Cuban Revolution Is Just a Memory

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

On Oct. 18, Cuba’s power grid failed and the entire nation plunged into darkness, a day after the government stressed the need to save electricity in the face of major gasoline shortages and large-scale, regular outages. For weeks, the country has lacked the fuel to run the power grid. It’s come to this.

As a left-wing graduate student back in the late 1960s-70s, I wrote my MA thesis on the Cuban Revolution. I visited the island when it was a truly Communist state, slogans and all. But that, as they say, was long ago. Indeed, given today’s Cuba, it was really very, very long ago.

Regime corruption, economic collapse and public anger are now a part of life. The perpetual blackouts are an apt symbol of a country that is headed for the dark ages. For the first time since the revolution, Cuba is asking international agencies for food aid. The Cuban economy produces little for internal consumption and almost nothing that can be sold abroad for hard currency.

Enormous numbers of civilians are fleeing the island. In July Cuban demographer and economist Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos released data showing that Cuba’s population shrank by 18 per cent between 2022 and 2023.  He calculates that some 8.62 million remain on the island, down from was 11.2 million. People feel trapped and hopeless.

At the same time, the Cuban public has found its voice. Despite the blackouts and the poor connectivity, large numbers of Cubans are venting online. This has turned into an immense chorus of anger and disgust. The public perception of a worsening crime rate finally led the authorities to openly address it on state television. In August, an edition of the nightly talk programme Mesa Redonda was titled Cuba Against Drugs.

Some of these criminals may themselves be government figures. The regime has given up any revolutionary pretensions and has become what ordinary Cubans call a “mafia.” Outwardly, nothing has changed. The worn-out slogans are still piously intoned. The Communist Party, with its repressive apparatus, still dodders on. But it is in charge of ruling a society that has lost all faith in the system, and so those who command power and resources want nothing more than to enjoy the good life and protect themselves against an uncertain future.

Officials fortunate enough to have control over scarce resources like fuel sell these on the black market. The preferred approach is more indirect, however. Following the outbreak of anti-regime protests in July 2021, the government allowed the establishment of private “micro, small, and medium enterprises,” theoretically to open the economy to market forces.

But – no surprise -- most of the 9,000 private enterprises operating in Cuba today are owned by powerful regime figures who then funnel public works contracts to themselves. Most of the money they accrue is converted into dollars and sent illegally out of the country. Yes, a thin crust at the top live in modern comfort. But for all their power and luxury, these people are terrified of the future.

Cuba makes life very hard for journalists and accuses some independent writers of being political activists paid to file reports for American government-funded outlets such as Radio Marti, which are considered hostile, counter-revolutionary platforms by the Cuban government.

In 2021, Cuban journalist and opposition activist Lazaro Yuri Valle Roca was arrested on charges of disseminating enemy propaganda and sentenced to five years in prison. As his health faded, he listened to the implorations of his family and accepted the offer to leave. “My fight was in Cuba for the freedom of the island. I never wanted to leave,” he has stated.

His grandfather Blas Roca Calderio was a labor union journalist and longtime Communist leader prior to the 1959 revolution who held several important posts after Fidel Castro took power, including president of the National Assembly from 1976 to 1981.

For years, Valle Roca and other reporters had worked on the fringes despite independent journalism being effectively outlawed. There was a moment of hope when the Obama administration began engaging with Cuba. But that faded and was replaced by outright hostility and a ruthless crackdown on independent media coverage of opposition voices following mass street protests in July 2021. 

Even those journalists who stuck to the professional guardrails of independence and political neutrality were forced into exile. “Almost all of them were targeted, harassed, or threatened,” according to Ted Henken, a professor at the City University of New York who has written extensively about Cuban media. 

New laws governing “social communication” and “cyberspace security” make it a crime to publish news considered contrary to the “interest of the State.” Cuba’s media policy can be neatly summed up by a famous phrase uttered by Fidel Castro in 1961: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”

How long can such a situation continue? Perhaps one anonymous observer provides hope. His simple theory of when Communist regimes collapse is when the true believers die and the people at the top are no longer willing or able to kill for ideals. Raul Castro, the former president and one of the revolution’s heroes, is now 93 years old. Fidel Castro died eight years ago. Miguel Diaz-Canel, their successor, is little more than a bureaucrat born after the revolution. It won’t be long.

 

The Hurdles Facing Egyptian Intellectuals

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

In the twentieth century, many middle-class Egyptians adopted a cosmopolitan cultural style. They wanted to move the country toward a more liberal and secular state.

But they always came up against, and were unable to surmount, the strength of a very strong Islamic religious culture. In despair, some, despite their own preferences, ended up preferring autocracy to what they considered a backward and dangerous ideology.

In 1952, a revolution brought the Free Officers movement, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, to power. It seemed to have brought a secular quasi-socialist regime to power.

But the undercurrents of politicized religion, though banned by Nasser, did not disappear. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna and preached a fundamentalist Islamism guarded exclusively by the sharia, was outlawed. Its most prominent theoretician, Sayyid Ibrahim Qutb, was executed in 1966.

But secular movements fell from favour following Egypt’s defeat by Israel in 1967, and the country was transformed into an autocracy following Nasser’s death three years later. From 1981 until 2011, Egypt was ruled with an iron hand by Hosni Mubarak, until popular unrest forced him to step down during the Arab Spring.

Would this herald a new, democratic chapter in Egypt? Would free elections bring about a rebirth of secular politics? The answer was no.

Mubarak’s ouster cleared the way for the Muslim Brotherhood to participate openly in Egyptian politics, and to that end the group formed the Freedom and Justice Party. In April 2012 the party selected Mohamed Morsi to be its candidate in Egypt’s presidential election. Morsi defeated Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister under Mubarak, that June.

Morsi soon issued an edict declaring that his authority as president would not be subject to judicial oversight until a permanent constitution came into effect. Although he defended the edict as a necessary measure to protect Egypt’s transition to democracy, mass demonstrations were held against what many saw as a seizure of dictatorial powers.

Worsening economic conditions, deteriorating public services, and a string of sectarian incidents, including attacks on the country’s Coptic Christian minority, strengthened opposition to Morsi’s rule. Clashes between Morsi’s supporters and critics in late June 2013 culminated in massive anti-Morsi protests around the country.

On July 3 the military under the head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, removed Morsi from power. A figurehead president, Adly Mansour, was installed, but it was clear that Sisi, who retained the title of defence minister, wielded power.

Sisi claimed that the military had carried out the will of the Egyptian people, as expressed in the anti-Morsi protests, and that the Islamist-dominated administration led by Morsi had put the Muslim Brotherhood’s interests before those of the country.

A month later the Egyptian police and armed forces committed what Human Rights Watch deemed “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”

Eleven years on, the murder of over 1,000 supporters of the deposed president, known as the Rabaa Massacre, has gone largely unpunished. The Muslim Brotherhood was formally outlawed that September and Morsi was jailed. Prison conditions were harsh, and he was denied adequate medical attention. He died in 2019.

Sisi officially left the military to run for president and was elected in a clearly fraudulent manner in May 2014. He has been re-elected twice since, in March 2018 and again in December 2023, when he was reported to have won with 89.6 per cent of the vote after several opposition figures were prevented from participating. Under his reign, Egypt has degenerated into a police state even more repressive than the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.

Caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, Egypt’s pro-democracy and civil society movements jettisoned their long-standing commitments to human rights and the rule of law and enthusiastically supported the return of military rule.

One of those civil society leaders, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was among Egypt’s most influential intellectual figures. He had spent his career insisting that democracy is the solution both to political authoritarianism and to the allures of religious fundamentalism in the Arab world.

Pushing back against the prevailing view that Islamist groups must be marginalized, he argued that they should be included in the democratic process. He even went so far as to advocate, in an article titled “Toward Muslim Democracies,” that “it will be better for us as democrats, for the Islamists, and for Egypt to enlist Islamists under the flag of democracy.”

He encouraged Egyptians to support this vision and put aside common fears about Islamist movements and had been arrested for his views under Mubarak. Yet even he abruptly became an apologist for authoritarian rule.

The “problem” was that the bulk of the Egyptian masses were unwilling to part with their religious traditions or wholly consign them to the realm of the private. Put another way, if most Egyptians were given the choice between being liberal or being Muslim, they would overwhelmingly select the latter.

Faced with that reality, these intellectuals forged authoritarian alliances to forcibly impose their worldview on an otherwise unwilling populace. When Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were in actual control of the state rather than at its fringes, the liberal secularists chose authoritarian rule. This is the same tragedy found in most of the Arab world.

 

Surprisingly, Sri Lanka Remains an Electoral Democracy

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Sri Lanka, to my mind, has always been a unique country politically, particularly for those in the Global South. It has defied a major political axiom: that countries with deep ethnic divisions leading to horrible civil wars virtually always devolve into brutal dictatorships, usually involving the military.

The island nation of 20 million is overwhelmingly Buddhist Sinhalese, with the Hindu Tamil community making up about 11 per cent of the population. The civil war that broke out in 1983 followed years of failed attempts to share power within a unified country. Tamil fighters, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), tried to create an independent homeland in the country’s north.

The group was eventually crushed in a 2009 government offensive. The war killed at least 100,000 on both sides and left many more missing. Hundreds of LTTE fighters, including top leaders, were allegedly killed after surrendering. A study by a United Nations panel of experts published in 2011 found up to 40,000 civilians were killed in the final months of fighting.

This was not exactly conducive to electoral democracy. And it certainly left scars on the body politic. Yet there have been eight presidential elections since the war began and at no time was there a coup overthrowing an elected president, or the formation of a junta promising to end the conflict.

The country remains divided, which is only to be expected, but it is also in serious economic trouble, and this has seen the rise of extremist parties, culminating in the Sept. 21 election of a Marxist president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

Two years earlier, crowds overran the presidential palace, forcing then-leader Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country. For more than 10 years, the Rajapaksa family held a vice-like grip over Sri Lankan politics. The family appealed to the majority-Sinhalese nationalist base. So, for years, they survived allegations of corruption, economic misrule, widespread human rights abuses and suppression of dissent.

That changed in 2022, when a slew of policies set off the country’s worst-ever economic crisis. It defaulted on its loans, plunging the country into a crippling economic crisis marked by acute shortages of fuel and other basic goods. Ranil Wickremesinghe, an opposition politician, was appointed as president for the remaining two years of Rajapaksa’s tenure.

Wickremesinghe campaigned on his economic record in this election. While he was in office, he stabilized the economy and brought inflation down from a high of 70 per cent to about 0.5 per cent. He also negotiated a crucial bailout package with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to contain Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, raising taxes in the process. This did not go down well with the electorate. Levels of poverty in the country have doubled since the economic crisis erupted in 2022.

Which brings us to the surprising electoral victory of a relatively unknown candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who defeated both the incumbent, who ended in third place, and Sajith Premadasa, the son of a former president. Dissanayake, who headed an alliance of parties called the Jathika Jana Balawegaya (JJB) or National People’s Power, brought together 21 groups including political parties, youth groups, women’s groups, trade unions and other civil society groups.

“We will defeat those who use the influence of their family, their wealth, the influence of government,” he told a large crowd on the last day rallies were allowed ahead of the vote, which saw turnout of about 75 per cent.

To revive the economy, Dissanayake has promised to develop the manufacturing, agriculture and IT sectors. He has also committed to continuing the deal struck with the IMF to bail Sri Lanka out of the economic crisis while reducing the impact of its austerity measures on the country’s poorest. The main focus has been on the country’s $36 billion foreign debt, of which $7 billion is owed to China. Whether Dissanayake will be able to deliver on this program of economic sovereignty is to be seen.

He has managed to overcome trepidation over the violent past of his own political party, the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), or People’s Liberation Front. The JVP was founded in 1965 and carried out two armed insurrections against the Sri Lankan state in the 1970s and 1980s.

The 1987-1989 campaign, spurred by discontent among the youth of the rural lower and middle classes, precipitated a conflict marked by raids, assassinations and attacks against both political opponents and civilians which claimed thousands of lives.

Dissanayake comes from a working-class background in north-central Sri Lanka, far from the capital city of Colombo. His worldview has been shaped by his leadership of Sri Lanka’s student movement. Elected to the JVP’s central committee in 1997, he became its leader in 2014 and has since apologised for the group’s violence during the so-called “season of terror.”

It has long been on the political fringe and only holds three seats in Sri Lanka’s 225-member parliament. To try to increase its presence, parliamentary elections will be held on Nov. 14.

But for the country’s Tamil minority, the future is not hopeful. Dissanayake has rejected giving more power to the northern and eastern areas where most Tamils live. He has also rejected investigating incidents during the civil war that United Nations investigators have described as possible war crimes.