The Cuban Experiment - Part Four

With socialism on the island of Cuba closer than ever to collapse, Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio traces the Cuban Experiment, from the Batista regime which pre-dated the revolution, to the present day. 

Transcript

1991, as the Soviet Union collapses, and most of the world sees hope amid the uncertainty, in one corner of the Latin Caribbean, there is deep, deep trepidation. It’s big news, this event from across the other side of the world, but in Havana, Trinidad, Santiago, Cienfuegos, Pinar del Rio and right across the country, it’s personal. There’s simply no escaping that this event will have seismic consequences. The government knows this too, and calls it The Special Period in Time of Peace.

Everyone knows it will be huge, and it is; in an instant, a staggering 85% of Cuba’s foreign trade market disappears. The economy is devastated. The island loses its primary supplier of oil, food and machinery, and GDP drops by 35%. Food and fuel shortages will follow, as will blackouts, and - inevitably - hunger, with daily calorific intake dropping by half. With no oil in the country, public transport almost disappeared, supplanted by the delivery of a million bicycles from China. 

In a remarkable turn of events, agriculture - which had seen mass mechanization and intensive farming methods - was forced into a period of artisanal, organic farming. 

In a country used to crisis, the 1990s were perhaps one of the periods of greatest hardship, and two significant things happened, on top of everything else.

The first of these was a period of mass migration, known as the maleconazo, after the boardwalk in Havana, the malecon, from which thousands of Cubans, in makeshift rafts, jumped aboard and attempted to make the journey to the USA, to Miami specifically, where a US law was in place which made that Cubans who made landfall in the United States, even if they arrived illegally, were entitled to citizenship. It was known as the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, and was designed to socially and politically destabilise the island by encouraging Cubans to leave, but it was in the nineties when the law came into its own.  

The second thing that happened, which was previously almost unthinkable, was that Havana took on and legalized the US dollar. It was felt to be necessary, in order to be able to have access to hard currency which could allow for purchases internationally, in particular fuel and food products. The only way that the US dollar could come in, though, and which exacerbated the counterintuitive decision, was to encourage tourism onto the island. 

There are many ways in which the end of communism can be interpreted in Cuba, multiple factors and events, but one of the points in this academic exercise, from which there was no return, was this one. With the arrival of the US dollar as legal tender, the gradual establishing of tourism as a new and critical sector, and the gradual privatization of certain sectors of the economy, specifically around accommodation and eateries, the Cuba of Castro’s political theology was no more. 

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Meanwhile, not far away in Venezuela, there is a different kind of turmoil, which leads to the presidency of leftist Hugo Chavez, politically aligned to Castro. And as we know now, Venezuela had - and has - huge amounts of oil. So, in October 2020, Venezuela began providing tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day to Cuba not only at preferential rates, but also in exchange for services, in particular doctors and health professionals. It was a crucial boost for the island, and would set up a relationship which would extend for 25 years until the seizure of President Nicolas Maduro by the United States. But back then this was nowhere in sight. 

The 2000s led to a further entrenchment in Cuba, with a variety of events and ongoing issues. It was also the presidency of George W. Bush in the United States, which exacerbated the ideological conflict and the squeeze on the island. It also led to a major crackdown on dissidents in 2003, often referred to as the Black Spring, and the banning of the US dollar in 2004, to be replaced with the convertible peso, basically a peso equivalent which could only be used by tourists and which could buy certain products which were only internationally available. It was the dollar but it wasn’t the dollar. This split economy would be an ongoing issue for Cuba, and was economically the lifeline designed to continue to bring in foreign currency, but which at the same time established a kind of apartheid system for those who had access to this currency (workers in the tourism sector), and everybody else. 

And then, in 2006, the inevitable moment everyone feared (or hoped for), when Fidel Castro’s mortality became apparent, and he got sick with a perforated and infected intestine, which led to a series of failed operations, which themselves caused ongoing complications to Castro’s health. And so, Fidel Castro’s transfer of power to his brother Raul began, on July 31st 2006, with the transfer becoming permanent in February of 2008. Of course, if we’re looking at the moment when the Cuban experiment ended, the onset of the dollar economy and the arrival of tourism is a contender, but another is the moment at which Fidel Castro was no longer the First Secretary of the Communist Party on the island. 

Raul had been at Fidel’s side since the revolution, but he was a technocrat, and had none of the charisma of his brother. It was never possible for it to be a continuity administration, and Raul focused on restructuring the economy, attempting to decentralize, reducing state involvement and encouraging the emergence of small businesses. It was new, and it was different, but they still called it socialism, although really, with each passing year the only thing that remained which was left of center was the ubiquity and political control of the communist party. 

And then, in November 2016, at the age of 90, Fidel Castro died. He had been the longest-serving non-royal head of state across the 20th and 21st centuries, and his death was not simply the death of an individual, albeit one with a massively outsized influence on his story, but also the end of the line for a man who was as much an international political argument as he was anything else. 

Across the water, in Miami, Cuban exiles danced in the street. 

Communist Cuba had suffered another major blow, but little did they know that, just a few short years away, perhaps their greatest crisis of all was soon to strike, a crisis which would underscore all of Cuba’s weaknesses, and arguably prove to be the beginning of the end of the Cuban experiment.

Nobody knew then, nor could they have known, but inexorably on its way, was COVID.