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HELLO FROM HAVANA: Nuanced but unmistakable stirrings of change in Cuba In this essay, Jorge Dominguez, professor of Mexican and Latin American politics and economics, offers observations on his March visit to Cuba, giving special attention to ways in which Raul Castro has departed from brother Fidel in both style and substance. Raul, for instance, emphasizes governmental efficiency, and brevity and self-discipline -- even flashes of humor -- characterize his speeches. A mocking sally at Hugo Chavez even suggests that Cuba’s new leader may be willing to put some distance between himself and Venezuela’s dictator. More arresting is a series of unfolding reforms making available to Cubans upscale consumer goods and services previously available only to tourists. Because the median Cuban salary amounts to little more than a half-dollar a day, however, that change will benefit largely the country’s small upper middle class. Dominguez nevertheless has no illusions about the continuing authoritarian nature of communist Cuba. It remains a single-party state, despite some cracks in Fidel’s former paranoid hold on society. Whether Raul is truly kinder and gentler or is simply desperately seeking to shore up popular support for a regime teetering on the brink of economic disaster remains open to question. Regime forecasts of economic growth for 2009 have been cut by seventy per cent, and hunger looms on an island that imports 40 percent of its groceries. Unwilling to assess Cuba’s future openly, Raul recently cancelled the upcoming Communist Party Congress. Regarding the search for popular support, the professor might also have observed that military officers -- a pillar of the regime – would be amongst those most benefited by access to upscale consumer goods. As Dominguez has done before <http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/07/your-friend-fidel.html> he attributes much of Cuba’s sad state to the American embargo that, he claims, deprives Cubans information from the outside world, in part through the banning of information technology exports to the island. On this point others have argued that there is little indeed that America can offer Cuba that it cannot obtain from other Western sources. This essay recognizes that although political change in Cuba is likely to remain semi-glacial, societal change seems to be occurring at a more rapid pace. The author sees the entrepreneurial capacity of the Cuban people coupled with loosened resistance to private financial incentives as offering hope for a brighter future.
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