Will History Absolve Fidel Castro?

The legacy of Cubas socialist revolution is still very much in doubt.

BY WILLIAM M. LEOGRANDE

NOVEMBER 26, 2016

On trial in 1953 for leading a rebel attack on the Moncada military garrison in Santiago de Cuba, Fidel Castro, then
a young lawyer, concluded his own defense by declaring, Condemn me. It does not matter. History with absolve
me. Now that the 90-year-old patriarch of Cuba has died, the time for historys judgment has arrived.

Its tempting to echo Zhou Enlai, who, when asked in 1972 what impact the French Revolution had on Western
civilization, famously replied, It is too early to say. Certainly, in Fidels case and everyone called him Fidel,
even his enemies the broad outlines of his legacy are clear enough. By his own account, he made a revolution
in pursuit of two goals: to gain real independence for Cuba, freeing it from the political and economic tutelage of
the United States; and to introduce a measure of social justice to Cubas deeply corrupt and unequal social order.
Somewhere in his intellectual development his own accounts of when varied over the years he decided that
the only road leading to these goals was socialism. He kept that insight to himself as he led a nationalist, antiauthoritarian revolution to triumph over the Batista regime in 1959. Perhaps he was mindful of his hero, Cubas
founding father Jos Mart, who once wrote, To achieve certain objectives, they must be kept under cover; to
proclaim them for what they are would raise such diculties that the objectives could not be attained. When the
revolutions early reforms brought Cuba into conict with the United States, as Castro knew they would, he
decided that the revolutions survival depended on forging an alliance with the Soviet Union.
In the revolutions early decades, Castro appeared to achieve his two goals. He purged Cuba of U.S. inuence by
nationalizing over $1 billion in U.S. investments and thumbing his nose at Washingtons often ham-sted
attempts to rein him in. Assassination, invasion, and covert war all proved unequal to the task of dislodging him,
to the chagrin of Washington policymakers, who could neither understand nor tolerate such deance in their own
backyard. Buoyed by the publics nationalist cheers, Fidel hit the Yanquis hard, and they could never devise an
eective way to hit him back. Even today, the residue of Washingtons frustration with him continues to fuel the
animus of policy makers who oppose President Barack Obamas opening to the island.

Beginning with radically redistributive economic reforms and culminating in the nationalization of the entire
economy, right down to the mom and pop stores on the corner, Castro transformed Cuba into the most egalitarian
society in Latin America. Healthcare, education, and social security were declared human rights and provided
free to everyone. Income disparities shrank as wage dierentials narrowed and basic consumer goods were
provided to all through rationing at prices heavily subsidized by the government.
But all this came at a cost. With link between workers compensation and productivity shattered, growth stalled.
And in the service of creating a socialist economy, Castro crushed Cubas bourgeoisie. Once the direction of the
revolution became clear, the upper and middle classes began an historic migration north into exile. In just the
rst decade of revolutionary government, more than 250,000 Cubans ed their homeland. Over the ensuing
decades, nearly a million more would follow.
Castro was a keen politician, appealing to deep currents in Cuban political culture, most especially the
nationalism born of Cubas repeated failure to win its independence, rst from Spanish colonialism and then
from U.S. neocolonialism. A charismatic leader par excellence, he harbored a deep distrust of institutions,
believing he was a better judge of the desires and aspirations of the Cuban people than any formal structure. More
than once, he tore down institutions that he himself had built when they worked in ways that endangered his
vision for Cubas future.
In so doing, he left a legacy of institutional weakness which his brother Ral has spent the past decade trying to
repair. Fidel was, as social scientists say, a minimum winning coalition all by himself. When he decided on a
policy, the rest of the leadership dutifully fell into line. Political power, then, was directly correlated with
proximity to Fidel. It was no accident that the principal path to power for an aspiring young politician led through
Castros personal sta. During the last two decades of Castros leadership, a series of young heirs apparent rose
and fell based on their personal relationships with him. Their meteoric ascendance aorded them no
institutional base of support, denied them the political savvy only experience can provide, and imbued them with
the hubris of Icarus. None lasted more than a few years. Ral Castro has implicitly acknowledged the politys
institutional shortcomings by calling for a major renovation of the Communist Party, empowering local political
institutions, and proposing 10-year term limits for all senior ocials. Strengthening institutions has been a
constant theme in his public addresses.

As Cubas maximum leader, Fidel Castro was never one to tolerate dissent. All criticism is opposition, he told
compatriot Carlos Franqui, All opposition is counterrevolutionary. To consolidate political control, Fidel closed
o all channels for independent political expression. He dealt ruthlessly with opponents from Comandante
Huber Matos, sentenced to 20 years for treason in 1959 for his anti-communism, to 75 dissidents imprisoned for
subversion in 2003 for accepting aid from the United States. Maintaining tight political control allowed Fidel to
survive dozens of assassination attempts and half a century of U.S. hostility. But the very real threat from the
United States became the rationale for a perpetual national security state that suppressed traditional civil and
political liberties, and rewarded conformity. The absence of an independent press, political parties, and civil
society associations left the state without the self-correcting mechanisms of a pluralist democratic society. A
series of policy disasters followed.
In the late 1960s, Castro embraced Ernesto Che Guevaras vision of new socialist man a citizen with
communist conscience who would work according to his ability and consume only according to his needs.
Economic policy was recast to level wage dierentials and severed the link between workers productivity and
income. Predictably, many people simply stopped coming to work; productivity plummeted. In the following
decade, that policy was replaced by a model of centralized socialist planning imported from the Soviet Union,
based on material incentives. With it came all the distortions typical of that model, including a surge in
corruption.
Although the experience of the 1960s forced Castro to acknowledge that Cubans were not ready to act like seless
citizens in a Marxist utopia, he could never reconcile himself to relying on markets. The inevitable social
inequalities that markets produce, even in a state-owned economy, were simply anathema to his vision of social
justice. In 1986, Fidel repudiated the Soviet planning model and launched a campaign to rectify errors and
negative tendencies, which meant once again moving away from the use of market mechanisms and toward
moral incentives. And once again, the economy stagnated as a result.

This new economic experiment was abruptly cut short by the collapse of European communism in 1989-1991,
which plunged Cuba into a deep depression known as the Special Period. The loss of $3 billion annually in
Soviet economic assistance reduced Cubas import capacity by 75 percent. The resulting shortages of raw
materials like fuel and fertilizer caused huge production losses in both manufacturing and agriculture, triggering
a downward economic spiral. Between 1989 and 1993, gross domestic product fell 35 percent, and real wages fell
by even more. Consumer goods of all types disappeared from store shelves, and people went hungry.
At rst, Fidel responded with deance, closing his speeches by declaring, Socialism or Death! But survival
required economic concessions. At his brother Rals urging, a reluctant Fidel agreed to re-introduce market
mechanisms to restart the economy, legalizing free farmers markets and small businesses. The government
eased restrictions on direct foreign investment to attract the capital needed to modernize the tourist industry,
and legalized the possession of dollars, encouraging Cuban Americans to send remittances. But Fidel was never
comfortable with these reforms, regarding them as strictly temporary. We have gone down this road basically
because it was the only alternative for saving the revolution, he said at the depths of the recession. As the
economy gradually recovered in the late 1990s, he scaled back the market-oriented reforms.
By the time Ral took over from the ailing Fidel in 2006, the economy faced serious structural imbalances.
Although it had been growing since the 1990s, the gains were concentrated in tourism and the export of medical
services. The actual production of goods on the island still lagged below 1989 levels, and many state enterprises
operated at a loss. The central problem, Ral bluntly pointed out, was low productivity. No country or person
can spend more than they have, he reminded the Communist Party Congress in April 2011. Two plus two is four.
Never ve, much less six or seven as we have sometimes pretended.
Ral launched a major updating of Cuban economic policy, relying more directly on market mechanisms to
drive eciency than at any time since 1959. As a package, these reforms resembled the early stages of Chinas and
Vietnams turn towards market socialism in the 1970s and 1980s. From his retirement, Fidel endorsed the new
policies, admitting to a visiting journalist that Cubas traditional model of central planning, doesnt even work
for us anymore. But the new policies clearly went well beyond anything he himself would have designed, calling
into question the durability of Fidels vison of social equality.

The price of freeing Cuba from U.S. domination was alliance with the Soviet Union, which turned Cuba into a
focal point of the Cold War. The U.S. embargo forced Cuba into dependence on the Soviets, which proved to be
almost as crippling as Cubas pre-revolutionary dependence on the United States. But while U.S. politicians
routinely denounced Cuba as a puppet of Moscow, Fidel Castro took orders from no one. Hes his own man,
Mikhail Gorbachev tried to explain to President George H. W. Bush at the end of the Cold War. We cannot dictate
to him.
Fidel saw the Cuban revolution as both a Third World national liberation struggle and a socialist revolution, and
he had aspirations that went beyond his small island. From the earliest days, he envisioned Cuba as a model for
Latin Americas struggle for independence and social justice. Fidel and Che Guevara inspired a generation of
Latin American youth, from student revolutionaries in the 1960s, to Central American guerrillas in the 1980s, to
the 21st-century socialism of Hugo Chvez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
Even critics harbored a certain admiration for Fidels ability to defy the United States and live to tell the tale.
Beyond the Western hemisphere, Castro supported anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia. Cuban arms and
military advisers bolstered independence movements against colonialism and white minority rule in southern
Africa, and when South Africa invaded Angola in 1975 to install a puppet regime, Cuba sent 30,000 troops to drive
the South Africans back across the border. Fidel won the leadership of the Nonaligned Movement in 1979 despite
Cubas close partnership with the Soviets. It was sometimes a dicult balancing act. We are playing two roles,
Fidel explained to visiting U.S. diplomats after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We are playing the role of the
revolutionary and we are also playing the role of the member of the Nonaligned Movement. Its not easy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union eectively ended Cubas ability to project military force abroad, but Cubas
global engagement remained high as soldiers were replaced by doctors and teachers. Even President Obama
acknowledged the diplomatic eectiveness of Cubas medical internationalism. In 2006, Cuba was once again
elected to lead the Nonaligned Movement, and in 2013, Ral Castro assumed the chair of the Community of Latin
American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which excludes the United States and Canada.

Like a good chess player, Fidel had an uncanny ability to anticipate his opponents next moves and preempt them
or turn them to his own advantage. Fidel has long headlights, said one senior Cuban ocial, describing Castros
prescience. In 1980, when Jimmy Carter goaded Castro about the number of Cubans wanting to emigrate, Fidel
threw open the port of Mariel, unleashing a ood of some 125,000 refugees. With this uncanny act of political
jujitsu, Castro turned Cubas embarrassment over how many of its citizens wanted to leave, into Washingtons
embarrassment over its inability to control its own coast.
When Ronald Reagan authorized propaganda broadcasts to Cuba by Radio Mart, Castro responded not by
broadcasting Cuban programs to the United States, as U.S. ocials anticipated, but by suspending a recently
signed immigration agreement that had been four years in the making. In 2003, the George W. Bush
administration tried to goad Cuba into closing the U.S. Interests Section in Havana by directing the chief of
mission to publicly embrace Cuban dissidents. Instead, Castro struck not at the diplomats, but at the dissidents
they supported, arresting them by the dozens.
Fidels political acumen was a perennial frustration for U.S. policymakers, who could never gure out how to
bring him to heel. As National Security Council director for Latin America Robert Pastor wrote in 1979, U.S. policy
toward Cuba was driven out of unmitigated frustration, derived from three irreducible facts: (1) Cuba causes us
terrible problems; (2) Cuba is a little country, and we are a superpower; and (3) We have almost no leverage or
inuence over the Cubans.
For half a century, U.S. policymakers hoped and believed that Fidel was so central to Cubas revolutionary regime
that it would not survive his passing. In the 1960s, the CIA sought to accelerate that process through
assassination. By the turn of the century, George W. Bushs administration was planning for the fall of the regime,
certain it had a life expectancy no better than that of its octogenarian founder. Your policy is to wait for me to
die, Fidel lectured two U.S. diplomats in 1979. And I dont intend to cooperate. And he didnt. Instead, he fell ill
and was forced to hand the reins of authority to his brother. The transfer of power could not have been smoother;
there were no protests, no riots, no rush to the exits. Not only did Fidels revolutionary regime survive him, he
lived long enough to see it.

But the goals for which Castro made the revolution face real challenges in the years ahead. The normalization of
relations with the United States, if it survives into Donald Trumps presidency, represents both a triumph and a
danger: a triumph, in that Washington has nally recognized the reality and permanence of the revolution; a
danger, in that it will open the ood gates to a resurgence of U.S. economic inuence. During the campaign,
Trump promised to roll back Obamas policy of engagement, but as recently as September, he said the opening to
Cuba was ne if the United States could get a better deal. The businessmans nose for economic opportunity
might yet trump the politicians campaign promise.
Without the embargo, trade with the United States will quickly grow to dwarf trade with every other partner,
tourists from the United States will dwarf the numbers from Canada and Western Europe, and investment from
U.S. rms (including Cuban American rms) will dwarf investments from everywhere else. The gravitational pull
of the U.S. economy could be irresistible, pulling Cuba back into the orbit of its northern neighbor and
threatening to recreate the dependency the revolution aimed to end. This was the danger that Fidel himself
envisioned when he warned his fellow countryman about the risks of engagement after Obamas visit to Havana
last March.
Cubas move to market socialism puts at risk the ideal of social equality that Fidel held to so tenaciously. His
successors have pledged to maintain the collective welfare system of which the revolution is most proud free
health care, free education, and social security. No one will be left behind, Ral Castro has promised. But other
state subsidies for consumers are being phased out as too costly. By giving free play to market forces, Cubas
current leaders hope to boost productivity, even at the expense of increasing income disparities. Markets
inevitably produce winners and losers. Already, Cubans who are well-educated, live in cities where economic
development is more dynamic, and have access to hard currency, are thriving in a freer economic environment.
Those who are low-skilled or elderly, live in rural areas, have no relatives abroad to send remittances, and suer
from racial discrimination are at risk.

Going forward, Ral Castro has described Cubas task as adapting Cuban socialism to contemporary reality, while
preserving the core values of national sovereignty, dignity, and social justice that led Fidel Castro to take up arms
half a century ago. Perhaps Fidels greatest achievement was upholding those values long enough to pass them
on, albeit a little threadbare, to a successor generation of Cubans. To them falls the task of forging an ecient,
productive economy, a more open, democratic polity, and a normal relationship with the United States. Will
Fidels legacy prove to be a foundation on which they can build, or an obstacle to progress? The answer will
determine whether history will absolve him. At the moment, its too early to tell.
Photo credit: OAH/AFP/Getty Images

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