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.