Cuba Refrozen: Defiance And Dollarization

David Rieff

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996

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Summary:  Cuba's downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes halted the thaw in relations that had seemed slow but inexorable. That suits Fidel Castro perfectly. Anti-Americanism hitched to a very Cuban sense of doomed defiance is the only sentiment he has going for him now that faith in socialism is dead and his regime is peddling tried-and-failed solutions for the ramshackle economy. Ironically, Castro's sovereignty fetish has driven Cubans into dependence on Miami, as well as into poverty and crime. But the Maximum Leader, who has outlasted eight U.S. presidents, is a wily tactician. A post-Castro Cuba does not seem imminent.

David Rieff is the author of The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami.

Until the moment in February when a Cuban air force MiG-29 shot down two civilian planes sponsored by the Miami-based exile group Brothers to the Rescue near Cuba, people on both sides of the Florida Strait assumed U.S.-Cuban relations were headed for a thaw, if a slow one. But the prospect of normalization had hardly been welcomed in Havana. The Castro regime's only claim that resonates with ordinary Cubans nowadays, particularly those old enough to remember life before Fulgencio Batista's overthrow in 1959, is that it has saved Cuba from American domination.

The ubiquitous slogan "Socialismo o Muerte," "Socialism or Death," has evoked pained smiles on the island since the collapse of the Soviet empire, the loss of Cuba's leading trade partners, and the cutoff of subsidies from Moscow in 1989-91. Socialism has lost, and even those in the upper echelons of the Castro regime know it. But "Patria o Muerte," "Motherland or Death," still carries considerable weight in a country whose political culture is steeped in the legends of resistance and self-immolation of the nineteenth-century struggle for independence. The Second Cuban War of Independence -- known in the United States, to Cubans' chagrin, as the Spanish-American War -- left one-fifth of the population dead and a good part of the island in ruins. Yet for Cubans of almost every political persuasion, including the exile community in the United States, the sacrifice was worth it.

In their own minds, whether rebelling against the Spanish or confronting the Americans, Cubans are continually doing mythic battle. "It is my duty," José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence, wrote shortly before his death, "to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies, and falling, with that added weight, upon other lands of our America. My weapon is only the slingshot of David." As the possibility of exporting revolution in the Americas or even building socialism at home has dwindled, the Castro regime has turned to nationalist, anti-American rhetoric to rally a population beset by everyday scarcity and with little prospect of economic improvement.

In early 1991, when the loss of Soviet subsidies that had reached $8 billion a year really began to take its toll, signs sprouted in Havana boasting that the capital would remain "an eternal Baragua." The reference was to an episode in 1878 at the end of the First Cuban War of Independence, in which the revolutionary leader General Antonio Maceo, faced with a superior Spanish force, rejected a settlement that would have called for his army to lay down its weapons. That Maceo soon afterward abandoned the field at Baragua, boarding a British ship for Jamaica, did not seem to matter; the symbolism of the act, Maceo's glorious gesture of defiance, called for emulation. To listen to Fidel Castro, his regime's success in withstanding American domination counts for far more than its failure to run the economy. "We have resisted for 35 years," the Maximum Leader declared in a recent speech, ...

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