Miguel Diaz Canel and Raul Castro. Source: Infobae.

The Cuban Revolution: A Process of Marches and Countermarches:

Since January 1, 1959, Cuba has become the only complete communist experiment in the Americas. What began as a humanist utopia, and in several aspects, even "liberal" in its institutions, ended up devolving into a textbook example of Latin American autocracy.

Economically, the project was much less stable than it was politically. Between 1959 and 1961, Fidel Castro dismantled market mechanisms, especially in the sugar and industrial sectors, dominated by American capital. The nationalization of these assets unleashed the fury of Washington and triggered the first economic sanctions against the island. The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961) definitively sealed the estrangement from the U.S. and pushed Havana into the arms of Moscow, accelerating the establishment of a communist model that, despite the Soviet umbrella, ended up resembling more the "Great Leap Forward" of Mao, both in its epic and its catastrophic results.

The climax of that drift was the famous "Ten Million Harvest" in 1970. The government mobilized the Army and practically the entire society with the goal of harvesting 10 million tons of sugar in a single campaign. Fidel Castro emphasized the goal with a strong statement: “If we end up at 9 million 999 thousand tons, it will be a failure.” In the end, production remained around 8.5 million tons, a setback that, in Castro's terms, marked the failure of the productivity epic and paved the way for a new economic stage on the island.

The Gray Cuban Politburo:

The regime change represented a drastic shift towards the public administration models in Eastern Europe: from voluntarist Maoism to the gray bureaucratization of Brezhnev. 

This turn brought about the appearance of a non-subsidized black market (already common in many planned economies, even today), the introduction of economic incentives, greater salary disparities, and even the expansion of self-employment permits in several sectors. 

Moreover, reforms were not limited to the economic realm; they also transformed the political sphere. According to Levitsky, until 1970, the economy and politics were governed under the umbrella of Fidel Castro's charismatic leadership, who made decisions on both fronts. The Communist Party existed but hardly functioned and almost never met. With the importation of the complete bureaucratic model, the party became a true political tool, just like in the countries behind the Iron Curtain.

During this period, Cuba deepened its commercial dependence on the USSR: it exported sugar at inflated prices and received subsidized oil, recreating the logic of Batista's sugar monoculture that the failed Guevara industrialization attempt had sought to overcome.

All this resulted in a rise in inequality, despite improvements in macroeconomic indicators. At the same time, a new “caste” of technocrats began to manage economic levers and gain power, eroding the veteran generation of the Revolution.

Fidel, of course, put a stop to the rise of this “caste” and, between 1985 and 1991, in clear rejection of Soviet perestroika and glasnost, propelled another period of greater socialist intensification, determined to turn society into fully communist. The internal purge echoed Mao's Cultural Revolution when the charismatic leadership of the Great Helmsman attacked the Party's bureaucracy.

From the "Special Period" to the Rise of the Venezuelan "Sugar Daddy"

The result could not have been more unfavorable: with the collapse of the USSR and the wave of global neoliberalization, Cuba found itself in a critical economic situation. The disappearance of the Soviet subsidy scheme dismantled the entire productive structure of the island. The social crisis was dramatic, and the figure of the “balsero” fleeing to Miami appeared en masse.

After a total economic collapse that involved a brutal adjustment and a massive exodus, a glimmer of hope emerged for the Castro regime: Hugo Chávez, the new star of Latin American leftist politics. More than ideological affinity, what excited Havana was the arrival of a new patron. Venezuela, an oil power, signed agreements with Cuba similar to those once subscribed by the USSR. This time, instead of sugar, the island sent doctors and intelligence advisors for the Barrio Adentro program and for the training of SEBIN, in exchange for subsidized oil barrels that were later re-exported, keeping the foreign currency. That fuel, both literally and figuratively, fed the last socialist push in Cuba, which began to crumble after Chávez's death in 2013, Trump's victory in 2016, and the tightening of sanctions following the brief thaw initiated by Obama.

The Death of Fidel and the Death of Charisma.

With Fidel Castro's death in 2016, a new stage opened on the island, which was further accelerated in the following years. The old revolutionary guard retired for biological reasons or retirement age, and Raúl himself stepped aside, leaving power in the hands of a historical bureaucrat from the Party who, both in his gestures and aesthetics, appears as an official freshly out of an Eastern European politburo from the 1980s.

Miguel Diaz Canel. Source: Anadolu Agency.

After the pandemic and Trump's return to the White House, the choice of the new leader seems anything but casual. The Cuban economy has been creaking for years, especially post-pandemic: the average salary barely hovers around 17 dollars a month, blackouts are more frequent than ever, and in 2021, Díaz-Canel faced his first outbreak of mass protests. The exodus of young people is dramatic: in less than three years, more than 850,000 young people escaped to the United States, a demographic drain that has already reduced the island's population by around 18%.

In this limbo between the inertia of an epic past in a crumbling present, the IX Congress of the PCC appears less as an ideological ritual than as a postponed death certificate. With charisma depleted, cheap oil evaporated, and the youth voting with their feet, the Revolution faces the dilemma of mutating or petrifying, but unlike other crossroads, it no longer has either the Soviet cushion or the Venezuelan lifeline. What remains of Cuba after this crisis, if anything new emerges, will depend on its ability to reconcile freedom and equity in a world that, paradoxically, demands both at once.