Cuba Fidel's Race Against Time

By Lisa Beyer

"Hope?" asks the 60-year-old Fidelista, who fought with Castro's guerrillas in the mountains a generation ago. He flicks on a cheap cigarette lighter and, in its feeble glow, takes stock of his home in Santiago de Cuba, the officially designated "Hero City" of the revolution: no running water, paint peeling off the walls, a wild pig snuffling around the main corridor. "I need a candle to look for hope here.

"There's no future in Cuba," the former captain goes on, speaking softly so his wife won't hear. "If you'd have said that to me in the first ten years of the revolution, I'd have killed you! But sooner or later, you've got to open your eyes and see that it's only getting worse. Ten years ago, I thought there was still some hope. But it's getting late now, really late." And -- as the lighter's flame dies out -- dark too.

Nothing ever seems to change in Cuba -- except for the shadows cast on the island by the outside world. Yet the government of Fidel Castro, 63, seems as convinced as ever it is the rest of the planet that is out of step. While a hurricane of change sweeps across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, toppling leaders and shredding communism, Cuba stands like a lonely lighthouse of ideology, battered but unyielding. "We must dig in with the ideas of Marxist Leninism more than ever," Castro has declared. "Long live rigidity!" Signs along the country's roads exhort, SOCIALISM OR DEATH!

If Havana's brand of socialism was once attractive to many Cubans, its allure has diminished considerably. The country's growing alienation from the rest of the communist world threatens an end to the aid and favorable trade arrangements that have kept its lame economy hobbling along. At the same time, many Cubans are weary of stagnation. "Castro is probably faced right now with the greatest challenge he's ever had to his rule," says a senior Bush Administration official. "A year ago, nobody was even questioning that he would continue in power until he died. Now it is a subject of debate."

Reforms seemed to be in the air when the country's 213-member Central Committee held a special one-day session in Havana two weeks ago and issued what the Cuban Communist Party daily Granma trumpeted as "transcendental pronouncements." The "revitalization" measures initially seemed to be a belated curtsy to the changes initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. But a closer reading indicated that the proposals were aimed at distancing Cuba from events across the Atlantic.

"What we are talking about is perfecting a single, Leninist party based on the principles of democratic centralism," the committee pronounced only two weeks after the Soviet Communist Party, following the lead of its East European counterparts, abolished its monopoly on power. The new policy is designed to improve the party's organization to make it more responsive, but not to expose it to competition. In a speech before the National Assembly last week, Castro reiterated that Havana would not remove "the tiniest bit of authority from the party."

Nor did the Central Committee embrace the shift to free-market measures that is transforming other communist states. "Nobody should dream that we are going toward capitalism," growled Castro. "On the contrary, we have to socialize progressively." The committee's new program is actually a continuation of the "rectification of errors" campaign launched in 1986 to reverse the modest free-market reforms instituted in the mid-1980s. Castro abandoned that experiment, complaining angrily that it had produced skyrocketing prices and corruption.

The Central Committee did implicitly acknowledge, however, that there is room for improvement, when it called for a "favorable environment for creative thinking and fruitful debate." In making that concession, the party appeared to be playing to the home audience. According to U.S. intelligence reports, CuTMEba is enduring an intense internal debate over the country's future course, particularly its economic management.

The most visible sign of a possible fissure within the ruling elite was the execution last July of Major General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, a celebrated war hero, and three other officers. Though they were charged with drug smuggling and corruption, many Cuban exiles believe their real crime was to pose a threat to Castro and his brother Raul, the Defense Minister and heir designate. Meanwhile, the government jailed at least ten human-rights activists last year. The U.S. State Department's annual human-rights report, which was issued last week, lambasted Cuba's record, which it said had "worsened significantly" in 1989.

Perhaps the most significant fount of dissent in Cuba is the generation gap. Half of Cuba's 10 million people were born after Castro seized power in 1959. "People who lived through the revolution had a sense of what they were fighting against," says a U.S. State Department official. "The kids who have grown up since don't. All they've been told is austerity, austerity, less and less freedom."

Among Cuba's young as well as its old, the greatest source of dissatisfaction is the exhausted economy. The nation's coffers have been devastated by the drop-off in world petroleum prices since the mid-1980s; Cuba generated much of its foreign exchange by reselling, at top prices, cut-rate oil supplied by the Soviet Union. Sugar, Cuba's main export, has also been a loser on international markets. Ever since Havana in 1986 suspended payments on its foreign debt, which now stands at $7 billion, most industrialized countries have refused to extend new credits. With only $87 million in reserves, Cuba lacks the hard currency to buy vital imports.

An East bloc refrigerator costs $2,000, an average worker's income for an entire year. A $35 Sanyo fan goes for $500 -- no small consideration in a country where the daily temperature averages 78 degrees F. Local goods are in short supply too. Thanks to inefficient methods of growing and harvesting, Cuba may be the only tropical island in the world where fruits and vegetables are hard to find. The widening rift between Havana and Moscow has caused other deprivations. The Soviet Union's increasing unwillingness -- or inability -- to continue carrying the Cuban economy has created severe shortages of flour, bread, razor blades and TV sets. The long-standing U.S. trade embargo continues to take its toll as well.

The worst is yet to come. Cuba relies on the East bloc for about 90% of its imports and exports. This trade is based mainly on barter, not cash, and on terms heavily skewed in Cuba's favor: the Soviets, for example, buy Cuban sugar at about four times the market price. But as East bloc countries move toward free-market economies, they are seriously reassessing their ties with Cuba, which cannot pay in the hard currency that Western customers offer.

Cuba's lifeline of direct economic and military aid from Moscow -- about $5.5 billion annually -- may be choked off as well. Gorbachev is under increasing pressure to cut back Castro's allowance, as Soviet citizens tire of propping him up while their own economy languishes. And Gorbachev may find it irksome that despite his professed repudiation of exported revolution, his financial support allows Castro to continue backing communist regimes and insurgencies in the Third World.

Western diplomats disagree about whether Moscow is apt to cut substantially its $15 million-a-day subsidy to Havana. The handout, after all, is not pure charity, since the Soviet military derives enormous benefits from having a beachhead in the Western hemisphere. In recent months, the Soviets have delivered two advanced MiG-29 fighters to the island. Still, Castro is edgy. For the first time, he suggested publicly in January that the Soviets might abandon him, in which case, he said, Cuba was prepared to live "under a wartime economy." Says Wayne Smith, director of Cuban Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: "Castro sees that the world has turned upside down, so he decides Cuba has to circle the wagons and spit on everybody beyond the wagons."

Despite the obstacles against him, no one is dismissing El Comandante just yet. "Castro is charismatic, even if his popularity has eroded some," says Smith. "It could be argued that he would win an open election even today." The "maximum leader" maintains his high favor by constantly mixing with ordinary folks, thereby cultivating a keen sense of popular sentiment. Observes a senior Cuban official: "He is not like Honecker and Ceausescu, who lost touch with their people." And unlike the communist regimes imposed on Eastern Europe after World War II, Castro's revolution was a homegrown affair that quickly attracted the support of most Cubans.

Such arguments fail to impress the 700,000 Cuban exiles in South Florida, who over the past few weeks have worked themselves into a greater frenzy than usual over Castro's fate. Miami's Spanish radio stations dedicate hours of airtime to speculation that Castro's regime will collapse. Some emigres are even preparing to sell their property and return to their homeland. To Miami Herald columnist Sergio Lopez-Miro, such actions constitute "wishful thinking cum madness." Or call it hope -- the same hope that people like the Fidelista in Santiago have been searching for in the dark. Uva Clavijo, a Miami-based fiction writer who came to the U.S. in 1959 at the age of 15, has decided she will return to Cuba if Castro falls, and she believes it will be soon. "History has accelerated, and he can't go against history," she says. "Communism is crumbling. Why should Cuba be different?" While Clavijo's speculation may be premature, her question is increasingly one worth pondering.

With reporting by James Carney/Miami, Ricardo Chavira/Havana and Pico Iyer/Santiago de Cuba