Worms And Blackouts: Cuba’s Dark Reality Of Missed Opportunities

-Analysis-

BUENOS AIRES — Cuba’s communist regime calls Cubans who fled the island and settled in Miami “worms.” The contempt is mutual, as Cubans in Florida have done everything to maintain the United States’ embargo against the island, pushing it at times toward economic asphyxiation.

Both Democrats and Republicans seek the support of Cuban Americans, who are largely Republican. But they have another, curious accomplice: hardline officials inside Cuba. They need the Florida lobby to justify maintaining their iron-fisted rule and privileges.

Of course, some in the Cuban nomenklatura have sought modernization and reforms, but their voices were not loud to sway decision makers. The island’s dismal socio-economic state — evidenced in the recent, nationwide blackout lasting days — may be the fruit of this indecision. It followed the breakdown of Cuba’s biggest power plant, the Antonio Guiteras power plant in Matanzas. Cuba’s darkness is in fact political.

Bunker up

The U.S. embargo on Cuba, an archaic remnant of the Cold War, is certainly a calamity that restricts the regime’s cash flow, making purchases, notably of fuel, more difficult and costly. But hardliners consider it a price worth paying to keep their power and party perks from any “counter-revolutionary deformations” as reforms are pompously termed in the “revolutionary” jargon.

For a while, they had an easier ride thanks to generous backing in the form of cash and oil from Venezuela’s late ruler, Hugo Chávez, an avowed admirer of the Cuban communist state and its late founder, Fidel Castro. That was when Venezuela was aflush with petrodollars, and the objective as some have suggested, was to safeguard Cuba’s ideological purity or, in plainer terms, keep McDonald’s out.

U.S. sanctions have thus provided a welcome cover for the regime’s own incompetence, shortcomings and failures, as the younger of the Castro brothers, Raúl, might have pointed out in private to Fidel. Raúl was first secretary of the Communist Party from 2011 to 2021 and president of Cuba between 2008 and 2018, succeeding his older brother.

For Raúl, Cuba’s best option was to follow the Chinese or Asian path of liberalizing the economy.

For Raúl, Cuba’s best option was to follow the Chinese or Asian path of liberalizing the economy — allowing a measure of property rights and private enterprise — while leaving the Communist party in charge. That was working in Vietnam but was of little interest to hardliners in Cuba.

As the head of the Granma editorial group, which publishes the island’s chief daily, Lázaro Barreda, a Raúl confidante, once told me, they preferred to “bunker up,” waiting for some big change outside. He explained this inflexible mindset in ironic terms.

Cuba’s soil, he said, was of excellent quality and land had been divided in plots using colonial measurements known as caballería, amounting to about 13 hectares (0.13 square kilometers) per head. More production needed bigger plots, he said, but its recipients would in any case have to start employing workers and paying wages, and “then there is the question of surplus value,” or effectively, profits.

And while the state was laboring over the dilemma of how to reconcile profits with Marxism, he said, ordinary folk were hoping for oranges and grapefruit. Needless to say, he observed, “there were no oranges or grapefruits.”

Détente under Obama

The younger Castro’s liberalization led to a fit of détente with the United States under President Barack Obama and subsequent easing of trade, travel and money flows.

As tourists disembarked, people in Cuba began renting out rooms and opening cafés, which hinted at the rise of a new middle class. Obama’s bet, and he was likely right, was that the circulation of people and money would propel other changes.

Raúl wanted to build the Caribbean’s biggest container port in Mariel, to be run by a private firm under a free-zone regime. The black market that feeds some Cubans today would have become plain-old business by now, as happened in Vietnam.

That would have required debate of course on the Stalinist-style system in place, and the acceptability and partial rehabilitation of private property, which in principle had ended in 1959-60. The state might have had to wean people off their coupons and encourage them to work and produce instead, perhaps using incentives as they do in capitalist firms.

This was unnerving to regime hawks. Their generous patron, Chávez — who in any case was less cordial with Raúl than with Fidel — died, Venezuela was running out of cash and in deep economic trouble, and then Trump came along.

He terminated Obama’s détente, likely delighting the intransigent lobby in Miami and Havana, and serving their otherwise divergent interests: The exiles wanted things to “explode” in Cuba, and the island’s apparatchiks wanted their precious status quo.

Things fall apart

Castro tried again in 2021, when Joe Biden became president of the United States. He already knew him from the Obama administration, though “the moment” seemed to have passed and his efforts proved to be in vain.

Hoping for a renewal of outside investments, Castro began brutal adjustments to the Cuban economy, notably its exchange rules, fueling an inflationary spike that soon provoked protests, which were brutally put down in 2021.

After that, the country effectively dollarized itself, but badly. Tourism never returned to pre-pandemic levels and investments. And the power grid, went into freefall. People began migrating with renewed vigor, despairing at a state that insisted the CIA was to blame for anything and everything.

Since 2022, more than 1 million Cubans or 10% of the population have left the island.

Since 2022, more than 1 million Cubans or 10% of the population have left the island, according to Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, head of the Cuban National Statistics and Information Office. Official figures are showing a drop in the population from just under 11.2 million souls in December 2021 to a little over 10 million in December 2023, though continued decline may have taken the figure to below 10 million this year.

Some independent observers like Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos of the Cuban Center for Christian Reflection and Dialogue (Centro cristiano de reflexión y diálogo en Cuba), believe it may not even be 9 million, which means one-quarter of all Cubans on the island will have fled in recent years.

And the regime — like its Venezuelan ally and counterpart — prefers it that way. Those leaving are young and people with flair and initiative, while remainers are probably more obedient, which suits the repressive state. Yet this is bad news even for the oppressors hiding in a cocoon of their own delusions. As the 19th century thinker José Ortega y Gasset would say, history often takes revenge on those who ignore it.