By Laurie Goering. Tribune Foreign Correspondent.
Chicago Tribune. January 28, 2001
HAVANA -- It is a reflection of the aging of Cuba's 42-year-old revolution
that the men touting the newspaper Rebel Youth on the streets of Old Havana are
mainly white-whiskered and tottering.
Seventy percent of Cuba's population has been born since Fidel Castro's
historic march into Havana in 1959. Four decades later, Cuba is awash in often
contradictory changes, and despite the forest of roadside billboards insisting "We
Are All Revolution" and socialism is "Stronger Than Ever," the
government's grip on young Cubans has been slipping.
Explosive growth in tourism has made bellboys better paid than surgeons,
diminishing aspirations to professional life. Stipends from Miami relatives have
cut the desire to work and eroded state control. Experiments with everything
from small-scale enterprise to the Internet have exposed young Cubans to new
ideas. And for many, the simple passing of years has reduced the relevance of
the revolution.
Alarmed, the island's leaders have launched a "Battle of Ideas,"
what analysts in and outside of Cuba are calling a small-scale cultural
revolution, similar in some aspects to Mao Tse-tung's ideological sweep of China
in the 1960s.
Like that effort, experts say, this one is aimed at renewing revolutionary
fervor, particularly against the United States, as well as strengthening ideals
and providing a clear warning to those who might stray from the revolutionary
path.
The methods are much less extreme than in China. No wayward groups have been
led through the streets in dunce caps; no artists have been executed after
public show trials.
On the surface, nothing seems out of the ordinary for the groups of visiting
American academics and artists filling Havana's hotels, or for the tourists
flocking to Cuba from Spain and Italy and Canada to bask in the Caribbean winter
sun and savor the island's fine beaches, music and rum.
Buoyed by those planeloads of tourists and growing foreign investment and
trade, Cuban officials cite last year's 5 percent economic growth as evidence
that they have weathered the worst of the crisis after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and are on the right track.
"The perception that we're closed to the world is only in the United
States," Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said recently.
At the same time, though, official tolerance for even limited dissent is
waning, and foreigners perceived as "subversive" have become a target.
Just this month, Cuba's government arrested a visiting Czech legislator and
prominent pro-democracy student leader and jailed them on charges of "counter-revolutionary"
plotting and inciting rebellion after they met with Cuban political dissidents
and, the government charges, handed over a laptop computer and diskettes.
Cuban officials have suggested they might consider freeing the pair, but
only if they and their government admit Cuba was correct in its assertions that
the two are agents of Freedom House, a New York-based group partially funded by
the U.S. government. The two also must appeal to Cuba's generosity and "no
longer commit the mistake of questioning our truth or putting our firmness to
the test," according to a Cuban Foreign Ministry document.
Cuba's government also has attacked the work of Pascal Fletcher, a longtime
British news correspondent on the island. Castro has insisted that some foreign
journalists "are dedicated to defaming the revolution" and asking to
be expelled.
"They have been, sometimes for years, not only transmitting lies but
insults as well--insults against the revolution and against me in particular,"
Castro charged.
Castro led a million-person march on the U.S. Interests Section office in
Havana this month. Cuba's government-run television stations have focused with
renewed zeal on unveiling what officials describe as "political subversion"
by the United States. The government also has begun tightening controls on Cuban
artists, closing down controversial exhibits.
Looking to the future, Castro has reiterated that his 69-year-old younger
brother, Raul, the nation's defense minister, will be Cuba's next leader. In
recent remarks widely publicized by state media, Raul has warned President Bush
to make a deal now with Cuba or things will get tougher later.
Castro "wants to make sure that before he dies every duck is in line
and Raul is respected," said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute of
Cuba and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "That way he
can die in peace and the revolution will remain."
No one is suggesting that Castro is at death's door. Despite years of rumors
about infirmities, the 74-year-old Cuban leader still manages speeches of
stunning length, prompting even critics to joke that at least his vocal cords
and bladder are in fine shape. But Cuba's bearded icon appears increasingly
concerned about shoring up the long-term prospects for his revolution, and is
looking beyond his death to Cuba's future in a more public way.
The mini-cultural revolution, analysts say, has its roots in the Fifth
Congress of Cuba's Communist Party in 1997, when Castro began talking of the
need to re-establish Marxist-Leninist values and appointed Raul Valdez Vivo, a
staunch communist, as the party's new ideology chief.
Commitment to those values has wavered in recent years because of economic
transformation in Cuba. Since the early 1990s, the island's leaders have been
forced to allow some small-scale private enterprise and have superimposed a
dollar tourist economy over the prevailing socialist system to make ends meet
after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The concessions have in some ways weakened state control of the economy and
of Cuban workers, some of whom now draw substantial dollar salaries through
foreign joint venture companies and from tourism, or survive on payments from
exiled relatives in Miami. That worries Cuba's leaders.
"It seems the more they have to make structural or economic concessions
to capitalism and globalization, the more they feel they have to keep
ideological stiffness and vigilance, so as not to be seduced by the consequences
of the new reality," said Max Castro, a Cuba expert at the University of
Miami and no relation to the president.
In particular, Cuba's leaders have clearly been worried about the island's
youth, many of whom respect Castro but see his revolutionary struggle as
long-ago history, much as the Vietnam War is for U.S. college students today.
Growing numbers of Cuba's youth are graduating as doctors, lawyers and
engineers from the island's universities only to find the professional world
turned upside down. With the tourist economy booming, a bellboy at a good hotel
can make $25 a day, as much as a peso-earning surgeon makes in a month. Many
young Cubans are abandoning their chosen careers, or choosing not to work.
An easing of government restrictions in the last decade also has given more
Cubans a taste of the world. Artists have been allowed to travel abroad to mount
exhibits, and aspiring entrepreneurs have been given the opportunity to open
private, family-owned restaurants.
One unintended result of the changes has been new social trends worrisome
for Cuban officials, ranging from the reappearance of open prostitution to
troubling cases of official corruption within some government circles. Party
officials, afraid that the reforms had gone too far and could threaten the
long-term stability of the Communist Revolution, cracked down, increasing the
police presence on the capital's streets to curb crime and fiercely attacking
official corruption in a variety of public forums.
Some of the reforms have been reined in. The number of paladares, or
privately owned small restaurants, has declined sharply, and top Cuban officials
no longer talk, as they did just a few years ago, of expanding foreign property
ownership or private enterprise.
"That's not the role of the private sector, to be an engine," one
Foreign Ministry official said recently, emphasizing that 90 percent of the
economy remains in state hands. "It's going to be a complement. We're not
growing capitalism here."
Instead the new motto seems to be the one found on an aging beauty parlor in
Old Havana: "Toward Commerce That is Modern, Efficient and Always
Socialist."
Although tens of thousands of Americans visit Cuba each year--most of them
legally but many in defiance of the U.S. embargo against Castro's
government--U.S. university officials who have maintained cultural exchanges
with Cuba say official invitations to the island are slowing. That may indicate
a new wariness on the part of Cuban officials as a Republican administration
takes over in Washington.
In this, the Cuban government may find agreement with the new Bush
administration, which many American analysts believe may be less enthusiastic
about promoting "people-to-people" U.S.-Cuban contacts than the
Clinton administration was.
How far the retrenchment on the island will go no one is quite sure. But the
University of Miami's Suchlicki believes the current measures are "just the
tip of the iceberg before [Castro] goes. I think we'll see more people thrown in
jail," he said.
The government's recent actions, he said, are "a warning to every
foreigner in Cuba: Don't talk to dissidents; don't subvert the revolution. It
won't be tolerated."
Over the last year, Cuba's government has embarked on a major educational
campaign designed to reacquaint the island's youth with the history of the
revolution and rally Cubans, in part by beating the drum against Castro's old
political foe, the United States.
The massive marches last year to demand Elian Gonzalez's return to the
island were widely seen as part of that effort. So are new textbooks in schools,
the creation of a nightly televised "informational roundtable" on
Cuban television and a steady diet of front-page history lessons in the
Communist Party paper Granma under headlines such as, "The CIA's bandits
were decisively defeated 35 years ago."
Such efforts are part of what Castro calls a larger "Battle of Ideas"
designed to expose the shortcomings of U.S. "imperialist capitalism"
and highlight the superiority of Cuban socialism.
For example, the Christmas Eve deaths of two teenage Cuban students, who
climbed into the wheel well of a British Airways jet bound for London, were
blamed on a U.S. immigration policy that rewards Cuban migrants who reach the
United States by granting them legal residency.
The boys reportedly left behind a note indicating that they hoped one day to
live in Miami.
Last week, Castro renewed his criticism of President Bush, questioning in a
speech whether the new occupant of the White House was "as stupid as he
appears" or "as Mafioso as he seems from his record." Overall,
Castro said, "the new leader of the great empire" was "very
strange and unpromising."
Perhaps the key question for Cuba's government and for analysts is whether
the new cultural campaign is working. Suchlicki believes it is, at least by
shoring up the regime for the near future and the immediate years after Castro's
death.
"I don't think this thing is going to collapse when he dies. He's got
the military. He's got a functioning Communist Party and a very strong security
apparatus. Succession has already taken place."
And either with Raul or without him, Suchlicki said, the government Castro
put in place can survive the man who has led it for more than 42 years. | 