In few places were the reverberations of the collapse of the Soviet bloc more strongly felt than Cuba. Over the previous three decades, this island nation of ten million people had enjoyed extremely favorable terms of trade with the Soviet Union, which fueled its remarkable social development. The abrupt cut-off of that trade relationship was the catalyst for an economic meltdown, which was exacerbated by the structural faults of Cuba’s centralized planning model. Salivating at the prospect of delivering a death blow to the Communist upstarts, the U.S. Congress passed the embargo-fightening Torricelli bill in 1992. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Fidel Castro’s demise turned out to be greatly exaggerated. The Cuban revolution-abetted by U.S. hostility-has once again proven its extraordinary resilience, born of its ability to adapt and remake itself at critical junctures.
As the inefficiencies of the Cuban economy became apparent, the leadership’s first response was a “Rectification Campaign.” This campaign, formally announced in 1986, sought to return the revolution to its historical roots, invoking moral incentives and volumarism as the motor force to rejuvenate the economy. While elements of the rectification process were successful and enduring-such as efforts to streamline the cumbersome state bureaucracy and to root out corruption-revolutionary fervor was neither easy to maintain nor able, in and of itself, to revitalize the economy, especially after Soviet largesse dried up.
In the early 1990s, the government seemed in shock, incapable of developing a master strategy to respond to the crisis in its totality. “On the ideological plane,” says Juan Valdés Paz, deputy director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CEA), “the government was on the defensive, and in total chaos. Events ran ahead of ideological discourse, something unprecedented in socialism.” The leadership began to take dramatic, daring steps only when painted into a corner. It decriminalized possession of dollars by Cubans in response to the protests of the summer of 1993, and opened the free farmers’ markets in response to the balsero crisis of the following summer.
Recently, however, the government seems to have accepted the reality that the revolution must either chart an entirely new course or risk collapse. While the country’s opening to foreign capital and the development of the tourism industry can be interpreted principally as reactions to the realignment of external forces, the free farmers’ markets, the turning of state farms into cooperatives, and the gradual expansion of self-employment and Cuban small business are all policy reforms aimed at remedying flaws in the traditional organization of production.
The resultant overlay of the old state-socialist system and the new market and cooperative forms of production has spawned a plethora of contradictions. A new socialist paradigm-which would make sense of it all and act as a compass for the future-is still sorely lacking. The sense of vertigo and uncertainty that pervades Cuba today has prompted a wholesale rethinking of the revolutionary project among the Cuban intelligentsia. While there is a general consensus that the country must not regress to its pre-1959 past, there is much less agreement about both the kind of future Cuba should aspire to, and the related question of the types of economic and political reforms that the government should enact.
Answers are urgent and necessary. If the leadership doesn’t take the initiative, the social forces released by Cuba’s partial embrace of capitalism may compel their own solutions. “We have to keep in mind that Cuba is in a battle against time,” warns CEA researcher Gerardo González in this issue, “and time is against us.”
