Dimensions: 9.2'' x 6.34'' 285 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: September 2003 Hardcover ISBN: 0-8447-4175-2 Price: $ 25.00 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

August 2003
Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro's Legacy
By Mark Falcoff

While the long history of antagonism between Cuba and the United States may be drawing to a close, the outlook for a Cuba whose economy has been ruined by forty years of communism is fraught with difficulties. Neither lifting the American embargo nor investment by Cuban Americans will easily rehabilitate Cuba.

Mark Falcoff, a resident scholar at AEI, is the author of the monthly Latin American Outlook and editor of The Cuban Revolution and the United States (2001).

As its title announces, this is a book about Cuba's future. But it is also a book about the future of U.S.-Cuban relations. It could hardly be otherwise. In spite of a forty-year period with no formal diplomatic relations, the United States and Cuba have never ceased to be close to one another--not simply geographically, but also in terms of their broader political imaginations. No Latin American country arouses the level of interest that Cuba perennially evokes; one need only visit any bookstore or library in the United States to establish this fact. And no American or foreign visitor to Cuba can come away from the island without being struck by how firmly Cubans of all classes and political ideologies have their gaze fixed across the Florida straits. Acting as a bridge of sorts is a large, relatively affluent, and politically well-organized exile community centered in southern Florida, hostile to the regime that governs its homeland, but intensely involved with the island and its people in myriad other ways.

Barriers to Normal U.S.-Cuban Relations

Standing between the two countries lies something called "the revolution"--a shorthand term for the events that followed the triumph of a movement led by Fidel Castro, resulting in Cuba's transformation into a tropical Communist state and member of the Soviet community of nations. Although that larger community no longer exists, Cuba's Communist state remains--as does its progenitor. More convinced than ever that his version of Marxist socialism will ultimately prevail, Fidel Castro continues to wait for the collapse of both the capitalist system and the United States of America.

Meanwhile, his adversaries on the other side of the water--not only the expatriate Cuban community, but also its allies in the U.S. political class--await the collapse or disappearance of the Castro regime and its replacement by something more nearly resembling the "bourgeois" democracies of El Salvador, Uruguay, Chile, or Costa Rica. Indeed, much of U.S. policy, particularly since the end of the Cold War, has been predicated on Castro's Cuba losing its lease on life, its extinction but a matter of time. Meanwhile, a series of laws that hinder normal trade and travel relations between the two countries--the so-called embargo--remain in place. So far, both sides have been disappointed: neither capitalism nor Castroism has yet disappeared from the map.

Underpinning this book is the presumption that sooner rather than later, relations between the two countries are bound to resume, though under circumstances yet unclear. At that point the United States will confront a Cuba very different from the one with which it broke relations more than four decades ago. This new Cuba--new, at any rate, to the United States--will pose a whole range of problems, many of them far more nettlesome and complex than the enforcement of a trade embargo or the marshaling of support for resolutions at the various international organizations. Much of this book is dedicated to teasing those problems out from the shadows of imminence where they presently lurk, ignored in the pressure of current events and necessities.

More than a decade has passed since the collapse of the Soviet empire, and with it, the loss to Cuba of an entire network of advantageous trade and political and intelligence assets worldwide. Since 1991, Cuba has been living in what President Fidel Castro calls a "Special Period in Time of Peace," which is to say, one in which the country has known greater privations than ever before. The collapse of the Soviet Union has deprived the island of an economic subsidy amounting to roughly $6 billion a year. Ironically, the disappearance of a strategic logic to hostility between Cuba and the United States has only deepened the antagonism between them. At the same time, however, the links between the two countries--both human and economic--have grown stronger than ever before. Cubans now depend heavily on remittances from their American cousins and on tourism--much of it from the United States, and most of that from Cuban expatriates returning to see their families.

Meanwhile, both sides nourish long-standing grudges. The United States, on behalf of nearly 6,000 certified claimants whose property was expropriated by the revolution, brandishes a bill of several billion dollars. For its part, the Cuban government demands not merely the unilateral lifting of the trade embargo, but literally hundreds of billions of dollars in "reparations" for economic damage allegedly inflicted by the same.

As this book tries to show, however, the issue of expropriated property is far less serious than the loss of Cuba's capacity to earn a living wage in today's world economy. This is due partly to the collapse of its sugar economy, its principal source of income for more than a century, and partly to the structural inability of tourism--even massive tourism--to replace it. While a drastic reform of its economy may render Cuba at least able to feed its 11.2 million residents--a task that far exceeds its current capacity--it will probably never again be an important participant in the world agricultural economy.

While history takes its own time resolving its conundrums, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of Cubans, dream of emigrating to the United States, just as legions of their compatriots have done almost without interruption since 1960. Many Cuban ŽmigrŽs have prospered in their new lives, and even those who have not are enjoying a far higher standard of living than they would have if they had remained at home. A special entry regime for Cubans set up during the Cold War continues, somewhat anomalously, partly to inhibit a "migration crisis"--that is, the unrestrained release of thousands to make their way to the United States as best they can, as occurred in 1980 and again in 1994--and partly because of inertia and vested domestic political interests.

Although the Castro government officially (and loudly) objects to special treatment for Cuban entrants, it is probably the principal beneficiary of this policy. The possibility of leaving Cuba for a happier existence across the Straits of Florida has acted as a stabilizing political influence; many who would protest the policies of the Castro government simply opt out and queue for an exit visa. Once relations between the two countries have been normalized, it seems unlikely that Cuba will continue to enjoy this safety valve. Surely Cuba will not "deserve" special treatment more than Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba's other island neighbors. But will the absence of special treatment for its ŽmigrŽs compromise Cuba's basic stability? If so, what policies and attitudes should the United States pursue? These issues have disturbing implications for the island's political future, a point explored at some length in the final chapter.

No Simple Solution for Cuba

This book also directly confronts two underlying assumptions that drive both U.S. Cuban policy and opposition to it. First, many assume that once the Castro regime is gone and full diplomatic and trade relations resume, the island will experience rapid economic reconstruction thanks to the existence of a large, affluent, and able exile community based in southern Florida. This would be a logical (and happy) outcome were it not for the fact that Cuba today in no way resembles the country most of these expatriates left twenty, thirty, much less forty years ago. Everything--political culture, habits of work, expectations, even notions of national identity and everyday speech--is completely different and cannot be transformed overnight. Both Cuban "nations"--the one on the island and the one in exile--have lived different histories since 1959, cherish different memories, and worship, so to speak, at the altar of different gods. It goes without saying that the diaspora has enjoyed a far more constructive and wholesome experience than the one endured by those who remained at home, but the bottom line remains the same.

It is reasonable to assume that some expatriates will return to do business in Cuba; some already have, through third parties or third countries, and many more are preparing to do so. But to assume that the reconstruction of Cuba can simply be farmed out to the Miami diaspora is a fantasy that the United States would be best advised to abandon. The future relationship of Miami and Havana is bound to be far more complex and problematic than that, even assuming a political transformation that is likely to be nowhere near as far-reaching as many (myself included) would wish.

The book also challenges a second underlying assumption--that lifting the embargo will rescue Castro's revolution and make socialism finally "work" in Cuba. This is the aspiration of the international left and those in the American cultural community who currently control our institutions of higher education and much of our print and electronic media; it finds resonance among important congressional Democrats and their staffs.

The reality is quite the contrary. The normalization of relations will have the important side effect of trivializing the Cuban drama, stripping the country of its adversarial mystique--arguably its only remaining asset after a forty-year detour through suffocating authoritarianism and harebrained economic experimentation. The eventual and inevitable disappearance of Fidel Castro--a figure of ineffable (if somewhat inexplicable) glamour to Western journalists, celebrities, and politicians--will also deprive Cuba of much of its global prestige and influence. The sight of his successors, whoever they might be, welcoming American investors will probably do the rest. Indeed, there are signs that the opening to European and Latin American investment and the priority given to foreign tourism--and the consequent introduction of new economic and racial inequalities--have already begun to tarnish Cuba's prestige among what might be called the solidarity community.

Ironically, the U.S.-Cuban passion play is drawing to a close at the very moment that a new generation of leaders in Latin American countries far larger and more geopolitically significant than Cuba has arisen to reject the United States as a hemispheric leader, and more important, to question market-driven solutions to economic problems. The wisest among them would do well to consider the experience of Cuba and thereby spare themselves and their people Cuba's harsh reckoning, which, along with normalization of relations with the United States, may be remarkably close at hand.

 This summary is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.