Why The Cuban-Venezuelan Alliance Is More Toxic Than Ever

-Editorial-

HAVANA — In Cuba, where a Communist regime has held power since the 1960s, the regime is teetering again as socio-economic tensions threaten to explode. More and more ordinary Cubans are in desperate circumstancs, with a dysfunctional economy on the one hand and the absence on the other of a structured political opposition that could offer alternatives.

The threat of a collapse is real with the economy’s relentless decline in the past five years, chronic shortages and inflation. Recurrent power outages have become a telling symbol of the system’s decadence, triggering public fury against both its incompetence and arrogance.

Communist officials here appear increasingly paralyzed before the unfolding crisis, as regime hands keep repeating old slogans against imperialism and hostile machinations. Loyalists cannot understand that with the failure to meet people’s basic needs, the Cuban revolution has long lost its mythical and symbolic importance to the island’s destitute proletariat!

But the country’s fate is not just of importance to Cubans. Other regional states that have chosen to emulate the Castro revolution, or at least use it as an excuse to oppress their own people.

The best example here is Venezuela, Cuba’s ally and one-time generous patron, which makes up for its ramshackle socialist credentials with advanced methods of repression reminiscent of the junta regimes of the 1970s. Its efficient repression is, of course, more indicative of its weakness than any strength. President Nicolás Maduro’s renewed offensive against the opposition ahead of the sham general elections he’s planning later this year, has one thing in common with the Cuban calamity: popular opposition and an ideological state that is exhausted.

Some novel incidents have been happening in Cuba. On March 24, a mass protest in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second city, spread to other districts as people demanded food and electricity. Cubans are hungry and need functioning energy sources, but the government thought better to blame the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House. These were a smaller version of the protests of July 2021, which began as a response to the country’s painful economic adjustments and an effective dollarization of prices that has hurt the poorest most.

Not just a nuisance

Power cuts, which can last up to 18 hours a day, are more than a nuisance. The least-well off, often living in the hinterland, use electric stoves to make food since they have no other alternatives. Fuel shortages, which are affecting manufacturing, are another link between Cuba’s problems and Venezuela. The Caracas regime can no longer send the daily 100,000 barrels of oil it used to in days of booming oil revenues, when it would practically give them as a gift. Now, children are forced to skip school because there’s no petrol for the school bus in a country where few have cars.

Initially the protest’s stated goal in Santiago was basic: electricity and food. Then somebody chanted the Patria y vida (Homeland and Life) slogan that had become a viral song after the 2021 protests, as a cheeky rebuttal of the regime’s slogan of Patria o muerte (Homeland or Death). It wasn’t long before people were shouting Down with Communism and Down with Díaz Canel, the current president and successor of the semi-retired Raúl Castro.

The communist party is today an inefficient and discredited organization.

One difference, so far, with the protests of 2021 was the absence of harsh repression. While police did attack protesters and the Internet was cut off to avoid people viewing their compatriots’ rage, moderation prevailed in spite of the usual, anti-Yankee rant. We should take note of this cautious response, as it coincides with the regime once more asking the UN for food aid, as it did in February.

It is interesting to see how Cuban intellectuals, who have effectively acted as regime cheerleaders, are viewing the crisis: The Marxist historian Alina López Hernández, who lives with the same shortages in Cuba, says “the fundamental dilemma in Cuba… is not between ideologies but between an excluded citizenry and an oppressive state.”

López Hernández has written in her blog CubaxCuba that the Communist party is “today an inefficient and discredited organization.” People are protesting “because they’re hungry,” she adds. Her comments would be equally valid for Venezuela.

Raúl Castro and Hugo Chávez disagreed…

Some years back, Cuba had its opportunity to emulate the ‘dynamic’ communism of Asian states like Vietnam.

The doi moi model was attractive to the last president, Raúl Castro, though hardliners inside the regime, fearing changes would threaten their positions, ensured it never took off.

But another opponent was the ruler of Venezuela, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, who hated anything even resembling a Chinese-style, hybrid capitalist model. In fact this difference of opinion became a source of discord between Castro and Chávez. Around 2014, after Castro’s older brother died and Barack Obama became U.S. president, the new model in Cuba looked like a real and imminent possibility.

As Obama and Castro ushered in a period of bilateral détente, private initiatives, tourism, a measure of prosperity for some, and of course debates, began to flourish. Firms began planning for big hotels here, while another initiative was to create a free zone in the port of Mariel as the chief distribution point of containers in the Caribbean.

We’ve hit rock bottom in Cuba.

All this ended with Donald Trump, who was, curiously, in synch with Cuban hardliners. Moderates became hopeful again with Joe Biden’s election in 2020, and desperately so as the island’s GDP had fallen by over 10% in a year, in the worst slump for two decades.

Anticipating a renewal of business with a Democrat in the White House, Castro ordered the end of the two-tier exchange rate, heralding the start of a painful adjustment process that has effectively meant “stagflation” for most Cubans. But business did not resume as President Biden has chosen not to antagonize Hispanic and Latino conservatives in Florida and elsewhere, so things have simply gotten worse in Cuba.

The first signs of exasperation were in the protests of July 2021, where people demanded rights and freedom, believing, plausibly, that these could only better their plight.

Nothing has improved since. As the poet Leonardo Padura has been saying for years: We’ve hit rock bottom in Cuba, where we need something more than food and electricity. We need hope.