Castro's last fight may be against Cubans - Part 2

Castro's last fight may be against Cubans - Part 2
2006/5/2
By Carol J. Williams MIAMI, Los Angeles Times


Most Cubans' commitment to sharing and solidarity "went out the window
in the 1990s," said Phillip Peters, Cuba analyst for the Lexington
Institute think tank in Arlington, Va., recalling the Cuban leadership's
replacement of moral incentives with material rewards to boost
production in the lean years after the Soviet aid cutoff.

"I think it was always clear that during some of the market-oriented
changes made in the '90s that Castro was holding his nose. One reason
was because those changes produced inequalities in the society," Peters
said.

Granma has been exposing case after case of "unscrupulous elements"
engaging in black market commerce. The Communist newspaper disclosed in
March that theft of medications and health-care equipment, from
factories as well as hospitals and clinics, has become so chronic that
some patients can't get vital treatment.

The volumes of food disappearing from state warehouses also suggest
thievery from top to bottom. As in former communist states in Eastern
Europe, there is little sense of wrongdoing among Cubans who take home
part of what they produce to sell and stretch puny salaries that average
less than US$15 a month.

A high-profile campaign against corruption has been under way for at
least three years, but Castro disclosed the severity of the problem when
he warned last November that the very fate of the revolution was at risk
amid such moral failures.

"He's trying to relight the fire. But no one goes to the fire," said
Damian Fernandez, head of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida
International University. Castro can still turn out half a million
people for big anti-American protests, he noted, "but they're bussed
there and they go because it's a big fiesta or their jobs depend on it."

The revolutionary fervor has irrevocably faded, he said, because "the
regime that produced equity in the 1960s now produces inequity," with
high-ranking Communist Party members benefiting from development of
tourist resorts that average Cubans aren't even allowed to enter.

"Fidel frankly dislikes capitalism. He has this very romantic notion
that money corrupts, that money is bad," Fernandez said. "He genuinely
believes that."

Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami's Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, likens Castro's end-of-life actions to
the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution. Like Mao's Red Guards,
Castro deploys special enforcement squads from the Ministry of Interior
and the neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution to
seize property, break up demonstrations and hound those who challenge
the one-party order.

While China's burgeoning middle class and growing prosperity today are
due to the reforms embraced after Mao's death, Castro rejects the
Chinese model, said Suchlicki.

"He went to China and came back and said they're making great advances
but this is not for Cuba," Suchlicki said. "He's afraid of it, just like
he was afraid of perestroika and glasnost." Despite the severity,
Castro's moves have failed to stamp out dissent.

In an attempt to draw international attention to restriction on use of
the Internet, psychologist and Angola war veteran Guillermo Farinas has
been waging a hunger strike since late January. The Women in White,
relatives of political prisoners, still march after church on Sundays,
demanding the men's release.

Caleb McCarry, the State Department's Cuba transition coordinator, sees
the latest crackdowns as "a sign of weakness and fear on the part of the
regime." He predicts the efforts will fail to fan the revolutionary
embers. "The genie is already outside the bottle," McCarry said. "People
want a real life."

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