On Friday it was reported that Raúl Castro was stepping down from his leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba. It marks the end of Castro rule in that island which began in 1959 when his brother Fidel Castro overthrew the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista. It is widely thought that the role will pass to Miguel Díaz-Canel, who was made President in 2018 after Raúl Castro resigned from that post. Whether it is indeed the end of an era remains to be seen, since Mr Castro has said he will still be ready with his “foot in the stirrup to defend the fatherland, the revolution and socialism.” Outsiders will interpret this to imply that Mr Díaz-Canel will not have full autonomy, more especially since during his period as President he has shown no initiative outside of what Mr Castro would deem tolerable and in consonance with Cuba’s socialist ideology.
Guyanese have always had an interest in Cuba, if only because it has helped prop up our public health service for so many decades. While the PPP in the colonialist period had a variety of links with Cuba, it was Forbes Burnham who in 1972 established formal diplomatic relations with Havana in conjunction with Eric Williams of Trinidad & Tobago, Errol Barrow of Barbados and Michael Manley of Jamaica. This was at a time when the United States had already imposed the crippling sanctions which still afflict the island, despite a brief respite under the Obama administration.
Those sanctions, reimposed by Donald Trump, have caused an economic crisis on the scale of that which followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Up to that point the then USSR had underwritten the Cuban economy, but with the break-up of the Soviet system all economic support came to an end, and the island was left to fend for itself. What eventually rescued it was Venezuela and its oil generosity. Then President Hugo Chávez was an admirer of Fidel Castro, and held socialist views very much in tandem with those of his Cuban mentor. It was under Chávez that Cuban ideas and modes of operating began to be imported into Venezuela, a process which has accelerated dramatically under his successor, President Nicolás Maduro.
Among the various favours that Fidel Castro did Guyana was one relating to our border. Early on in his presidency Chávez had been very bellicose where this issue was concerned, but it has been reported in Venezuela that Castro persuaded him to modify his view, so he came to regard the controversy as having had its origins in the cold war. As such, the Venezuelan President declared that Caracas would not oppose development projects in Essequibo as had happened previously, provided they were intended to benefit the people and did not involve any multinationals. Castro died in 2016, and what his view would have been in the current circumstances with ExxonMobil and others involved in offshore oil exploitation, no one will ever know.
In any event, it seems that Cuba’s interest in the matter ended with Fidel Castro, although other considerations aside, his brother was unlikely to use his own persuasive powers on Mr Maduro in that regard given Venezuela’s own huge problems.
Cuba’s current economic crisis has its origins in what has happened in Venezuela, which can no longer provide the level of support on which Havana once depended. This is in addition to the pandemic which has struck Cuba’s tourist industry particularly hard. At least one Guyanese businessman has been a victim of the island’s lack of foreign exchange. Rice miller Nand Persaud & Co was reported in our business edition earlier this month to have ceased sending rice shipments to Cuba because after supplying 7,000 tonnes under an agreement made in 2017 with the state-run entity Alimport, full payment had still not been made; there was an outstanding balance of US$600,000.
Prior to the pandemic, enterprising Cubans with any access to US dollars from remittances were coming here to buy clothes for resale at home. They were very much in evidence in the city at one point, and some of them even stayed, hawking various items. One Cuban was reported as saying that they came here to buy clothes in Chinese stores because they were cheap, while they went to Panama to buy food, which was inexpensive there. That development too was a product of the economic difficulties at home.
While this was mostly a Georgetown phenomenon, the Cubans with whom the Guyanese population all along the coastland became most familiar were medical personnel. They first began arriving after the recognition of Cuba, and represented evidence of Fidel Castro’s appreciation for that act. In the early days, he also sent a number of other experts to assist this country in areas where it needed help. Over the years, however, that has mostly been reduced to doctors and other health workers.
There are fewer of them than there used to be, because Cuba now trains Guyanese in the medical field in Cuba itself. In addition, of course, Havana sends 50,000 health workers to very many more countries – about 60, it has been reported − and has large numbers concentrated in Venezuela, for example, in the Barrio Adentro programme. It is a method of securing foreign exchange, and in the case of our neighbour, helping to pay for its oil shipments. After Fidel Castro relinquished power to his brother in 2008, the arrangements with the Cuban doctors here continued, and presumably that situation will not change for the moment under Mr Díaz-Canel.
While the current President who will presumably also take on the responsibility of Communist Party leader, is committed to implementing Cuba’s traditional form of socialism, events on the ground may force him to make amendments to customary arrangements. In fact, some reforms have already been put in place because of the dire economic circumstances. Among other things, earlier this year the government allowed small private businesses to function in a large number of fields, although whether this has gone far enough to salvage the situation is maybe open to question. As it is Mr Castro said that reforms stimulating the non-state sector should not go beyond certain limits because it would lead to the “very destruction of socialism and the end of national sovereignty.”
Perhaps he hopes that with a change of government in Washington there will be a lifting of the crippling sanctions. President Biden has indicated a preparedness to look at the matter of relations with Cuba again; however, it has been reported that it is not one of his foreign policy priorities.
The younger generation has grown up knowing nothing but Castro rule, and while the charisma of the brothers may have been sufficient to maintain the status quo even in extremely hard times, it is unlikely that a colourless personality such as the current President will be able to hold things together in quite the same way. The young feel frustrated by the lack of jobs and the shortages of even basic commodities, but this time there is a difference. It is that they have access to the mobile internet and can express criticism there. The kind of control which the authorities could exert before is less easy now. Dissatisfaction, sometimes assuming unusual forms as in the case of the ‘artivist’, Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, is beginning to find an outlet, and while it is by no means on a large scale, it might be a sign of things to come.
Cuba is a dictatorship, and at various stages in the past has been a pretty brutal one. The older generation here and in the West Indies, closed their eyes to that, partly because Fidel Castro was admired for thumbing his nose at the Americans, who were seen as the bully in the region; partly because of their admiration for how he built up his nation’s health service and gave every child access to education; and partly because of the doctors whom he sent to shore up their own hospital services.
But even if democracy is on the decline globally, it is important to the region, and the feeling nowadays in the anglophone territories at least, is that Cuba should move in this direction. At the Congress in which he announced he was relinquishing the leadership of the Communist Party, Mr Castro said that the new leadership were party loyalists who were “full of passion and anti-imperialist spirit.” Perhaps. But time sometimes has a way of overtaking even the most deeply held convictions.