Cuban Reforms
The economic changes in Cuba are not so much a turn towards capitalism as a blow to bureaucracy, the “internal” enemy of socialism. Those half a million people that will be losing their jobs soon are not working in factories or sugarcane fields, not rolling those fine cigars. They’re sitting behind desks in government offices trying to look busy.
Granted, there will be a lot more private enterprise in Cuba in the future, but the country’s socialist foundation is very secure: the key industries and the financial system are still nationalized, the state retains a monopoly on foreign trade and the economy continues to be centrally planned. Whatever success the mom-and-pop businesses expected to spring up may enjoy it won’t threaten any of that. In fact, it will help strengthen that socialist base by stopping an enormous drain of state resources.
The blow to the bloated bureaucracy is political as well as economic. In the experience of every 20th century revolution, bureaucracy doesn’t mean just red tape and the occasional bribe. Party and state apparatchiks separate themselves, as a caste, from the rest of society, becoming its rulers. That’s what killed the Russian Revolution, and the process was repeated everywhere else - with local differences - except Cuba.
There the revolution was led by people with no ties to the Soviet Union. Although they later accepted its aid (without which they wouldn’t be around today), they did not ape its political system. But in a poverty stricken country like Cuba, with nearly a majority of people illiterate, and subject to a “brain-drain” of professionals and technicians after the victory, capable administrators and managers easily came to see themselves as “special.”
The ‘60s saw several political battles led by Fidel against that tendency. The fight flared up again in the ‘80s, and we see another episode now - sort of a never-ending war.
The current changes should be seen in the context of economic reforms that began nearly ten years ago when Cuba reorganized its sugar industry in the face of declining prices on the world market. That had a ripple effect on the entire economy. The Cubans were dealing with that well enough until 2008 when they were hit by the international recession and three of the most destructive hurricanes of the last century. Add to that some political intrigue following Fidel’s illness and retirement.
A year and a half ago, several members of the Councils of State and of Ministers were unceremoniously dismissed from their posts for “unseemly conduct” related to their expectations of an accommodation with the US. Just a few months ago, Esteban Morales - a professor at the University of Havana considered the country’s expert on the US - was expelled from his local unit of the Communist Party for publishing an article denouncing unnamed members of the party leadership for plotting a post-Soviet union style sell-off of nationalized industries into their own greedy hands.
Morales is appealing his expulsion. I bet he gets back in but we won’t hear too much about the substance of his issue. The Cubans, understandably, don’t like to wash their dirty laundry in public.
In any case the half a million layoffs is a body blow to the bureaucracy and to the hopes of its leading elements to enjoy a post-Soviet style bureaucratic bonanza in Cuba.