The impending demise of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has led observers to vastly different viewpoints concerning Cuba’s future. Yesterday, George Friedman of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. offered the following tautology:
The Communist regime, as we have known it, cannot possibly survive Castro’s death. To be sure, Fidel’s brother Raul will take over leadership; the Cuban Communist Party, the military and intelligence system, and the government ministries will continue to rule. But the regime that Castro created will be dead. It will be dead because Castro will be dead, and whatever survives him cannot be called the same regime. It will have been fundamentally transformed.
Friedman’s essay is a somewhat surprising exercise in grudging admiration, if not for Castro’s ideology, then at least for his ability to inspire followers in the face of undeniable economic failure, particularly after the Cold War ended and Cuba’s geopolitical weight was reduced to that of a 90-pound weakling. Friedman’s view of Cuba’s future, then, relies heavily upon his view of Castro as a kind of modern Sun King. With Castro, it was a case of l’etat, c’est moi (or is that soy el estado?). Castro embodied the Cuban state, not just its ability to rule and function, but its purpose and mission, or as Friedman has it,
That was the foundation of his [Castro’s] strength: He believed deeply in what he said, and those who listened believed as well. Fidel was writing poems, not economic analysis, and that kept anyone from looking too closely at the details.
Now, the poetry is ending, and the detail men and bean-counters are in charge. They don’t know any poems—and while they can charge the United States with bearing the blame for all of the revolution’s failures, it is not the same as if Fidel were doing it. Regimes do not survive by simple brute strength. There have to be those who believe.
For Friedman, the death of Castro will signify the death of the Cuban revolution, leading to ever-greater sclerosis and—absent Castro’s ‘poetry’—abject hopelessness; therefore, the prognosis is grim:
We are, therefore, pessimistic about the regime’s ability to survive. Or more precisely, we do not believe that the successor regime—communism without Fidel—can hold on for very long. [Fidel’s brother and heir apparent] Raul Castro now is reaching out to the United States, but contrary to the Cuban mythology, the United States cannot solve Cuba’s problems by ending the trade embargo. The embargo is a political gesture, not a functioning reality. End it or keep it, the Cuban problem is Cuba—and without Fidel, the Cubans will have to face that fact.
Over and against this dire prediction, Julia E. Sweig, writing in Foreign Affairs magazine’s January/February issue, takes a decidedly different tone on the Cuban succession. Sweig, a Senior Fellow and Director of Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicts the ‘Denging’ of Cuba, a slow, uneven process that will attempt to balance political control with market economics and incrementally more individual freedom. She writes,
Even as Cuba-watchers speculate about how much longer the ailing Fidel will survive, the post-Fidel transition is already well under way. Power has been successfully transferred to a new set of leaders, whose priority is to preserve the system while permitting only very gradual reform. Cubans have not revolted, and their national identity remains tied to the defense of the homeland against U.S. attacks on its sovereignty. As the post-Fidel regime responds to pent-up demands for more democratic participation and economic opportunity, Cuba will undoubtedly change—but the pace and nature of that change will be mostly imperceptible to the naked American eye.
To be fair, Friedman’s and Sweig’s essays are different exercises. Friedman is more concerned with the 40,000-foot view; he examines what Castro’s death will mean in general and over the long term. Sweig is more concerned with the immediate future, i.e., how Americans and American policy will react upon learning that Castro is dead. In this regard, both writers have something important to say.
Sweig cautions that we should not expect any immediate changes in Cuba, and this strikes me as a wise expectation to maintain. No doubt, when the day comes, we will hear from fossilized Cold Warriors and Cuban-American exiles about the need for immediate changes, such as multiparty elections and a free press. There will be a note of urgency in these requests, and they will likely appeal to our sense of political rectitude, perhaps even reminding us of the Castro regime’s noxious legacy of repression, but in sum, I tend to agree with Sweig that American intervention into Cuba’s post-Fidel politics can only cause more harm than good.
This is where Friedman’s long-term view and Sweig’s more immediate concerns—seemingly at odds with one another—tend to converge upon the same perspective. Cuba’s Communist regime is, over the long haul, a losing proposition, and, therefore, we would be wise in the short term to observe a very basic rule in foreign affairs: why force History’s hand with great effort when time and circumstance will conspire to do the same job for us if we simply remain patient?
Castro’s death will embody an object lesson of sorts, a lesson in mass psychology and vengeance. There is a generation of Cubans living in the United States, many of whom have lived their expatriated lives with one abiding goal in mind—to topple Castro. Likewise, many of these folks, I suspect, will feel cheated by Castro’s death, cheated that he died in the tranquility of his home, surrounded by cronies and sycophants, rather than in The Hague or Washington, facing trial for his misdeeds. And many of these folks, like Castro, are not long for this world. They, too, hear ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.’ They are old, and their children, more American than Cuban, are much less interested in the old country. Their emotions will run high once Castro dies, not least because the object of their vengeance will be gone; once the joy of seeing the old man off fades, frustration will undoubtedly settle in its place, frustration that their lives’ ambition will have ended in failure, and many will seek to transfer that vengeance with renewed vigor to the remnants of the regime that Fidel leaves behind.
But we should not let empathy and nostalgia cloud our judgment about what happens next in Cuba. George Friedman is right; over the long term, the time capsule in which Fidel entombed Cuba cannot last. But Julia Sweig is also right; in the near term, it benefits the US very little to intervene into Cuban politics. It is how we manage that stretch of time between the two that will determine if future US-Cuban relations will be less belligerent than the previous half-century, but as a start, we should resist the temptation to settle old scores with Cuba and, instead, use Fidel’s death as a new start. Be wary, but be friendly. Killing Cuba with kindness would cost so little and would provide us with the side benefit of sending Hugo Chávez into paroxysms of anguish.
No comments:
Post a Comment