Following Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba in January 1998, there was a joke that summed up the issue of different perspectives vis-à-vis Fidel Castro. The story goes that the Pontiff and the Cuban strongman were walking along the malecón, Havana’s famed seawall, when a sudden gust of wind blew the Pope’s hat into the open sea. Fidel immediately strode out across the waves and retrieved the hat for the Pope. The next day, the official Cuban newspaper, Granma, proclaimed, “Fidel Performs Revolutionary Feat: Walks on Water to Rescue Pope’s Hat!” The Vatican’s L’Osservatore trumpeted, “Papal Miracle! Holy Father Enables Fidel to Walk on Water!” But the anti-Castro press in Miami was scathing: “No Doubt About It – Fidel Can’t Even Swim!”
Now, with confusion abounding regarding Mr Castro’s recent statement to Jeffrey Goldberg, an American journalist from The Atlantic magazine, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” we are reminded how much the truth tends to depend on one’s perspective.
For Mr Goldberg, whose account of his encounters with Mr Castro are slightly surreal, this was “the mother of all Emily Litella moments” – a reference to the fictional elderly woman with a hearing problem, prone to making outrageous gaffes, played by Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live – and he asks rhetorically, “Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, ‘Never mind’?”
In spite of his advancing years and reputation for iconoclasm, it is inconceivable that Fidel Castro would be criticising the revolution he has championed this past half century and counting. Dr Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert from the Council on Foreign Relations, who was with Mr Goldberg and Mr Castro, offers a more nuanced interpretation: “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.” Dr Sweig also tries to establish some context, pointing out that Fidel might have been trying to create space for his brother, Raúl, to press ahead with economic reforms in the face of resistance from hardliners within the ruling Communist Party.
Perhaps Fidel was flying a kite to gauge the country’s reaction to the possibility of change. But as the news of his declaration was seized upon by American commentators and spread around the world, the state-controlled Cuban media were silent. And in a country where news takes time to circulate via informal means and where people are coy about voicing personal opinions, it is hardly surprising that the statement does not seem to have elicited much public reaction. In any case, Cubans, unlike Mr Goldberg, are somewhat wary when it comes to deconstructing Fidel’s increasingly Delphic utterances.
Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a prominent Cuban dissident, however prefers to believe that, as demoralizing as it is for his own people, Fidel is joining the “national consensus” that the Cuban model is “dysfunctional and disastrous for the country.” Max Lesnick, a former friend of Fidel’s, now in exile in the US but an outspoken critic of the embargo, believes that Fidel is trying to right the wrongs of the revolution. More significantly, both men think that Fidel is hardly the reactionary opponent of reform, as many believe.
Last Saturday, Fidel himself confirmed that he had made the remark but was amused that it had been taken literally and misinterpreted. He said that he meant “exactly the opposite” and that “the capitalist system doesn’t work for the United States any more or for the world, which it is leading from crisis to crisis” and which cannot work for a socialist country like Cuba. Maybe he was trying to spin his way out of the polemic; or he was just continuing to be obfuscatory and mischievous.
It was therefore, in all likelihood, no coincidence that the Cuban government announced plans this week to lay off at least half a million state workers by the middle of 2011 and to reduce restrictions to help them find new jobs in the private sector, following on from President Raúl Castro’s notification, at the beginning of August, of “structural change” to ease controls to help revive the country’s ailing economy.
The US Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela, regards the move as recognition of the “failure of the system” and has welcomed any means to empower the private sector in Cuba. On the other hand, as he told a press conference in Miami on Tuesday, there is no intention by the Obama administration to lift the embargo as a way of encouraging economic development and empowerment on the island.
The sad reality in Cuba is that, in spite of talk about allowing self-employment, non-state employment and co-operatives, there is virtually no facilitating framework or financing for small enterprise development. Nor is there much of a private sector in Cuba and, with the lay-offs starting immediately, President Castro himself has suggested that nearly one million Cuban workers, about 20% of the labour force, may be made redundant. There is nothing gradual about this transition and most observers expect more pain ahead for the Cuban economy and for the Cuban people.
Perhaps Fidel’s almost throwaway remark was nothing more than a cynical act aimed at deflecting anger and despair over the loss of employment and harder times ahead. It all comes down to perspective and what one wants to believe.
