CUBA THE MORNING AFTER 84˚ 80˚ 76˚ Nassau Atlantic y Largorg Ocean Ke Gulf off Mexico da Stra The Bahamas 24˚ 24˚ Ciudad De Matanzasatanzastanzasa e Cá llanos Minas dee SanS Cristobal Co Archipiélago Surgidero Ar de Bataban Aguada de Golfo de Pasajeross de M Batabanó anzas La Fee Yu ca ta n Florida C Cayo Nu h Isla De La Largo a Juventud nn Cuba Camagamag el Camagüey Banes Holguin Archipiélago De Los Jardinas A De La Reina Holguin Caribbean Sea amoo Baracoa Manzanillo e g mo a ss a P 20˚ rd a 20˚ w U.S. Naval Base d de Cubau in Cuba Guantánamo Bay W Haiti National Capital Parish Boundary Cayman Islands Parish Center Grand George Town Cayman (U.K.) 0 50 100 Kilometers Ocho Haiti Montego Bay Rios 0 50 100 Miles maica Cayes Port Antonioo Savanna Spanish la Mar Town Kingstoningstonngston 84˚ 80˚ 76˚ CUBA THE MORNING AFTER Confronting Castro’s Legacy Mark Falcoff The AEI Press Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute WASHINGTON, D.C. 2003 Distributed to the Trade by National Book Network, 15200 NBN Way, Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214. To order call toll free 1-800-462-6420 or 1-717-794-3800. For all other inquiries please contact the AEI Press, 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 or call 1-800-862-5801. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Falcoff, Mark. Cuba the morning after : confronting Castro’s legacy / Mark Falcoff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8447-4175-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Cuba—Economic conditions—1990- 2. Cuba—Social conditions. 3. Cuba—Relations—United States. 4. United States—Relations—Cuba. I. Title. HC152.5.F35 2003 303.48'27291073—dc21 2002038514 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 © 2003 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI. Printed in the United States of America For Les Gelb Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi INTRODUCTION 1 1. THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 5 The Search for Utopia 5 History as Melodrama 6 Cuba’s Sonderweg 8 The Years of Protectorate, 1901–1934 18 The Batista Years, 1934–1958 22 Cuba in 1958 24 Past and Present Compared 33 2. SUGAR 42 A Blessing and a Curse 42 Agriculture under Socialism, 1960–1963 46 The Return to Sugar, 1963–1989 48 Some Problems of Socialist Production 51 Changes in the World Sugar Market 54 Prospects for Reinsertion in the U.S. Market 59 Alternatives to Sugar 62 Concluding Remarks 70 3. PROPERTY 72 The Most Socialist of States 72 Property Issues and Diplomatic Normalization 75 Third-Party Contracts and Property Controversies 79 Claims of Former Cuban Nationals 81 Possible Redress in Cuban Courts 86 Some Problems of Implementation 89 Who Should Pay What? 91 Is There a Way Out? 93 Looking Ahead 95 vii viii CONTENTS 4. SECURITY 97 The Cuban Threat Revisited 97 The Cuban Military and Its Strategic Doctrine 103 Guantánamo 106 Lourdes 109 Germ Warfare 110 The Juraguá Nuclear Plant 116 Narcotics 118 Espionage 123 Terrorism 126 Conclusions and Prospect 128 5. TOURISM AND ENVIRONMENT 132 The Cuban Reentry 132 Cuba in the Caribbean: Some Comparative Facts and Figures 134 Background to Growth 136 Impact of Tourism on the Cuban Economy 138 The Tourism-Environment Nexus 142 The Formal Structures of Environmental Protection 145 Systemic and Ideological Constraints on Environmental Protection 146 Forestry Policies 147 Agriculture 150 Water 151 Industrial Pollution 152 The Urban Environment 154 The “Special Period” and the Environment 155 The Environment and the Future 156 6. IMMIGRATION 158 The Coherence of Differences 158 A Brief Policy History 159 Cuba and Haiti Compared 163 The Four Waves 166 A Different Kind of Immigration? 168 A Larger Perspective 170 The Economic Dimension of Immigration 172 Some Demographic and Socioeconomic Predictors 175 The Impact of Normalization 178 CONTENTS ix 7. CIVIL SOCIETY 181 Communist “Civil Society” 181 The Roman Catholic Church 182 Other Religious Bodies 187 Race 190 Nongovernmental Organizations 201 The Military 206 The Cuban-American Community 209 Concluding Remarks 215 8. THE PROSPECT 217 An Impending Succession Crisis? 217 U.S. Constituencies for Post-Castro Cuba 222 A Question of Identity 232 The Riddle of Cuban Nationalism 234 The United States and Cuba: The Question of Insertion 237 NOTES 243 INDEX 281 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 291 Acknowledgments The author wishes to express his deepest appreciation to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation for the generous support that made this study possible. He also acknowledges the indispensable support of five extraordinary research assistants—Dean Schaffer, Christopher Weld, Stephen Joyce, Román Martínez, and Lauren Di Cecio. A tip of the hat to James Knowles, who penetrated the mysteries of both software and economics to produce the charts in chapter 2, and to Ralph Galliano for generating the data on which they are based. In addition, the author thanks his editor, Juyne Linger, for her perspicacious and diligent preparation of the manuscript for publication. Above all, thanks to David Rockefeller and Peter G. Peterson, who co- chaired a Council on Foreign Relations delegation that visited Cuba in February 2001, for inviting the author to come along. xi Introduction As its title announces, this is a book about Cuba’s future. But it is also a book about the future of U.S.-Cuban relations. It could hardly be otherwise. In spite of a forty-year period with no formal diplomatic relations, the United States and Cuba have never ceased to be close to one another—not simply geographically but in terms of their broader polit- ical imaginations as well. No Latin American country arouses the level of inter- est that Cuba perennially evokes; one need only visit any bookstore or library in the United States to establish this fact. And no American or foreign visitor to Cuba can come away from the island without being struck by how firmly Cubans of all classes and political ideologies have their gaze fixed across the Florida straits. Acting as a bridge of sorts is a large, relatively affluent, and polit- ically well-organized exile community centered in southern Florida, hostile to the regime that governs its homeland, but intensely involved with the island and its people in myriad other ways. Standing between the two countries lies something called “the revolution”—a shorthand term for the events that followed the triumph of a movement led by Fidel Castro, and Cuba’s transformation into a tropical Communist state and member of the Soviet community of nations. Although that larger community no longer exists, Cuba’s Communist state remains—as does its progenitor. More convinced than ever that his version of Marxist socialism will ultimately prevail, Fidel Castro continues to wait for the collapse of both the capitalist system and the United States of America. Meanwhile, his adversaries on the other side of the water—not just the expa- triate Cuban community but its allies in the U.S. political class—await the col- lapse or disappearance of the Castro regime and its replacement by something more nearly resembling the “bourgeois” democracies of El Salvador, Uruguay, 1 2 CUBA THE MORNING AFTER Chile, or Costa Rica. Indeed, much of U.S. policy, particularly since the end of the Cold War, has been predicated on Castro’s Cuba losing its lease on life, its extinction but a matter of time. Meanwhile, a series of laws that hinder normal trade and travel relations between the two countries—the so-called “embargo”— remain in place. So far both sides have been disappointed: neither capitalism nor Castroism has yet disappeared from the map. Underpinning this book is the presumption that sooner rather than later, rela- tions between the two countries are bound to resume, though under circum- stances yet unclear. At that point the United States will confront a Cuba very different from the one with which it broke relations more than four decades ago. This new Cuba—new, at any rate, to the United States—will pose a whole range of problems, many of them far more nettlesome and complex than the enforce- ment of a trade embargo or the marshaling of support for resolutions at the var- ious international organizations. Much of this book is dedicated to teasing those problems out from the shadows of imminence, where they presently lurk, ignored in the pressure of current events and necessities. More than a decade has passed since the collapse of the Soviet empire, and with it, the loss to Cuba of an entire network of advantageous trade and political and intelligence assets worldwide. Since 1991, Cuba has been living in what President Fidel Castro calls a “Special Period in Time of Peace,” which is to say, one in which the country has known greater privations than ever before in its history. The collapse of the Soviet Union has deprived the island of an economic subsidy amounting to roughly $6 billion a year. Ironically, the disappearance of a strategic logic to hostility between Cuba and the United States has only deepened the antagonism between them. At the same time, however, the links between the two countries—both human and economic—have grown stronger than ever before.