Debating Cuban Exceptionalism

Comparative politics is a curious field of academic endeavor. It is about detecting commonalities between political processes that are in many of the most fundamental respects unique. All political histories are exceptional, but the political history of Cuba is so to an exceptional degree, as is demonstrated here. This chapter seeks to place current discussions about the foreseeable demise of the Castro regime, and alternative post-Castro scenarios, in a broader historical and comparative perspective. The objective is to explore the implications of Cuban political exceptionalism and not to essentialize it. Such an exploration is intended to broaden the repertoire of resources for thinking about possible post-Castro and even postcommunist transition scenarios. It should not be expected to generate any highly predictive conclusions, since an exceptionalist tradition can develop in multiple directions.

I am not an expert on Cuba: although I have learned many things about Latin America from my students, I have not had the good fortune to learn about Cuba to the same extent. So, even the familiar notion of Cuban exceptionalism that Laurence Whitehead so eloquently describes in this book was new in a sense. From a familiarity with international history I knew, of course, that Cuba was not part of the wave of anticolonial, republican revolutions that swept through Spanish America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and I knew that the island was the last major Spanish colony in the Western Hemisphere until the Spanish-American War. And from U.S. history, I was also familiar with Cuba’s special status, as symbolized by the Platt Amendment that was forcibly incorporated into the country’s first republican constitution and was bolstered by repeated direct and indirect U.S. interventions in Cuban internal affairs. Finally as a student of comparative democratic transitions in communist Eastern Europe, I was very much aware that Cuba belonged neither to the set of democratizing countries of the 1980s or early 1990s. What I had not realized until reading Laurence Whitehead’s contribution to this volume is that these three separate and exceptional circumstances may very well be interrelated. I had always thought and hoped that Cuba might simply become a belated member of either sequence of transitions, or of both, and that it would simply take longer to begin and end that process in Cuban than in Latin America’s other most protracted case—that of Mexico. My view was that because the Cuban dictatorship, like the Mexican, was the product of an indigenous social revolution, this fact and the regime’s attendant special legitimacy resources might lead regime forces to initiate a protracted transition carefully controlled “from above.”¹ Whatever the normative desirability of such a path as compared with others (such a lengthy process usually makes it more vulnerable to uncertainty and reversal), this seemed to be the most likely kind of transition in Cuba.

There were good reasons why in 1990 Cuba’s economy was expected to collapse along with the Soviet economic bloc. Economic dependency on Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) trade and finance was extreme: in 1989, the Cuban economy was an open one, with an imports-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of 35 percent, and the COMECON trade bloc accounted for around 80 percent of all trade. The bloc also provided the external financing to cover a large current account deficit, amounting to more than 10 percent of GDP.¹ Of total exports, sugar accounted for 80 percent, and the COMECON preferential sugar price was around three times the world market price, a benefit worth around 12 percent of GDP. The extent of Cuban dependence on COMECON thus meant that when the trading bloc collapsed around one quarter of GDP was immediately wiped off Cuba’s national income, even before the effects of economic dislocation were added, as import capacity fell by 70 percent between 1990 and 1993 (see figure 3.1).

In the 1990s the Cuban regime displayed two unexpected characteristics. One was survival. The other was the implementation of uneven economic reforms, meaning that some sectors of the economy were revamped, while others remained untouched. This chapter connects these two outcomes by arguing that uneven economic reforms explain regime survival. Uneven economic reforms served to strengthen the power of the state vis-à-vis society, and within the state, the power of hard-liners. This new type of state, which I call the gatekeeper state, dominates society through a new mechanism—it fragments the economy into different sectors of varying degrees of profitability and then determines which citizens have access to each respective sector. While some authoritarian regimes stay alive by providing widespread economic growth, the Cuban regime in the 1990s has survived by restricting access to capitalist rewards. This has permitted the incumbents to navigate through societal pressures and postpone regime transition.

Even at its most decadent, the Cuban Revolution continues to captivate global attention. The revolution turned the page on the radical anticapitalist projects that once won the minds and hearts of millions of people and in the name of Marxism and socialism, achieved the social justice, national independence, and economic development that peripheral capitalism failed to produce. But the revolution failed to construct a viable alternative to the capitalist order and has become an isolated dissident within the global capitalist system. Moreover, it has failed politically: Marxism plays the role of ideological legitimization, but endogenous authoritarian forms have prevailed. So the kind of transition that can be discussed in the case of Cuba is not fundamentally one toward democracy but rather toward some form of peripheral capitalism. This process is already underway and is perfectly compatible with many of the authoritarian habits of the Cuban political regime. The global capitalist system requires that Cuba establish clear rules for market competition and an adequate context for the “probability calculus” that Weber deemed vital for functioning mercantilism to flourish. The United States is a key player in all this, and its geopolitical ambitions demand that any new system in Cuba should entail an organic alignment with Washington, and the kind of government that can prevent undesirable situations such as uncontrolled surges in immigration flows, or operative freedom for drug traffickers.

Political science scholars are usually fascinated by great political changes. But in Cuba, what has been spectacular after 1989 is precisely the continuity of the political system in spite of truly dramatic changes in the international context and a profound national economic and social crisis. Against expectations, Cuba’s brand of state socialism proved to be immune to the wave of regime change that led to the demise of Communist Party rule in all the Eastern European countries within a brief period of time. From a comparative perspective, therefore, what needs to be explained is Cuba’s “nontransition.” Claus Offe refers to the “dilemma of simultaneity” in his study of the transformation process in Eastern Europe: in contrast to Southern Europe and Latin America, political regime change toward pluralist, civilian democracy did not call into question the fundaments of the economic system, and, in the former socialist states, political and economic change had to be accomplished simultaneously.¹

“In order to appraise Miami’s present-day development, it is convenient to look at that city in 1959. To simplify, Miami was then a typical southern city, with an important sector of retirees and veterans, whose only interest was the exploitation of tourism during Miami’s warm winter months. The growth achieved by Miami has no precedent in the history of the United States. It occurred during what has been called The Great Cuban Miracle. So I believe that those who left the Island after 1959 and those who have arrived more recently with the same faith and hope must feel proud not only of what they achieved for themselves but also what they have accomplished for the entire community.”¹ These remarks, written almost 20 years ago by one of the most prominent members of the Miami Cuban establishment, were part of the response of Cuban exiles in that city to attempts by the native Anglo population and its leaders to deal with newcomers and, as it were, ‘show them their place’ in America’s ethnic hierarchy. During the Mariel exodus of 1980, the Miami Herald, arguably the principal institution of the old Anglo establishment, led a vigorous campaign to remove the new arrivals from the city. After the end of the exodus, a rapid grassroots mobilization led to an overwhelming vote against the public use of Spanish. “We did not come to Miami to live in a banana republic,” proclaimed one of the organizers of the anti-Spanish referendum.²

The interplay of religion, culture, and society in any country, at any given time, is one of the most complex phenomena experts have attempted to understand and explain. This is true in the case of democratic regimes where empirical evidence is accessible and conceptual categories are grounded in long-standing scholarly discourse, and the attempt to study these themes in a system such as Cuba’s presents considerable challenges. For example, the study of Cuba forces us to grapple with concepts that, notwithstanding broad and sometimes serious disagreements among scholars, can be employed with more or less consensus in mainstream cases. One such concept is civil society itself, which we broadly define as a complex network of individuals and groups through which people participate in community and polity. As such it includes not only civic associations and institutions, but also informal networks that are linked horizontally and, at times, vertically to political elites and the state, particularly in an effort to secure the public’s interests.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the transition to democracy in Cuba is developing in an historical context marked by commercial, financial, migratory, technological, and cultural globalization, and simultaneously by the normative diffusion, on a planetary scale, of the Western philosophy of human rights.¹ Against this background—which makes the political limitations of the nation-state more ostensible and also incites a revamping of nationalist discourses and practices—a pact of national reconciliation must take effect among Cubans of all political persuasions, without which it is virtually impossible to imagine an actual transition to democracy.

What are the social laws or “rules” to which twentieth-century Cuba appears such a flagrant exception? Those who believed that the fall of the Berlin Wall had inaugurated “the end of history” will need to concede that at least in this corner of the Caribbean history seems to be taking another generation to extinguish itself. It is still just about possible to counter that triumphalist claim with Castro’s equally resonant slogan “history will absolve me.” Those who believe that state intervention to control the entire economy and marginalize the price system had been proven unviable and doomed to collapse will have to cope with the evidence that, compared to other post-Soviet economies, after the initial slump between 1989 and 1993 Cuba’s economic performance has been at least average, or perhaps even slightly better than most. Those who have argued that there is now only one hegemonic “superpower,” and that U.S. military, economic, political, and cultural supremacy is now such that outright resistance to it has become futile, must face the fact that the Castro regime, as tiny as the Cuban economy may be in a global perspective, still continues to flaunt its resistance, and even to attract occasional new allies to its cause. Those who would argue that no single autocrat can remain sane and politically effective after exercising virtually unlimited power over his home territory for up to half a century, have still not come to terms with the secrets of Fidel Castro’s psychology and his personal authority. Those who believe that the unquestionable yearnings of ordinary Cuban citizens for personal freedom, economic opportunity, the right to travel and access information must be sufficient to overwhelm all the artificial props used to sustain a “closed” system of Communist Party control, have not yet grasped either the offsetting power of the regime’s “David versus Goliath” imagery or the density of its formal and informal social controls beyond the security apparatus.