Sol Sanders Archive

High time Cuba rejoined real world; But is it too late?

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Unfortunately several misbegotten Communist regimes still hang on, relics of a totally discredited past. And Communist Cuba, perhaps the most anomalous, staggers on only 90 miles from the U.S. The Havana regime has its peculiarities — just as East Germany had its omnipresent surveillance, Czechoslovakia its trade union base, Romania its megalomaniac Ceausescus, etc., etc. Cuba has Fidel Castro, the charismatic dictator who recently returned from a near-death experience.

Fidel waxed philosophical in a lame-leading-the-blind interview by an American reporter with no knowledge of Cuba — slightly aided by an apologist from the Council on Foreign Relations. Although he later retracted, Castro made one of his few honest statements: Communist Cuba doesn’t work. That doesn’t surprise more than a million Cuba-born Americans. Their former countrymen still risk body and soul to swim to freedom if they can touch down on American soil after evading both Fidel and before U.S. interdiction at sea.

Whatever Fidel intended, his words shortly were followed by Brother Raul Castro, the family’s generalissimo who has taken command of the sinking ship. Raul announced he would drop by March next year a half million from the bloated five-million government “workers”. In a country of some 12 million with 20 percent under 14, that would constitute a huge shift. Absorption into a harassed private sector almost wiped out in the decades of ruthless Soviet social engineering is fantasy, with conditions worse now than when the Moscow dole ended in the 90s.

Only repression, guile and luck — and naiveté of would-be friends — has kept Cuba going. Spain, former colonial overlord which held on for a half century after losing the rest of Iberoamerica, has invested modestly. European tourists have trickled in. More recently, Fidel’s ideological blood brother, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, picked up a partial energy check. But Fidel’s attack on Chavez’ newfound friend, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, indicates that may be ending given Chavez own difficulties.

Can Raul's Cuba muddle through to a new era when, inevitably, even the now-straitened Western world would extend aid?

The Brothers Castro, and much of the rest of the world, had counted on the Obama Administration lifting the U.S. embargo to encourage reform. Lifting the blockade is debated — even among embittered Cuban Americans. But as always, the Castros are their own worst enemies. Havana recently welched on releasing some political prisoners to the Catholic Church, with some trying to take their lives in hunger strikes. That’s one reason despite minor concessions on travel for Cuban — Americans, and despite lobbying by sympathetic U.S. business — especially the agro-industries — it hasn’t happened.

If and when Cuba reenters the real world, the road couldn’t be more difficult. Sugar, the monoculture which at the beginning of the Communist era gave it one of the highest per capita gross national products in Latin America, is moribund — with half the agricultural land lying fallow. Moreover, Cuba’s once cartelized U.S. market is gone. Havana now would face competition from corn fructose, beet sugar and synthetic sweeteners, as well as dealing in one of the world’s most heavily protected industries.

In the new global economy, there would be plenty of other pitfalls for a late arrival. New Chinese refining techniques using poorer Asian ores now threaten Cuba’s No. 1 foreign exchange earner as the world’s ninth largest nickel producer with a third of the world’s reserves. That hasn’t stopped Beijing selling the U.S. stainless steel products around the embargo using Cuban nickel, however. Canada, one of impoverished Cuba’s major trading partners, is also on the nickel [and cobalt] take. But its Cuban sales dropped 60% in 2009. Beijing, too, is involved in a search for oil just off the Florida Keys — something American opponents of deepwater drilling will eventually have to face — but so far with dry holes. There likely won’t be any magic solutions.

Remembering how sudden other seemingly iron-clad Communist regimes fell, the possibility of a Cuban implosion is real. That, of course, would be a nightmare for the U.S. The memory of Castro’s dumping 125,000 political opponents and jailbirds he called “worms” on Miami in the summer of 1980, is all too vivid in Florida, now the fourth largest state. A sudden refugee flood would tax U.S. facilities already inadequately handling the illegal Mexican immigration. Although Cuba crisis studies are stacked in dark corners at the State Dept. and The Pentagon, with its bulging roster of domestic and foreign concerns, Washington’s response might be Katrina-like to a sudden Cuban meltdown.

Maybe it won’t happen. But it is one of many largely unanticipated events that could turn U.S. policy upside down overnight. Even if longer term, a post-Castro Cuba on America’s doorstep is likely to be more bereft than Fidelista propaganda has led even its critics to believe and eventually will put new demands on American generosity.

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