Celia Sánchez’s death in 1980 tore a great hole not only in the life of the then 63-year-old Castro, but also in the Cuban leadership nomenklatura. For a long time, the Máximo Líder appeared completely devastated to those around him. Then, on the Moncada anniversary on July 26, one of the two female participants in the attack on the Batista Barracks – Haydée Santamaría – took her own life. The director of the Casa de Las Americas – the publishing house often in the firing line of cultural bureaucrats and intellectuals – was said to have had personal problems, in that her husband Armando Hart, also a pro-Castro revolutionary from the earliest days, wanted to separate from her. But the death of these two women, who, together with Raúl Castro’s wife Vilma Espín, embodied female emancipation under the revolution, was rather like a bad omen.
Soon the struggle for survival was again breaking out on all fronts. When Ronald Reagan took over as US president in January 1981, the promising (if inconsistent) detente initiated by his Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter came to an end. The trade embargo was further tightened, and Washington declined to renew a fishing agreement signed by the two countries in 1977. Because of Cuba’s support for the Sandinist revolution in Nicaragua and the guerrilla struggle in El Salvador, the Reagan administration even considered for a while a total sea blockade of the island.
In October, Moscow succeeded in scoring an own goal on the little Caribbean island of Grenada, when the ambitious Sovietbacked finance minister, Bernard Coard, ousted the popular prime minister (and friend of Castro’s), Maurice Bishop. In the ensuing power struggle, Bishop was killed by soldiers who had sided with Coard. Then the United States used the putsch as the pretext for an invasion, and on October 26 just under 9,000 US soldiers landed on the island. At the airport, the first-ever direct military confrontation took place between US and Cuban forces.
At the time of the landing, there were nearly 800 Cubans on the island: 636 construction workers employed at the airport, 43 military advisers, and the rest diplomats. Of these, 24 were killed during the invasion, and 642 were taken prisoner and displayed to the world in a camp surrounded by barbed wire. All the White House claims about at least 1,100 professional Cuban soldiers, who were supposed to have built arms depots and planned to take over the island, soon turned out to be untrue and had to be officially withdrawn.
Despite the loss of Grenada as an ally, things had been changing in Cuba’s favor in Latin America. Since 1977, when the OAS (with a US supporting vote) loosened restrictions on contacts, the island state had managed to break out of isolation. Diplomatic relations were restored with nearly all Latin American countries, and the arc of cooperation in the first half of the eighties stretched from offers of military assistance for the right-wing Argentinean regime during the “anti-colonialist” Falklands War,21 to both civilian and military aid for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the left-wing FMLN liberation movement in El Salvador. “When we were asked for teachers after the victory of the revolution in Nicaragua, 29,000 volunteers came forward,” Castro proudly reported. “At the beginning [of 1959], we didn’t even have enough doctors to send to the interior of our own country. Today we have doctors in 25 Third World countries – more than 1,500 doctors are working in the Third World.”
Cuba also established links with the major continental economies, such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, which in turn offered it loans. During those years the Third World generally was sinking ever deeper into a debt crisis vis-à-vis the First World. In Latin America, this was so dramatic that the eighties are thought of in retrospect as the “wasted decade.” Only Cuba seemed to be doing better – for the time being. “In these years of crisis, 1982, 1983 and 1984, … the economies of Latin American nations as a whole declined by 9 percent while Cuba’s grew by 24; this is for the 1982–84 period. Last year our economy grew by 7 to 8 percent, during 1984.”22 In the seventies and early eighties, even the sugar harvests were so good that between 1981 and 1985 Cuban economic experts were looking forward optimistically to the future. Given the stable prospects, Castro allowed only a cautious opening to the market in the mid- to late seventies. From 1976, private individuals were again allowed to offer their services as electricians, plumbers, hairdressers, motor mechanics, and so on – a course followed up in 1980 with the authorization of private farmers’ markets and housebuilders.
The positive economic data for the first half of the eighties were not immune from crisis. After all, although the US blockade had been in place since 1962 and Cuba had been a member of Comecon since 1972, figures produced by Julio Carranza Valdés at Cuba’s American Studies Center (CEA) have shown that “right into the seventies approximately 40 percent of Cuba’s foreign trade was with capitalist countries.”23
The Cuban economy was therefore hard hit when the Reagan administration stepped up its embargo, and when a collapse of world sugar prices, from 27 cents a pound in 1980 to 4 cents a pound in 1985 (the lowest in real terms since the thirties depression), dramatically reduced foreign currency earnings.24 Neither the good harvests, which in the first half of the eighties averaged 7.5 million tons, nor the sizeable Soviet sugar price subsidies could come near to compensating for this drop.
The slump in oil prices after 1985, combined with a rise in the dollar exchange-rate, had similar effects. For, until then, Cuba had been able to obtain some $500 million, or a good 40 percent of its foreign currency, by reselling up to a quarter of the 12 million tons of crude oil that it imported each year from the Soviet Union.
As the terms of trade changed, Cuba’s debt to the West climbed from $2.8 billion in 1983 to $3.6 billion in 1985 and more than $6 billion in 1987, while with the Eastern bloc it reached $19 billion, or its peso equivalent, by 1987. When Cuba tried to renegotiate its debt in summer 1986 at the Paris Club, the Americans pressed for the application to be turned down, and the island suddenly found itself with its back to the wall – especially as the repayment of billions of dollars in loans from the Soviet Union was due to begin that same year. Communist Cuba, which had long had a good reputation in Latin America for debt servicing, now saw no option but to declare a moratorium on repayments, which in turn led indirectly to a freeze on Western loans and a further exacerbation of the country’s plight.25
Castro, whose credibility and authority had suffered from his justification of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, responded to the worsening situation by making the Third World debt crisis the central theme of his foreign policy in the mid-1980s. All the levers of his propaganda machine were used to mobilize world opinion, and his reputation in the Third World shot up when he made it clear: “I think this is the key problem of our time.”26 Since Washington had anyway shut him out of the world economic system dominated by the industrial countries, he was able to address the North–South problem in a direct and open manner, and to press the kind of demands that state leaders dripfed by the North could not afford to raise. The shaky social stability of most developing countries was indeed dependent on their major lenders, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for which Cuba was just a white speck on the map. According to official statistics, in just the first half of the 1980s the Third World transferred to the industrial nations a total of $325 billion in interest and $321 billion in debt repayment.27 Latin America’s accumulated debt alone – overwhelmingly to North American banks – was put at roughly $350 billion.
Castro took a fighting stance in his conversations with Betto: “This is totally untenable…. Mathematics shows that [the debt] can’t be paid.” Emphatically demanding “total cancellation of the debt – both capital and interest,” he justified this by the history of relations between the First and Third Worlds: “Our countries have been and continue to be plundered.” He then proposed a reform of international monetary policy:
An essential aspect of our thesis is that the … rich and powerful creditor states assume responsibility for the debt to their own banks, allocating 12 percent of their military spending – which now amo
unts to $1 trillion a year – for this purpose. . . . The Third World [would have] an additional $300 billion purchasing power each year as a result of the cancellation of the foreign debt and the establishment of a system of fair international economic relations.28
He warned that the USA and IMF, with their “selfish, absurd policy,” might provoke a social explosion in the Third World. And, speaking as a statesman – rather different from his former image as a professional revolutionary – he considered that social upheavals would carry the Third World back rather than genuinely forward. “I’d rather have an orderly way out of the crisis … than an uncontrollable explosion. Even more important than one, two, three, four or five revolutions, at this point, is to come out of this crisis, to establish the New International Economic Order and to create the conditions for development.”29
Castro’s involvement in the debt debate was, however, increasingly driven by economic difficulties inside Cuba, which had to face not only the US embargo but ideologically motivated discrimination on the part of the World Bank, IMF, and other financial organizations and private banks. But it also had itself to blame. Since the seventies – as in the early sixties – Cubans had been living and consuming beyond their means; they had spent scarce reserves of foreign currency or loan money to pay for too many imports. Meanwhile the productivity of Cuban firms had continually declined: outlays had risen but output fallen. A swollen bureaucracy worked inefficiently, corruption was spreading, private farmers’ markets and small firms allowed the profit motive, envy and class contradictions to reemerge. The common good took second place, as material incentives prevailed over what was left of moral ones.
Castro was disappointed and furious with the way things were going. In 1985 he ditched the new Five-Year Plan and kicked those responsible for it out of their jobs, because the figure work was based on credit and on income that belonged to the realm of fantasy. At the National Assembly in early January, the Cuban leader angrily complained as he had in the sixties that “a sectorial spirit has reigned in all the organizations, in all the ministries.”30 Instead of a plan for everyone, everyone was planning for himself. JUCEPLAN, the central planning authority that had operated since 1960 in accordance with the Moscow model, was frozen out of the picture, and the quinquennial congress of the Communist Party, the body that normally approved the Five-Year Plan and future targets, was postponed until February 1986. Castro set up a special coordinating group of his own to formulate a new plan, a cost-cutting budget very different from those of the past. When the congress finally took place in 1986, it decided on major new measures to steer the economy onto more viable paths; it launched a campaign in this spirit under the title Rectificación de los errores.
The Spanish word rectificación, like the rather more formal English “rectification,” carries a sense of “correction,” “improvement”, or “reformation.” In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev had been general secretary of the CPSU since March 1985, and what perestroika (or “restructuring”) was to him rectificación was to Castro. However, the common features did not go much beyond this rough terminological equivalence in respect of a new policy. Castro understood by rectificación a consolidation of the old, a “re-Cubanization” of the revolution, whereas Gorbachev meant perestroika to denote a radically new departure.
Thus in May 1986, for example, Castro put an end to the limited reforms of 1976 that had allowed individuals to provide services and to set up street stalls on a market basis, as well as the measures of 1980 that had cleared the way for private farmers’ markets. At that time Gorbachev was moving in the opposite direction, toward the introduction by stages of a “regulated market economy.” Castro wanted to go back to orthodox Marxist-Leninist principles, to central planning and control; Gorbachev aimed at further decentralization and enterprise autonomy, gradually involving partial integration into the Western capitalist system. While Gorbachev appeared in large parts of the world as the bright new hero of the Soviet Union, and even won growing sympathy inside Cuba, Castro forcefully counterposed the myth and egalitarian austerity associated with the dead hero Che Guevara and his time.31 “Perestroika,” the New York Times quoted him as saying in 1989, “is another man’s wife. I don’t want to get involved.”32
Since 1959 Castro had repeatedly given the order for “corrections” – always under direct or indirect pressure from Moscow. After the collapse of Che Guevara’s great leap forward into industrialization, he had to beat a retreat into sugar monoculture; the failure of the 10 million tons harvest in 1970 eventually forced him into a Moscow-style decentralization of the Cuban economy and a delegation of authority, responsibility, and influence, hence a partial loss of his own scope for control. The rectification campaign, however, did not involve such a bending to the Kremlin’s model for the Communist world. Rather, Castro used it as an opportunity to free himself from Moscow, and to breathe new life into the original fighting spirit of the revolution. “What has made us powerful and invincible in the face of economic and political aggression and military threat?” he asked in July 1986 at a conference on enterprise management. And he gave the answer himself: “Morale, an unselfish spirit of social altruism: that was the raw material that made our people. It is more important to safeguard the consciousness of workers and act honestly than to meet the plan.”33
Castro believed that a recentralization of economic processes could strengthen control over production and performance, check sloppiness and mismanagement, raise productivity in the state economy, rebuild social equality, and overcome the crisis. In line with Che Guevara’s teaching on the “new man,” moral incentives would once more have pride of place over material incentives – or, in translation, since resources were no longer sufficient to meet the expectations of consumption and social benefits that had grown in recent years, it was necessary to produce more than ever for lower levels of income and welfare.
For Cubans, the reforms begun in the mid-eighties were the most drastic they had experienced, because it was becoming clear that – although the problems facing Moscow and Havana were qualitatively the same and differed at most only in scale – they had reached the parting of the ways. With his conservative turn, Castro suddenly ended the limited opening to the market and took from his fellow-countrymen an element of freedom and joie de vivre that had been won through great effort. This led the New York Times to label him a “fossil Marxist,” while in the eyes of its columnist William Safire he was the “Ceauşescu of the Caribbean.”34 Where others saw elements of a market as an opportunity to guarantee a basic food supply that was never secure in the planning model, Castro laid greater emphasis than ever on the danger of ideological divisions and creeping disintegration of the system (and therefore of his own power). With an eye on events in Eastern Europe and reactions to them in the West, he began to toy with the concept of “inflexible” socialism. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Granma quoted him as saying: “Now there are two types of socialists, two types of communists: good and bad ones, as defined by imperialism. . . . Those who do not submit to imperialism … they call inflexible. Long live inflexibility.”35
To follow Gorbachev and expand the private sector would, in Castro’s view, lead Cuba into chaos, so unprepared organizationally and mentally were both the population and the state apparatus. It would be necessary to dismantle the Cuban Revolution and build a completely new political system virtually overnight, creating a highly explosive vacuum at the center of the tense relationship between Cuba and Florida. To expect that of Castro and his leadership would indeed have been politically naive, or even irresponsible.
Castro soon gave a glimpse of the direction he wanted to take. The authorization of private services and private farmers’ markets had, he said, “created a class of newly rich who are doing as they please.”36 He accused certain independent farmers of making 50,000 to 60,000 pesos (1 peso = 1 dollar) from a one-hectare field of garlic. At that time, it was known that there were “1,800 millionaires in Cuba and nearly five tim
es as many with more than half a million pesos, most of whom wanted to leave Cuba.”37 These people had sown among the population traditionally “capitalist attitudes,” such as idleness, self-interest, and materialism. Castro hit out at enterprise managers who, “dressed up as capitalists but without capitalist efficiency,” conspired with their employees to deceive the state – for example, by lowering output targets so that the plan could be easily fulfilled and earnings increased through extra bonuses.
Castro described in exaggerated terms how many regularly earned money in their sleep. A manager might say to a worker: “Sleep on the floor and I’ll pay you extra for abnormal conditions.”38 Until the mid-eighties, when the “rectification” process was introduced, output targets were indeed so often reduced that nearly every Cuban worker was easily capable of fulfilling them four or five times over. “Although we recognize that there is room for bonuses under socialism,” Castro explained, “they must be the result of good work … not because of trumped-up profits.”39 In all sectors people were busy lining their own pockets. Products and spare parts were stolen from state enterprises, sold on the sly or taken for use at home; good-quality agricultural produce landed on the counters of private farmers’ markets, while poor-quality stuff was traded in the state sector; construction material and machinery disappeared and ended up in private housebuilding; workers tried to arrange early retirement so that they could use their pension to set up a private business. Castro was not afraid to denounce shortcomings all over the country, and exposed to ridicule officials such as those at the MINCONS (Construction Ministry): “[If you] appeal to the MINCONS and say to them … please build a day-care centre in Guanabacoa because there’s a new factory … MINCONS couldn’t build a single day-care centre, not one!” Just to make the request “was enough to make them faint.” And he mockingly suggested how the comrades there might answer: “How can you ask such a terrible thing, to build a day-care centre in Guanabacoa with all the commitments we already have and all the projects that we never finish?”40
Fidel Castro Page 30