Cuba No Libre

Americas Quarterly published by the Americas Society offers a preview of its Spring edition, and presents summaries of two articles on Cuba.

Cuba No Libre by Gary Marx and Cecilia Vaisman

On February 19th, Fidel Castro made it official: he was resigning the presidency and ending his 50-year reign over Cuba. Many exiles, U.S. officials and Cubans on the island had been waiting for this historic day, confident that it would not only mark a new beginning but signal that fundamental change was coming to the hemisphere’s only communist nation. Some experts predicted that Cubans, fed up with shortages and hardship, would rise up and demand freedom. Others suggested change would come from within the government—that a younger generation of leaders would ascend to the top and recognize that Cuba’s economic and political system was bankrupt and needed radical reform.

But what happened following Fidel’s announcement was the opposite. Rather than taking to the streets demanding change, Cubans are going about their daily lives—queuing for hours at bus stops, collecting monthly food rations at neighborhood bodegas, and showing up at government jobs—as if nothing unusual has happened. Rather than a new generation of leaders taking over, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother, was named Cuba’s new president, and a cadre of aging communist loyalists continue to dominate the leadership structure in the newly named Council of State, the nation’s top policy-making body.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once again urged the Cuban…

Frustration Mounts by Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat

If the new Cuban government has a remarkable resemblance to the old, that’s because they are one and the same. No real change has taken place in Cuba. Yet. The same group that accompanied Fidel and Raúl Castro since their days in the Sierra Maestra—all now senior citizens—remains firmly at the helm of government. They represent the quintessence of the Cuban military-industrial complex. Below them, however, lies an entity often observed but not very well understood: the Cuban people.

Recent polls by Gallup (2006) and the International Republican Institute (2007) indicate that a majority of Cubans are unhappy with their level of personal and economic freedom. Cubans increasingly cry out for greater personal autonomy, and that also includes questioning of the political structure. That unhappiness has largely been expressed in a withdrawal from the political involvement that has been crucial to the government’s ability to keep the population in check. According to the government’s own figures, over 1.4 million Cubans did not participate in the one-party, single-candidate electoral process that culminated with the selection of Raúl Castro as president this year. That’s a noteworthy decline from the 823,171 who absented themselves from the previous “elections” held in 2003. Considering that the Cuban government uses a wide array of persuasive and coercive measures to pressure citizens to participate, it is a highly significant figure.

But passive discontent is already changing into a more active mode…

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