The Illusion of Cuban Reform: Castro Strikes Out

Dr. Jose Azel at the World Affairs Journal:

The Illusion of Cuban Reform: Castro Strikes Out

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_view/public/field/image/hp.07.16.13.WAJAzel.jpg
The 2006 succession from Fidel Castro to his brother Raúl, programmed since the early days of the Cuban revolution, was efficient, effective, and seamless. The eighty-two-year-old Raúl, who recently announced that he will step down in 2018, is now orchestrating his own succession behind the scenes. But however the transition from the Castro era plays out, one outcome is off the table: that Raúl will emerge as a reformer to end the Communist era and inaugurate a new democratic and market-oriented Cuba.How Cuban communism will finally meet its demise is yet to be known, but perhaps we will find parallels in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 at age eighty. His successor, Yuri Andropov, took over at sixty-eight and died less than two years later. Andropov was in turn succeeded by the Konstantin Chernenko, who died a year later at the age of seventy-four. Chernenko was then succeeded by the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. It took the Soviets three leadership changes to get to a new generation with prospects for reform.

Cuba’s first vice president of the Council of State, the eighty-two-year-old José Ramón Machado Ventura, was expected to be Raúl Castro’s pro forma successor. In February 2013, however, he was replaced in that post by Miguel Díaz-Canel, a factotum-like party apparatchik in his early fifties. The international media jumped on the appointment and concluded that Cuba’s Gorbachev had arrived on the scene. But while Díaz-Canel is in line to succeed Raúl in the Council of State, this is not equivalent to being number two in the regime.

General Raúl Castro leads Cuba not because he is president of the Council of State, but because he is first secretary of the Communist Party, head of the armed forces, and Fidel’s brother. Article 5 of the Cuban Constitution makes it clear that the Communist Party is “the superior leading force of the society and the State.” It is the eighty-two-year-old Machado who remains second secretary of the fifteen-member Politburo of the Communist Party—and thus, at least for now, Raúl Castro’s heir apparent. Under Cuba’s governing succession protocol, the military-dominated Politburo is the cabal that will recommend, when the time comes, the country’s next leader.

The succession plot thickens when we consider that the president of the Council of State is also the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. When Raúl Castro leaves office, it is difficult to envision old comandantes like Ramiro Valdés and three-star generals of the Politburo offering their allegiance and subordinating themselves to a youthful civilian bureaucrat like Díaz-Canel. Civilian control of Cuba’s armed forces is not part of Revolutionary Cuba’s genetic makeup.

When contemplating change in Cuba, one must be mindful that for the past half-century Cuba’s history and political culture has been shaped and dominated by the Castro brothers and their ideas. Raúl Castro’s inner circle is not made up of closet democrats waiting for an opportune moment to put into practice their long-suppressed Jeffersonian ideals. Their governing philosophy is inseparable from the totalitarian ideology that subordinates citizens to the state, and the state to an unelected Communist elite. The incentive for democratic reform is further hindered because this elite profits personally from a symbiotic relationship in which authoritarianism engenders a corrupt oligarchy and that oligarchy profits from the continuation of corrupt authoritarianism.

Continue reading HERE.

1 thought on “The Illusion of Cuban Reform: Castro Strikes Out”

Comments are closed.