99
Mexican
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Number 2
V
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE
OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER
Ramón I. CENTENO*
ABSTRACT. The leadership and ideology of the Cuban regime have changed
since Raúl Castro came to power. Fidel Castro’s charismatic authority was
replaced by a collegial arrangement, and the centrally planned economy has
admitted market socialist features. The main argument of this article is that
both changes are related as the decline of charisma increased the relative weight
of performance-based legitimacy. Drawing on the literature of communist survival,
I claim that Cuba has thus changed from a charismatic post-totalitarian
regime to a maturing one –thus joining China and Vietnam in the same regimetype,
although Cuba has not (yet) restored capitalism.
KEYWORDS: Cuba; Raúl Castro; leadership; ideology; charisma; market so-
cialism.
RESUMEN. El liderazgo y la ideología del régimen cubano han cambiado desde
que Raúl Castro llegó al poder. La autoridad carismática de Fidel Castro fue
reemplazada por un acuerdo colegiado, y la economía de planificación centralizada
ha adquirido características de un socialismo de mercado. El argumento
principal de este artículo es que ambos cambios están relacionados ya que la
*
Post-doctoral fellow, UNAM’s Institute for Legal Research. This article is based on the
author’s doctoral thesis at the Department of Politics of the University of Sheffield, and is a revised
and extended version of a paper that was awarded the second place of the 2015 Graduate
Student Award Competition of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy
(ASCE). The research was possible thanks to a scholarship granted by the National Council
of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) for doctoral studies abroad (2011-2015).
The author also wants to thank Steve Ludlam and Alessandro Badella for their helpful criticisms
and suggestions on earlier drafts. Thanks for helpful comments are also due to the participants
of the panel at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, May 27-30 2015, where an earlier version of the ideas contained in this article
was presented. All errors are mine. E-mail: ramon.i.centeno@gmail.com
BJV, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas-UNAM,
2017
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22201/iij.24485306e.2017.18.10777
1870-0578 /© 2017 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas. This is an open access article
under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
MEXICAN LAW REVIEW100 Vol. IX, No. 2
disminución del carisma aumentó el peso relativo de la legitimidad basada en la
actuación. Partiendo de la literatura de la supervivencia comunista, se sostiene
que Cuba ha transitado de un régimen postotalitario carismático a uno maduro
–uniéndose así a China y Vietnam en el mismo tipo de régimen, aunque Cuba
no restablecido (todavía) el capitalismo.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Raúl Castro, liderazgo, ideología, carisma, socialismo de
mercado.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 100
II. RE-FOCUSING COMMUNIST SURVIVAL IN CUBA ...................................... 102
1. DEFINING THE PROBLEM ................................................................. 102
2. AN ALTERNATIVE ANALYTICAL APPROACH ......................................... 104
III. ADDRESSING CHANGE.......................................................................... 106
1. LEADERSHIP: FROM CHARISMA TO COLLEGIALITY.............................. 107
2. IDEOLOGY: FROM CPE TO MARKET SOCIALISM................................... 112
IV. EXPLAINING CHANGE .......................................................................... 116
1. REGIME-TYPE DEVELOPMENT........................................................... 117
2. CUBA IN (BRIEF) COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE..................................... 121
V. CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................... 123
I. INTRODUCTION
It has been a decade since Raúl Castro succeeded his brother Fidel as President
of Cuba and First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC, by
its acronym in Spanish). On the 31st of July 2006, after falling ill, Fidel Castro
wrote a Proclamation that “provisionally” delegated power to Raúl.1
In 2008,
however, Raúl’s takeover became definitive. Soon after, he launched a reform
process that reverberates until today. Two Party Congresses have been held
since then (in 2011 and 2016), where the main goal has been to ‘update’ the
Cuban ‘economic and social model’. That the post-Fidel transition has tested
the Cuban political system is an understatement.
However, most international attention on Cuba has recently focused in
the normalisation of its relations with the United States –a diplomatic breakthrough
that Raúl Castro and Barack Obama announced in December 2014
in simultaneous speeches in Havana and Washington, respectively. Although
this development says more about the United States changing its approach
1
Fidel Castro, PROCLAMATION BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF TO THE PEOPLE OF CUBA
(2006), http://ow.ly/FeKCs (last visited Aug 8, 2016).
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 101
towards Cuba rather than the other way around,2
this does not mean that
Cuba has not changed at all under Raúl Castro. Quite the contrary, Washington
has noted that Cuba has changed, which is why it has modified its
diplomatic stance in the first place –now it pursues its interests by trying to
engage the expanding Cuban private sector.3
The fact that the new US-Cuba
relations have only emerged eight years after Fidel Castro stepped down and
Raúl Castro took over, must serve as a reminder that the internal factors
shaping Cuba deserve equal if not more attention than the external ones
in order to understand how and why the Cuban polity has changed. Such a
premise has laid the foundation of this article.
Drawing on the literature of post-totalitarian rule, I argue that between
2006 and 2016 Cuba experienced a change from a charismatic post-totalitarian
regime to a maturing post-totalitarian one. The basic argument behind
these concepts (that I will later explain) is that the loss of Fidel Castro’s
charismatic authority –he stepped down in 2006– pushed forward economic
performance as a compensatory source of legitimacy, which helps to explain
the market reforms adopted by Raúl Castro.
This characterisation is opposed to one proposed by Steven Saxonberg,
who draws on the same literature.4
This author has provided a sophisticated
framework to understand the survival of communist rule in Cuba, China,
North Korea and Vietnam. His comparative study on a multi-region range
of cases (fourteen, as he also discussed many non-survival cases) is an important
contribution to the analysis of communist political systems. This said, I
contend that Saxonberg has poorly applied his own model to understand the
survival of Cuba, which he equates to North Korea on the ground that in
both cases the Soviet-style economy prevails and power has been transferred
within the same family –from father to son, in Pyongyang; and from brother
to brother, in Havana. I refute this take on the Cuban regime –valid for Saxonberg
as far as 2013– not least because Raúl has introduced market reforms
that have revised the previous economic ideology and because beyond Raúl
and Fidel there is no other Castro family member in the line of succession.
In this article I thus re-apply Saxonberg’s own theory to the analysis of
contemporary Cuba. In doing so, nevertheless, I challenge some assumptions
in regards to both his evolutionary theory of communist rule and his conceptualisation
of the Cuban case.
2
Alessandro Badella, Obama and US Democracy Promotion in Cuba: New Strategies, Old Goals?, 3
CARIBBEAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND DIPLOMACY 7–35 (2015); Samuel Farber,
The Alternative in Cuba, JACOBIN, 2014, http://ow.ly/Sd6Bu (last visited Mar 11, 2015).
3
The same day that the United Sates and Cuba announced the normalisation of relations,
Washington explicitly declared that it “will seek to empower the nascent Cuban private
sector”. See White House, CHARTING A NEW COURSE ON CUBA (2014), https://goo.gl/rsF2fz
(last visited Aug 8, 2016).
4
STEVEN SAXONBERG, TRANSITIONS AND NON-TRANSITIONS FROM COMMUNISM : REGIME SURVIVAL
IN CHINA, CUBA, NORTH KOREA AND VIETNAM (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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MEXICAN LAW REVIEW102 Vol. IX, No. 2
The Sixth Congress of the PCC held in April 2011 marked the culmination
of Raúl Castro’s consolidation of power. By then, 1) the leadership had
already lost the charismatic character granted by Fidel Castro’s decades-long
tenure; and, 2) the ruling ideology had started a departure from the centrally
planned economy (CPE). The key argument of this article is that both
changes are related as the loss of charisma helped to increase the weight of
economic performance, thus re-shaping the regime’s claims to legitimacy.
As Raúl Castro has confirmed that he will step down in 2018 –when his
second five-year presidential tenure comes to an end, the contours of the new
regime analysed here are arguably those of what will be the initial conditions
of the post-Castro era.
In the next section, I provide the theoretical framework of this study. I will
define Cuba as Raúl Castro ‘received’ it –i.e. a charismatic post-totalitarian
regime– and I will theorise why the decline of charisma can boost a performance-based
legitimacy. In the third section, I discuss how the Cuban regime
has changed. I argue that the charismatic leadership turned into a collective
arrangement and that the ideology swerved from CPE orthodoxy to a market
socialist approach. In the fourth section, I explain why these changes are related
in the re-equilibration of the regime’s legitimacy, which I will situate in
(abridged) comparative perspective. Cuba is a new maturing post-totalitarian
regime, thus joining contemporary China and Vietnam within the same regime-type…
without the restoration of capitalism (for now).
II. RE-FOCUSING COMMUNIST SURVIVAL IN CUBA
1. Defining the problem
In their seminal work, Linz and Stepan argued that 20th-century regimes
could be divided into five ideal types: democracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism,
post-totalitarianism, and sultanism.5
Crucially, the post-totalitarian
regime differs from the other four in that “it is not a genetic type but an evolutionary
type”.6
Based on this notion, they developed a framework to analyse
the transitions from communist rule, which Saxonberg has taken to a new,
more sophisticated level. Instead of adding a new study on the fall of communist
rule, Saxonberg has focused on communist survival in contemporary
Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam. Thus, he took the post-totalitarian
approach out of its original focus on European Communism and advanced a
general argument –regardless of region.
5
JUAN J. LINZ & ALFRED C. STEPAN, PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION AND CONSOLIDATION
: SOUTHERN EUROPE, SOUTH AMERICA, AND POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE (John Hopkins
University Press, 1996).
6
Id. at 293.
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 103
Also, Saxonberg has advanced a theory of why post-totalitarian rule
emerges in the first place. In his account, totalitarian rule is a temporary
“messianic phase” –marked by revolutionary fervour– after which “the regime
begins to institutionalise itself ”. 7
The early post-totalitarian stage is the
outcome of such a relaxation process. His basic argument is that a salient
element of the early stage is the endurance of socialist ideology as a key claim
to legitimacy –an ideological legitimacy that is eventually undermined by the
CPE failures. Once this de-legitimisation process reaches a certain critical
point, the regime enters the “late post-totalitarian” stage marked by a shift
toward performance-based legitimacy:
The communist regimes lose their grand-future oriented beliefs and instead
promise improves living standards. Consequently they try to reach some sort
of social contract with the population in order to induce it to “pragmatically
accept” that given certain external and internal constraints, the regime is performing reasonably
well. 8
As this shift is likely to produce a crisis, the regime either moves into a
“freezing” direction (the reformist path is stopped or reversed) or a “maturing”
one (the reformist path continues). Applying this model, Saxonberg proposes
that China and Vietnam had long been on a maturing post-totalitarian
path. While in the European cases the ideological legitimacy was lost because
of the erroneous belief that the CPE model was superior to advanced capitalism,
China and Vietnam have lost their (socialist) ideological legitimacy because
they have, ironically, restored capitalism.9
Hence, these regimes would
have remained in power because they bypassed their ideological predicament
by building their pragmatic acceptance on capitalist ground.
In regards to Cuba and North Korea, Saxonberg argues that both cases
have long become patrimonial (Fidel Castro became a dynastic ruler like Kim
Il Sung), the difference being that Cuba overlaps with freezing post-totalitarian
rule, while North Korea does so with totalitarianism (hence, both cases
stick to CPE).10
Under this view, these regimes turned to patrimonial rule in
order to avoid collapse.
However, Saxonberg has ignored a previous post-totalitarian analysis of the
Cuban case. Although Linz and Stepan had limited their typology to the
comparative analysis of European Communism, Mujal-León and Busby later
applied their toolkit to characterise the Cuban regime after 1990, which they
termed a “charismatic early post-totalitarianism” –incidentally, a solution
7
SAXONBERG, supra note 4 at 17.
8
Id. at 18.
9
Id. at 272.
10
Id. at 107–152. Saxonberg uses the term ‘patrimonialism’ instead of ‘sultanism’ in order
to avoid the cultural stereotype that associates this regime-type with the Middle East –a caveat
I agree with.
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MEXICAN LAW REVIEW104 Vol. IX, No. 2
Linz later agreed with. 11
As Linz and Stepan defined the typical totalitarian
leadership as “often charismatic”,the peculiarity of Cuba, according
to Mujal-León and Busby, was not so much the presence of charisma, but
its persistence beyond the phase in which such element was supposed to be
endemic.12
The counter-intuitive argument was that the importance of Fidel
Castro’s charisma to the Cuban regime had “increased by the scope of
the crisis in the 1990s” –i.e. “the crisis spawned by the collapse of the Soviet
Union […] made him even more indispensable”.13
In contrast, Saxonberg holds that Cuba became a patrimonial communism
–i.e. a concept applied by Linz and Stepan to Romania, which López
later extended to Cuba,and that Saxonberg picked up and applied to North
Korea as well. 14
However, Mujal-León and Busby had already objected
to the sultanistic (or ‘patrimonial’) label for the 1990s Cuban regime “not
least because of its reliance on ideology and mobilisation.”15
According to
Saxonberg, Cuba lost its ideological legitimacy since the early 1990s, and
had been on a freezing post-totalitarian path since the late 1980s. As I will
argue, socialist ideology is still a key claim to legitimacy in today’s Cuba and
the economic reform launched by Raúl Castro is a clear case of maturation.
2. An alternative analytical approach
Now, what happens to a charismatic early post-totalitarian regime if its
charisma fades? My proposition is that the finale of charisma can change the
11
E. Mujal-León & J. W. Busby, Much ado about something? Regime change in Cuba, 48 in PROBLEMS
OF POST-COMMUNISM 6–18 (2001); JUAN J. LINZ, TOTALITARIAN AND AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES
10 (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000).
12
The early post-totalitarian ideal type was originally defined as “very close to the totalitarian
ideal type” but differing from it “at least in one key dimension, normally some constraints on
the leader” inLINZ AND STEPAN, supra note 5 at 42, 45.
13
Mujal-León and Busby, supra note 11 at 11, 15. For another influential account of Cuba
from a post-totalitarian perspective, see Jorge I. Domínguez, ¿Comienza una transición hacia el
autoritarismo en Cuba?, 6/7 ENCUENTRO 7–23 (1997). While Domínguez has helped to look at
Cuba through the post-totalitarian lenses, his approach draws from an older theory by Linz
that regarded post-totalitarianism as a sub-type of authoritarian rule –Linz later defined the
former as a regime-type on its own, to be distinguished from authoritarianism in LINZ AND STEPAN,
supra note 5. This distinction is helpful to not only define Cuba’s path as a post-totalitarian
one, as Domínguez has done, but to examine such a trajectory vis-à-vis the different varieties
of the post-totalitarian mould.
14
LINZ AND STEPAN, supra note 5; JUAN J. LÓPEZ, DEMOCRACY DELAYED: THE CASE OF CASTRO’S
CUBA (John Hopking University Press, 2002); SAXONBERG, supra note 4.
15
Mujal-León and Busby, supra note 11 at 11. To be sure, in the sultanistic ideal type there is
“no elaborate or guiding ideology […] outside of despotic personalism” according to LINZ AND
STEPAN, supra note 5 at 44–45. For another objection to López’s conceptualisation of Cuba, see
Jorge I. Domínguez, Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro’s Cuba by Juan J. Lopez, 119 POLITICAL
SCIENCE QUARTERLY : PSQ ; THE JOURNAL PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 189 (2004).
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 105
style (and power) of the leadership, which in turn can modify the regime’s
legitimation strategy.
Different Communist systems built its leadership on charismatic legitimacy,
to use Weber’sclassic term 16
–i.e. on the devotion to Stalin (Russia),
Mao (China), Tito (Yugoslavia), Enver Hoxha (Albania), Kim Il-Sung (North
Korea), or Fidel Castro in Cuba. However, most post-totalitarian transitions
were accompanied (or sometimes sparked) by the dissipation of charismatic
authority. According to Linz and Stepan, the post-totalitarian regime institutionalises
“checks on top leadership.” 17
I define this change as a turn to
collective leadership or collegiality, which refers to “specific social relationships
and groups which have the function of limiting authority”, to use Weber’s
words. 18
Weber also stressed, to avoid confusion, that “collegiality is no sense
specifically democratic”, though it is an arrangement “to prevent the rise of
monocratic power.”19
But what happens if collegiality replaces charisma when the regime (apart
from its leadership) has already entered the early post-totalitarian stage? First
and foremost, this means that two anachronistic legitimation strategies had
co-existed:
Charismatic: as analysed by Mujal-León and Busby in regards to the renewed
role of Fidel Castro’s leadership in Cuba after 1990
Ideological: as theorised by Saxonberg as a highly distinctive feature of
post-totalitarian regimes in their early stage
If the former dissipates, the strategic importance of the latter will increase.
At that point, the regime may be said to have experienced a post-totalitarian
normalisation –i.e. hybridity ends because the leadership is no longer totalitarian
(charismatic), which moves the regime closer to the ideal early post-totalitarian
stage. The causal chain may be theorised as follows: if a charismatic
early post-totalitarian rule loses its charismatic leadership, its reliance on
ideology as a central piece of its claims to legitimacy will confront the regime
sooner rather than later with Saxonberg’s dilemma, namely that the regime will
have “to choose between either losing their ideological legitimacy by sticking
to their ideology and having it fail, or giving up their ideology in order to
meet their economic goals”.20
As explained above, the first alternative is the
freezing path, and the second, the maturing one.
In other words, Saxonberg identifies two solutions to the dilemma:
— Sticking to the centrally planned economy (CPE)
— Introducing market reforms (in the sense of capitalist restoration)
16
MAX WEBER, 1 ECONOMY AND SOCIETY : AN OUTLINE OF INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGY 241
(Claus Wittich ed., 1978).
17
LINZ AND STEPAN, supra note 5 at 45.
18
WEBER, supra note 16 at 241.
19
Id. at 277.
20
SAXONBERG, supra note 4 at 272.
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MEXICAN LAW REVIEW106 Vol. IX, No. 2
However, I propose a third, intermediate theoretical solution that destabilises
the dilemma posed by Saxonberg and its presupposition that non-capitalist economic
formations are incompatible with market mechanisms. The third solution
would then be as follows: instead of having to choose between Soviet-style
orthodoxy and capitalist restoration, ideology itself may be modified in a manner that
redefines the boundaries of admissible economic action according to socialist ideas. In the language
of constructivist or discursive institutionalism, the alternative advanced here
implies that ideas can change and even shape political processes –as opposed to
the fixed nature of communist ideology in Saxonberg’s model.21
In other words, the rise of performance-based legitimacy in communist
polities does not inevitably lead to capitalism. A viable path is thus the
emergence of ‘market socialism’, which has been defined as “an attempt to
reconcile the advantages of the market as a system of exchange with social
ownership of the means of production”. 22
Curiously, although Saxonberg
has classified the Yugoslavia of the 1970s as a maturing post-totalitarian regime,
he has ruled out any market-socialist potential for any other case.23
Nonetheless,
this article argues that, within the decade following Raúl’s rise to power
in 2006, Cuba adopted a maturing, market socialist path. It is still premature,
however, to predict the fate of this path as it can get stuck or ‘frozen’ in Saxonberg’s
terms. This said, the regime’s bid is clear: bringing the market without
the formation of a capitalist class –a clear-cut market socialist approach.
In summary, if charismatic early post-totalitarian rule ‘runs out’ of charisma
(ergo, also the legitimacy granted by it), the regime will rapidly enter the
late stage –i.e. Saxonberg’s dilemma. If the regime responds to the new situation
by adopting a performance-based legitimation strategy (still) constrained by
socialist ideology, a likely outcome is a market-socialist style of post-totalitarian
maturation.
III. ADDRESSING CHANGE
In this section, I argue that the Cuban regime during the presidency of Raúl
Castro has experienced a ‘double political shift’ at the levels of leadership and
21
e.g. COLIN HAY, POLITICAL ANALYSIS (2002); Vivien A. Schmidt, Taking ideas and discourse
seriously: explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth “new institutionalism,” 2
EUROPEAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 1–25 (2010); ANDREAS GOFAS & COLIN HAY, THE ROLE OF
IDEAS IN POLITICAL ANALYSIS : A PORTRAIT OF CONTEMPORARY DEBATES (Routledge, 2010).
22
Market socialism, DICTIONARY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 294 (Craig J. Calhoun ed., 2002).
23
SAXONBERG, supra note 4 at 105. Yugoslavia’s ‘workers’ self-management’ embodied the
market-socialist paradigm of that time, distant from both CPE and capitalism, a point well
discussed by Sergej Flere & Rudi Klanjšek, Was Tito’s Yugoslavia totalitarian?, 47 COMMUNIST
AND POST-COMMUNIST STUDIES 237–245 (2014). For a seminal analysis of Yugoslavia’s political
economy, see Jean Michael Montias, Types of Communist Economic Systems, in CHANGE IN COMMUNIST
SYSTEMS 117–134 (Chalmers A. Johnson ed., 1970), https://goo.gl/hxFsjn (last visited
May 17, 2016).
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 107
ideology. On the one hand, I claim that the charismatic nature of the leadership
has been replaced by a collegial arrangement –i.e. Raúl Castro did not
become a patrimonial ruler. On the other hand, I hold that the orthodoxy
of CPE ideology has softened in favour of market-socialist solutions –i.e. the
regime is far from ‘freezing’. After discussing the changes in leadership and
ideology, in the next section I will address the relationship between them as
part of the transformation of the Cuban regime.
1. Leadership: from charisma to collegiality
When Fidel fell ill in July 2006, he provisionally delegated his posts of president
of the Council of State and first secretary of the PCC to his younger
brother Raúl –long-time head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR, in
Spanish) and second secretary of the PCC. This change would bring a new
era in the leadership of the Revolution.
Kapcia has cleverly described the Cuban leadership as an “onion”, “with
real power at the centre (an ‘inner circle’), outside which were layers of lesser
influence, weakening the further from the ‘core’ now went”.24
The nucleus
was, of course, the veteran mountain guerrilla, known in Cuba as the historical
generation (generación histórica) who fought in the Rebel Army that won the 1959
revolution.
For Mujal-León the inner circle resembled a charismatic community for
its “dependence and unswerving loyalty toward the comandante en jefe” –i.e. the
Commander-in-Chief, Fidel Castro, who was the unrivalled leader of the historical
generation from 1959 to 2006, and thus, of the elite ruling Cuba.25
Of course, this does not mean that charisma acted in an institutional vacuum
or that it was the sole political force. Fidel’s charismatic authority, as
Mujal-León and Busby have explained, “also had an institutional aspect of
which the PCC and the FAR have not been the only, but certainly the most
important tools”.26
In other words, the FAR and the PCC became the “two
main pillars” of the Cuban state – of which Fidel Castro remained “the key
figure”, as Klepak has put it.27
As charisma “in its pure form” only exists in
statu nascendi and thus it eventually undergoes a routinisation process –i.e. it must
24
ANTONI KAPCIA, LEADERSHIP IN THE CUBAN REVOLUTION : THE UNSEEN STORY 81 (Zed
Books Ltd, 2014).
25
Eusebio Mujal-León, Survival, adaptation and uncertainty: the case of Cuba, 65 JOURNAL OF
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 149–168, 154 (2011).
26
Eusebio Mujal-León & Lorena Buzón, El excepcionalismo y la trascendencia: el caso de las
relaciones civiles-militares en Cuba, in INFLUENCIAS Y RESISTENCIAS: MILITARES Y PODER EN AMÉRICA
LATINA 372 p., 35 (Felipe Agüero & Claudio Fuentes eds., 2009), http://library.georgetown.
edu/search/i?=9789563240405.
27
HAL KLEPAK, CUBA’S MILITARY 1990-2005 : REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIERS DURING COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
TIMES 51 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
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be either “traditionalised” or “legalised” according to Weber, the FAR-PCC
coalition may be seen as the legal-rational routinisation of Fidel’s charismatic
authority.28
Although during his provisional rule (2006-2008) Raúl did not reshape the
leadership, he did advance a more consultative decision-making style since
his first days in power.29
Later, after being appointed president in February
2008, he overhauled the top leadership. Between 2008 and 2009 Raúl dismantled
the Support Team of the Commander-in-Chief –also simply known as the
“Grupo de Apoyo– which acted as a “parallel structure of government that
answers to only [Fidel] Castro and is an extension of his power”.30
As part of
this move, Raúl Castro did not hesitate to fire the top leaders that owed their
careers to their service in the Grupo de Apoyo, such as vice-president Carlos
Lage and Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, whom had developed charismatic
claims to succession.31
After re-shaping, between 2008 and 2009, the leadership he inherited from
Fidel, Raúl would unveil his own approach to the succession question in April
2011, when he told the delegates of the Sixth Party Congress that it was “advisable
to recommend limiting the time of service in high political and State
positions to a maximum of two five-year terms”.32
Less than a year later, in
order “to prepare the gradual renovation of cadre”, term limits became the
official Party line. 33
As Weber explained, the “principle of collegiality […]
is usually derived from the interest in weakening the power of persons in
authority.”34
In this sense, term limits can be understood as a form of collegial
relation for the introduction of term limits attests to the intention of turning
to a more collective style of decision-making –as opposed to the undefined
duration of charismatic rule.35
28
WEBER, supra note 16 at 246.
29
MARC FRANK, CUBAN REVELATIONS : BEHIND THE SCENES IN HAVANA (University Press of
Florida, 2013); William LeoGrande, Cuba’s Perilous Political Transition to the Post-Castro Era, 47
JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES 377–405 (2015).
30
Armando F. Mastrapa, Equipo de Coordinacion y Apoyo al Comandante en Jefe: Cuba’s Parallel
Government?, 11 in CUBA IN TRANSITION 476–480, 476 (2001), http://goo.gl/OKc14l.
31
The contrast between the model of succession developed by the Grupo leaders, on the
one hand, and Raúl Castro and the históricos, on the other, has been extensively discussed in
Bert Hoffmann, Charismatic Authority and Leadership Change: Lessons from Cuba’s Post-Fidel Succession,
30 INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 229–248 (2009).
32
Raúl Castro, Central report to the 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, PORTAL CUBA,
April 16, 2011, http://ow.ly/TE0cs (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
33
PCC, OBJETIVOS DE TRABAJO DEL PARTIDO COMUNISTA DE CUBA APROBADOS POR LA PRIMERA
CONFERENCIA NACIONAL 7 (PCC ed., 2012), http://ow.ly/MX8Jx (last visited Jul 19, 2016).
34
WEBER, supra note 16 at 277.
35
The collegiality of term limits lies in the fact that the Cuban head of state will need a degree
of peers’ endorsement to secure a second period in office –i.e. he or she cannot be a monocratic
ruler, let alone a patrimonial one.
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 109
Advanced since 2011 by Raúl himself as a means of succession for him
and his generation of leaders, the new collegial arrangement is far from Saxonberg’s
review of the Cuban case, according to which “a successful [patrimonial]
succession took place within the ruling dynasty, as Fidel Castro’s
brother, Raúl, replaced him when he stepped down for health reasons.” 36
But
a different picture emerges at a closer look. Crucially, although the brotherly
bond between Fidel and Raúl was indeed “a vital resource […] in resolving
the issue of succession”, it was not a case of “a transfer of charisma by heredity”,
as Hoffmann has explained.37
Addressing the issue of succession, Raúl
discarded any transfer of Fidel’s charisma to the future as early as July 2006:
The special trust granted by the people to the founding leader of the Revolution
cannot be transmitted, as if it was an inheritance, to those who hold the
main leadership posts of the country in the future. The Commander-in-Chief
of the Cuban Revolution is one and only one, and only the Communist Party
[…] can be the worthy heir of the trust deposited by the people in its leader. 38
This solution defined Cuba’s succession problem, not in terms of who
would succeed this or any other leader, but which institutional order would
constrain any future leadership (principle of collegiality). Far from trying to
establish a Castro dynasty akin to the Kim’s in North Korea, Raúl said goodbye
to charismatic rule, advancing “a much more institutions-based model”
instead; in other words, “Raúl Castro’s thesis that the answer to succession is
institutionalization has carried the day”.39
To catch a glimpse of the conditions in which collegiality is expected to
operate after the historic generation is gone, it is worth it looking at the core team
since Raúl took over –those Politburo members with a seat on the Council
of State. If one looks at Table 1 and visualises the ‘core team’ without the
revolutionary veterans, what is left is a FAR-PCC collegial partnership that
will be led by someone different every five or ten years.
Table 1. Members of PCC Politburo with Joint Appointments to the Council of State
Status in the Council of State
Politburo member 2008a 2011b 2016c Background
Entrance/
Exit Polit-
buro
Raúl Castro Ruz President President President REV
36
SAXONBERG, supra note 4 at 109.
37
Hoffmann, supra note 31 at 243.
38
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado el 14 de junio de 2006, GRANMA, June 14, 2006, http://
ow.ly/GOCzu (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
39
Hoffmann, supra note 31 at 239, 242.
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MEXICAN LAW REVIEW110 Vol. IX, No. 2
José Ramón
Machado Ventura
1st VP 1st VP VP REV
Table 1. Members of PCC Politburo with Joint Appointments to the Council of State
Status in the Council of State
Politburo member 2008a 2011b 2016c Background
Entrance/
Exit Polit-
buro
Ramiro Valdés
Menéndez
VP (Dec
2009)
VP REV
Miguel DíazCanel
Bermúdez
1st VP
(Feb
2013)
PCC
Leopoldo Cintra
Frías
Member Member Member FAR
Salvador Mesa
Valdés
Member
VP (Feb
2013)
PCC
Alvaro López
Miera
Member Member FAR
Juan Almeida
Bosque
VP REV
Died in
2009
Julio Casas
Regueiro
VP VP REV
Died after
2011
election
José Ramón
Balaguer Cabrera
Member PCC
Not
reelected
in 2011
Esteban Lazo
Hernández
VP VP PCC
Not
reelected
in 2016
Carlos Lage
Dávila
VP GA-PCC
Removed
in 2009
Abelardo Colomé
Ibarra
VP VP FAR
Resigned
in 2015
Lázara Mercedes
López Acea
VP (Feb
2013)
PCC
Added in
2011
Jorge Marino
Murillo
Member Member FAR-TECH
Added in
2011
Bruno Eduardo
Rodríguez Parrilla
Member
PCC-
TECH
Added in
2012
Ulises Guilarte de
Nacimiento
Member PCC
Added in
2016
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 111
Miriam Nicado
García
Member TECH
Added in
2016
Table 1. Members of PCC Politburo with Joint Appointments to the Council of State
Status in the Council of State
Politburo member 2008a 2011b 2016c Background
Entrance/
Exit Polit-
buro
Teresa Amarelle
Boué
Member PCC
Added in
2016
Key: VP = Vice President; REV = Revolutionary Generation; FAR = Military;
PCC = Cuban Communist Party; GA= Support Group of the Commander-in-Chief;
TECH = Technocrat.
Sources: Granma and Juventud Rebelde; data for 2011 taken from Mujal-León.1
a Membership at the moment Raúl Castro took over as President in February
2008.
b Membership as of September 2011.
c Membership as of August 2016.
40
After 2011, the core team experienced some changes that underpinned the
collegiality of the Cuban leadership. In February 2013, during the National
Assembly that confirmed his second and last presidential term, Raúl Castro
ratified: “this will be my last term”.41
In that same event, the promotion of
Miguel Díaz-Canel to First Vice President of the Council of State signalled
the first time ever that a revolutionary veteran did not hold that position.42
The end of Raúl Castro’s presidency in 2018, ceteris paribus, will then bring
to the fore the FAR-PCC coalition: the true successor (not a dynasty) of the
Castro era. Paradoxically, the Seventh Party Congress (April 2016) still elected
Raúl Castro and José Ramón Machado, First Secretary and Second Secretary
of the PCC, respectively. While this means that the revolutionary veterans
will still control key posts after 2018, it will also be the first time that the
head of the Party and the head of the State is not the same person. All things
considered, between the Sixth and the Seventh Party Congress –i.e. between
2011 and 2016– the nascent collegiality of the Cuban leadership was rein-
40
Mujal-León, supra note 25 at 161.
41
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado el 24 de febrero de 2013, CUBADEBATE, February 24, 2013,
http://goo.gl/ADKMOj (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
42
According to the Cuban constitution, if the President dies, the First Vice-President
takes over. Explaining the promotion of Díaz-Canel to First Vice President, Raúl Castro acknowledged
that this decision represented “a defining step in the configuration of the future
leadership of the country” –see Id.
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forced through measures that seek or serve “to prevent the rise of monocratic
power”, to repeat Weber’s words.43
The Cuban case has thus moved closer to
the institutional pluralism typical of the post-totalitarian ideal regime-type. 44
Another new outcome of the Seventh Party Congress has been the rise of
non-revolutionary veterans and non-FAR individuals to the core team –between
2008 and 2016 they grew from three to seven. Of them, six have careers
in the PCC –of which four have been provincial Party leaders (Díaz-Canel,
Mesa, López, and Boué). Thus, provincial party leadership has emerged as
a desired promotion’s criterion to the top. 45
Whether the PCC or the FAR
will fill the future vacancies left by the revolutionary veterans will define the
precise terms of the FAR-PCC partnership in the post-Castro era.
2. Ideology: from CPE to market socialism
Kong has classified the economic strategies of the surviving Communist systems
into three different types: 1) ‘mono-transition’ (China and Vietnam), 2)
‘cautious reform’ (Cuba), and 3) ‘ultra-cautious reform’ (North Korea).46
For
him, ‘mono-transition’ refers to a capitalist restoration under the same political
regime –as opposed to East European countries that experienced the ‘dual
transition’ of capitalist restoration and regime change. In contrast, the “cautious
reform strategy seeks to alleviate the problems of the centrally planned
economy (CPE) while resisting transformation towards a market economy”.47
Finally, the ‘ultra-cautious’ approach seeks “to restore the CPE by limited market
measures“–hence the term refers to the stubbornness of an orthodox CPE.48
To build the definition of cautious reform in Cuba, Kong mainly refers to the
economic reforms of the 1990s, though things have changed since then. According
to Mesa Lago, 1991-1996 was indeed a period of ‘pragmatic’ policies,
followed by a period of stagnation (1997-2003) and then by an ‘idealistic’ reversal
of the reform (2003-2006).49
As for the presidency of Raúl Castro, the
reformist path has not only resumed but also taken to a higher level. If the
challenge for Cuban policymakers in the early 1990s was defined in terms of
resisting the collapse of the Soviet Union (and its subsidies), since 2006 the
self-imposed task has been to fix the economic model itself.
Raúl Castro has thus unleashed a new ‘pragmatic’ cycle of economic
policy, the “strongest under the revolution.” 50
Updating Kong’s words, it
43
WEBER, supra note 16 at 277.
44
LINZ AND STEPAN, supra note 5 at 44–45.
45
This pattern had already been proposed in Mujal-León, supra note 25.
46
Tat Yan Kong, The political obstacles to economic reform in North Korea: The ultra cautious strategy
in comparative perspective, 27 THE PACIFIC REVIEW 73–96 (2014).
47
Id. at 73.
48
Id. at 74.
49
CARMELO MESA LAGO, CUBA EN LA ERA DE RAÚL CASTRO (Colibrí, 2012).
50
Id. at 25.
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 113
would be more precise to say that the Cuban regime has resumed the cautious
reform by turning to market socialism ideas –an approach that, as I argue in this
article, seeks to reconcile the CPE model with the market under the social
ownership of the means of production.
In hindsight, Cuba’s ideological overhaul started with Raúl Castro’s first
major speech as provisional head of state. On that occasion, he criticised
how the country was run economically and sad that “structural and conceptual
changes” were necessary.51
However, it was not until late 2009 that Raúl
summarised his enterprise with a catchphrase: “the update of the Cuban
economic model.”52
A few months later, he explained what he meant by “update”
or “upgrade” (actualización, in Spanish):
We are convinced that we need to break away from dogma and assume firmly
and confidently the ongoing upgrading of our economic model in order to set
the foundations of the irreversibility of Cuban socialism and its development.53
This quote shows the compromise between change and orthodoxy articulated
by the upgrade-of-the-economic-model formulation –a compromise between
reform (“we need to break away from dogma”) and the respect of principles
(“the irreversibility of Cuban socialism”). Although this tension has marked
the presidency of Raúl Castro, it has functioned as a middle way solution
between the two main economic visions within the elite: the Soviet-style one
and the pro-market approach.54
To be sure, the largest expansion of non-state activity in socialist Cuba has
occurred under Raúl Castro. For example, 71% of the workers employed in
2015 were state employees, in contrast to 80% in 2007.55
Since 2008, more
than 1.58 million hectares of idle land have been transferred to non-state
actors by January 2014, and the number of (mostly urban) self-employed
workers has grown from 141 600 to half million in 2015.56
In a country with
51
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado el 26 de julio del 2007, GRANMA, July 26, 2007, http://
ow.ly/L27xz (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
52
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado el 20 de diciembre de 2009, PORTAL CUBA, December 20,
2009, http://ow.ly/TE1YH (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
53
Raúl Castro, Speech delivered on April 4, 2010, PORTAL CUBA, April 4, 2010, http://ow.ly/
TE1ld (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
54
For an analysis of these visions, see Camila Piñeiro Piñeiro Harnecker, Cuba’s New Socialism:
Different Visions Shaping Current Changes, 40 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 107–125 (2013).
55
ONEI, ANUARIO ESTADÍSTICO DE CUBA 2015 (2016), http://www.one.cu/aec2015.htm
(last visited Jul 21, 2016), Table 7.2; ONE, ANUARIO ESTADÍSTICO DE CUBA 2010 (2011), http://
www.one.cu/aec2010/esp/07_tabla_cuadro.htm (last visited Oct 25, 2015), Table 7.2.
56
Yaima Puig Meneses, Entrega de tierras en usufructo: al compás de la actualización, GRANMA,
January 17, 2014, http://ow.ly/TPr1r (last visited Oct 26, 2015); ONE, supra note 55; ONEI,
supra note 55. By January 2016, the land transferred downsized to 1.4 million hectares enjoyed
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6.2 million hectares of agricultural land and a total workforce of five million
people,these changes are far from trivial.57
A major step in ‘updating’ the economy came in August 2010 when Raúl
Castro announced the restructuring of the Cuban labour –self-employment
being hailed as an alternative to soon-to-be-fired state employees.58
As a result,
the self-employed were no longer portrayed as a necessary evil –top PCC
leaders called them piranhas in the 1990s– and Granma even condemned such
stigmatisation.59
At this point, “Raúl Castro and his associates obviously felt
that they had arrived at a critical juncture and needed the endorsement of
the highest party institution to strengthen their hand.”60
As a result, the call
for the Sixth Party Congress was issued, with the Guidelines of Social and Economic
Policy as the only document of the meeting agenda, which was first
discussed in the grassroots inside and outside the Party.
The document had 291 paragraphs sketching future reforms in all sectors
of the economy. Although “the document sometimes read like a laundry list
that lacked strategic vision”,61
the rudiments of CPE-market love can still be
perceived. The guideline that most explicitly elaborated the departure from
CPE orthodoxy was the first one, which stated that in the new socialism of
Cuba, “planning would take the market into account, influencing upon it
and considering its characteristics.” 62
Although this is rather a clumsy engagement
with the market –treating it as an alien from outer space whose
features are yet to be discovered– it epitomises the ideological hardships of
the Party in coming to terms with the ‘update’ of Cuban socialism. In spite
by 279 021 tenants; see Granma, Inician en Cuba análisis del uso y tenencia de tierras en usufructo,
OPCIONES, January 25, 2016, http://goo.gl/i4RxcN (last visited Jul 21, 2016).
57
ONEI, supra note 55, Tables 7.1 and 9.1. There have been other changes, such as greater
autonomy of state enterprises, the growth of urban co-ops, and a friendlier law for foreign investment.
However, I do not intend to analyse the economic reforms undertaken since 2006
as this theme that has been much analysed by others. Instead, this article aims to capture and
define the ideological change informing the reform –i.e. the revision of the previous economic
strategy and the contours of the new one. Some relevant works that have assessed the Cuban
economic reform are: MESA LAGO, supra note 49; MIRADAS A LA ECONOMÍA CUBANA: ENTRE
LA EFICIENCIA Y LA EQUIDAD SOCIAL, (Omar E. Pérez Villanueva & Ricardo Torres Pérez eds.,
2013); ARCHIBALD R. M. RITTER & TED A. HENKEN, ENTREPRENEURIAL CUBA : THE CHANGING
POLICY LANDSCAPE (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014).
58
Raúl Castro, Discurso a la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, GRANMA, August 2, 2010,
at 4–5.
59
John Rice, Cuban Official Attacks Capitalism, ASSOCIATED PRESS, November 27, 1997,
http://ow.ly/KE3Fg (last visited Mar 22, 2015); Leticia Martínez Hernández, Mucho más que
una alternativa, GRANMA, September 24, 2010, at 3.
60
SAMUEL FARBER, CUBA SINCE THE REVOLUTION OF 1959: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT 279
(Haymarket Books, 2011).
61
Mujal-León, supra note 25 at 157.
62
PCC, LINEAMIENTOS DE LA POLÍTICA ECONÓMICA Y SOCIAL DEL PARTIDO Y LA REVOLUCIÓN
(2011), guideline 1.
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 115
of these tensions, the second guideline was more confident in championing
foreign investment, co-ops, private farmers, and self-employment as partners
of “the socialist state enterprise” –defined as the “main form of the national
economy”– in the quest for “efficiency”.63
The year after the Sixth Party Congress, and as a product of it, the then
three-year-old upgrade-of-the-economic-model notion was entwined with a newborn
concept: prosperous-and-sustainable-socialism, which was born in December
2012.64
The new notion was not fully shaped, however, until July 2013, when
it was ingrained in the ideological framework advanced by Raúl Castro up to
that point. The journey away from CPE orthodoxy had finally turned into a
passage towards market socialism:
[T]he implementation of the Lineamientos […] approved by the Sixth Congress
[…] [is] the main task of all of us, because the preservation and development
of socialism in Cuba depends on its success. A prosperous and
sustainable socialism that ratifies the social property of the fundamental
means of production and acknowledges the role of other, non-state, forms of
management at the same time […] [A socialism that] reaffirms planning as
an indispensable tool in directing the economy, without denying the existence
of the market. 65
The market had been pardoned, but not capitalism yet. The rise of selfemployment
was not the return of the bourgeoisie –i.e. a class of large proprietors
of means of production, as opposed to small businesses. However, it
is clear that times had changed. Non-state economic activity has never been
this size under the Revolution.
Figure 1 summarises the ideological vicissitudes of Cuba in Raúl Castro’s
time in office. In hindsight, the period between 2006 and 2008 was in preparation
for what would come next. Once Raúl was firmly in power, he championed
the need to ‘update’ the economy with increasing confidence from
2009 to 2011, when his revolt reached its climax at the Sixth Party Congress.
After this turning point, market socialism started to emerge and be acted
upon according to the idea that prosperity was essential for the sustainability of
Cuban socialism. In toto, the market was no longer the enemy, but a junior
partner of central planning.
63
Id., guideline 2.
64
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado el 13 de diciembre de 2012, CUBADEBATE, December 13,
2012, http://ow.ly/Sd79Q (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
65
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado el 7 de julio, PORTAL CUBA, July 7, 2013, http://ow.ly/
TYlMk (last visited Jul 19, 2016).
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The Seventh Party Congress kept on the market socialist path of ideological
change but also acknowledged the slow pace of economic reform. Raúl
Castro informed that only 21% of the Guidelines approved in 2011 had been
fully implemented, 77% were in process, and 2% had not yet started.66
However,
the 2016 Congress also approved a Conceptualisation Project of the Cuban
Economic and Social Model of Socialist Development, which attempted to provide a
long-term strategic direction to the reform process approved five years ear-
lier.67
This document turned into Party doctrine the notion that “the strategic
goal of the Model [that will emerge from the updating process] is to drive
and consolidate the construction of a prosperous and sustainable socialist
society.”68
In market socialist terms, the Conceptualisation Project also insisted:
“the State recognises and integrates the market into the functioning of the
system of planned direction of the economy.” 69
IV. EXPLAINING CHANGE
In the preceding section, I discussed how the leadership and ideology of the Cuban
regime have changed during the presidency of Raúl Castro.
As I have been at pains to demonstrate, such changes can be defined as
follows:
66
Raúl Castro, Informe Central al VII Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba, CUBADEBATE,
April 16, 2016, http://goo.gl/Qh4FIi (last visited Aug 7, 2016).
67
In terms of long-term planning, it is revealing that the Conceptualisation Project was accompanied
by a National Plan of Economic and Social Development until 2030.
68
PCC, PROYECTO DE CONCEPTUALIZACIÓN DEL MODELO ECONÓMICO Y SOCIAL CUBANO DE
DESARROLLO SOCIALISTA 6 (2016), http://goo.gl/hpOj3h (last visited Aug 8, 2016).
69
Id. at 7.
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 117
— from charismatic to collegial leadership; and
— from CPE to market-socialist ideology.
In this section I will discuss the relationship between both variations and
their combined effect in the development of the Cuban regime within the
same timeframe. A key claim of this article is that the rise of market-socialist
ideology is, to a substantial extent, an effect of the decline of charismatic
authority.
1. Regime-type development
All Raúl´s speeches in Cuba are both transmitted on national TV and
reproduced next day in Granma and/or Juventud Rebelde. Such speeches do not
only intend to help Cubans make sense of political developments in the country,
they are also the public face of the regime’s political moves. As “the mode
of exercising authority” is conditioned by “the kind of legitimacy which is
claimed”, it is not an insignificant political development when such claims
vary in any regime.70
In the case of Cuba under Raúl Castro, I argue that
there has occurred a variation in the legitimation strategy of the regime –a
process indicated, albeit indirectly, by Figure 2.
70
WEBER, supra note 16 at 213.
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Although Figure 2 only deals with only one person’s speeches, such a person
is the head of the Cuban party-state –hence his political weight shall not
be underestimated. I took all Raúl Castro’s speeches delivered in Cuba since
2008 and coded them according to key terms that stand for one or another
legitimation strategy –“Fidel” for charismatic, and “economía” (economy, in
English) for performance-based.71
Then I disaggregated this data by year and
compared their relative incidence.
When the ratio shown in Figure 2 is < 1, it means that Raúl Castro mentioned
‘Fidel’ more times than the ‘economy’ in that single year in his speeches
in Cuba.Using this index, it can be argued that before the 2011 Party Congress,
charismatic claims prevailed over economic-based ones, while the opposite
was true afterwards.72
In 2008, “Fidel” was mentioned 45 times and
the “economy” 17 times. Meanwhile, in 2015 the numbers changed to 4 and
11, respectively. The exception to this trend was 2013, when Raúl’s presidency
was renewed for five more (and final) years and the commemoration of
the 60th anniversary of the attack to the Moncada barracks on the 26th of
July took place. In this latter event, which marks the beginning of the Cuban
revolution, Raúl praised his brother’s Fidel legacy to the socialist system,
mentioning him on twelve occasions (from a total of twenty-three that year).73
As I have already discussed, Raúl Castro reformed the leadership before
reforming the economy. It is significant, nonetheless, that this shift in political
concerns was accompanied by a decline of the Fidel Castro’s persona in public
discourse as a token of the state policies’ legitimacy. Thus, if Raúl asked
the National Assembly permission to ‘consult’ everything with Fidel when
the former was elected president in 2008, in his re-election –five years later–
he reminded the National Assembly that state authority emanated from the
‘people’ according to the constitution. 74
71
This approach is based on the premise that the political salience of the succession question
vis-à-vis the economic reform across time can be grasped through Raúl Castro’s political
choices as he explains them to both the elite and the lay public. In other words, I have assumed
that a change in the claims to legitimacy of any regime leaves discursive footprints in the
speeches of key actors, such as the head of state.
72
An equivalent pattern to the one shown in Figure 2 appears if, instead of the term
‘economía’, one aggregates into one indicator the appearances of the keywords of Cuban
economic reform (‘Lineamientos’, ‘actualización del modelo’, and ‘socialismo próspero y sostenible’).
A more concise approach was then to focus on the term ‘economía’, even if it is not
an obvious invocation of a legitimacy based on performance –as ‘Fidel’ clearly is in regards
to charisma.
73
Although Figure 2 is not a conclusive ‘test’, the pattern displayed in it suggests –rather
than ‘proves’– that Raúl Castro changed how he accounts for his right to rule, initially stressing
Fidel’s endorsement, and then promising economic results. I have defined this change as a shift
from charismatic to performance-based legitimacy.
74
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado en las conclusiones de la sesión constitutiva de la VII Legislatura
de la ANPP, GRANMA, February 24, 2008, http://ow.ly/GOI7J (last visited Aug 1, 2016); Castro,
supra note 41. In order to legitimise his rule, Raúl felt the need to rely on Fidel’s charismatic
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When compared to concerns on the succession question, the intensification
of political concern on the economy suggests a political re-equilibration
of the regime –i.e. the rise of market socialism took the toil of the decline of
charismatic legitimacy. From a regime-type perspective, from 2006 to 2015
Cuba may be said to have changed from a charismatic early post-totalitarian regime
to a maturing post-totalitarian one. This change can be analytically divided
into two distinct stages:
1. from a ‘charismatic’ to a ‘typical’ early post-totalitarian regime; and
2. from the latter equilibrium to a maturing post-totalitarian regime.
Although both processes were empirically intertwined and coetaneous to
some extent, each represents a different link in the political causal chain.
The first process is mostly related to the change in the type of leadership. As
discussed, Raúl Castro’s answer to the succession problem after Fidel stepped
down was the introduction of collegiality, as the approval of term-limits attest.
Such a change marked the post-totalitarian normalisation of the Cuban
leadership, as opposed to the typically totalitarian charisma. Therefore, the
charismatic early post-totalitarian regime moved closer to the early post-totalitarian
ideal type. As a result, the dissipation of charisma confronted the
regime with the need to restore the deficit of legitimacy caused by the end of
this old source. As early as 2009, Hoffmann had sensed that sooner or later
the regime would have to sort out this predicament:
In the short run, the successor government can claim legitimacy based on
the formal succession; in the medium term, however, it will have to seek new
sources of support and legitimacy of its own. Economic performance will
be crucial, and Raúl’s calls for economic reforms –however limited their implementation
has been so far– seem to signal that the new leadership is very
much aware of this. 75
This argument can be taken a bit further. As the next generation of leaders
–expected to take over in 2018– will not have the same legitimacy as the founding
fathers of communist Cuba, let alone Fidel Castro, the upcoming biological
end of the revolutionary veterans still in power has added an extra dose of
difficulty to the problem of revamping the legitimacy of the regime. Hence
Raúl Castro’s challenge has not only been to make his presidency stand on
solid ground, but also to do so in such a manner that the new equilibrium of
the political system will endure after he leaves. In other words, the revolutionary
veterans –still the ‘inner circle’ of the leadership– have showed a strong
authority in the 2008 speech, while he sought the same effect in the 2013 speech through
different means, namely the emphasis on the legality of his rule. In fact, Raúl mentioned
Fidel seventeen times in 2008, far more than the five times he was mentioned in 2013, when
performance –i.e. the ‘updating’ of the economic model– was already the kernel of Raúl’s
legitimacy.
75
Hoffmann, supra note 31 at 243.
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interest in the survival of the system they devoted their life to. This biographical
feature of the elite is perhaps what ultimately explains the rejection
of capitalist restoration in Raúl’s economic reform. Of course, it is still to be
seen how long this anti-capitalist limit will survive the “históricos” if it does.
The second process (maturation) is related to the change in the type of
ideology. The new post-totalitarian equilibrium rapidly evolved from the early
to the late stage, in which the regime was fully confronted with its economic
failures –Fidel was no longer a safety belt. Raúl responded this problem with
another switch: he gave up the freezing path he inherited from Fidel (the
last ‘idealist’ cycle) and adopted a maturing direction. Raúl explicitly admitted
that the economic focus of the Sixth Party Congress expressed the inner
circle’s answer to the question of communist survival in Cuba:
The Sixth Party Congress should be, as a fact of life, the last to be attended by
most of us who belong to the Revolution’s historical generation. The time we
have left is short, the task that lies ahead of us is gigantic, and […] I think we
have the obligation of taking advantage of the power of our moral authority
among the people to trace out the route to be followed and resolve some other
important problems. […] [W]e strongly believe that we have the elemental
duty to rectify the mistakes that we have made all along these five decades during
which we have been building socialism in Cuba. 76
This quote, which confirms the extent to which the generational succession
was linked to the problem of political survival, also reveals that the “moral
authority” of the revolutionary veterans was being used to make Cuba stand
on more solid ground after Fidel’s charisma was lost. It was perceived as necessary
“to trace out the route to be followed”, which the Congress did by
approving the economic Lineamientos that turned the initial relaxation of CPE
orthodoxy into nascent market socialism.
Later, at the end of a 2012 Party Conference –with the new leadership and
ideology already flourishing, Raúl assessed the new political situation: “the
route has been traced.”77
Indeed, it had. Here the perspective of legitimacy
helps to understand why the economic reform was necessary in the first place.
It was needed, in Saxonberg’s terms, in order “to reach some sort of social
contract with the population in order to induce it to ‘pragmatically accept’
that given certain external and internal constraints, the regime is performing reasonably
well”.78
In other words, the turn to a performance-based legitimacy had been
completed. The Sixth Party Congress thus resulted in Cuba definitely adopting
a maturing path, as opposed to a freezing one of CPE obstinacy.
76
Raúl Castro, Speech delivered on December 18th, 2010, PORTAL CUBA, December 18, 2010,
http://ow.ly/TDZM9 (last visited Oct 20, 2015).
77
Raúl Castro, Discurso pronunciado en la clausura de la Primera Conferencia Nacional del PCC,
CUBADEBATE, January 21, 2012, http://ow.ly/ReBQd (last visited Oct 21, 2015).
78
SAXONBERG, supra note 4 at 18.
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 121
Cuba’s maturing path, nonetheless, differed from Saxonberg’s scheme in
that there was no abandonment of socialist ideology, let alone a capitalist
restoration (e.g. proper large-scale privatisations of means of production).
Conversely, Cuba underwent an ideological renewal (an ‘update’ in Raúl’s
words) in order to reconcile the socialist claims of the regime with economic
performance (via the market), now turned into a naked test –i.e. the ‘Fidel
card’ could no longer be played– to the regime’s legitimacy.
2. Cuba in (brief) comparative perspective
In order to appreciate the peculiarity (if any) of Cuba’s evolution, it makes
sense to look at this case from a comparative perspective. To be sure, I do not
intend to present an exhaustive comparison, which may well worth a specific
endeavour. My aim is more modest: to place the characterisation advanced in
this paper within the literature on the survival of contemporary communist
systems in order to grasp the Cuban transition.
Figure 3 presents a comparison of the communist survivors at present,
presupposing that only Cuba has changed its type of leadership and ideology
since 2006. From this scheme, it follows that Cuba was more similar to North
Korea than to China and Vietnam when Fidel Castro stepped down, but after
eight years the opposite is true.
FIGURE 3. LEADERSHIP AND IDEOLOGY IN SURVIVING
COMMUNIST SYSTEMS, 2016
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I do not mean that Kim Jong-Il (the North Korean leader at the time) was
as ‘charismatic’ as Fidel Castro in the sense that both leaders had the same
personal charm. All I assume is that both were treated as if their policies were
infallible –i.e. as charismatic leaders. When Kim Jong-Il took over after his
father died in 1997, his key claim to legitimacy was based on the premise that
“the cause of the great leader” had been passed to him –in this case, the cause
of the founding leader of North Korea’s regime, Kim Il-Sung. 79
In other
words, the North Korean solution to the “problem of succession” adopted
“the conception that charisma is a quality transmitted by heredity”.80
As if
to mimic Weber’s theory, the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea also explained
that (when the time comes) the great leader (whoever she or he may be) is
in charge of “designating the people’s leader who possesses extraordinarily
personality and qualities as the successor”.81
In regards to ideology, although Cuba under Fidel oscillated between
‘idealist cycles’ and ‘pragmatic cycles’, the latter were tactical retreats as a
rule. Hence the market was tolerated rather than accepted. In that sense,
Cuba was closer to North Korea, although their actual economic approaches
differed. By 2006, both countries had lived a period of economic reforms
(North Korea in 1999-2005, and Cuba in 1991-1996), which were later
curbed. In comparison, though, North Korea’s reforms had been more re-
strictive.82
As for China and Vietnam, I assume that upon the death of their founding
leaders (respectively, Mao Zedong in 1976, and Ho Chi Minh in 1969)
both regimes adopted sooner rather than later a collegial type of leadership.
By 2016, Raúl Castro had established the same type of leadership, although
it can be argued that as one of the founders of the regime, his presence still
entails a dose of charismatic legitimacy as part of the históricos. If Kim IlSung
had opted for a hereditary succession to avoid the messy post-Stalin and
post-Mao successions,83
Raúl has tried to pre-empt any disorder by instituting
collegiality within the históricos’ lifetime –an original route.
China and Vietnam eventually reformed the Soviet-style CPE through
market reforms that later restored (a state-led) capitalism: China since 1979
led by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping; and Vietnam since 1987-88 when
the war with the United States was over (in 1975) and the confluence of
Gorbachev’s perestroika and Deng’s reforms in China convinced the Vietnamese
leadership of a change.84
79
KYO DUK LEE, THE SUCCESSOR THEORY OF NORTH KOREA 27–29 (Y n’guw n Minjok
T’ongil ed., 2004).
80
WEBER, supra note 16 at 248.
81
LEE, supra note 79 at 26.
82
Kong, supra note 46.
83
Id.; Ji You, China’s Reaction to the North Korean Succession Crisis, 8 CHINA BRIEF, 2008, http://
ow.ly/Redxf (last visited Jul 19, 2016).
84
Pierre Brocheux, Reflections On Vietnam, NEW LEFT REVIEW 73–91 (2012).
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 123
While capitalism has been restored in China and Vietnam and the CPE
is still firmly entrenched in North Korea, Cuba is located somewhere in
between. Although Cuba’s current economic ideology is classified in Figure
3 as being closer to China and Vietnam than to North Korea, the difference
between ‘medium’ and ‘high’ market acceptance is a substantial one for the
latter presupposes a comeback of the bourgeoisie –an ideological limit that has
not yet been lifted in the Caribbean case.
Raúl Castro has even implied that the difference of Cuba’s path from that
of China and Vietnam is that the former has kept its communist –i.e. anti-capitalist–
commitment:
The introduction of demand and supply rules is not at odds with the principle
of planning. Both concepts can coexist and complement each other […] as has
been successfully demonstrated in the processes of reform in China and renovation
in Vietnam, as they call them. We have called it [our process] updating because
we are not changing the key goal of the Revolution.85
I would then distinguish two degrees of maturation: ‘minor’ and ‘major’
–each one in turn informing and conditioning correlated economic strategies.
Closer to the early post-totalitarian stage, a ‘minor’ maturation implies
an ideological adjustment that has not broken the standard Marxist stance
against the private property of means of production. If this principle is compared
to a taboo then a ‘major’ maturation occurs when the taboo is broken,
hence annulling the key Marxist anti-capitalist principle –as in contemporary
China and Vietnam. If sparked as a regime’s response to the dissipation of
charisma, any maturing trend, either minor or major, is another confirmation
that charismatic decline has turned economic performance into the main
concern of the regime –i.e. its main challenge to legitimacy.
V. CONCLUSIONS
According to Linz, in the work he co-authored with Stepan they limited “to
distinguishing post-totalitarian regimes from both authoritarian regimes and
the previous totalitarian regime. We did not enter into a detailed analysis of
the change from totalitarianism to post-totalitarianism, although we did point
to different paths and degrees of change.”86
Meanwhile, Saxonberg added a
stringent framework to explain such a change and the rationale behind the
different post-totalitarian paths. While I found his analytical contribution a
powerful foundation to build on, I reapplied his framework to the Cuban
case when doing so, in order to rectify a characterisation that I sensed was
contradicted by reality.
85
Castro, supra note 66. The highlights are mine.
86
LINZ, supra note 11 at 6.
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I then discarded and endeavoured to replace Saxonberg’s explanation of
the post-totalitarian evolution of Cuban communism. For him, Cuba (even
under Raúl Castro) is a freezing post-totalitarian regime mixing patrimonial
elements. I thus contended that, focusing on the period between 2006 and
2016, Cuba was neither patrimonial nor a freezing regime. On the one
hand, I argued that the leadership of the Cuban regime had been charismatic,
and then demonstrated that in the transition from Fidel to Raúl, the latter
turned to collegiality. Then I established that market-socialist ideology had been
ingrained in the Cuban approach to the CPE model, which is what I call a
maturing path. Besides, I also demonstrated that the change in the type of
leadership and ideology of the Cuban regime was caused by the re-equilibration
of its claims to legitimacy.
In conclusion, Cuba under Raúl Castro has experienced a minor maturation
after the Cuban regime entered the late post-totalitarian stage due to the loss
of charisma. The ideological redefinition of admissible anti-capitalist economic
policies managed to retain socialist claims to legitimacy (typical of the
early stage) while developing market-based claims (typical of the late stage). This
political tension is likely to mark the beginning of the post-Castro era, which
is expected to start in 2018.
To position the contribution of this article within the existing literature,
Table 2 proposes an updated classification of the surviving communist systems.
TABLE 2. ECONOMIC STRATEGY AND REGIME-TYPE
OF SURVIVING COMMUNIST SYSTEMS
Economic strategy Regime type
China,
Vietnam
Capitalist restoration Maturing post-totalitarian
Cuba * Market socialism * Maturing post-totalitarian
North
Korea
Centrally planned economy
Totalitarian (mixed with patrimonial
rule)
87
SOURCES: Apart from Cuba, the economic strategies and the regime-types were
classified according to the characterisations of Kong and Saxonberg, respectively.1
* This is the argument developed in this article
In order to explain the evolution of China and Vietnam, Saxonberg had
asserted that:
87
Kong, supra note 46; SaXONBERG, supra note 4.
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THE CUBAN REGIME AFTER A DECADE OF RAÚL CASTRO IN POWER 125
In some cases (China and Vietnam), the very economic success of reforms
undermines the ideological legitimacy of the regime, since it has now become
obvious that the reforms were based on the introduction of a capitalist market
system, rather than on any kind of “socialist” alternative. 88
As Saxonberg’s theory is based on the assumption that “any kind of “socialist”
alternative” is impossible, he has only admitted two possible political
paths:
[I]t seems communist countries have had to choose between either losing their
ideological legitimacy by sticking to their ideology and having it fail, or giving
up their ideology in order to meet their economic goals. 89
This is what I call Saxonberg’s dilemma in section 2. The Cuban regime has
escaped this dilemma as it neither has stuck to its ideology nor given up on
it, which has implications when characterising the type of regime. On the
one hand, its ideological departure from anti-market CPE precluded a freezing
path. On the other, an orientation to performance-based legitimacy faithful
to socialist ideology is still far from the current Chinese or Vietnamese capitalist
maturing path. This is why Cuba’s peculiar path may be well defined as a
post-totalitarian regime maturing in a market-socialist direction.
The Cuban regime, however, has curtailed the democratic potential of the
market socialist path. In a rough comparison Cuba with the Yugoslav case,
the ‘workers’ self-management’ effort is absent in the former. If the authoritarian
path persists in Cuba, so will the threat of capitalist restoration.90
For
example, the new co-op legislation has suppressed the democratic potential
of the co-op’s General Assembly because its President is legally treated as if
s/he were “a supreme figure” – perhaps “an extrapolation of the leadership’s
schemes of the state sector.” 91
Based on this legal ambiguity, some de facto
privatisations have been disguised as conversions of small state businesses
into urban co-ops, such as the “La Divina Pastora” restaurant in the tourist
area of Morro Castle in Havana.92
However, whether this case of Cuban-style
88
SAXONBERG, supra note 4 at 31.
89
Id. at 272.
90
Camila Piñeiro Piñeiro Harnecker, Nonstate Enterprises in Cuba Building Socialism?, 41 LATIN
AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 113–128 (2014).
91
Natacha Teresa Mesa Tejeda, Reflexiones críticas en torno a la regulación de las cooperativas no
agropecuarias en Cuba, BOLETÍN DE LA ASOCIACIÓN INTERNACIONAL DE DERECHO COOPERATIVO
227–243, 238 (2014). For Cuban co-op’s legislation, see CONSEJO DE ESTADO, DECRETO-LEY
NO. 305. DE LAS COOPERATIVAS NO AGROPECUARIAS 249–253 (2012).
92
Miriam Celaya, La conjura de “La Divina Pastora,” DIARIO DE CUBA, September 30, 2013,
http://goo.gl/i2XjIE (last visited Apr 11, 2015); Marc Frank & Rosa Tania Valdés, Cuba looks
to cooperatives to slow rise of capitalism, REUTERS, April 14, 2014, http://ow.ly/PdM0L (last visited
Nov 4, 2015).
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spontaneous privatisation is an isolated case or part of a wider phenomenon is still
unknown and thus a (disquieting) matter of speculation.
To summarise, the market socialist approach seeks to reconcile the CPE with
the market without restoring capitalism. I have also argued that Cuba belongs
to the same type of regime as China and Vietnam, although it has a different
economic strategy. Indeed, while these two Asian cases have long adopted a
maturing path, in Cuba this kind of political development has just started.
Will Cuba catch up with China and Vietnam? This is, of course, a matter
for future consideration, which the post-Castro leadership will most certainly
undertake.
Received: June 15, 2016.
Accepted: July 5, 2016.
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