Caught in a Contradiction: Cuban Socialism between Mobilization and Normalization

Abstract

Since 1989, when the Communist regimes of eastern Europe fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the United States tightened its economic embargo, the world has been awaiting the downfall of Fidel Castro. So far he has failed to oblige. It is not entirely surprising that Cuban state socialism has not yet suffered the same fate as its erstwhile eastern European allies since, unlike them, its political vitality never depended on the Soviet Union. The Cuban revolution rode to power on the crest of a national insurgency against a U.S.-supported and widely unpopular dictatorship, and Cuban leaders have successfully defied nine U.S. presidents. That in the 1990s the Cuban government has reconstituted itself in the face of inordinate adversity and managed, like China, Vietnam, and North Korea, to persist in a post-cold-war environment can in part be attributed to the virtually inexhaustible fount of nationalism. However, Cuba, unlike China and Vietnam, has not initiated economic reforms and, unlike North Korea, does not subsist in hermetic isolation. What accounts for its resilience? Though the dramatic events of 1989 temporarily led social scientists to recast the analysis of state socialism in terms of its collapse, they quickly returned their attention to the more salient intellectual charge of determining how this social formation actually functioned over decades.1 Since the mid 1980s studies of the institutional dynamics of state socialism have focused on a master process of social change involving three types of interactions: between central planning and incipient markets, between state institutions and civil society, and within the regime's own institutions.2 State socialist transformations and market transitions are the often unintended consequences of the efforts by Communist parties to modify the operation of the central plan; these modifications in turn create new opportunity structures and centers of power largely but not exclusively outside party-state institutions. The reform experiences of post-1956 eastern Europe and post-1978 China have provided the empirical basis for the institutionalist paradigm. State socialism in Cuba, however, suggests a more politically centered drive. The Cuban regime never completely implemented old-fashioned market socialism, nor has it presently embarked upon far-reaching market reforms. While the forces of the master process of institutional interactions are partially at work in the economy and the regime, Castro's Cuba, like Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao Zedong's