President Fidel Castro's 81st birthday marks a year of transition, of
change but no change. No longer at the helm, the government still pays
reverential homage to the spirit of Fidel, while the physically frail
81-year-old leader has stopped all public appearances during his
prolonged recuperation in a secret medical facility.
His younger brother, 76-year-old Raúl Castro, defence minister and now
acting president, makes far fewer and much shorter speeches than his
brother, but his economy of words has raised hopes, because he has
focused on tackling bread-and-butter issues. He has spelt out a simple
basic truth: that state salaries are inadequate. Most Cubans officially
earn less than $20 a month, totally out of synch with prices for
cooking oil and other basics, forcing many Cubans to moonlight, pilfer
and barter to make ends meet.
Since Fidel Castro was forced to undergo serious surgery and
transferred all his powers to a group of senior ministers led by his
brother Raúl in August 2006, Cuba has confounded those who predicted
the collapse of the system without the supreme leader in charge.
Fidel's successors have successively demonstrated that this small
island nation is still stable and that a smooth succession is in place.
Before his intestinal operation last year, President Castro ceded all
his powers to a team of six senior cabinet ministers including his
younger brother, who currently run the country.
Now the agenda for the future must be to prove they can resolve some of
the economic issues that the grand old man, now a semi-retired
revolutionary who now longer appears in public, either could not or
would not address. These are the chronic shortages of basic goods,
which cannot all be attributed to the effects of the US trade embargo,
but also caused by bureaucratic bottlenecks, poor wages, and
incompetence.
Cubans can only stand and stare in disbelief at the chasm between their
world-renowned health system with its wealth of highly motivated
doctors and innovative medical research, and the poverty of thinking
expertise and effort in economic management and delivery of basic
commodities.
Where do the two Castro brothers differ and how different is Raúl?
Fidel was always the charismatic visionary, his limitless energy often
consumed by global issues and stamping Cuba's influence on the world
stage, while forever exhorting his people to make continuous sacrifices
and work harder for the revolution.
Raúl Castro, in charge of the military, is far more wedded to
practicality, and closer to everyday problems. As in China and Vietnam,
the Cuban armed forces have increasingly turned to running some
business enterprises, in order to cope with shortfalls in the state
budget. Cuban journalists report that these are often the best-run
factories and businesses, with more bonuses and incentives than in the
rest of the crumbling state sector. Raúl Castro has quietly achieved a
reputation for efficient management. Hence it comes as no surprise that
his recent speech spoke frankly about absurdly inefficient agriculture,
and the need for structural changes to cut back on costly imports of
food.
Some Fidelistas and ardent supporters of the Cuban revolution will
object that it is all caused by the US embargo. It is true that
Washington's draconian blockade spanning more than four decades and 10
US presidents, has inflicted incalculable damage. The government
estimates that since the sanctions were first imposed in the 1960s,
Cuba has lost an average of $1.8bn dollars a year from exports denied,
damage to production, from financial blocks on Cuban dollar accounts
held with banks in third countries, and exorbitant extra shipping costs.
Shortages of some medicines, and the high price of imported goods and
machinery is rightly blamed on Washington's undeclared war on Cuba, but
this does not account for the erratic supply of eggs, the high price of
good-quality Cuban coffee in the shops, and the scarcity of fish, to
name but a few home-made irritations inflicted on the good citizens of
Havana.
This point is clearly grasped by a leading sexologist and sex rights
campaigner Mariela Castro, the daughter of the acting president, and
tipped as a future leader. "I feel most people want to experience a
socialism that will deliver benefits more quickly," Ms Castro declared
"but the state cannot be responsible for everything", intimating there
are other forms of public ownership.
So what are Cuba's choices? Her father, Raúl Castro has visited China
and is known to be impressed with some of their economic advances. But
either the Chinese path or the western market model is a false
dichotomy that substitutes for original and creative thinking that
would fashion a truly Cuban model for economic development.
Mariela Castro complained that is the trouble. "Too many communist
cadres think that the market economy is the only alternative" (to the
Leninist state-run model). Impatient with knee-jerk reactions and old
orthodoxies, she is eager for more economic debate about
decentralisation and community-run cooperatives.
One of the revolutionary heroes of the urban underground in Santiago de
Cuba 1959, Professor Jose Guzman, has expounded on the need for: "A
decentralised cooperatives controlled by local communities." He has
sent his research on this to party leaders.
In Venezuela, various experiments in community councils, and workers'
participation in factory management, co-exist alongside the still
mainstream privately-owned economy.
Raúl's authority is growing by the day in the absence of any public
appearance by his older brother and the certainty he will never return
to the helm. On Tuesday the party newspaper had a photo of the younger
brother on the front page, and an editorial written by Fidel Castro,
the president emeritus, was tucked deep inside the sports page.
What is clear is the command economy has to change and that Castro's
successors, while looking for more investment, trade and improved
markets, are not going to blindly follow a Chinese model and surrender
their notable achievements in health or education to the market.
Carlos Lage, vice-president in charge of economic affairs, is also
known to favour relaxing controls, allowing more small-scale private
enterprises while not presenting any opportunities for Cuban exiles in
Miami to buy up land and property and turn the clock back to pre-1959
times.
Raúl Castro, aged 76, is also a transitional figure, and real power is
expected to be passed on to the next generation: Carlos Lage and Abel
Prieto are in their 50s, and foreign minister Felipe perez Roque still
in his 40s.
However, the long shadow of Fidel the ageing revolutionary, strongly
attached to authoritarian Leninist economic models, acts as a brake on
any major policy changes while he is still alive.
The changes that are coming are unlikely to fulfil the entrepreneurial
hunger of investor groups that descend in droves on newly opened-up
economies. Cuba is not eastern Europe. The Cuban objective appears to
be to inject more flexibility and rationality into the existing
economy, rather than capitulate to a neoliberal world.
