Although many Western observers are already showing optimism over the
semi-retirement of Raúl Castro and the rise to office of the previously obscure
Miguel Díaz Canel, what just happened in Cuba is not a regime change. In fact,
for the moment, it appears that very little will change in that island nation,
including the severe restriction of human and civil rights with which Cubans
have been living for the past six decades.
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| Miguel Díaz Canel |
While it is true that Díaz Canel is the first person other than Fidel
and Raúl Castro in nearly 60 years to ostensibly take charge of the country, he
was handpicked by Raúl to ensure the continuation of a Castro dynasty that has
been ensconced in power since the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. He has garnered
Castro's favor by eschewing personal power quests and adhering to the regime’s
main political and economic lines in his most recent post as the country’s
First Vice-President, after long years as a grassroots regime champion and
enforcer.
The 58-year-old Díaz Canel may be a “fresh new face” compared to the
geriatric Castro perennials who have been running the country, and although, in
the wake of the Obama-era rapprochement, he has suggested that Cuba needed to
take a more open approach to its economic affairs, should he be tempted to go
rogue and take Cuba in an entirely new direction on his own, it wouldn’t be
easy. Despite the fact that Raúl Castro is nearly 87 years old—his brother
Fidel, the iconic leader of the Cuban Revolution died, aged 90, in 2016—he has
made it clear that he is only semi-retiring. Observers say that he will remain
in control, behind the scenes, of both state intelligence and the Army (which
between them, in turn, control practically everything on the Cuban islands). He
will also continue to hold the post of First Secretary of the only political
organization permitted in Cuba, the Communist Party.
Nor is it as if the influence of the Castros will end with Raúl’s
eventual death or incapacitation. His 52-year-old son, Colonel Alejandro Castro
Espín, for instance, works out of the Interior Ministry and is believed to run
the overall day-to-day operations of Cuba’s all-pervasive intelligence
services, despite his doctorate in international relations. And he is not the
only younger-generation Castro that Díaz Canel might have to contend with.
Among others, there is Raúl Castro’s politician daughter, Mariela, and his
grandson and chief bodyguard, Raúl Rodríguez Castro (son of another of the
retiring leader’s daughters, Débora, and her ex-husband, General Luis Alberto
Rodríguez, who heads up over a thousand Cuban companies owned by the country’s industrial-military
complex).
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| Díaz Canel with Raúl Castro |
While for now the Castros seem to want to avoid the impression of the
Cuban regime’s being a family affair where power is inherited, there can be
little doubt that they have no plans to relinquish the cumulative power that
their two patriarchs have developed since the Revolution ended, or that the
Castros have continued to make a great show of defending from ostensible enemies
both foreign and domestic throughout their incredibly prolonged reign.
Fidel Castro held sway over the country and its people for more than
half a century. Indeed, he was the world’s longest ruling non-royal leader in
more than a hundred years. When his health began to fail, his younger brother
Raúl, who had served as his political right hand since the revolution that
brought them both to power, took his place as the head of state, a post which
the younger Castro has held, both virtually and effectively for the past
decade.
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| Fidel and Raúl Castro with Ernesto "Che" Guevara during the
Cuban Revolution.
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While the revolutionary hype of the Castro regime paints a picture of a
Marxist-Leninist workers’ heaven, it has most often functioned as a cruel
dictatorship. Many left-leaning thinkers, especially in Latin America, have
defended the Castros far beyond justifiable levels because Fidel and Raúl have
become iconic symbols of the Cuban Revolution, which is seen as a just uprising
against a cruel, exploitative and corrupt dictatorship. But beyond the courageous
and astute leadership of Fidel in the revolution as such and despite the early
efforts of the Castros to reorganize the country once the previous regime had
been conquered, it is hard not to notice that the Castro dynasty has become
what it swore to wage war against—an iron-fisted dictatorship that has
repressed and oppressed the Cuban people for more than half a century.
Clearly, then, while one may defend the Cuban Revolution as a triumph of
the people of that nation over an authoritarian regime kept in power by
international big business and organized crime at the expense of the rights and
prosperity of the Cuban people, there is little difference between venerating
the Castros and lauding similarly cruel former dictatorships like those of
Pinochet in Chile, Gaddafi in Libya or Franco in Spain. Like these other
strongmen, the Castros have used repression of dissent, summary executions,
torture and arbitrary imprisonment as the grist for their “revolution”. But
similarly, the US-backed sanctions that have haunted the Castros since their
earliest years in power have been, perhaps, “the right thing to do” for all the
wrong reasons, since they have been more about revenge for the nationalization
of US and multinational business interests than about putting pressure on the
regime to initiate a democratic opening and to respect the human rights of its
citizens.
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| The Castro brothers, a six-decade dynasty. |
The rapprochement initiated by the administration of former US President
Barack Obama was for all the right reasons, and provided the octogenarian
Castro brothers with a golden opportunity to gracefully end their regime and
herald a new, more progressive era in Cuba. With a more fundamentalist Fidel
out of the way, Raúl Castro seized that opportunity and indeed began taking
baby steps toward both economic and social reform, providing Cubans with
somewhat increased freedom of movement and freedom to entertain their own small
commercial enterprises, as the US government simultaneously lifted its ban on
travel to Cuba and some of its restrictions on trade with the island nation.
But the hopes for improvement in bilateral ties, which had begun to sketch the
coming of a brighter era for the Cuban people, were quickly dashed in the first
year of the Donald Trump administration in Washington, sparking a new hardening
of the Castro regime’s stance.
No one in the Cuban government more than Díaz Canel had demonstrated
enthusiasm for the possibility of expanding trade ties with that country’s
closest and richest neighbor. And he quickly began talking about the need for
economic reform. Now, as he takes over as the visible head of the Cuban
government (though not of the regime) it is probable that he will have to wait
for the end of the Trump era in Washington before he will be able to make good
on any plans he may have to relax the government’s iron grip on the Cuban
people and reinsert his country into its proper place in the world order.
Meanwhile, the only remaining question that Díaz Canel should be asking
himself is whether the so-called “revolution” under the all-pervading influence
of which the Cuban people continue to live—and which has functioned as a
one-family autocracy ever since the real Revolution ended—be able to survive
the deaths of its cynically charismatic and coldly ruthless founders. Or will
Cubans finally rise up and demand a more democratic opening and long-awaited
delivery on the Revolution’s promises of freedom, rights and equality and on
which the Castro regime has failed to deliver for the past six decades?
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