Caleb Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 28, 2016. I am Caleb Brown. As the government of Cuba plans official mourning, Cuban refugees in the United States celebrate the death of Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator who cracked down on free speech, free association, and entrepreneurship while also working to spread socialism throughout Latin America. Juan Carlos Hidalgo says that for the average Cuban right now, Castro’s death has more symbolic value than anything.
Juan Carlos Hidalgo: Well, history should remember him as what he was, which is a dictator. Not a president, as Prime Minister Trudeau said, but as a person who helped to power for over fifty years through violence and by calling off elections and imposing a Stalinist dictatorship in Cuba. There is a lot of discussion about people who claim that there are merits on his rule on Cuba, particularly when it comes to healthcare and education which, according to international standards, these are areas where Cuba excels, at least compared to Latin America. But again, you don’t need to impose a dictatorship in order to have universal healthcare or universal access to education. Look at my country. My country, Costa Rica, has universal healthcare, universal education, and we didn’t have a dictatorship. We didn’t even have an army since 1948. But certainly the greatest legacy of Fidel Castro will be the fact that he remained in power for over fifty years, that he impoverished Cuba, that he tried to export his revolution to other parts of the world, particularly in Latin America, and that in doing so he claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who died in communist, by communist insurgencies, and who died in civil warfare in other countries. So at some point Fidel Castro said that history will absolve him. I hope it doesn’t.
Caleb Brown: So for Cubans trying to move on and for the country of Cuba trying to develop and develop better relationships around the world, what is the next step? It doesn’t seem like you know, the regime doesn’t evaporate overnight just because Fidel Castro is dead.
Juan Carlos Hidalgo: No, there was a lot of discussion about whether the mere physical presence of Fidel Castro was preventing his brother from engaging in further reforms and opening up the Cuban economy and opening up the political system to free elections and so on. I really doubt that. His brother, Raúl, is also a Stalinist. He was the second at commanding most of Fidel’s rules. He was the head of the army. And he has been fully in charge in the last ten years. Fidel has been, in the last decade, mostly a symbolic figurehead. Very sick, very ill, writing columns for the official newspaper. There is a transition within two years Raúl Castro promised to step down in 2018, so all the talk is about what’s going to happen then. Who is going to charge? Nominally the person next in line is Miguel Díaz-Canel, which is a very obscure figure within the regime. He was born after the revolution, he is not charismatic, he doesn’t have much of a following within Cuba, but some people speculate that power is going to be passed on to someone in the Castro family, probably Raúl’s son or his son-in-law. So, again we will be witnessing the transfer of power, if that were the case, the transfer of power within a family like a monarchy, like a tropical monarchy. I don’t expect many changes in the short-term in Cuba. Actually, we can expect the regime to tighten the screws because they don’t want people to you know, go into the streets and celebrate the death of Fidel or try to take advantage of the situation in order to push for further freedoms.
Caleb Brown: I remember in 2009 Raúl Castro has just sort of, had just taken over for his ailing brother, Fidel, and there had been some reforms that seemed extremely promising, like long-term leasing of farm land, the ability of farmers to plant what they wanted to. I mean they seem like very basic things but at that moment in time it seemed very promising and then just a few years later you see these crackdowns on entrepreneurship of almost any kind. So what are we to take from that?
Juan Carlos Hidalgo: Yeah. I mean probably Raúl was already foreseeing that Venezuela was going to run out of oil or was going to — the prices of oil were going to collapse and the regime in Venezuela who had become a patron of the Cuban government was going to be and somehow, wasn’t going to be there forever. Let’s remember that at its peak, the aid that Cuba received from Venezuela amounted to 20% of the island’s GDP. So it was substantial. Even larger than probably what Cuba received at some point from the Soviet Union. But I take from the reforms, quote unquote reforms, that Raúl Castro started and implemented shortly after he took over, that he was more interesting in keeping the economy afloat and keeping the regime afloat than in making the Cuban people prosperous. And as you said, we saw certain instances for example where the reforms allow for private restaurants, small restaurants. They will control the number of chairs, tables, that that restaurant will have, but we saw that some of these restaurants became really popular and then they were shut down just because people were going there, and they were becoming prosperous. So I don’t think that the regime is generally interested in having a thriving private sector. They just want certain reforms in order so people can live by, the government wouldn’t have to support the entire population, and the regime can stay afloat.
Caleb Brown: Americans have begun traveling to Cuba in greater numbers as a matter of tourism. What do you see right now that indicates that the relationship is going to strengthen or weaken over time and fully integrate Cuba into, you know, the first world?
Juan Carlos Hidalgo: I think that lifting the travel ban, which the Obama administration already did de facto, because it’s still on the books but Americans can basically travel freely to Cuba without much constraints. I think this is the most subversive policy that the United States can engage with Cuba in the medium and long-term. Having hundreds of thousands of Americans traveling to the island, engaging day to day with Cubans, going to their restaurants, staying in their houses, talking to them, and exchanging ideas and points of views, I think that this is going to be in the long-term very important in order to bring about political change in the island. And I will expect that the Trump administration will keep this policy in place. It’s very popular with Cubans in the island, it’s very popular with the Cuban-American community in Southern Florida, and it’s popular with the American population at large. So he claims, President Trump claims that he wants a better deal for Cuban Americans for Cubans and for the U.S. Well, here we are, a deal that is very popular with all these three constituencies, and I hope that he keeps it in place.
Caleb Brown: Juan Carlos Hidalgo is a policy analyst on Latin America at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute. You can subscribe to this podcast at iTunes, Google Play, and with Cato’s iOS app. And follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.
