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Cuba: The Twelfth Hour
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17692 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1990 |
2,238 Words |
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Carlos Alberto Montaner
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The countdown has started in Cuba. In order to prevail, a government must fulfill at least one of the three fundamental conditions, besides force, that sustain power: It must possess political legitimacy; have the economic means to avoid a constant decline in the standard of living; and be able to offer a plan for the future. Fidel Castro's government fulfills none of these conditions. It is, therefore, condemned to failure.
Its political legitimacy disappeared when communism lost its credibility and Eastern European governments collapsed. Castro's Cuba was modeled on the Soviet state, its constitution is based fundamentally on Bulgaria's, and its ideology is nothing more the a repetition of conventional Marxist clichés. It was supposed that the system adopted by Castro in 1959 and imposed on the Cuban people was simply a dress rehearsal for what inevitable would be the destiny of the world in the ensuing years. The demise of Marxism-Leninism in Europe and the end of Soviet expansionism necessarily have delegitimized "Castroism."
Havana, literally devoid of reserves, owes $7 billion to Western nations and another $25 billion to former Eastern bloc regimes, but principally to the Soviet Union. Until recently, Cuba received annual subsidies of between $5 billion and $6 billion. According to Irina Zorina, an economist with the Academy of Sciences in the USSR, since 1959 the Kremlin has given its distant satellite more than $100 billion. That is a larger amount than the Marshall Plan and the Alliance for Progress disbursed - an incredible amount of money that has not prevented Cuba from declining from third to twelfth place in terms of development in Latin America.
The key to economic disaster has been not only the misuse of subsidies but also the structure of Cuba's foreign trade. Income from all exports, at real market values, is barely sufficient to pay for the 12 million tons of petroleum that the country needs to maintain subsistence levels. It is a very inefficient economy; one that consumes more than it produces. And neither Mikhail Gorbachev nor Eastern Europe can or wants to continue this not-so-slow bloodletting. Hence the decline in aid and the totally unrealistic demand to change form a policy of barter and exchange to a hard currency market. This demand is tantamount to paralyzing hundreds of factories or substantially reducing consumption.
The third requirement lacked by Castro's regime is a plan for the future. Castro has asked Cubans to persist in Stalinist-type Marxism-Leninism and to ignore the changes in Europe. Not only does he not promise them a better future, but be tells them, realistically enough, that their economic situation could deteriorate substantially, taking the nation back to nineteenth-century conditions. That is to say, Castro is asking the Cubans to resist for the love of resistance itself, for the mere sake of not surrendering to reality as the other socialist countries have.
Castro's position
Obviously, Castro has conceived alibis and sophisms to defend his position. In the first place, he constantly reiterates that Cuba need not copy other nations. Second, he has taken Jose Marti hastily out of mothballs to support his own romantic and sometimes anti-American nationalism. Last, having resisted developing the tourist industry for years for fear of Western
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