Is it the autumn of the patriarch? Castro seems increasingly a figure from the fiction of his Colombian novelist friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez. An important new book by Miami Herald journalist Andres Oppenheimer, “Castro’s Final Hour,” includes an account of the commander in chief last November delivering three hours’ worth of war threats, sugar-production statistics and the “dialectical view of Che” to 1,000 Young Pioneers, some as young as 6. But erratic as Castro’s ruminations sound, they are prompted by grim realities, of which the Cuban leader is painfully aware.
A year after Moscow cut off economic and military aid to its erstwhile Caribbean ally, Castro’s diehard Communist regime is fighting for its life. A spiraling mix of bankruptcy and international isolation has accelerated the debate over whether the Cuban regime’s survival can be measured in years or just months. “Castro’s Final Hour” provides the most comprehensive documentation yet that the disillusionment now extends deep into Cuba’s ruling elite itself. “There are two things you can say about Cuba today, and both are equally valid,” says Harvard’s Jorge Dominguez, who participated in a high-level official symposium in Havana last month. “This can’t go on. And the end is not near. That’s what’s so depressing for everyone involved-it’s a situation without hope.”
In the streets of Cuba, despair and anger at the tattered revolution rise with each new billboard proclaiming SOCIALISM OR DEATH! After the last Soviet oil tanker departed in June, Havana officials began eight-hour-a-day rolling electrical blackouts. Granma, the official party newspaper-now cut back to six skimpy pages five days a week-features a factory, originally designed to build light railcars, proudly unveiling the first six of 200 planned horse-drawn carriages. Meanwhile, a cat for the dinner table sells for 30 pesos–a dollar at black-market prices, half a week’s wages for most. Huge state bureaucracies have begun transferring laid-off workers to hard-labor jobs in the countryside. Still, shortages of fuel and working machinery produced the worst sugar harvest in nearly two decades. “Nothing in this country works anymore except the machinery of repression,” says Elisardo Sanchez, one of the handful of human-rights activists not in jail or exile.
Castro, in fact, has taken the lessons of his East-bloc allies grimly to heart: reform at your peril. “Castro’s Final Hour” gives the first full account of last October’s closed-door Fourth Party Congress, where Castro dashed even modest proposals from party reformists and delivered a diatribe against the “corruption” of market economies, the “garbage” of Western democracy and the Kremlin’s “inconceivable” decision to end one-party rule. To replace the billions in lost Soviet aid, the regime approved measures to lure foreign tourists and investors, who in theory pose less risk to the party’s control. But they also smack of prerevolutionary days–a fact not lost on Cubans eying the new knot of prostitutes on Havana’s seaside Malecon.
Cuban officials say they need at least another year to turn the economy around. But diplomats say the country’s cash reserves, $50 million a year ago, have fallen close to zero. With a staggering $8 billion hard-currency debt in default already (not to mention what Moscow says is $30 billion owed the former Soviets), no one is lending any more. Food supplies, briefly buoyed by the main spring harvest, have resumed their steady decline. Cuba’s health-care system, once considered a socialist showcase, is riddled by shortages of imported medicines and other basic supplies. Nor is there relief in sight from the crippling U.S. trade embargo, even if the Democrats win next fall. At a campaign stop in Miami two months ago, Bill Clinton told the cheering crowd: “I think this [Bush] administration has missed a big opportunity to put the hammer down on Fidel Castro.”
Castro has taken the threat of unrest–food riots are one common scenario–seriously enough to have established “rapid reaction” brigades of party militants with standing orders to confront any public protest. For would-be rebels within the government, the stakes are even higher. One of Oppenheimer’s most chilling scenes depicts Castro calmly watching a video of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, the popular hero of Cuba’s war in Angola, going bravely to his death by firing squad. Ochoa was charged with drug trafficking, but his real crime was voicing doubts about Castro’s leadership.
The conventional wisdom has always been that Castro’s homegrown revolution enjoyed more popularity than its East-bloc counterparts–especially given the safety valve of having exported nearly a million opponents. But Cubans these days seem numbed by the apparent lack of any peaceful way out. One recent afternoon in Havana, half a dozen working-class black Cubans sat drinking beer from soggy paper cups on an old Havana doorstep. Their cassette player bounced with a scratchy, fifth-hand tape by Cuban-born Miami salsa star Willy Chirino: after a few solemn bars of the " Internationale," the singer shouts, “Nicaragua?” and a joyful chorus answers, “LIBRE!” Then come Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany and, after a pause, “Cuba . . . LIBRE!” Last New Year’s Eve at midnight, that song, “Our Day (Is Coming),” echoed subversively from open windows along many Havana streets. Will it be on Radio Havana next time?
