I’m guessing most of you have heard about some of the current reforms that little brother Raul is implementing in Cuba these days. Here’s a link if you want to read one small article about what’s going on. Basically, residents are now allowed to buy some things that they weren’t allowed to buy before, (and most still can’t afford). These include things like cells phones, computers, DVD players (why couldn’t you buy a DVD player before?), and the ability to stay in “tourist hotels”. The tourist hotel issue apparently has something to do with prostitution, at least according to the end of the story I caught on NPR yesterday.
I certainly have more questions than informed comments about this, so please excuse my slightly illformed OP. What I’d like to hear some informed people discuss are things like; Is this current course of action an admission of how bad things were under Fidel? Aren’t these reforms a slap in the face to Fidel? Any guesses on how far these reforms will go? Private land or car ownership are two biggies discussed on NPR yesterday. Will these reforms appease the populace, or just whet their appetite for more freedoms? Are these reforms the same type of beginning reforms that other communist countries took in their transition to a more market based economy? Will these have any effect on a transition to democracy?
See, I told you I had more questions than information!
The Chinese experience seems to suggest you can have economic liberalization, and as long as the economy does well, political authoritarianism can survive. The Soviet experience seems to suggest that absent economic improvement, small scale political liberalization leads to a desire for more and more freedom.
Possibly. China a much more ambiguous case than you note here. There’s a lot of unrest and I think the leaders there are just pushing off the issue for a generation or two. It’s also true that China has a long history or “going with the flow for now.”
The case of Cuba will be interesting, too, in that it’s so much closer to America. Our culture can hardly help but influence it if they do open up even a little bit. They can still manage to be a dictatorship, of course, but it may become increasingly unstable much faster than, say, China. But I still think it might last another 30-60 years.
Well it was kind of an overgeneralization, I’ll admit that. In general, my view is that people see political freedoms as a luxury, and will tolerate political oppression if their fridge is full and their wallet is (relatively) bulging. It is when people have rumbling stomachs their minds turn to dissent.
I seem to remember some quote along the lines of “Chartism is a knife and fork question.”
Actually, I disagree with that principle. I knwo why you hold it; it seems logical.
I used to think that way, but the mroe I looked at it, the less it seemed to hold. Oh sure, people tend to rebel a bit when disatisfied. But in order to rebel, you need to have a certain freedom of action. Communist nations oppressed people by limiting their freedom of movement and action. If you couldn’t move around, publish, communicate, you couldn’t do diddly.
The Nazis stayed in power because they controlled the means of communication. The Soviets controlled everything, and prevented any possibility of rebellion because no one could ever start one. The Chinese likewise. Heck, the Russian Czar fell first and foremost because people got education and his secret police weren’t capable of locating and imprisoning all the rebels. The French revolution sounds romantic (the oppressed classes rise up and so on) but we see in history that things had vastly improved for this class.
In short, when people lack education, freedom of action, and private communication they don’t rebel because they can’t. And they are likely to be thinking of where they can get the next meal than how they get freedom. An emerging middle class (not employed/controlled by the government) is the most dangerous thing to any authoritarian nation.
China is still only at the tiny beginning end of this. They have not really liberalized a very large section of their country, from what I understand.
I completely disagree as to the Nazis, by the way. Not only were they only in power for 12 years, which is hardly a significant time for a dictatorship, they may have been elected through impressive use of communications (though I think that can be overstated) but they stayed in power through other means. The Nazis successfully destroyed all potential alternative power bases/bought them off - the KPD/SPD were eliminated, the Nationalists bought into the program lock, stock and barrell, the Catholic Church was appeased, and the unions brutalized and coopted. While the Nazis did not actually provide what they promised to the working classes (the workers vacation resorts never really existed, VW’s were not delivered, standards of living fell etc) they did appear at least to solve many economic problems. Now, of course, many of these problems were being cured anyway by Weimar, and much of the Nazi ‘boom’ was the result of damgerously inflationary policies that would have collapsed had the war not started legitimizing greater control of prices/wages, but they only had to keep it up for 6 years.
During that time as well, the Nazis were incredibly popular. There wasn’t an uprising because, well, people didn’t want an uprising. And by 1941 or so, there were no alternative power structures left - the Army had been totally subsumed. Communication didn’t have anything really to do with it. The KPD successfully published and circulated leaflets and newspapers until the war started. The Nazis even had problems stopping soliders bringng home snapshots of the Holocaust.
As for the Czar, I would say he fell first and foremost because he led Russia into a disasterous war, presided over hunger in the peasantry, and made decisions militarily based on what was best for the Western Allies, in particular France, rather than what was best for Russia. Lose the support of the military, especially when millions of them are mobilized, and it is pretty tough for a despot to stay in power. And being senselessly slaughtered doesn’t improve the love the military has for a tyrant. Nor do letters from home describing starvation.
Establishing new private farms and cooperatives on underused land is exactly what Chavez has been doing in Venezuela, except he started with privately- rather than state-owned land. (Paying the owners compensation, BTW.) Maybe at some point his system and Cuba’s will meet in the middle?
Authoritarian governments do tend to try to control what information, especially information about life in other countries or mistakes their government has made, that their people can get access to. The Great Firewall of China is one example.
So, easier to outlaw the actual players than sift through which DVDs are ok and which aren’t? I guess that’s the easier route. The other things, phones and computers made sense to me. I’ve never thought of a DVD player as a means of communication, just entertainment.
I agree with **Smiling Bandit ** about China and the need to have “resources” (for lack of a better word) in order to have a rebellion. If you’ve been kept ignorant your entire life, you don’t know any better. Once a middle class has seen what they’re missing, they’ll want more of it. The upper class will have a more immediate effect on this, but they’re proportionately small enough to be kept happy with freedoms that can be kept from the middle class. While this certainly won’t happen overnight, I think economic reforms can’t help but lead to political reforms. Similarly, I think having the Olympics in China will force the leaders to make some changes that they won’t be able to change back when the games are over. In short, I think both countries have started down the slippery slope to political reform by starting economic reform.
Exactly. Plus, if you ban all DVD players, you give someone who wants to watch a contraband DVD an extra hoop to jump through.
But entertainment movies can get people to think in directions that the government of Cuba might not like. You could certainly have a movie that contained a sympathetic portrayal of pre-revolutionary Cuba, or that portrayed the lives of Cuban refugees in Florida favorably as compared to life in Cuba. And of course there are documentaries- you could probably order a DVD from the History Channel about the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.
Before you go too far here… the Nazis shut down all alternative sources of news. It was very nearly among the first things they did when they took power, and it was done in fairly short order (they did it peicemeal to avoid public anger).
A genuine Cuba thread started by someone other than me!
I actually wrote about these things in this thread.
Like I said there, these changes are potentially huge. Not in the sense that these concessions are going to change the life of ordinary Cubans, but in the sense that these are changes. Not ‘temporary changes’, as have been announced in the past when dollars were decriminalized, but changes to remove “obsolete prohibitions”.
That phrasing to describe the previous government policies is something new in Cuba. Now is not the time for Cubans to be dancing in the streets and celebrating a new world order, but I think we should start thinking about what music we’re going to be playing, because things are looking up!
I think this and other reforms are just the beggining of huge changes in Cuba. In my opinion Raul seems intent in very publicly demonstrating that the misery and shortages of the past 40 years are the result of Fidel’s failed policies, not his own fault. And that he’s doing this while his brother is still alive but powerless to stop him probably has some psychological meaning.
