The Cuban dictatorship is preparing to ostensibly transfer power this week for the first time in nearly 6 decades to someone not named Castro, so the international media has gone into a predictable swoon. “Cuba Passes the Torch to a New Generation,” says one headline. “Cuba looks to a future without Castro rule,” says another. While still a third says, “Cuba’s lost generation set to lead as new President takes office.”
When it comes to predicting the future of Castro’s Cuba, however, the international media gets it wrong, as they have in the past. The truth is they have uncritically accepted a carefully constructed regime narrative meant for both domestic and foreign consumption. Because what is occurring in Cuba this week is not a transition to a new, enlightened leadership, but merely the first step in the transfer of power of one generation of the Castro family to the next.
According to the regime narrative, power is supposed to be handed over to a low-profile apparatchik of slight accomplishment, First Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel. But, with no domestic power base and no military rank (in a country ruled by generals), Diaz-Canel is merely a figure-head, designed to convey a civilian image of vitality and generational change, while the real powers remain behind the throne. (That Raul Castro intends to remain as head of the Cuban Communist Party and “generalissimo” of the Cuban military means we are not talking about a sedentary retirement to play with his great-grandchildren.)
No, what it means is that Raul Castro intends to choreograph a transfer of power not to a new generation of Cubans, but a new generation of Castro’s. The top echelon includes: his son Alejandro Castro Espín, a Colonel in State Security; his erstwhile son-in-law Gen. Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas; and his grandson, Raul Rodriguez Castro, who heads his grandfather’s Praetorian Guard. What Castro intends is a dynastic succession resembling the Kim’s in North Korea or the Assad’s in Syria.
The 52-year-old Castro Espín is said to be the second-most powerful figure in Cuba — and among the most feared. As head of Cuban counter-intelligence police he can destroy careers at his whim using real or manufactured evidence. While Castro Espín wields the baton, Rodríguez López-Callejas employs the money bags. He runs the military’s holding company GAESA, which controls all the Cuban military’s vast business interests, about 70% of Cuba’s wealth, including most of the tourist facilities, where foreign visitors deposit the hard currency that keeps the police state operating and the elites in clover.
Sadly, Cuba’s succession means not a turn towards openness and freedom, but merely the solidification of the type of narrow and militarized state capitalism evident today, with a minute and highly regulated sector of Cubans operating micro-enterprises.
Still, there are many who argue that Cuba’s so-called transition presents an opportunity for the Trump administration to reengage with Cuba, resurrecting President Obama’s rapprochement to influence Cuba’s next leaders.
But that is precisely the wrong action to take. Not only is it based on the flawed premise that Cuba is in transition, but it ignores the fact that Obama’s series of unreciprocated, unilateral concessions to the Castro regime had negative consequences for US national security, foreign policy interests and traditional values, while resulting in increased repression of the Cuban people and filling the coffers of the Cuban military, the Communist Party, and the Castro family.
The United States should do nothing to assist the Castro regime in its intended succession plan. In fact, the time is right to increase pressure on the military oppressors to expose their ruse and lay bare before the oppressed Cuban people what real change looks like.
Upon the hollow transfer of power in Cuba this week, the Trump administration ought to state clearly that it welcomes a new relationship with the oppressed, not the oppressors, and calling on the “new” government to, as a start, cut off ties with State Sponsors of Terrorism and with enemies of the U.S. such as North Korea, Iran and Syria; stop commanding and controlling repression in Venezuela against the unarmed population; dismantling the massive police state and surveillance apparatus; allowing freedom of speech, free and independent newspapers, television and radio stations, magazines, labor unions, houses of worship (e.g., stop bulldozing protestant churches it considers subversive); allowing private property and compensating or restoring those who had property confiscated without compensation, as required by international law. None of those freedoms or institutions of a civil society exist in Cuba today.
If the next set of Cuban rulers allowed the Cuban people the freedom to achieve the amazing economic prosperity that free Cubans have realized in the US, Cuba could finally do away with 59 years of Soviet-style food rationing and rebuild the nation that three quarters of a century ago was called the “Pearl of the Antilles.”
It is tragic that almost three decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall communist regimes continue to exist anywhere in the world. Communism lost the Cold War and the 20th Century battle of ideas for very good reasons, and there is no justification why it should still survive in Cuba 59 years after it was imposed by force. The end of that oppressive system – and the ultimate liberation of the oppressed — should be the objective of all nations of good will. The sooner they recognize that fact, the sooner they can devise better policies to help the Cuban people experience a real transition to a better future.
