It was as if a circle in Castro’s life closed with the Holy Father’s visit, and at times it seemed more to answer a need on Castro’s part than to meet a necessity for the Party and state leadership. For years there had been persistent rumors that Castro was receiving treatment from Swiss doctors for a heart condition or Parkinson’s disease or loss of cerebral function or cancer. Visitors repeatedly said that he looked physically shrunken, exhausted and debilitated, although he was fully alert during conversations. Deep down, perhaps, Castro was also making his own highly personal peace with the Church. “The Pope told me that when he prayed he would also pray for me. I thanked him for that,” Castro gave away shortly before the pontiff’s arrival in Cuba.114
Freedom or “socialismo tropical”
The news item was terse, its language matter-of-fact: “Following the Pope’s visit, suppression of political dissent continued, but was generally less severe than the previous year.” The four pages on Cuba in the Amnesty International report covering the year 1998 went on to state that, after John Paul II’s five-day visit, approximately 300 prisoners, including at least 120 political prisoners, were released, but that “at least 350 others remained imprisoned, including some 100 prisoners of conscience.”115 Already in May 1998 the human rights organization had spoken in an interim report of 500 to 3,000 political prisoners in Cuba, but acknowledged that no one knew the exact number, because relatives did not dare report cases of detention to aid agencies for fear of reprisals. “Often political dissidents were jailed on the pretext of a non-political offence.”116 One favorite variant was “short-term detention” for the purposes of intimidation, when people were arrested for hours or a few days without being allowed to contact their family or a lawyer, and often without knowing whether it might last for years.
Foreign correspondents’ reports spoke of a “sense of disappointment and emptiness following the papal visit,” and criticized the fact that “the Castro regime could not bring itself to introduce any decisive reforms.” In the view of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, it was on “a zig-zag course between reform and dogged persistence.”117 The Economist reported that, after the papal aircraft left Havana on the evening of January 25, “the regime moved fast to show who [was] in charge.” Within hours “large groups of ‘special brigade’ police were on every street corner. Young people strolling in Havana’s parks and squares [were] being constantly harassed by police.” Elizardo Sánchez from the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which by the late nineties had become the most important organization of its kind in Cuba, commented: “The Pope’s demands will not prompt any radical changes because the government … does not respect any of the civil and political rights recognized in international law.”118
In February 1999, a special two-day session of the Cuban National Assembly passed a series of measures that tightened existing penal legislation, including the death penalty for serious drugs-related crimes and longer prison sentences for robbery with violence. A new “Law for the Protection of the National Independence and Economy of Cuba” (Law No. 88) threatened up to 20 years’ imprisonment against anyone “providing information to the US government; owning, distributing or reproducing material produced by the US government or any other foreign entity; and collaborating, by any means, with foreign radio, television, press or other foreign media, with the purpose of destabilizing the country and destroying the socialist state.”119 That this was directed against political dissidents, Amnesty International learned from opponents of the regime who had been warned against a continuation of their activities. But a particularly important target was Cuban journalists who had asserted some independence and were using reports from 15 press agencies abroad.
At first sight it is difficult to comprehend why, after more than 40 years, Castro still uses repressive machinery which harasses critics of the system for the slightest reason. After all, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Cubans have been driven into exile means that there is only weak political opposition to his rule inside the country. It is true that not everyone can just up and go without permission, and only the privileged can get a passport to travel abroad. But unlike in the Soviet Union, the GDR, and other Eastern bloc countries, Castro has not really prevented his opponents from leaving the country if they so wish – indeed, he has encouraged this when it seemed a useful way of relieving political pressure. He has even consistently put up with the emigration of well-educated academics and skilled workers, despite the great damage this does to the national economy.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, many factors lay behind the growing alienation of part of the population from the institutions of the Cuban state. No amount of propaganda could offset that loss of faith in the future of the Marxist-Leninist social order which came with the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, and doubts about the viability of the system only increased as a result of the catastrophic economic effects of the Soviet collapse. From the mid-nineties on, the cautious opening by necessity to foreign investment, the boosting of tourism, and the introduction of market niches within the state-run economy created ever greater space for new impressions, influences, and thinking. Suddenly small circles of oppositionists sprang up all over the country. In October 1995, 140 of these came together to form a “Cuban Council” (Concilio Cubano), but a few months later, in February 1996, its meetings were forbidden and some of its leading members arrested.
New thinking was supposed to be expressed only behind closed doors, in the leadership bodies of the Party and state; at all other levels of society, increased vigilance was the order of the day. “In the nineties,” noted Jorge Domínguez, a Cuba expert at Harvard University, “a new centralization of power may be observed in the hands of Fidel Castro.”120 In Cuba, after 20 years during which Castro had been prepared to delegate a large part of his administrative powers, the decade that saw the end of the Cold War, democratization in Latin America, and the spread of globalization was marked by a return to the authoritarianism of the sixties.
Although an estimated 100 to 200 small groups of dissidents exist on the island, the number of “genuinely” active dissidents is probably no higher than 500,121 and only a few of these manage to gain such a reputation abroad that they cause the government any real political difficulties. One case that did make the world’s headlines was that of René Gómez, Félix Bonne, Martha Roque, and Vladimiro Roca (son of the legendary Communist leader Blas Roca), who were arrested in July 1997 and, 19 months later, sentenced at a closed trial to terms of three and a half to five years’ imprisonment; several EU countries responded by freezing their development aid to Cuba, and the King of Spain canceled a trip to Cuba that had been planned for the spring of 1999. Canada, too, whose prime minister Jean Chrétien had paid a friendly visit to Castro a few months before, suspended cooperation with Havana and announced that it would no longer support Cuba’s entry into the Organization of American States. Yet Castro did not budge during the period from the papal visit in January 1998 through to the Ibero–American summit in autumn 1999 (which did, in the end, take place in the presence of the Spanish monarch). Not even condemnation by the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva was capable of making him change his mind, and it was only in the summer of 2000 that three of the group of four dissidents were released. Vladimiro Roca had to serve out the whole of his sentence.
In autumn 1997 the four had distributed a 34-page pamphlet at the Fifth Congress of the CPC, attacking the claim of the Party and the ruling nomenklatura to be the nation’s sole legitimate representative and demanding a new economic and political opening. In this connection, they called for a boycott of the upcoming elections to the people’s assemblies. What made the Cuban leadership act so intransigently against them was ostensible evidence that they had been closely collaborating with the CANF and other militant exile organizations in Miami, as well as with people in or around the CIA, and representatives of US interests in Havana. They were alleged to have coordinated the distribu
tion of leaflets, the holding of press conferences, and the organization of interviews for dozens of broadcasts by the US-funded propaganda station Radio Martí.
Obvious interference from abroad, or collaboration by internal opposition groups with the “class enemy,” makes more difficult the work of those who go their own serious way and do not wish to be suspected of being the playthings of Miami or anonymous forces in Washington. Those who come under this category are Elizardo Sánchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN); Gustavo Arcos, executive secretary of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights (CCPHD); Héctor Palacios from the Center for Social Studies (CES), and a number of others. These all refuse any collaboration with forces abroad that support or promote the US embargo. Instead, they look hopefully to dialogue with the government, in the medium to long term, convinced that only this can achieve a peaceful and orderly transition to democracy which preserves the social security and other good aspects of the revolution. In this, they have the backing of the Miami-based Cuban Committee for Democracy and Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo’s Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change), both of which are led by former active fighters against Castro. Thus, the lawyer Alfredo Durán took part in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and spent nearly two years in a Cuban prison; he then left for Florida, where for a long time he held high the banner of the militant veterans’ association, “Brigade 2506.” He has since renounced the aim of toppling Castro by force: “We cannot either overthrow Castro or govern Cuba. Castro himself must lead the country to reconciliation, if he wants to save his legacy.”122
Gutiérrez Menoyo’s views are similar. At the Ibero–American summit held in Havana in November 1999, he appealed to the heads of state and government to make Washington “end its conspiracy with elements … that profit from a lucrative business: the ‘anti-Castro industry’.” With the authority of a man who spent 22 long and bitter years in a Cuban jail, he claimed in his open letter that “certain circles in Washington” were seeking to block the request of the Cuban opposition and to prevent an improvement of relations with Havana. “In the guise of peaceful means,” they were continually trying to revive the “old stances and formulas of confrontation” from the days of the Cold War.123
In 1994 and 1995, Castro invited to Havana representatives of Cuban exile organizations that were open to dialogue, and even laid on an official reception for them, while Miami hardliners, particularly from the CANF, angrily denounced what they saw as an attempt to divide the opposition to his regime. In June 1995, Castro also had a long discussion with Gutiérrez Menoyo, who afterwards wrote in the German weekly Die Zeit, with an eye on his diehard compatriots in Miami:
As a revolutionary and an opponent of Castro … , I have better credentials than most of the others. I certainly have more reason than they to hate. But I don’t live in the past… . Rather, it is time to leave hate and the past behind us. I have long been convinced that we will better help people in Cuba through dialogue with the government than by confronting the Castro regime head-on and isolating it.124
Another center of the anti-Castro movement is the Spanish capital, Madrid. It was there in November 1999, just before the Ibero–American summit in Havana, that the billionaire former president of the Telepizza fast-food chain, Leopoldo Fernández Pujals, set up the Elena Mederos Foundation and confidently presented himself more or less overnight as a personal alternative to Fidel Castro. Having grown up in Miami, he sought to fill the vacuum left in the Cuban exile community by the death of CANF chairman Mas Canosa;125 the only question was whether the others would accept him. This underlined the greatest lack in the anti-Castro opposition: a charismatic leader with a convincing political project for a democratic Cuba.
Drawing upon his experience of democratization processes in other Latin American countries, the former director of the Madrid-based Institute for European–Latin American Relations (IRELA), Wolf Grabendorff, has stressed “the indispensability of agreement among internal and external actors about the goals and stages of the transition [in Cuba];” rival political objectives among oppositional forces would be counterproductive. As an example, he mentions the support of part of the Cuban diaspora for the Helms-Burton Act. But so long as there are no serious forces inside the country able to resist the demands for power and representation coming from outside, there seems little point in looking for models elsewhere in Latin America that might be applied to a transition in Cuba. Experiences in Chile and Nicaragua, in particular, have shown that at the decisive stage of the transition it is the opposition existing inside the country – and not exiles returning from abroad – who shape the change of government.126 Conversely, so long as the opposition on the spot is dominated and debilitated by its friends in exile, a process of democratic change is unthinkable on the island itself.
The cautious approach taken by opposition forces inside Cuba has been of little use to them. Castro has closed his ears, dismissing them as lackeys of imperialism to be taken no more seriously than their “friends” in Miami, while disunity in the opposition, and its lack of a leader to match Castro, have allowed him to run rings round them. The anachronistic and disproportionate bunker mentality of the Castro system toward opponents who represent no real threat can be explained only on the assumption that, within his own apparatus, there may be considerable frictions and a greater degree of discontent than one can detect from outside.
Referring to an unnamed director of a state economic institute, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote in a background report that we should not imagine the top political levels in Cuba to be as rocksolid as they appear. Away from the limelight, “hardliners” and “heretics” within the ruling apparatus fight out bitter struggles with each other, and the rebels include a growing group of technocrats who have no chance of making a career for themselves under the revolution.127
One sign of ongoing struggles over power and orientation has been the changes in the 25-member Politbureau. Whereas this supreme political authority operated as a monolith in the years from 1965 to 1980 and scarcely ever brought on fresh blood, the Fourth Party Congress in 1991 left in place no more than five men from the time of the victory of the revolution: Fidel and Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, José Machado, and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez. Many other former mainstays of the revolution disappeared from public life, at the latest at this Fourth Congress. “The new faces in the government were generally much younger,” Domínguez noted. “The rejuvenation of the regime’s political leadership marked its willingness to accept new ideas and to adopt a new style of politics.” This was connected with a certain widening of the room for political maneuver – but only within a framework stamped with the personal authority of Fidel Castro.128
This became especially apparent in 1996, during the conflict between the ruling apparatus and a large number of intellectuals over the fate of the political research institutes founded by the Party’s Central Committee in 1976: the Centro de Estudios sobre Europa (European Studies Center) and the Centro de Estudios sobre América (American Studies Center). The publication of a series of books in the first half of the nineties, which were critical of the country’s economic and political development, led to a massive reaction by the Party leadership, because the constructively posed demands for further liberalization contradicted the prevailing Party doctrine. Another reason why the two centers were in the firing line was that their funding came not only from the Party but also from foreign sources, and they operated academic exchanges with colleagues from political and scientific foundations in Europe and North America. They were accused of collaborating with “Cubanologists” in the service of Washington, of adopting their theses and half-truth, and even of constituting a fifth column in the service of imperialism.129
It was a clear signal when the Central Committee and Politbureau put a military man, Defense Minister Raúl Castro, in charge of publicly disciplining the academics on March 23, 1996, and when he subsequently engineered a “restructuring” of the two institut
ions and the dissolution of the CEA management. Castro had previously stressed that, in the “new ideological battle,” socialism remained the irreversible dogma of Cuban politics. According to the IRELA institute in Madrid, many of the academics involved in the conflict now limited themselves to “gazing outward from the Malecón [the Havana waterfront].”130 Others went into internal exile, changed their job, or left the country.
Another problem group for the regime were the children of the revolution. IRELA reported in 1999 that 63 percent of the population belonged to the post-revolutionary generation; at most they had an emotional link via their parents and grandparents to the struggles of the 1950s, from which the Castro generation derived the legitimacy of its rule.
For many young Cubans the political system appears in many ways less attractive. Economically, because of the continuing special period, rising unemployment and lower wages, … they have less and less interest in attending university, but find it much more appealing to work in jobs that require fewer qualifications or none at all. Politically, there is limited scope for involvement and renewal, and the disenchantment, social dissatisfaction and a certain political apathy make it clear that large numbers of young people in Cuba no longer consider themselves represented by a system that appears to many as a “legacy from the past” offering little in the way of visions for the future.
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