LRB, Vol. 43 No. 13 · 1 July 2021
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You say embargo...
Tony Wood
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/contributors/tony-wood>
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The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times
byAnthony DePalma
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Anthony%20DePalma>.
/Bodley Head, 368 pp., £9.99, July,978 1 78470 822 1/
We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet
World
byHelen Yaffe
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Helen%20Yaffe>.
/Yale, 363 pp., £18.99, February 2020,978 0 300 23003 1/
On 16aprilRaúl Castro stepped down as first secretary of the Cuban
Communist Party. Much of the coverage focused on the fact that, for the
first time in more than sixty years, none of the island’s top political
posts is occupied by a Castro. This was a generational transition: the
current president and first secretary of the party, Miguel Díaz-Canel,
to whom Raúl handed over the reins of government three years ago, wasn’t
even born when the 1959 revolution took place. Soon the system
established by Fidel Castro’s 26 July Movement will have outlasted its
founders. Its longevity has confounded repeated predictions of its
imminent demise, and should have put paid to the abiding image of it as
a Cold War relic. After all, Cuba’s distinctive state-socialist model
has now lasted longer in the post-Cold War world than it did before
1989. Yet the image of Cuba as stranded in a previous epoch stubbornly
persists, distorting outsiders’ view of a state that has all along been
changing at its own pace.
Cuba’s modern history is a famously polarising subject, with even simple
word choices signalling opposed political sympathies. What most people
in theUScall an ‘embargo’ – meaning the sweeping trade restrictions
first imposed in 1960 and ratcheted up many times since – is known in
Cuba as/el bloqueo/, ‘the blockade’. One term suggests targeted trade
measures; the other implies all-out economic warfare. The same applies
to the word ‘revolution’: it is either a single event that occurred in
1959 or, for supporters of the Cuban model, a process that is still
unfolding. Analysis of Cuba can seem to operate in parallel universes,
depending on where you stand.
/The Cubans/tells the life stories of an assortment of people in
Guanabacoa, a town across the bay from Havana. Anthony DePalma, a
veteran correspondent for the/New York Times/, describes the real gains
made after the revolution by several of his interviewees, but also the
frustrations and dissatisfactions of their lives today. His subjects
include Caridad Ewen, an Afro-Cuban woman from the poor, rural east of
the island who eventually became vice minister of trade; her son Oscar
Matienzo, one of a new generation of Cuban businessmen; Arturo Montoto,
a dissident painter who went into exile but returned to Cuba because of
its extraordinary light; and Jorge García, who became an implacable
critic of the regime after the Cuban coast guard sank a boat carrying
two of his children to theUS. Migration, to Florida in particular, is
central to DePalma’s stories, and to Cuban families across the island.
/The Cubans/is based on many hours of interviews and years of research.
But it isn’t exactly journalism, or oral history: it adopts the
omniscient third-person narrative voice of a novel, often dipping into
the protagonists’ minds. It isn’t always clear whose thoughts and
opinions we’re hearing. One or two of DePalma’s subjects remain
committed to the revolution, but the story he chooses to tell is mostly
one of disenchantment. Much of that feeling can be traced back to the
privations of the 1990s, a time the Cuban government named the Special
Period. Perestroika and the collapse of theUSSRdeprived Cuba of its main
source of income: the Soviets had been paying three times the market
price for sugar, which accounted for 80 per cent of the island’s
exports. Fuel shortages and rationing followed. TheUSbegan tightening
the political and economic noose, strengthening the embargo with the
Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. Pharmacies
were no longer able to stock essential medicines, and hunger and
malnutrition were widespread. Every scrap of waste was recycled or
repurposed: meals were made out of fried grapefruit rinds or discarded
banana skins. To this day, Cubans keep turning to the words/luchar/, ‘to
struggle’, and/resolver/, ‘to solve a problem’ or to obtain what’s needed.
As DePalma sees it, the resourcefulness of ordinary Cubans enabled the
system to survive. But such resourcefulness was also a ‘paralysing
weakness’. ‘Instead of marching to the Plaza de la Revolución demanding
change, or locking arms with dissidents to fix Cuba’s grim reality,’
DePalma writes, most Cubans still ‘simply accept and then adapt to the
latest privation’. The Cuban state implicitly figures here as an
unchanging monolith like those toppled in Eastern Europe in 1989.
DePalma’s assumption that regime change would ‘fix’ Cuba is common in
theUS, but at the end of his book he reveals that he also has personal
reasons for thinking this way: he is married to a Cuban exile whose
family left in the months after the revolution. As an explanation for
the survival of the Cuban model, DePalma’s paradigm – an oppressive
regime facing off against a subjugated but passive people – falls short
for the same reason most Cold War narratives do: their refusal to
concede any legitimacy to the state, or even to analyse it. DePalma
asserts without embarrassment that for his account he ‘had no contact
with any officials of the government’. He makes no attempt to understand
the system as it actually operates.
Helen Yaffe’s premise runs counter to DePalma’s: rather than presenting
state and people as opposed, she describes the relationship between them
as ‘extremely permeable’. She argues that citizens are directly involved
in the governing system, helping it to adapt in spite of external
pressures. Where DePalma sees stagnation and a subdued people, she sees
popular participation and constant reinvention. Her use of Cuban
government sources and official state data may deter some readers, as
may her unabashed support for the Cuban model. But part of her argument
is that, to a degree not really seen elsewhere, Cuban citizens/are/the
state. For/We Are Cuba/! she interviewed government officials,
diplomats, social workers, student leaders, economists, environmental
scientists and immunologists, describing them all as ‘“ordinary” people
given the opportunity to do extraordinary things by the Cuban system’.
She also provides a mass of information missing from most accounts. In
an earlier book,/Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution/, Yaffe wrote
about some of the policy debates that preoccupied Guevara and his
comrades: how to achieve growth alongside social justice, how to strike
a balance between plan and market, what forms of ownership are
compatible with a socialist economy. All this, she suggests, is still
relevant today. She shows the state trying out various solutions to
these questions over time, while responding to shifts in global economic
conditions and geopolitics.
Yaffe spent a year in Cuba in the mid-1990s and describes the many
privations of the Special Period. She backs up her account with data:
‘GDPfell 35 per cent in three years, the scale of collapse usually
associated with war, famine or a natural disaster.’ The government
responded by cutting military spending in half while increasing health
spending and state pensions. Prices of essential goods were fixed to
help people get by. But since imports had to be paid for with hard
currency, state finances deteriorated. For most Cubans the 1990s were
catastrophic: between 1989 and 1993, real wages dropped by half and
household consumption fell by a third, along with the average calorie
intake. Desperation led thousands to flee to theUSon rafts, and in
August 1994 the first serious anti-government demonstration in more than
thirty years took place on Havana’s Malecón. Cuba avoided the
hyperinflation and unemployment that accompanied market transitions in
much of Eastern Europe, but it was hard for Cubans to imagine how things
could have been worse. Yaffe addresses the discontents briefly but
doesn’t take full account of the scale or impact of emigration. Between
1995 and 2015, about 650,000 Cubans were admitted to theUS, with smaller
flows to Spain and other Latin American countries – considerable numbers
for an island with a population of eleven million.
The Cuban economy improved in the decade that followed: between 2002 and
2007,GDPgrowth averaged 7 per cent, nearly twice the level of Latin
America as a whole. Credit for this is commonly given to the support
Cuba enjoyed from the government of Hugo Chávez – as if the island had
exchanged reliance on the Soviets for Bolivarian dependency. But
Venezuelan oil is only part of the story. Over the course of the 1990s
and 2000s, the Cuban economy was reshaped by a turn away from sugar:
once the dominant export, by 2004 it accounted for only 12 per cent of
earnings. Cuba was able to find other sources of revenue thanks to
investments it had made long before the Special Period began. Long-term
planning had laid a foundation for recovery.
Not all Cuba’s new sources of income have been universally beneficial.
Long wary of the inequality and exploitation tourism generates, in the
1990s the Cuban government had to bet heavily on it all the same. In
1994, urgently needing to increase revenue, the authorities created a
parallel ‘convertible’ peso to stand in forUSdollars as a way of drawing
in foreign currency. It worked, but it also effectively split Cuba’s
economy in two: a limping, resource-starved state sector paid salaries
and pensions in ‘national’ currency, while private-sector workers became
relatively cash-rich earning convertible pesos. The imbalances were
plain to see. An island in a general state of disrepair was dotted with
enclaves of prosperity inaccessible to most Cubans.
But other sources of income were available, thanks to early decisions by
the revolutionary government – in particular, the decision to invest
heavily in medicine. Cuba now has a universal healthcare system with
eight physicians per thousand people – nearly three times theUK’s
density of doctors – and medical training schools that draw students
from around the world. Cuban doctors are both a source of income and a
diplomatic asset: in the past year they have been deployed to more than
forty Covid-stricken countries. The biotech sector got underway in the
1980s and grew rapidly: by 2007, pharmaceutical exports were earning
$350 million a year – the country’s second largest source of income
after nickel. Among its innovations are vaccines for meningitis and
hepatitis B, as well as a promising vaccine for some forms of cancer.
Cuba is the only Latin American country to have developed its own Covid
vaccines: two of them, Soberana 02 and Abdala, are now being rolled out
across the island, and three more are in the final stage of clinical
trials. The government is in talks with several countries over mass
production for export. Not for the first time, Cuba offers hope for the
developing world while wealthy states insist on patent protections for
pharmaceutical companies.
Cuba continues to prioritise long-term social goals over immediate
growth. In 2017 a hundred-year plan was announced to address the impact
of climate change on the island. Long-term thinking and short-term
expediency sometimes converge, as in 2005-6, when Cuba’s electricity
grid was decentralised to improve energy efficiency and reduce its
vulnerability to natural disaster and sabotage. As part of the same
‘energy revolution’, tens of thousands of social workers replaced more
than nine million incandescent lightbulbs across the island with energy
efficient ones in the space of six months. This exemplifies the Cuban
approach: a combination of ambitious goals and, with mass mobilisation,
a low-cost means of achieving them.
Yet the familiar dilemmas remained: how could a country with a
state-dominated, low wage, low productivity economy make its way in a
cut-throat global market without surrendering the revolution’s
egalitarian achievements? Another dilemma was new. In November 2005,
Fidel Castro pointedly asked in a speech: ‘When those who were the
forerunners, the veterans, start disappearing and making room for the
new generations of leaders, what will be done and how will it be
accomplished?’ A few months later the announcement came that Fidel was
ill and would be handing over power to his brother Raúl, who had been
head of Cuba’s armed forces since 1959 and vice president since 1976.
This wasn’t exactly a changing of the guard. But once he took over, Raúl
oversaw a series of reforms that marked a new stage in the evolution of
the Cuban model.
The centrepiece of Raúl Castro’s reforms was a set of three hundred
‘guidelines’ (/lineamientos/) for reshaping social and economic policy.
They were first drafted in late 2010 and amended after a process of
public consultation in which millions of Cubans participated. (DePalma
dismisses the whole thing as a charade.) They involved change across the
board: in agricultural co-operatives, foreign trade, education budgets,
restaurant licensing, ministerial payrolls and private sales of
apartments and cars. Taken together they signalled a shift from an
overwhelmingly state-run economy to one in which state and private
sectors, plan and market, are meant to coexist.
This is a major change. Previous gestures towards liberalisation, such
as joint ventures with foreign capital, had been tolerated on the
understanding that they were exceptions to the state-socialist rule.
The/lineamientos/were different: the document introducing them blamed
Cuba’s economic difficulties on the excessive weight of the state
sector, and recommended a relaxation of restrictions on self-employment
and small business. The liberalisations carried out by China and Vietnam
in the 1980s – with the aim of creating a ‘socialist market economy’, or
‘socialist-oriented’ in Vietnam’s case – were seen as parallels for
Cuba’s reforms. Some of the Cuban economists Yaffe interviewed were
alarmed by the resemblances, pointing in particular to China’s current
inequalities, and warning against too single-minded a focus on the economy.
The Cuban authorities seem to share some of these worries, and after
2016 the pace of reform slowed. Trump’s election was a factor, bringing
as it did a more hostileUSstance: the White House escalated sanctions
and reinstated curbs on travel and remittances. MountingUSpressure made
the Cuban government think twice about major policy shifts. There was
unease, too, about the rapid creation of a new layer of Cuban
entrepreneurs: a bourgeoisie in embryo. But Yaffe argues that the
stop-start character of the reforms wasn’t a sign of hesitancy: it can
largely be explained by the wish to defend/los logros/, ‘the
achievements’ of the revolution. Necessary reforms could have
undesirable side effects, and there was a tightrope to be walked.
In February 2019, after further public consultation, a new constitution
was approved by referendum. It retains an insistence on Cuba’s socialist
character and on the primacy of the Communist Party, but differs from
the 1976 version in significant ways. It straightens out some of the
legal obstacles to the implementation of the 2011 guidelines but also
registers broader changes in society. Article 42 prohibits
discrimination by sex, gender, ethnic origin, skin colour or religious
belief, and Article 81 protects the family ‘in whatever form it is
organised’. This was a feeble substitute for a draft article that would
have legalised gay marriage: it was retracted during the consultation
process under pressure from both old-guard party members and Catholic
and evangelical churches. The latter receive generous, embargo-exempt
funding from theUSand are an increasingly assertive presence in Cuba.
But change may still be on the way: a new Family Code is being drafted
that could allow for same-sex marriage.
The new constitution has also reordered the political system. Power used
to be centralised in the Council of State and in the hands of its chair:
Fidel Castro for 32 years and then his brother. It is now distributed
between a president, a prime minister and the head of the Communist
Party. Both the first and third of these roles are currently filled by
one person, Díaz-Canel, with the former minister for tourism, Manuel
Marrero Cruz, serving as prime minister. The president is neither
all-powerful nor permanent: he is limited to two five-year terms, and
any successor must be younger than sixty on taking office. Generational
renewal is now built into the system.
But there have been new tensions. One of Díaz-Canel’s first acts on
taking power in 2018 was to sign Decree Law 349, which tightened state
regulation of the arts. Cuban artists and musicians immediately
denounced it as an instrument of censorship. Their campaign led to the
formation of the Movimiento San Isidro, a group which last November
mobilised public protests – the first since the Maleconazo of 1994. The
usual anti-Castro figures voiced their support, enabling the government
to paint the whole phenomenon as Washington’s creation. But many others
on the island joined the protests too (including rappers with vast
online followings). This messy convergence is unlikely to last, but the
underlying discontent is real.
Covid-19 delivered a severe shock to the economy. Cuba’s healthcare
system kept case rates and casualties low for several months – fewer
than 13,000 cases were registered during the whole of 2020 – but tourist
arrivals fell by 90 per cent over the year. The Trump administration’s
decision to prohibit all remittances to the island severed a crucial
lifeline for many Cuban families and made an already dire economic
situation worse. In the middle of the crisis, the Cuban government
launched a wide-ranging set of economic and monetary reforms. Long
promised but much delayed, they came into effect on 1 January 2021 – Day
Zero. The monetary component was especially fraught. Until this year,
there was a sizeable difference between convertible and national pesos:
the convertible peso (CUC) was pegged at parity to theUSdollar, and
oneCUCwas worth 25 national pesos. This meant the convertible sector was
hugely overvalued, crippling exports, while the national sector remained
mired in a low income, low productivity trap. Meanwhile, the government
had to pay world market prices for imported goods – including the lion’s
share of its food – while subsidising their cost since no one receiving
a salary in national currency could afford them.
All this had put a heavy strain on Cuba’s economy for years, and
currency unification was among the goals laid out in the 2011
guidelines. But the effects of increasedUSsanctions combined with the
pandemic made it pressing. Without remittances or tourist dollars, the
flow of hard currency into Cuba was drastically reduced, and the
government had no room for fiscal manoeuvre. In 2020,GDPdropped by 11
per cent, and the shortages already affecting much of the island became
severe. In better times it might have been possible to unify the
currencies gradually, bringing them into alignment through periodic
devaluations. But the crisis led the government to scrap
theCUCaltogether, bringing in a single currency officially pegged at 24
to theUSdollar. Demand for dollars shot up after the announcement of Day
Zero, with oneUSdollar fetching twoCUCin some black market exchanges.
To make matters worse, early this year Covid cases began to climb. By 15
June the total number recorded in Cuba had passed 160,000, around half
of them in Havana, with more than 1100 deaths – equivalent to around
1400 cases and ten deaths per 100,000 people. This was a significant
increase from 2020. But the figures compare favourably with Cuba’s
Caribbean neighbours: the incidence of Covid fatalities in the Dominican
Republic and Jamaica is almost four times higher; in Puerto Rico it’s
eight times higher. And they compare more favourably still with many
much wealthier countries: there have been 188 deaths per 100,000 people
in theUK, nearly twenty times Cuba’s rate. The island’s homegrown
vaccines should bring down case rates quickly, but the wider economic
picture isn’t promising. The Biden administration has so far done little
to alter its predecessor’s course, and shows no real interest in a
return to the Obama-era ‘thaw’. PunitiveUSmeasures seem set to remain in
place for the foreseeable future.
How Cuba navigates the road ahead depends on how well its distinctive
system can adapt to the terrain. The Day Zero reforms are,
characteristically, both a hurried improvisation and a long-term bet on
economic growth. Currency unification is designed to boost domestic
production and exports. State sector salaries, pensions and the minimum
wage have all been increased to help Cubans deal with any rise in
prices, and to allow for the gradual elimination of subsidies. But
currency unification will unfold unevenly across the economy. More of
the labour force will be shifted out of the state sector but it remains
to be seen if there will be enough jobs for them elsewhere. Díaz-Canel
has rejected the idea that the reforms amount to ‘shock therapy’, but
another round of hardship for Cubans may be on the way as a new balance
is struck between plan and market, and a new hybrid model – market
socialism with Cuban characteristics? – takes shape. Another common
phrase in Cuba’s lexicon is ‘No es fácil’ (‘It’s not easy’), the words
generally accompanied by a shake of the head but spoken with determination.
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