Cuba: The Changing Scenarios of Governability

Governability has become a useful label for a variety of often contradictory situations. This tends to happen in the social sciences when a term is appropriated by politics for less sophisticated uses than the search for new knowledge, or, inversely, when the social sciences borrow a term from politics with the intent of actualizing a conceptual problematic without the necessary prior internal critique. In the case of governability, the appropriations have been mutual.

It is not my intention to address this problem in this article, although its consequences are implicated in my argument. I will use governability operatively here to mean a relation of power between ruled and rulers, which in the most optimal conditions guarantees that the ruled act according to formally established norms and procedures. What we have here is a situation of relative and unstable equilibrium between diverse types of social demands and the institutional processing capacity of a given political system, which is not limited to positive administrative action or policy initiatives but also includes negative responses (the obliteration or repression of demands) and ideological and informational production that can act as a means of creation of new values. This last, ideological component of governability has been a highly effective element in regimes with foundational aims, such as the Cuban one.

No political regime in Latin America has enjoyed greater stability than the one installed in Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. In the course of four decades, there have been only three moments in which the discontent of sectors of the population has been translated into collective actions and outcomes that have been disruptive of the established order. The first of these occurred during the initial stages of the revolutionary process, when, over a period of five years, several centers of counterrevolutionary insurgency appeared in the mountain regions of the country, along with an upsurge in urban terrorism. The second happened in the spring of 1980, when discontented sectors occupied the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, precipitating the massive exodus to the United States from the port of Mariel. The third—another migratory explosion, known as the crisis of the balseros, or rafters—happened in 1994 and had as an additional ingredient widespread street protests, the most important of which took place in one of the most central neighborhoods of the capital city. In none of these three critical conjunctures did antisystemic forces represent a significant social base, however, and, in any case, the political class was able to mobilize sufficient countersupport. Similarly, each of the three situations mentioned was linked to U.S. policies hostile to Cuba, and each led to a massive exodus of discontents as part of the solution (although, as one might expect, the class basis of discontent and exile in the first conjuncture—the Cuban bourgeoisie and middle class—changes significantly in the second two).

One of the most notable characteristics of the Cuban process has been the specific role that violent repression has played as a mechanism of governability, especially in the early sixties, when the newly installed revolutionary state applied extremely repressive measures not only to the counterrevolutionary outbreaks but also to political dissidence within the Revolution itself or to forms of quotidian behavior the new leaders considered incompatible with a supposed revolutionary morality. Once this initial phase of consolidation was over, however, violent repression became more selective and punctual, and when its use was deemed necessary, the revolutionary political class could deploy it with the support of considerable sectors of the population. In the place of violent repression, the system began to deploy, primarily on ideological-cultural bases, diverse mechanisms of exclusion or anathematization of demands, sustained by a strict machinery of social-political control and regulation lubricated by the strong consensus in support of the Revolution.

Without recourse to this element of consensus, it is impossible to explain Cuban governability in the last forty years, or, for that matter, today. Of course, neither the type...