Cuba: ‘Taliban’ demotions no indicator of change

This week’s personnel shifts within Cuba’s communist elite do not amount to a shift in power away from the hard-core ‘Taliban’ faction towards more reformist technocrats, analysts suggest. Raúl Castro is striving to modernize the communist state’s institutions which – outside of the military – are and notoriously inefficient. But recent personnel changes do not amount to a major policy shift but “a modest step, in terms of streamlining,” says Phil Peters, a Cuba observer at the Lexington Institute. “I think this is Raúl Castro putting his own people into important positions,” he says.

Frank Mora, a Cuba expert at Washington, D.C.’s National War College agrees. Raúl Castro is “putting in someone who’s a technocrat and not an ideologue will be perceived as a small sign of something positive in Washington” even though recent senior personnel changes are “more about streamlining bureaucracy…. than any response to the Obama Administration.”

Raul Castro has frustrated hopes that he might usher in incremental reforms. “After elevating popular expectations for liberalizing change in his inaugural address last February — and in earlier performances as provisional president — he has retreated,” notes one observer.

The army is emerging as the principal source of power on the island, says Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. “I like to look at Cuba from an institutional point of view, the strength of the military, the strength of the Communist Party,” he says. “As long as we don’t see any cracks in the military, or the party …. there is going to be, or at least very likely to be, a continuation of the current regime.”

A U.S. Senate staff report recently advocated greater engagement with Havana arguing that a strategy of embargo and isolation had failed. Others, including Daniel P. Erikson, a senior associate for U.S. policy at the Inter-American Dialogue, and author of a new book on Cuba, argue for engaging reformers within the regime.

But many Cuban-Americans and democracy advocates are skeptical of an accommodation that does not require reciprocity from the communist regime, in terms of human rights concessions, including letting Cubans travel freely. As “an activist who has spent more than 17 years of uninterrupted confinement in filthy jails simply for expressing my desire for change,” Afro-Cuban democracy activist Jorge Luis Garcia Perez ‘Antunez’, has called for a continued policy of opposition to the regime, noting that the reforms that he advocates “are the same as those that were demanded in Central Europe in public squares and streets two decades ago.”

The Senate staff delegation was criticized for failing to meet or consult with any Cuban dissidents or members of the growing pro-democracy movement. Cuban-American Senator Robert Menendez is one of those urging continued support for Cuba’s democrats and emerging opposition. In a recent speech he highlighted the work of el Movimiento Feminista de Derechos Civiles Rosa Parks–the Rosa Parks women’s civil rights movement – and last week’s vigil by 130 Cubans in solidarity with a young activist, Iris Tamara Perez Aguilara, who went into hypoglycemic shock after a hunger strike against the regime. Her husband, “Antunez” has emerged as one of the civic opposition’s leading lights, Menendez notes:

She has been joined in her hunger strike by her husband Jorge Luis Garcia Perez “Antunez”, along with Segundo Rey Cabrera and Diosiris Santana Perez. They have avowed to continue their protest until the torture of political prisoner Mario Alberto Perez Aguilera, held at the Santa Clara Provincial Prison, ceases immediately. They will continue their protest until he is taken out of a tiny solitary confinement cell, until he is no longer beaten and forced to starve, until the regime allows Antunez’s sister, Caridad Garcia Perez, to rebuild her home destroyed by the hurricanes last year, which they have not allowed as further punishment to these activists.