| Cuba today may be described as “an impossible country” with unsustainable sociopolitical and economic arrangements. For the Cuban people, six decades of living under a totalitarian regime and with a failed command economy means a legacy of economic, social, political, and civil backwardness. Cuban economist and dissident Oscar Espinosa Chepe described the impact of Cuba’s economic system on civil society: “These years of prolonged and deep crisis have generated an enormous loss of spiritual values…egoism, mendacity, double morality, and illegal methods of survival have proliferated to incredible levels.” |
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For most Cubans today work has ceased to be the principal source of one’s livelihood. Unable to live from the results of their legitimate labors they have developed a quasi ethic that justifies everything. It is a way of dealing with the incoherence of life in Cuba. Cuba’s civil society has committed a sort of philosophical and ethical suicide to escape the existential absurdity of a future without possibilities. Cubans today do not venture to dream or hope, except perhaps about leaving the island.
As the Castro brothers’ era comes to an end, we must acknowledge these adverse conditions. Cuba’s way out of its existential distress is not just freedom from deplorable economic conditions. Cuba’s potentialities will depend more on individual freedoms and empowerment than on a given set of economic reforms.
Freedom from fear must be the first step for a genuine and successful transition because it is a necessary condition to reversing political apathy. Cubans have forgotten how to feel free and any reform effort that leaves civil society inarticulate fails to recognize that no modern society can function in the best interest of the people without an effective system of checks and balances.
In communist societies, political conflict-resolution processes are officially discredited in favor of dogma. But, a transition from totalitarianism to democracy cannot be imposed; it must emerge from explicit and implicit bargaining among the various constituencies. Whereas a “one-step” transition to democracy in post-Castro Cuba may be the most intellectually satisfying approach, it is unlikely. Political and economic necessities will require bargaining and compromise, perhaps in the form of governments of “national unity” or “national responsibility,” until pluralistic democratic elections can be held.
The essential point is that this bargaining and compromise stage should have as its central goal the terms for the dissolution of the totalitarian regime, and the procedures for the establishment of a pluralistic democratic government that gains legitimacy through free, fair, and competitive elections.
Conflicting political cultures, like scorpions in a bottle, cannot permanently avoid each other. But, political cultures, unlike scorpions, need not engage in an elimination fight to the end. They can coexist in a participatory democratic milieu provided that all participants accept democratic means as the field of engagement.
For six decades, the Cuban exile community has held the belief that the demise of the Castros would mean the end of communism in Cuba and that democracy would inevitably follow. That scatological vision of Cuban communism proved to be inaccurate. The 2008 succession from Fidel to Raul was efficient, and seamless. However, given Raul Castro’s age there will be another succession in the not-too-distant future. José Machado Ventura, also elderly, is the perfunctory successor to Raul Castro in the Communist Party.
The next succession in Cuba may not go as smoothly, but it is highly unlikely, given the identified potential successors, that it will provide fertile ground for a genuine transition. A legitimate transition may have to wait for a post-Castros-Machado interregnum.
The potential futures of Cuba will give way into a reality of either transition or succession depending on whether Cubans embrace a governing philosophy that recognizes individual freedoms or one that advocates the primacy of economic measures even if undertaken outside the framework of democratic empowerment.
The path chosen will crystallize the Cuban post-Castro narrative for generations to come. The healing of the Cuban nation cannot take place in a totalitarian setting, and it cannot take place without the civil liberties and political rights to practice heroic tolerance and political wisdom. In order to avoid political stasis or chaos in post-Castro Cuba, a new way of perceiving the future and of behaving as a people must emerge. For this to happen the transitioning Cuban government cannot be an ideological extension of the Castro regime. It needs to be its antithesis.
Political rights and civil liberties are not superfluous luxuries to be appended to a program of economic reforms. They are essential to empower the citizenry to correct mistakes, voice discontent, and bring about changes in leadership. Democracy requires a relationship model between the state and its citizens that is dramatically different from the relationship model of a Marxist-Leninist state. Thus, Cuban Communism cannot be reformed to bring about a genuine transition.
To awaken aspirations - to venture to dream and hope, to escape its daily Sisyphean tasks - Cuban society must exorcise the mythology of the messianic maximum leader. A successful transition in Cuba will require, perhaps above all else, a compelling vision of hope for all Cubans; an irrefutable realization that life can regain its potential meaning despite its tragic aspects.
In post-Castro Cuba, choices will be made and paths will be taken. Let them be those of individual freedom and empowerment so that Cubans will be able to always feel free.
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This article was originally published in English in the Miami Herald and in Spanish in El Nuevo Herald.
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