Cuba and the New Caribbean Economic Order.

• Author: Falcoff, Mark

When the soviet empire imploded some six years ago, most observers -- East and West -- assumed that the disappearance of the Castro regime in Cuba was but a matter of time. After all, no member of the socialist family of nations had received such generous economic subsidies from Moscow; none was more culturally vulnerable to outside influences or more geographically exposed; none had made so heavy an ideological investment in Lenin's vision of the future. Having bet on the wrong horse, Castro's Cuba was therefore destined -- to borrow Trotsky's durable phrase -- for the dustbin of history.

So far, at least, those predictions seem to have proven excessively deterministic. True, in the absence of Soviet oil, machinery, food-stuffs and other consumer products, Cuban living standards have fallen catastrophically, and may not yet have touched bottom. True as well, ordinary Cubans, particularly young people, are deeply alienated from the regime. (Cuban walls now bear such pungent inscriptions as "Down with You-Know-Who!") Finally, until the recent immigration agreement, unprecedented numbers of Cubans were attempting to leave the island on makeshift boats.

Nonetheless, Castro has never seemed more firmly ensconced in power. Those who have been bold enough over the years to declare themselves his enemies are now dead, in exile, in jail, or cowering in fear of arrest. While everything else in Cuba seems to be breaking down, the repressive apparatus is more effective than ever. The small dissident movement, hounded by the police and government mobs, offers an example of high courage -- but no apparent alternative for ordinary Cubans. The very fact of Castro's survival in the face of multiple predictions of his demise seems to have braced up the Cuban dictator psychologically. It has also strengthened the interpretive hand of those of his apologists, supporters, or sympathizers abroad, who would have us believe that, whatever has happened elsewhere in the world, in Cuba -- a country once known for rum, cigars, beaches, gambling, and the rhumba -- communism has finally found a place where it really "works."

This view is not wholly confined to the far left. Not long ago a right-wing Chilean congressman of my acquaintance urged me to consider the possibility that "in some countries, socialism, that is, Marxist socialism, can become a national project." When I objected that this particular national project seemed destined to starve an entire people to death, he agreed. It was an unpleasant project, he averred, certainly not one he would wish for Chile, but an authentic expression of that particular country's national quest nonetheless. Or consider an excerpt from a cover story of the international edition of Time magazine (December 6, 1993). "Through a combination of charisma and pride," wrote senior editor Johanna McGeary, Castro "still holds the island's fate in his hand ... Cubans [regard] their revolutionary heroes as Americans do...Che Guevara is their Lafayette, Fidel their George Washington." If this is so, one cannot help wondering why, thirty years on, we are still awaiting the appearance of Cuba's version of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe. Or is it rather that Cuba -- unlike the United States, France, or for that matter Russia -- is somehow capable of surviving indefinitely on the myth of a single cathartic revolutionary moment?

If Cuba turns out, after all, to be the one place in the world where communism really "works" Ernest Preeg has shown us just what "working" really means. In the old days (that is, before 1989), 85 percent of Cuba's trade was with the Soviet Union, 90 percent of which was restricted to five primary products. Because it was based not on comparative advantage but purely circumstantial political alignments, this relationship introduced radical distortions into the island's economy. For example, in 1986 Cuba received eight times the world price of sugar for its harvest. This naturally led Castro's planners to increase the acreage devoted to sugar by one third, while reducing that devoted to food products like corn by in some cases as much as 50 percent.

The sudden loss of the Soviet market is therefore a triple blow. There is no ready-made outlet for what Cuba is geared to produce (sugar); the prices it can now command for sugar are a fraction of what it formerly received@ and there is no apparent alternative source of foreign exchange. This means not only that there are no resources with which to buy what cannot be produced at home (e.g., foodstuffs), but that new investment to restructure the economy must be postponed indefinitely. Meanwhile, lack of fuel, fertilizer, and spare parts has undercut even the sugar harvest, which did not quite reach four million tons in 1994 (slightly less than half what it was in the heyday of the Cuban-soviet relationship). It is expected to be even less in 1995.

But Cuba's decline is not merely quantitative, but qualitative as well. As Preeg observes:

Cuba has become an undeveloping country. Bicycles are replacing automobiles. Horse-drawn carts are replacing delivery trucks. Oxen are replacing tractors. Factories are shut down and urban industrial workers resettled in rural areas to engage in labor-intensive agriculture. Food consumption is shifting from meat and processed products to potatoes, bananas, and other staples.

Cuba is not, of course, the first country in (what used to be called) the Third World to pursue a strategy of autarky leading to de-development. But -- given its demonstrated superiority in political repression -- it is one of the few countries capable of carrying such policies forward over the longer term. There are precious few loopholes in the system, which means that dogmatism and rigidity will not be as extensively tempered in Cuba (as in, say, Franco's Spain) by inefficiency, corruption, and administrative oversight.

The one area where Cuba can expect to move forward is in tourism, where some European and Canadian concerns have started to make new investments. But in spite of the fulsome claims made, Cuba cannot replicate the past success of Mexico or Spain in this regard, since the effects on the economy as a whole are limited by the small space reserved for market logic by the large, still nearly universal non-market economy. More to the point, an increase of tourist revenues to $250 million by 1995 -- which seems already to have been achieved -- pales into insignificance when compared to the loss of $6 billion in Soviet resources since 1989.(1)

There is also much talk of new investments in nickel, sugar, telephones and such basic industries by Mexican, Canadian, British, and other European consortia. There are, in fact, some three hundred foreign firms now operating in Cuba, but most of these have yet to make a new investment commitment; rather they are positioning themselves in the eventuality that the U.S. trade embargo is lifted and the government shifts to a full-scale market rationale. (Presumably they are also betting that no successor-state will penalize them for collusion with the Castro dictatorship, a wager they may just lose.) So far the needed changes have not occurred -- not, at least, on a scale sufficient to encourage the investors to move beyond the realm of speculation and marginality.

Stated succinctly, without drastic economic and political reform there is no way out. But of course, to change the system too drastically would render it unrecognizable, and altogether beg the question of whether Cuba has really proven Marx right after all.

Guilt Management as Art Form

Over the last five years there has been a subtle but perceptible shift in Cuban studies in the United States to take these new realities into account. Whereas formerly much of the emphasis was on the alleged economic and social "successes" of the revolution, particularly in the areas of education and health, today the viability of the regime is located in its historicity, in its deep roots with the Cuban past, and its continuing capacity to validate certain pre-Castro trends and tendencies in Cuban politics -- a need which, to follow the logic of the argument, even now is best served by hunger, rationing, repression, and cultural isolation. If one accepts -- but only if one accepts -- the notion that Cuban history is "about" the need for independence from the United States to the exclusion of just about everything else, then the Castro regime's demonstrated capacity to liberate the island from American influence can be represented as a towering achievement which requires little or no other justification. It is a case of heads I win (things are better because of socialism), or, alternatively, tails you lose (things are better even if they are not).

This intellectual shell game is the subject of Irving Louis Horowitz' The Conscience of Worms and the Cowardice of Lions. In a few brief but telling pages, it retraces the crooked path -- twisted in both the geometric and moral sense-taken...