Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments As I was revising my dissertation on the political economy of Argentina to submit it to a publisher, momentous developments were taking place in Cuba. Civil society was being re-created after a long period of near extinction. The Castro regime showed signs of weakness. It faced a severe economic crisis and had lost its Soviet patron. Communism seemed doomed to be swept away by the international wave of democratization. For the first time in over three decades, the Castro dictatorship seemed extremely vulnerable. When the Castro regime endured, contrary to expectations, explaining its ability to survive became a burning question. As I read the explanations in the scholarly literature , I realized how inadequate they were. I was already well acquainted with the literatures on transitions to democracy and on the Eastern European transformations . I saw the existing academic lacunae and the theoretical importance of explaining non-transitions in cases where many of the underlying conditions seemed to favor a regime change. I started by writing an article about the implications of the U.S. economic embargo for a political transition in Cuba. And then my research and writing on the non-transition in Cuba snowballed into this book. In explaining the non-transition in Cuba, I analyze the conditions in Cuba since the 1990s, when many expected communism in Cuba to fall. Consequently , I look at the regime type under the rule of Fidel Castro. However, the relevance of this book goes beyond Castro’s tenure. This is so for a number of reasons. Fidel has indicated that his younger brother, Raúl, will succeed him. If Raúl becomes the strongman in Cuba, the current regime might continue in its basic form or its nature could change. If the latter occurs and the regime becomes an authoritarian dictatorship, key factors that I identify as fostering a transition to democracy would remain important: independent communication , resources in the hands of the opposition, public protests, and economic pressure on the autocracy. A standard conclusion in the study of transitions from dictatorial rule, whether in Latin America or in Eastern Europe, is that almost all regimes faced serious pressures prior to the transitions. In the typical analyses of transitions to democracy developed from the experiences of Latin America and Southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, the pressures faced by authoritarian regimes tended to result in splits in the ruling bloc between hardliners and softliners, with the latter gaining the upper hand and implementing political liberalization as a strategy intended to save the dictatorships I argue in this book that a transition to democracy is possible under the regime headed by Fidel Castro. Given the nature of the regime, only a transition by regime collapse seems plausible, that is, a transition initiated and pushed by civil society and the population at large, what Mark R. Thompson has called a democratic revolution. Yet this possibility depends on the strategic choices pursued by key actors in the drama. Thus, whether a transition will take place remains uncertain. I show that in the regime led by Fidel Castro, he and other hardliners dominate and adamantly oppose political liberalization. Consistent with theoretical observations about the relationship between types of dictatorships and possible transition paths, a transition in Cuba in which regime elites initiate and negotiate a political transition is extremely unlikely under the Fidel Castro regime. If Fidel Castro dies or becomes incapacitated to rule and the regime changes in such a way that a negotiated transition ensues, there will be scholars who will affirm that a political transition in Cuba required the “biological solution ,” that Fidel had to die before change could happen. Cuba will be compared with Spain, Fidel with Franco. Spain rather than Eastern European countries will be seen as the model that was relevant for Cuba all along. And a deterministic construction of history will appear. But all of these arguments would be true only by default. It would be false to claim that such outcomes had to happen. This book will serve to deconstruct history and point to missed historical possibilities that did not materialize due to strategic choices adopted by main actors. The relevance of this book also transcends the case of Cuba. The work uses the Cuban case to evaluate a number of hypotheses in the literature on transitions and on the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a policy instrument. Moreover, in explaining the non-transition in Cuba, I generate hypotheses that can be applied...