Cuba without a Castro:"No es facil" (It’s not easy)

Rajan Philips-May 19, 2018, 6:47 pm 

For the first time in sixty years, Cuba is without a Castro at the helm. For fifty years after the revolutionary government first took power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro held the reins of power. For the next ten years, from 2008 when Fidel Castro stepped down, younger brother Raul Castro ran the show. Now Raul Castro has retired and is succeeded by Miguel Diaz-Canel, a 58-year old electronics engineer and senior leader of the Cuban Communist Party. Exactly a month ago on April 19, Diaz-Canal was elected by the National Assembly as Cuba’s new President. Raul Castro will remain as the all-powerful Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party until 2021, when Miguel will slide into that position as well.

This is the first peaceful civilian succession in Cuban history, and the first in sixty years that does not have a Castro assuming power. Born in 1960, the new President belongs to the first post-revolutionary generation of Cubans. The smooth succession might be seen as a testament to the stability of the Cuba’s one-party political system. At the same time, it has raised questions and speculations about Cuba’s future without a Castro at the helm. There is apparently a Cuban refrain that may seem to echo the national anxiety is: "No es facil" (It’s not easy).

Quite by happenstance I spent a week in Cuba from May 13 to 20, and what follows is a summary of what I heard and observed during that time. Cubans seemed quite free to talk about their country, its leaders, its past and its prospects for the future. Equally, visitors to Cuba are now free to travel freely within Cuba and interact with Cuban citizens. This was not the case when Cuba started its tourism industry in the 1990s, when tourists were confined to their beach resorts and were allowed out only under organized and supervised excursions.

The circumstance of my visit was the 2018 Conference of The Canadian Anthropology Society that was held in joint sponsorship with the Cuban Oriental University (Universidad de Orient) in Santiago de Cuba. My wife, Amali, was a participant and I tagged along just to see Cuba. There is nothing like being in a universe of Anthropologists to appreciate the unity of human experience amidst the diversity of human cultures. We also learnt that visitors from Canada are received especially well in Cuba.

The Castro era

The friendship between Canada and Cuba goes back to the personal friendship between former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Fidel Castro, much to the chagrin of the Americans. The Cubans also appreciate Canada’s support of the Cuban economy, since the 1990s, to withstand the double whammy of the post-Soviet Russian withdrawal and the American sanctions. Cubans call the period after the Russian withdrawal, the "Special Period", when Cuba was gutted and left isolated in global economic storms. During the Special Period the GDP fell by 35%, and the economy is yet to recover fully from that fall. Canada helped by re-launching the nickel and cobalt mining industries, by starting a new national beer brewery, and by providing large numbers of snow-bird tourists who leave wintry Canada for the warm Cuban beaches.

The Obama presidency sparked a ray of hope and seemed set to fulfill a 1976 prophesy attributed to Fidel Castro, that the US-Cuban relationship will be normalized only when there is a Black President in the White House and a Latin Pope in the Vatican. What seemed a lasting breakthrough two years ago under President Obama has now suffered a serious setback under the tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump. In the face of Trump’s capitulation to the Cuban diaspora in Florida and his undoing of the diplomatic and co-operational initiatives of President Obama, Cuba is courting Russia once again and the now mighty China to fill the new void created by Trump’s America.

One week might be a long time in politics, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson memorably said, but it is hardly enough time to study or experience a country. And our visit did not include Havana, the nation’s capital and its largest City of 2.2 million people. We spent half our time in the Holguin Province, in a beach resort, and the other half in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second largest City of 400,000 people. Yet, there are enough connections to fuel if not inspire my Sunday column. Writing about Cuba is also an occasion to reflect on Sri Lanka.

The town of Biran where Fidel and Raul were born is in the western part of Holguin Province and not far from Santiago de Cuba; the tour bus from the Holguin resort to Santiago passed by Biran. The impressively articulate and politically informed tour guide pointed to the giant portraits of Fidel and Raul erected at the junction to Biran. Santiago is Cuba’s heroic City. On May 19 there were celebrations in honour of Jose Marti, Cuba’s national hero who was killed in battle on May 19, 1895, while fighting for independence against the Spanish army. Fidel Castro’s ashes are also interned in the Provincial Cemetery in Santiago. We visited Castro’s grave. The epitaph on his gravestone is just one word: "Fidel". For a man known for making fiery speeches running into hours, Mr. Castro wanted just his first name as epitaph.

At the folk level, going by what our tour guide said, Fidel Castro is remembered as the son of a rich sugar plantation owner who sent his son to private Catholic schools in Santiago de Cuba and in Havana to be anchored in the family’s Catholic faith. After high school, he was sent to the university in Havana to study law to protect the family interests. The son repudiated the father in regard to both expectations. Not only did Fidel Castro become an atheist, but he also made Cuba an officially atheist country. And he not only nationalized the land in Cuba, but also included in it his father’s property.

People refer to the Castros by their first names: Fidel or Raul. Everyone, that is the few I was able to talk with and the tour guide, is nostalgic about the Castro era and not sure how effective or successful the new President will be. They recall Fidel’s charisma, and are aware of Miguel’s lack of it. They are also critical of the many missteps that were taken during the Castro era and recognize that change is necessary.

The recognition of change is also one of the official party lines. Especially in Agriculture, there is official admission, by Raul Castro himself, that a different revolution is necessary. The Soviet-inspired collectivisation program in agriculture has turned what once was a copiously producing country into a country wholly dependent on imports for its food staples. There seems to be a new determination to reverse the disastrous process of collectivisation.

After Fidel’s retirement, there was consensus between the brothers on the number of reform measures that were undertaken by Raul. Earlier, Fidel Castro was known to take responsibility for some serious failures in setting production targets and misallocation of resources, especially in regard to sugar production. While taking responsibility, Fidel would also publicly lament the failure of experts to give more objective advice.

From what I was able to hear and observe, it is fair to describe the legacy of the Castro era as a period of commendable achievement in social welfare and social infrastructure, but disastrous failure in physical infrastructure. Education and Health Services are two areas of Cuba’s greatest accomplishments. But both sectors bear the brunt of dilapidated facilities and total lack of physical infrastructure to match the impressive advances in knowhow and technical expertise. Notwithstanding all their travails, Cuban doctors and medical scientists were the first in the world to develop a treatment to prevent HIV and syphilis infection from being transmitted from the pregnant mother to her fetus. The WHO commended them for this achievement.

Trains apparently first ran in 19th century Cuba, the colony, before they did in Spain, the metropolis. Now there are no trains in Cuba, and the joke is that Cubans still look either way before crossing a track just in case a train might be running in from nowhere. A national network of highways was started with Soviet help but when the Russians withdrew the road system was left half done. 1950s American cars and Soviet era Ladas mingle with more modern German and Japanese tour buses and taxi cabs on Cuban roads. Motor cycles double up as taxis and the Chinese seem to be taking over the supply of buses for local transport.

The ubiquitous national mode of transportation is really the horse and buggy on tire-mounted wheels. The buggies are permitted to travel on all roadways and the speeding motor vehicles have to slow down and wait for their turn to overtake the slow-moving buggies. Road rules are observed scrupulously even though the traffic on the road is not that heavy. Local roads where people live are typically unpaved and often rutted. But the road system and road allowance are firmly established and serve as corridors for power transmission. Electric power supply would seem to cover the entire country, while water supply and sewage facilities seem woefully inadequate. Overall cleanliness is clearly observable and there is no littering or garbage heaps along the roadside or in public areas.

Sri Lanka’s fascination with Cuba

As islands go, Cuba is about twice as large as Sri Lanka in area, but with half the population of Sri Lanka. The Cuban revolution and the names of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara inspired a whole generation of Sri Lankan leftists born in the 1940s and 1950s. At the state level the centre-left governments in Sri Lanka maintained close ties with Havana. The two countries were leading members of the Non-Aligned group of countries. Fidel Castro visited Sri Lanka along with Marshal Tito and Indira Gandhi to attend the 1976 Non-Aligned summit gathering in Colombo that Sri Lanka hosted. In 1977, Sri Lanka turned its back on two decades of state-led economic development to gamble on the fortunes of a free market economy. The transition was neither thorough nor well executed, and it has turned out to be rather haphazard and uneven, often times reinforcing the vices of the state and the market rather than their virtues.

Sri Lanka’s liberalization of the economy was part of a broader political agenda – to re-orient Sri Lanka firmly in the western camp where it was for the first eight years after independence (1948-1956) and away from the non-aligned family of nations where it was trying to establish a prominent presence for the next twenty years (1956-1976). It may not be known widely now that the architect of this shift, President Junius Richard Jayewardene (called ‘Yankee Dick’ by his detractors on the Left), wanted to demonstrate his global inclinations rather dramatically by walking out of the 1980 Non-Aligned Summit hosted by Cuba in Havana. Only the special pleadings of President Jayewardene’s more circumspect Foreign Affairs Minister, ACS Hameed, saved Sri Lanka from what would have been a global embarrassment for the country.

Apart from politics and statistics, the Cuban landscape and climate, its flora and fauna and fruits, and its beaches have much in common with Sri Lanka. We even saw a fully grown murunga tree in a small house garden. Apparently, Cubans use the murunga leaves and flowers for medicinal purposes. Murunga fruits are not cooked and eaten but used as a cure for stomach ulcer.

Familiar fruits range from papaya to mangoes to large and delicious guavas. Sea food has much in common including the seer fish that goes as sierra. But as in Sri Lanka, food is a lot cheaper and much more readily available to tourists than to the local people. Although the exchange rate to USD is much lower in Cuba than in Sri Lanka, the people’s purchasing power is abysmally low and limits consumption to bare minimum levels.

At the same time, Cuba’s social welfare net protects people from the perils of private poverty and the threat of starvation. People are generally healthy with average life expectancy that matches that in the first world. There is no homelessness, and education and health services are universally accessible. Universal access to education is also the window to economic and employment opportunities. In the tourism sector, it is said that frontline workers must be fluent in at least two European languages besides Spanish. Language training is provided in schools, and recruitment to jobs is based on merit and not family contacts. There is no denying that connections to the Communist Party would always help, but only if the basic qualifications are satisfied.

Wages appear to be higher in sectors that are more critical to the economy than others. Anecdotally, it is often said that people in the tourism sector might be earning more than what Cuban doctors and engineers might be making. This might be criticized as extreme state regulation, but contrast this with jurisdictions in North America where systems of health insurance, public and private, are often forced to cut back on health services to pay back the doctors.

There are those who still insist that Cuba’s social welfare advancements in the Castro era are a myth because in 1959, when Castro’s revolutionaries captured power, Cuba’s health and education sectors were already well advanced relative to other Latin American countries and even by world standards. At the time of the revolution, Havana was one of the more glittering cities of Latin America to those who wanted a haven for gambling, golfing and sunbathing. Cuba was the most popular destination for American tourists and the Cuban economy was in the palms of American industrial and agricultural corporations.

On the other hand, a third of the Cuban society was seriously deprived from what was available to the upper two-thirds of society. Outside Havana, there was widespread resentment against the exploitative status quo and the Batista dictatorship that protected it. It was this resentment that Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries harnessed to overthrow Batista from power and establish a new revolutionary government.

Initially, both the US government and the Castro regime were quite interested in developing a friendly relationship. But the new government’s land reform measures angered the American corporations, and the wealthy Batista beneficiaries who fled to Florida became an implacable constituency within America insisting on the US government doing everything to eradicate the Castro regime root and branch. Even now, the Cuban Americans in Florida, who voted for Trump to spite President Obama, would want Trump to do nothing less than what the Eisenhower Administration set out to do in 1959. It’s never easy, as Cubans might say.