OPPOSITION MOVEMENT
Charting Cuba's post-communist politics
BY JOSE AZEL
jazel@miami.edu
The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere have
prompted some fundamental questions: Who are these rebels? What are
their political ideologies and governing ideas? What sort of government
will follow the fall of a long-term despot?
Closer to home, mortality tables inform us, with implacable certainty,
that the half-century totalitarian rule of the Castro brothers is
approaching its biological end. What will follow?
Recently, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, one of the most prominent members of
the Cuban opposition, stated that following the resignations of Raúl and
Fidel Castro, Cuban dissidents are prepared to negotiate a transition to
democratic governance. Biscet's declaration represents a symbolic
milestone in the Cuban narrative. Most significantly, this dissident
movement is now developing its own political expression.
Concurrent with this political coming of age of the opposition movement,
the Communist Party of Cuba has lost its ideological footing. With
communist ideology discredited and an opposition beginning to articulate
its own competing political expression, Cuba has entered a period of
post-communist politics.
To be clear, the political opposition is embryonic, without resources
and illegal under the Cuban legal system. Nonetheless, the political
monopoly of the Communist Party is being challenged with political
methods, political language, and competing governing philosophies. Cuba
is not yet post-Castro, but ideologically it is post-communist.
This raises the question of what competing political philosophies and
governing programs will begin to emerge in Cuba's political landscape
following communist rule. A starting point is to revisit briefly the
dominant political ideologies in the pre-Castro Cuba of the 1950s.
Cuba did have a pre-Castro communist party founded in 1925 as the
Partido Comunista Cubano. At the other end of the political spectrum,
Cuba also had a Liberal Party and liberal thinkers in the historical,
laissez-faire tradition. But in 1950's Cuba, the political scene was
dominated by two almost ideologically indistinguishable political
parties: The Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Autentico) and its splinter
group, the Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Ortodoxo)
In terms of modern political taxonomy, the governing programs of both of
these parties were significantly center-left, incorporating heavy doses
of nationalism, socialism and advocacy for governmental control of key
sectors of the economy. In economic policy they were as Keynesian as
their era. The most distinguishing characteristic of this political time
period was the personality-driven nature of political discourse.
The post-communist political spectrum in Cuba is likely to be far more
diverse. It will include the political beliefs developed as a result of
living in Cuba and the political beliefs learned by a Cuban diaspora — a
community that represents 15 percent of the Cuban nation.
At the moment, Cuba's opposition movement is ideologically diverse,
institutionally weak and imbued with the statist cognitive framework
inherited from the communist regime. It is impractical at this
historical juncture to try to locate the political positions of the
emerging Cuban body politic in terms of a single left-right axis. Even
so, it may be interesting to speculatively model the Cuban political
spectrum post-communism.
Given the radical denial of freedoms Cubans have experienced, it follows
that, in the abstract, most would desire high levels of personal and
economic freedoms. Theoretically, this would place most Cubans in the
libertarian corner.
However, this theoretical-conceptual modeling will immediately clash
with the mores of a population accustomed to dictates from above and
dependency from below. Cuban society will be suffering — in former Czech
President Vaclav Havel's metaphorical term — from a half-century
exposure to the "radiation of totalitarianism." In practice, the
policy-making advocated in political discourse will not match the
laissez-faire driven policies suggested by the conceptual modeling. The
economic reality is that social services of a Scandinavian magnitude
cannot be financed with Caribbean level productivity. Thus Cuban
politics post-communism will be not just diverse and nuanced by
traditional political ideologies, but close to being internally
self-contradictory.
The historical experience of post-communist countries is that transition
governments tend to be coalition governments. Cuban politics
post-communism will be a by-product of the regime's decay, not its
antecedent cause. This is critically important because it means that no
single overriding political project of transformation will emerge
victorious, and a governing coalition will have the unenviable task of
rebuilding the ship at sea in the midst of a hurricane.
José Azel is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Cuban and
Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami and the author of book,
Mañana in Cuba.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/04/2250037/charting-cubas-post-communist.html
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