Facing new test, Cuba’s revolution circles back

Facing new test, Cuba's revolution circles back
By Nick Miroff March 13 at 5:22 PM

HAVANA — At the gates of the city's largest cemetery, a feverish
34-year-old Fidel Castro was rallying rifle-toting militiamen to battle.
It was April 16, 1961. The Bay of Pigs invasion was underway. The
Americans were behind it.

"What they will never forgive us for," Castro roared, "is that we have
made a socialist revolution right under their noses!"

Here was Castro's political confession. Generations of Cuban
schoolchildren would memorize the event as the "Declaration of the
Socialist Character of the Revolution." Until that moment Castro had
insisted to his country, and suspicious U.S. officials, that his
revolution was a nationalist one. Not anymore.

"Fidel!" the militiamen shouted. "Khrushchev! We're with you!"

Almost 54 years after that turn toward Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union,
Cuba is at another defining moment. With its state-run economic model
exhausted, U.S. relations on the mend and the long Castro era coming to
a close, a subtle shift is underway to once more make Cuban nationalism
the meaning of its revolution. Younger generations of Cubans will have
to decide if they believe that.

The revolution's many detractors say it has been little more than a ruse
for the Castros to remain in power. If so, they are nearly out of time.
Fidel is 88 and too frail to appear in public. His brother, Raúl, is 83,
and says he will step down in 2018, leaving him three years to redefine
Cuba's relationship with the United States and hand off an economic and
political system capable of enduring beyond the brothers' rule.

They have long depicted their revolution as an evolutionary process, not
something that ended with guerrilla victory in 1959. They also insisted
that Cubans be for it or against it, and two generations later, this has
produced a kind of collective revulsion at politics.

"C'mon, man, don't ask me about that," said one 23-year-old computer
engineering graduate, selling phone cards in the street. He said he was
too fearful to give his name to a foreign reporter. "I'm just trying to
survive."

In the years before failing health forced Fidel Castro aside, when he
was still buoyed from the Elián González saga, the nation's leader
declared a "battle of ideas" in a last-ditch effort to rescue younger
Cubans from the ideological contamination they had incurred in the
post-Soviet austerity period. He wanted to warn them against the
temptations of capitalism, individualism and materialism. It was too late.

Cuba today is a place where many young people idolize the United States
and display little patience for the state-run economic model that has
left much of their country in ruins. There is no stigma anymore toward
entrepreneurship or private business. Real estate agents in Havana's
newly liberalized housing market signal high quality with the phrase
"construción capitalista," meaning a property that was built in the
pre-Revolutionary period, when people cared about aesthetics and
workmanship.

Indeed, nearly everything beautiful about Cuban architecture comes from
this era, and the more that communist authorities had to promote the
island's attractions for its tourism industry, the more Cubans
themselves began to internalize their "capitalist" heritage as a better
time.

In the Raúl Castro era, Cuba's revolutionary politics have receded. Gone
is the constant churn of rallies and marches denouncing "the Empire."
There is no spellbinding leader speaking for hours on end.

Ask young Cubans today what the purpose of the revolution was, and
chances are they'll say free health care and education. Canada has that,
too, of course, as do plenty of other liberal democracies whose citizens
enjoy far more freedom and prosperity.

Few Cubans think they have anything to lose by economic liberalization,
or that Cuba could stop being a place where people look out for their
neighbors, help strangers in the streets and live without fear of gangs
or criminals. They do not see a trade-off or worry that Cuba will end up
more like Mexico or the Dominican Republic than Miami.

"We have no alternative to opening up to private enterprise," said
Roberto Veiga, a founder of the civil society group Cuba Posible, which
advocates gradual reform. "But the younger generations don't see a risk
to the sense of equality and dignity that are positive achievements of
the revolution."

Since taking over for his brother in 2006, Raúl Castro has allowed
Cubans to travel abroad, buy and sell their homes and run small
businesses. The purpose of these liberalization measures — "updates" is
the official term — is for more socialism, he insists, not less, and
state-run companies will remain the core of Cuba's model.

This increasingly hybrid economy is evident at the very Havana
intersection where Fidel Castro stamped "socialism" on the revolution in
1961. All the main commercial spaces belong to the government, but
private entrepreneurs work the margins, selling shoes, hot churros and
pirated copies of Pitbull videos and "The Hangover."

Cuba's updated version of socialism is one that eagerly partners with
foreign capitalists to run heavy industries and all-inclusive tourist
resorts. It is building luxury hotels and golf courses with Chinese
bankers. It appears ready to roll out a red carpet for U.S. businesses
willing to help break the trade embargo.

But with every tentative turn toward market economics, Cuban socialism
becomes slipperier, less coherent, sending believers in the revolution
looking for meaning elsewhere. Some appear to be turning back to the
same Cuban nationalism Castro offered long ago.

It's an interpretation of the revolution that reaches back to Cuba's
founding as a nation, and the bitterness left by the 1898
Spanish-American War, whose very name left Cubans out after their
excruciating three-decade fight for independence. The United States kept
Guantanamo Bay, and for decades afterward it reserved the right to
intervene on the island at its whim.

Castro's revolution, in this version, was the event that truly fulfilled
the wishes of independence hero José Martí and ended U.S. domination of
the island.

In a ceremony loaded with symbolism and broadcast live on national
television on Feb. 24, the anniversary of the day Martí launched his
1895 uprising against Spain, Raúl Castro pinned medals on the five Cuban
intelligence agents — the "Cuban Five" — who returned in the prisoner
swap at the center of the agreement with President Obama. The men were
declared "Heroes of the Republic."

Gerardo Hernandez, the group's ringleader, told Cubans their mission
"was not over." Cuba's new relationship with the United States would
usher in an era of change that required a renewed patriotic commitment,
he said. "There are, and will be, many ways to defend Cuba, and Cuba
will always need loyal sons to look out for her," Hernandez said.

Raúl Castro did not speak. In his place, City Historian Eusebio Leal
gave a long lesson in Cuban history, from the country's origins to its
colonial domination by Spain and the 19th-century patriots who rose up
to fight for independence, forging a sense of nationhood despite their
differences. It was a sweeping, slow-building speech, and at the end,
Leal said Cuba had come to a new crossroads in its history, confronted
by "a gentlemanly adversary who has lowered his aggressive posture, at
least for a moment, giving us the opportunity to debate what we
obviously need to debate at length."

"What we need now more than ever is national unity," he said.

On government calendars and stationery, 2015 is "Year 57 of the
Revolution," and that too is a milestone of sorts.

The period between Cuba's founding as a republic in 1902 and the
Castros' rebel victory — the country's entire pre-Castro history — spans
just 56 years and seven months. By the next Jan. 1 anniversary of their
revolution, they will have been in power even longer.

Source: Facing new test, Cuba's revolution circles back - The Washington
Post -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/facing-new-test-cubas-revolution-circles-back/2015/03/13/6e209a34-c380-11e4-a188-8e4971d37a8d_story.html