TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030590/03050011.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.1 KB | 212 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 22

CUBA

Fidel's Race Against Time


With communism fading in the East bloc, Castro faces his
toughest challenge as he clings to his Leninist vision of a
socialist state

By LISA BEYER -- Reported by James Carney/Miami, Ricardo
Chavira/ Havana and Pico Iyer/Santiago de Cuba


    "Hope?" asks the 60-year-old Fidelista, who fought with
Castro's guerrillas in the mountains a generation ago. He
flicks on a cheap cigarette lighter and, in its feeble glow,
takes stock of his home in Santiago de Cuba, the officially
designated "Hero City" of the revolution: no running water,
paint peeling off the walls, a wild pig snuffling around the
main corridor. "I need a candle to look for hope here.

    "There's no future in Cuba," the former captain goes on,
speaking softly so his wife won't hear. "If you'd have said
that to me in the first ten years of the revolution, I'd have
killed you! But sooner or later, you've got to open your eyes
and see that it's only getting worse. Ten years ago, I thought
there was still some hope. But it's getting late now, really
late." And -- as the lighter's flame dies out -- dark too.

    Nothing ever seems to change in Cuba -- except for the
shadows cast on the island by the outside world. Yet the
government of Fidel Castro, 63, seems as convinced as ever it
is the rest of the planet that is out of step. While a
hurricane of change sweeps across Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union, toppling leaders and shredding communism, Cuba stands
like a lonely lighthouse of ideology, battered but unyielding.

ever," Castro has declared. "Long live rigidity!" Signs along
the country's roads exhort, SOCIALISM OR DEATH!

    If Havana's brand of socialism was once attractive to many
Cubans, its allure has diminished considerably. The country's
growing alienation from the rest of the communist world
threatens an end to the aid and favorable trade arrangements
that have kept its lame economy hobbling along. At the same
time, many Cubans are weary of stagnation. "Castro is probably
faced right now with the greatest challenge he's ever had to
his rule," says a senior Bush Administration official. "A year
ago, nobody was even questioning that he would continue in
power until he died. Now it is a subject of debate."

    Reforms seemed to be in the air when the country's
213-member Central Committee held a special one-day session in
Havana two weeks ago and issued what the Cuban Communist Party
daily Granma trumpeted as "transcendental pronouncements." The
"revitalization" measures initially seemed to be a belated
curtsy to the changes initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. But a
closer reading indicated that the proposals were aimed at
distancing Cuba from events across the Atlantic.

    "What we are talking about is perfecting a single, Leninist
party based on the principles of democratic centralism," the
committee pronounced only two weeks after the Soviet Communist
Party, following the lead of its East European counterparts,
abolished its monopoly on power. The new policy is designed to
improve the party's organization to make it more responsive,
but not to expose it to competition. In a speech before the
National Assembly last week, Castro reiterated that Havana
would not remove "the tiniest bit of authority from the party."

    Nor did the Central Committee embrace the shift to
free-market measures that is transforming other communist
states. "Nobody should dream that we are going toward
capitalism," growled Castro. "On the contrary, we have to
socialize progressively." The committee's new program is
actually a continuation of the "rectification of errors"
campaign launched in 1986 to reverse the modest free-market
reforms instituted in the mid-1980s. Castro abandoned that
experiment, complaining angrily that it had produced
skyrocketing prices and corruption.

    The Central Committee did implicitly acknowledge, however,
that there is room for improvement, when it called for a
"favorable environment for creative thinking and fruitful
debate." In making that concession, the party appeared to be
playing to the home audience. According to U.S. intelligence
reports, Cuba is enduring an intense internal debate over the
country's future course, particularly its economic management.

    The most visible sign of a possible fissure within the
ruling elite was the execution last July of Major General
Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, a celebrated war hero, and three other
officers. Though they were charged with drug smuggling and
corruption, many Cuban exiles believe their real crime was to
pose a threat to Castro and his brother Raul, the Defense
Minister and heir designate. Meanwhile, the government jailed
at least ten human-rights activists last year. The U.S. State
Department's annual human-rights report, which was issued last
week, lambasted Cuba's record, which it said had "worsened
significantly" in 1989.

    Perhaps the most significant fount of dissent in Cuba is the
generation gap. Half of Cuba's 10 million people were born
after Castro seized power in 1959. "People who lived through
the revolution had a sense of what they were fighting against,"
says a U.S. State Department official. "The kids who have grown
up since don't. All they've been told is austerity, austerity,
less and less freedom."

    Among Cuba's young as well as its old, the greatest source
of dissatisfaction is the exhausted economy. The nation's
coffers have been devastated by the drop-off in world petroleum
prices since the mid-1980s; Cuba generated much of its foreign
exchange by reselling, at top prices, cut-rate oil supplied by
the Soviet Union. Sugar, Cuba's main export, has also been a
loser on international markets. Ever since Havana in 1986
suspended payments on its foreign debt, which now stands at $7
billion, most industrialized countries have refused to extend
new credits. With only $87 million in reserves, Cuba lacks the
hard currency to buy vital imports.

    An East bloc refrigerator costs $2,000, an average worker's
income for an entire year. A $35 Sanyo fan goes for $500 -- no
small consideration in a country where the daily temperature
averages 78 degrees F. Local goods are in short supply too.
Thanks to inefficient methods of growing and harvesting, Cuba
may be the only tropical island in the world where fruits and
vegetables are hard to find. The widening rift between Havana
and Moscow has caused other deprivations. The Soviet Union's
increasing unwillingness -- or inability -- to continue carrying
the Cuban economy has created severe shortages of flour,
bread, razor blades and TV sets. The long-standing U.S. trade
embargo continues to take its toll as well.

    The worst is yet to come. Cuba relies on the East bloc for
about 90% of its imports and exports. This trade is based
mainly on barter, not cash, and on terms heavily skewed in
Cuba's favor: the Soviets, for example, buy Cuban sugar at
about four times the market price. But as East bloc countries
move toward free-market economies, they are seriously
reassessing their ties with Cuba, which cannot pay in the hard
currency that Western customers offer.

    Cuba's lifeline of direct economic and military aid from
Moscow -- about $5.5 billion annually -- may be choked off as
well. Gorbachev is under increasing pressure to cut back
Castro's allowance, as Soviet citizens tire of propping him up
while their own economy languishes. And Gorbachev may find it
irksome that despite his professed repudiation of exported
revolution, his financial support allows Castro to continue
backing communist regimes and insurgencies in the Third World.

    Western diplomats disagree about whether Moscow is apt to
cut substantially its $15 million-a-day subsidy to Havana. The
handout, after all, is not pure charity, since the Soviet
military derives enormous benefits from having a beachhead in
the Western hemisphere. In recent months, the Soviets have
delivered two advanced MiG-29 fighters to the island. Still,
Castro is edgy. For the first time, he suggested publicly in
January that the Soviets might abandon him, in which case, he
said, Cuba was prepared to live "under a wartime economy."
Says Wayne Smith, director of Cuban Studies at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: "Castro sees
that the world has turned upside down, so he decides Cuba has
to circle the wagons and spit on everybody beyond the wagons."


    Despite the obstacles against him, no one is dismissing El
Comandante just yet. "Castro is charismatic, even if his
popularity has eroded some," says Smith. "It could be argued
that he would win an open election even today." The "maximum
leader" maintains his high favor by constantly mixing with
ordinary folks, thereby cultivating a keen sense of popular
sentiment. Observes a senior Cuban official: "He is not like
Honecker and Ceausescu, who lost touch with their people." And
unlike the communist regimes imposed on Eastern Europe after
World War II, Castro's revolution was a homegrown affair that
quickly attracted the support of most Cubans.

    Such arguments fail to impress the 700,000 Cuban exiles in
South Florida, who over the past few weeks have worked
themselves into a greater frenzy than usual over Castro's fate.
Miami's Spanish radio stations dedicate hours of airtime to
speculation that Castro's regime will collapse. Some emigres
are even preparing to sell their property and return to their
homeland. To Miami Herald columnist Sergio Lopez-Miro, such
actions constitute "wishful thinking cum madness." Or call it
hope -- the same hope that people like the Fidelista in
Santiago have been searching for in the dark. Uva Clavijo, a
Miami-based fiction writer who came to the U.S. in 1959 at the
age of 15, has decided she will return to Cuba if Castro falls,
and she believes it will be soon. "History has accelerated, and
he can't go against history," she says. "Communism is
crumbling. Why should Cuba be different?" While Clavijo's
speculation may be premature, her question is increasingly one
worth pondering.