Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence
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Recall from chapter 18 that tourism was a weak pillar, because it did not generate enough net hard currency and depended on the whims of consumers in wealthy countries. Perhaps even worse, the tourist industry reduced the incentive for young Cubans to advance their education. A taxi driver with no more than a high school education could earn a monthly salary that was roughly five times greater than a university-trained chemist. Remittances from families abroad—mostly those living in the United States—came with two problems. First, they were vulnerable to US policy changes—President Clinton had stopped their flow in 1994. Second, they already were generating inequalities, as we observed in chapter 19.
Thanks in part to investments made by Canada’s Sherritt International conglomerate, Cuba was the world’s sixth largest producer of nickel in 2003.5 But the United States had set back Sherritt’s plans by applying Helms-Burton Act restrictions against it. Other investors shied away because they expected the price of nickel not to rise sufficiently to warrant their investment. While China did invest $1 billion to modernize Cuba’s nickel operations, it drove a tough bargain. China required that it recoup the full cost of capital investment in the mining industry before Cuba could begin sharing 50 percent of production income.
Meanwhile, sugar production had become so unprofitable that the cost to cultivate, harvest, mill, and ship the sweetener was greater than earnings from its sales. In 2002, Cuba did the unthinkable. The country that had been Sugar King announced it would close down more than half of its sugar mills and switch cane fields to other agricultural purposes. The decision came after more than a decade of declining sugar production and had been delayed largely to avoid the displacement of rural families and communities. But the state could no longer afford what had in effect become a large subsidy. Between 1989 and 2002, sugar production fell by 56 percent, Cuba’s rank among sugar-producing countries declined from third to tenth place, and the world price for sugar dropped from thirteen cents to six cents per pound. Fidel said that just the first year’s savings from downsizing would be $200 million.6
The Urgency for Reform
Cuba’s fundamental economic problems were no match for the modest market reforms introduced in the 1990s that had led to the creation of paladares and other self-employed businesses. While cuentapropistas cushioned some discontent and provided wealth for a few enterprising entrepreneurs, the high taxes and elaborate licensing procedures discouraged many potential small business owners. For example, the license for a private home to operate as a guest house required the owner to pay a tax rate of 70 percent on estimated revenues, not actual income. If such a casa particular had a bad month, the owner might pay more tax than the business actually earned. Such confiscatory taxation reduced the incentive to create small businesses, or it encouraged illegal behavior in the form of not registering for a license.
In addition, cuentapropistas could employ only family members, which reduced the ability of small private businesses to generate jobs. They employed only half a million people by 2003. In addition, the government began to discourage their growth once the worst of the Special Period ended. By December 2003, the number of active licenses was down to 151,000, and ten months later, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security cut the number of self-employment categories from 158 to 118.7
The urgency for reform was evident beyond the economic spreadsheets. We detected a palpable discontent—a lack of hope about the future—among Cuba’s youth. In part this was due to increased unemployment and underemployment, to the fatigue of listening to long speeches laden with promises that would go unfulfilled, and to a focus on individual gratification that had not been socially acceptable before the Special Period.
During a trip to Cuba by Philip Brenner at about this time, a twenty-year-old woman engaged him in a conversation as he walked along the Malecon on a windy winter day. She was dressed in a worn bomber-style leather jacket, a sweatshirt, and loose fitting jeans—not the style of a typical prostitute. In fact, what she was offering was conversation in return for some coffee and ice cream at a café for tourists. After high school, he learned, she had studied for a job in the hospitality industry and was working as a waitress, where she could earn a modest amount of hard currency. At one point Brenner asked her what she would say to President Castro if the Cuban leader gave her the chance for one wish. Without hesitation she answered, “I’d ask him for a passport to leave the country.”
Corruption
Consequences of the widespread discontent were an increase in petty theft, a disregard for rules, and the appropriation of public goods for private purposes. In short, corruption became a part of daily life throughout the country.8
Battle of Ideas
Beginning in 2000, Fidel Castro sought to counter the population’s alienation with a multifaceted effort aimed at reinvigorating revolutionary enthusiasm. Called the Battle of Ideas, the effort grew out of weekly patriotic rallies throughout the island in support of Elián González’s return. Each of the “Saturday speak-outs,” journalist Marc Frank reports, “was televised to the nation . . . the crowds waving little Cuban flags on sticks as they were entertained by local talent.” It soon became a movement, headquartered in an office adjacent to the Cuban president’s, aimed at Cuba’s disaffected youth. As at the start of the Revolution, young Cubans were sent out with an idealistic mission, “to become teachers, health care providers, and social workers.” Castro intended the young recruits to serve as “battering rams against creeping corruption.”*
In 2003, an additional forum made its debut. Mesa Redonda (“Roundtable”), a two-hour weekly television program, often served as a propaganda platform. But it also aired open debates about controversial subjects and became a venue for serious discussions of proposed reforms. Mesa Redonda continues today under the banner of a state-sponsored media outlet, CubaDebate.
Castro viewed the Battle of Ideas as essential for Cuba’s security. In 2003, he declared:
The decadent imperialist capitalist system in its phase of neoliberal globalization can no longer offer any solutions for the huge problems facing humanity. . . . That system has no future. It is destroying nature and expanding hunger. . . . In the face of political threats and aggression from abroad . . . we are profoundly studying and increasingly perfecting our concepts of the war of all the people, for we know that no technology, no matter how sophisticated, can ever defeat man. The battle of ideas, our most powerful political weapon, will not let up for a minute.†
* * *
* Marc Frank, Havana Revelations: Between the Scenes in Havana (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 37, 39.
† Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech on the Current World Crisis,” Havana, March 6, 2003, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2003/ing/f060303i.html.
An “informal economy” or black market—the sale or exchange of goods and services without a government license or the government’s knowledge—is common in most third world countries. But it had not been common in Cuba until the Special Period. By 2000, as nearly every Cuban participated in the black market for some household necessity, the petty illegalities corroded the sense of community the Revolution had developed. Cubans looked out for their own families and immediate friends, even if that meant undermining the common good, which many believed no longer existed as they watched inequality escalate.
Privatization added to the problem. Opening a private restaurant or guesthouse meant acquiring capital to renovate rooms and purchase goods. Some Cubans obtained the money from relatives abroad. Others stole resources from the government—construction materials, flour, tools, spare tires—and sold the booty on the black market. Theft became so integral to the way of life for some that it shaped how they made decisions about where to work. A study by Hope Bastion Martinez found that access to hard currency in a job was less important for some workers than the ability to pilfer goods they could sell or barter.
9
Protest Music
In the 1990s, Cuban hip-hop music became the outlet for youth protest (see one such hip-hop group in figure 22.1). “Young, mostly black Cuban men adopted the genre,” Margot Olavarria explains, “first by imitating it and eventually infusing it with their own roots and reality, transforming it into a space for self-expression.” She notes that “while not all rap is politically charged,” the government still censored it initially. But its widespread popularity forced official acceptance, and Cuban hip-hop artists now travel internationally and are regular participants at public music festivals. As Cuban hip-hop evolved independently of US influence, its lyrics and themes became a distinctive contrast to the American genre. Instead of promoting sexual exploitation and consumption, Cuban artists focused on the problems of daily life. The music provided a way for the generation of the 1980s and 1990s “to speak out about racism, prostitution, police harassment, growing class differences, the difficulty of daily survival, and other social problems of contemporary Cuba.”10
Figure 22.1. Cuban hip-hop group Anónimos Consejos (Anonymous Advice), in a makeshift studio, works on an album that protests increasing racism. Photo from video, Changing Cuba, produced and reported by Peter Eisner for World Focus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDvENDarA3c.
Americans may know the stirring folk songs of Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, who were leading artists in the nueva trova (new folk music) movement of the 1960s. Cubans in the new millennium favored more critical singers such as Carlos Varela. Many of his songs went right to the edge of what censors would allow and became wildly popular. Consider “William Tell,” which recounts the famous story from the perspective of the archer’s son. Tired of holding the apple on his head, the boy runs away. William Tell cannot understand why his son would abandon him, so the singer explains: “William Tell, your son has grown up / And now he wants to shoot the arrow himself.”
“William Tell” by Carlos Varela
William Tell didn’t understand his son
Who one day got tired of having the apple placed on his head,
And started to run away.
His father cursed him—
How could he now prove his skill?
William Tell, your son has grown up,
And now he wants to shoot the arrow himself.
It’s his turn now to show his valor with your crossbow.
Yet William Tell did not understand the challenge:
Who would ever risk having the arrow shot at them?
He became afraid when his son addressed him,
Telling William that it was now his turn
To place the apple on his own head.
William Tell, your son has grown up,
And now he wants to shoot the arrow himself.
It’s his turn now to show his valor with your crossbow.
William Tell was angry at the new idea,
And refused to place the apple on his own head.
It was not that he didn’t trust his son—
But what would happen if he missed?
William Tell, your son has grown up,
And now he wants to shoot the arrow himself.
It’s his turn now to show his valor with your crossbow.
William Tell failed to understand his son—
Who one day got tired of having the apple placed on his head.
In short, despite the superficial appearance of a successful rebound, at the start of the millennium there was a broad consensus on the island that Cuba needed a new economic strategy, one that would engender development and enable it to maintain the Revolution’s commitment to equity. But there was no successful model on which to base the desired strategy.
The model that Western advanced industrial nations advocated—the so-called Washington Consensus—had lost its credibility. Argentina, which accepted the strictures of the Washington Consensus in the early 1990s and had become its poster child, was experiencing an economic collapse at the start of the new century. Even the scholar who coined the term for the export-led privatizing model acknowledged it was a prescription only for macroeconomic growth, not equity.11
Other Latin American countries had reduced their poverty rates, yet the region’s total number of poor people was climbing and the gaps between rich and poor were still the world’s largest. China had made enormous leaps in its overall growth rate, but it had large areas where people remained ill-fed and its gains came partly from exploitative sweatshops with horrific working conditions. Vietnam’s seemingly miraculous recovery had similar problems.
United States and Europe Pressure Cuba
Changes in Washington
Adding to Cuba’s problems, it faced a Republican administration in Washington that owed its electoral victory to hardline Cuban-Americans. On November 22, 2000, the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board stopped its hand count of 10,750 votes that machines had not recorded because a group of Cuban-Americans menacingly demonstrated outside the building where the board was meeting. A full tally likely would have provided Vice President Al Gore with a sufficient majority to win Florida’s electoral votes and the presidency. The moblike rally added to other favors, such as campaign contributions, that George W. Bush needed to repay to the anti-Castro Cuban-American community.12
Surprisingly, the Bush administration’s Cuba policy in its first year was distinguished more by continuity than change. The president continued the practice of waiving implementation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, which otherwise would allow US citizens to sue in US federal courts persons who “traffic in property confiscated in Cuba.” In November 2001, in the wake of Hurricane Michelle’s devastation of the island’s crops, President Bush also relaxed some cumbersome provisions of the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 (TSRA) to facilitate the sale of food and medical supplies to Cuba.
But the president also laid the groundwork for a harsher policy by appointing longtime opponents of rapprochement throughout the executive branch.13 For example, he named Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, Lino Gutierrez and Daniel Fisk as Reich’s deputy assistant secretaries, Roger Noriega as ambassador to the Organization of American States, Adolfo Franco as director of the Latin American bureau in the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and Emilio González as the National Security Council staffer handling Caribbean affairs, including Cuba. Members of this group had worked together for many years, always championing the most extreme policies against Cuba.
A decidedly hostile tone soon emerged in US policy pronouncements. Notably, the United States criticized Cuba over its reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ignoring the Cuban government’s condemnation of the terrorism on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and its offer of medical assistance and the use of Cuban airspace for US aircraft.14 The Cuban government did refuse to give carte blanche to the US campaign against terrorism, arguing that the United Nations, not the United States, should direct this global effort. By October 2001 Cuba had ratified twelve UN resolutions against terrorism stemming from the September 11 attacks. It also chose to avoid a confrontation over US use of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base as a prison camp, although US occupation of this Cuban territory had long been a source of anger for Cuba. Raúl Castro, at the time Cuba’s defense minister, even offered to provide medical assistance to the detainees.
As most US foreign policymakers concentrated on Afghanistan and the Middle East after 9/11, the anti-Castro hardliners maintained their focus on Havana. In May 2002, for example, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton attempted to undermine former president Jimmy Carter’s planned visit to Cuba by falsely charging that “Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare” capability and had “provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.”15 When a National Intelligen
ce Council officer challenged Bolton’s claims, the undersecretary demanded he be fired. Yet the allegations were never substantiated and were not included in the State Department’s annual report on global terrorism.16
Carter broached the issue of human rights during his visit to Cuba. In a lecture at the University of Havana—broadcast twice over Cuban radio and television and reprinted in the next day’s Granma—he called for political reforms and praised a petition drive spearheaded by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, founder of the Christian Liberation Movement, to change the constitution. Called the Varela Project, the constitutional initiative demanded that the National Assembly consider amendments to permit freedom of association, expand private enterprise, and establish a new electoral system.17
The Varela Project collected more than 11,000 signatures between 1998 and 2002. But the National Assembly rejected the petition’s demands. Instead, it accepted a counterpetition that one million Cubans signed in a drive the government organized. It called for a constitutional revision declaring Cuba’s political system could not be changed merely by new laws, and that “Cuba will never return to capitalism.”
Carter received a warm reception from the Cuban government despite his call for reform. A Cuban official explained at the time that the government reacted positively because Carter had made his proposals with respect, acknowledging that it was Cuba’s prerogative to organize its society without external pressure or influence. In contrast, the chief US diplomat on the island, James Cason, seemed determined to antagonize the Cuban government. In 2002, he increased the number of shortwave radios the US Interests Section gave away to Cubans, saying the project would enable Cubans to gain access to information, including Radio Martí, whose shortwave broadcasts Cuba did not jam. The radios also were capable of receiving coded messages sent by covert operatives. While acknowledging that diplomats typically do not engage in subversion, Cason told USA Today that Cuba “is a different place.”18