The Setting
On 19 April 2018, Raúl Castro stepped down as Cuba’s president after ten years—two constitutional periods—in this position, thus formally finalising 59 years of Castro rule in Cuba. Miguel Díaz-Canel, a civilian party apparatchik born after the 1959 Revolution, was chosen to lead the country into an unknown future. His first promise was one of continuity. The new millennium seems not yet to have dawned upon Havana, still looking nostalgically back on its 500 years history which it is set to celebrate in 2019.
Ten months into his tenure, the first post-Castro president was able to get a new Constitution approved in a referendum, although with a much narrower majority than the country has been used to and its legitimacy thoroughly questioned by most neighbours. The situation in Cuba’s close ally Venezuela, with the US driving for regime change supported by most of Latin America, is leading Cuba to its most serious isolation and crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The general view of most observers has been that Raúl Castro carried out more fundamental reforms in Cuba after taking over from big brother Fidel, than anything that had ever occurred since the Revolution defined its Marxist-Leninist character in the early 1960s (see Mesa-Lago 2013). Yet, Raúl Castro stated from the outset that “the objective is to guarantee the continuation and irreversibility of socialism”. The same was said when the presidency was left to Díaz-Canel ten years later. Looking beyond rhetoric, the question we intend to discuss in this book is what these reforms consisted of in terms of economic and political change, and in which direction they have set Cuba in the final phase of its Castro era, and how they are followed up in the post-Castro era.
Cuba has since January 1959 been a unique country, in the Americas and globally. With its iconic Revolution, masterminded and led for almost 50 years by one of the most charismatic political leaders of the twentieth century, Fidel Castro Ruz, accompanied by comrade-in-arms Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara until his death. This small island nation of around 11 million inhabitants has been the centre of attention for students of socialism and communism; anti-imperialism and national liberation; US-Soviet Cold War geostrategic rivalry and the danger of nuclear war; human rights discussions of economic, social and cultural rights versus civil-political rights; leftist versus rightist recipes for development strategies. Cuba simply had it all.
So completely was this country and its Revolution associated with its towering leader, that nobody could imagine it would survive without Fidel at the helm. Then, on 31 July 2006, the Cuban state television announced that Fidel (then 80) was to undergo intestinal surgery, forcing him on a preliminary basis to leave all commanding positions in the Communist Party, the Armed Forces and the Government to his brother and second-in-command, Raúl Castro Ruz (then 75). News desks all over the world started to speculate: was this finally the end of El Comandante as well as his revolution, both having been written off so many times? Was it at all conceivable that Cuba, on its knees after the collapse of its Soviet benefactor, would survive without Fidel? We had been reminded about his omnipotence five years earlier, when Fidel had fainted on the podium, and insisted that he be kept awake during the surgery he had to undergo to treat some quite serious knee injuries, so as to make sure he could keep control on the same 24/7 basis he was used to. Afterwards he cracked a joke: “I simply pretended to die, in order to observe how my own funeral would look like”.
Then, in a letter dated 18 February 2008, Fidel Castro announced that he would not accept the positions of President of the Council of State and Commander-in-Chief at the upcoming National Assembly meeting. He stated that his health was a primary reason for his decision, remarking that “It would betray my conscience to take up a responsibility that requires mobility and total devotion, that I am not in a physical condition to offer”.1 On 24 February 2008, the National Assembly of People’s Power unanimously voted Raúl as president. Describing his brother as ‘not substitutable’, Raúl proposed that Fidel continue to be consulted on matters of great importance, a motion unanimously approved by the 597 National Assembly members.
In reality, after that July evening in 2006, Raúl was Cuba’s undisputed leader, although he was only formalised as president by the National Assembly in 2008, and as First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party at the Party Congress in 2011. The first and provisional transfer of power took place in a typically informal fidelista manner: right before he was hospitalised with unknown outcome, he left a handwritten message where he ‘provisionally’ delegated all his functions as head of state, of the armed forces and of the Communist Party to his formally designated deputy, Raúl Castro. Neither the National Assembly nor the Politburo of the Party met. Yet, this was in accordance with Article 94 of the Cuban Constitution, stipulating the transfer of responsibilities to the deputy in the case that the President of the Council of State is absent or dies.
When Raúl took over, many analysts saw this as an example of a dynastic succession within the family, comparing it to North Korea (the Kim family), Nicaragua (Somoza), Haiti (Duvalier). This was vehemently denied by the Cuban leadership, claiming that Raúl had been appointed to the deputy position exclusively based on the merits he earned during the guerrilla struggle and in his functions within the party, state and military establishment after the Revolution. In Fidel’s address to the National Assembly in December 2007, he stated as if to respond to any accusations about a family succession: “In the Proclamation I signed on 31 July 2006, none of you ever saw any act of nepotism”.
It was generally expected that Raúl, having lived in his big brother’s shadow during their entire life, would simply carry on Fidel’s mode of rule. It did not take long, however, before he proved most forecasters wrong. There were early signs that Raúl would set the country on a different track. The first signal came in his speech on the day of the Revolution (26 July) in 2007, when he recognised serious socio-economic problems and promised “structural and conceptual reforms”. He warned, however, that “everything cannot be resolved immediately [and that] you should not expect spectacular solutions”.2 In a badly hidden criticism of his brother’s exaggerated lust for control of every aspect of the Cuban citizens’ life, he removed a number of what he called ‘unnecessary restrictions’: allowing access for his countrymen to tourist hotels, Internet, DVD players, significantly allowing ordinary Cubans to establish cell phone accounts, and to rent cars—all in reality limited to those with access to hard currency.
Only four days after Raúl formally took over as Cuba’s president, on 28 February 2008, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque went to the UN Headquarters in New York to sign the two basic human rights treaties that, together with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conform the International Bill of Human Rights: The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESC). A couple of months earlier, Pérez had announced that Cuba would ratify these two covenants by March 2008.3 Until now, ratification has never taken place, nor has any such intention meanwhile been expressed.
In March 2009, Raúl made a sudden decision to fire some of the country’s most prominent young leaders, those ‘young Talibans’ who had been handpicked by Fidel to take over after the revolutionary generation would step down. These included vice president and expected presidential candidate Carlos Lage, foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque and other young leaders who had surrounded the now retired commander-in-chief, along with another ten ministers. They were all dismissed in a major cabinet sweep, in which Raúl filled most ministerial positions with his military confidants. By 2012, Raúl had substituted a total of 32 ministers, which means that the country’s entire executive leadership underneath the overarching Communist Party leadership had been changed from Fidel to Raúl. The militarisation of the ministry offices, however, turned out to be a preliminary solution: by 2016, only two line ministries in addition to Defence and the Interior were headed by military officers.
Raúl soon recognised the seriousness of Cuba’s economic situation. In 2010, in a speech to a conference of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), he warned of the danger that the Revolution could end up in deep crisis if the workers did not assume their responsibility for the necessary economic reforms. In his speech to the National Assembly in December 2010, he went on t...