Cuba: Communist State or Personal Dictatorship?

Abstract

In any study of the impact of the Communist system on political culture Cuba occupies a special place. It is (so far) the only Iberian Communist state, and this chapter therefore devotes a certain amount of space to considering Iberian political culture. It is one of the Communist states which does not have a land frontier with the Soviet Union. It is also the first Communist state in the non-Asiatic ‘Third World’. All these factors contribute to the feeling that Cuba represents a third centre in the Communist world perhaps as significant as Moscow and Peking.1 It is, however, very difficult to describe Cuban political culture with any degree of certainty. Cuba has only been a Communist state for fifteen years, and it is still evolving; it would have been very difficult to predict the present situation of the Soviet Union in 1932 or of China in 1964. Nevertheless Cuba seems to be developing as an interesting hybrid — a Communist state led by a charismatic leader and his loyal followers, most of whom have had little training in Marxism and were not Communists before taking power. It is therefore interesting as an interaction between the rigid Soviet model of government and an unusual political culture.2