookings event, including whether the U.S. has the “right, responsibility or capacity to bring down and replace authoritarian regimes with democracies.” The communist authorities closely monitor relations between dissident groups and groups working to promote democracy, “something that Castro has deemed to be a provocation of the highest order.”
The difference between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, said Marc Falcoff, is that the former is a revolutionary in the guise of a caudillo while Chavez is the reverse.
U.S. policy is fatally flawed by a confused, if not contradictory policy: “we want radical change yet our immigration policy allows Cuba’s government to systematically export its opponents.” Any engagement with Havana must keep democracy and human rights on the agenda, although the experience of the European Union and Canada’s dialogs with Havana is not encouraging.
Recent Comments