Caribbean & Central America - January 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The ruling Communist Party (PCC) will hold its first party conference beginning on 28 January, but in contrast to the ground-breaking April 2011 sixth PCC conference, expectations are low.  Indeed, in a 9 January posting the dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez noted that even the state TV was decidedly unenthusiastic. This is being attributed to dashed expectations about the slow pace and limited reach of President Raúl Castro’s reforms.

On 23 December President Castro declared before the national assembly that the government would pardon nearly 3,000 prisoners. He also announced the further expansion of the private sector in his ongoing bid to streamline the State, improve efficiency and increase domestic food production. The pace of reform, however, while rapid by Cuban standards, is too slow for many. The widely anticipated removal of travel restrictions was not forthcoming; Castro, determined not to be rushed, merely promised “gradual changes”.

The disillusion is understandable, but taken in context, Raúl Castro is in fact overseeing a quiet, if carefully measured, economic revolution in Cuba, and one that will almost inevitably snowball. The rising expression of discontent (and the government’s continued tough response to internal dissidence) is itself evidence enough that the seed has probably already been sown.

Sánchez writes, “In the ranks of the Party itself there are many illusions and more than one militant will turn in his or her party card if the meeting ends with poor results. The time “purchased” last April during the Party Congress is about to end. The political reforms are urgent and even the system’s most faithful have begun to despair.” One leading Havana-based dissident economist, Oscar Espinosa, summed it up in a recent article on the prospects for Cuba in 2012: “Change or Chaos”.

2012 forecasts

President Castro singled out the rising cost of food on international markets, along with the US embargo, for Cuba’s slow rate of growth in 2011. He said that 2.7% GDP growth (calculated by awarding an unorthodox weighting to social services) was “acceptable” given the adverse global economic climate, but he pledged to increase it in 2012 by expanding the private sector.  The food import bill in 2012 is forecast at US$1.7bn.

As of January 2012, farmers can lease 165 hectares (ha), up from the current maximum of 33ha.  The leases will be longer, at 25 years rather than 10, and will also be renewable. Also, farmers will be permitted to build houses on their plots. Notably, the state may also reimburse farmers that lose their lease. These moves are very likely a first step towards land titling. It is striking that even as its chief benefactor, Venezuela, seeks to nationalise agriculture (with scant results to date), Cuba, after 50 years of failed state-led efforts to secure domestic food security, is firmly going in the opposite direction.  In November 2011 the government unveiled measures to facilitate bank credit for farmers (and Cuba’s new self employed workers). Farmers can now sell produce directly to the tourism sector, and farm cooperatives can seek supply contracts with state companies, without having to use an intermediary.

According to government figures, since 2008 some 4m ha of un- or under-used state land has been leased to 150,000 locals. The state owns upwards of 70% of the arable land. Private farmers have just 24% of the land, but they produce about 57% of locally-grown food. However, agri output has been slow to rise and the state still imports up to 70% of the island’s total food needs at huge cost (approx US$1bn a year.)  Rising international food prices have propelled the cash-strapped government to accelerate agriculture reform. Aside from the land lease scheme, key state productive ministries like sugar have been overhauled and transformed into public holding companies, in a bid for efficiency.

• The PP is back in Spain

Jesús Gracia Aldaz is Spain’s new Secretary of State for Iberoamérica. Aldaz, 51, has ample experience in Latin America, having spent 12 of his 26 year-long diplomatic career in the region. Until late 2011 he was posted as minister counsel at the Spanish embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Between 1991 and 2001 he was also secretary general of Spain’s International Agency for Cooperation (AECI), which oversees development aid and other forms of cooperation.

More notably, he was Spain’s ambassador to Cuba in 2001-2004, and in March/April 2003 witnessed Fidel Castro’s notorious ‘Black Spring’, crackdown on internal dissidents. The Spanish Partido Popular (PP) government at the time, led by the conservative premier Jose María Aznar, oversaw a tough response by the European Union (EU) to the crackdown, which to all intents and purposes put Cuba-EU political relations on ice until 2008/2009.  The Socialist government led by Jose Luís Rodriguez Zapatero (2004-2011) made an effort, led by the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, to improve relations. Moratinos was instrumental in the deal agreed in mid-2010 between the Cuban government and the local Catholic Church for the release of political prisoners, over 100 of whom went to exile in Spain.

The on-again-off-again political relationship between Spain and Cuba, and by extension the EU (where Spain likes to monopolise Cuba policy), is unlikely to prosper as much under the new PP administration, elected in November 2011.  But that is not necessarily owing to the political difference between the PP and the Castros. The new foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, who is very familiar with Cuba and is known as a level-headed diplomat, has already signalled that boosting trade and economic relations with South America in particular will be Spain’s priority, as it struggles to pull out of a crippling recession.

Whatever the state of the relations between Madrid and Havana, however, Spanish companies have a major toe-hold in Cuba, not least in the tourist sector. More prominently, Spain’s Repsol is leading the country’s offshore oil-exploration efforts.

• The Pope and Ahmadinejad

Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad was due in Cuba for a short 24-hour visit on 11 January, where he was scheduled to meet President Raúl Castro and give a conference at the University of Havana. Iranian state media also suggested that he would meet Fidel Castro, who in response to the latest rumours of his death (this time on Twitter) issued a proof of life statement dated 8 January in which he suggested that the US government might be better run by a robot, which might be capable of avoiding “a war that will put an end to the life of our species” (in allusion to his forecast nuclear war between the US and Iran).

It has also been confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI will visit Cuba on 26-28 March next. The last Pope to visit the island was Pope John Paul II, in 1998.

• Lula, Sánchez and Rousseff

Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010) has suggested that the high profile Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, creator of the blog Generación Y, should write to President Dilma Rousseff in order to ask for Rousseff’s intercession with the Cuban government to permit Sánchez to travel to Brazil next month.  Sánchez has been invited to Brazil to attend the 10 February debut of a new documentary, Conexión Cuba-Honduras, in which she is interviewed.  In early January, Sánchez appealed to Rousseff (via a video message posted on her blog) to intercede with the Cuban authorities to allow her to travel. To date, the Cubans have turned down 18 travel requests by Sánchez, four of which were for Brazil.  Lula happened to be in Cuba in February 2010 when a hunger striking political prisoner (Orlando Zapata Tamayo) died. His silence generated fierce international criticism.

• Party conference

The PCC conference aims to assess the Party's work and determine changes "necessary" within the organisation. The PCC has over 800,000 members.  The communist youth and the mass sectoral organisations including trade unions, the Federation of Cuban Women and the neighbourhood-based Committees for the Defence of the Revolution were also invited to read and contribute to the draft conference document.

• Evolution

From the PPC draft national conference document: “The first thing we are obliged to modify in the life of the Party is the mentality that, as a psychological barrier, will be the most difficult thing to overcome as it is bound up with dogmas and obsolete criteria. The imperialists pin their hopes on the supposed vulnerability of the new generations and on certain groups or sectors of society. They try to foment division, apathy, discouragement, emigration and lack of confidence in the leadership of the Revolution and the Party. They try to paint us as a society without a future in order to turn back socialism and snatch away our independence and the gains of the Revolution. These intentions make it crystal clear that the sphere of ideas continues to be a decisive battlefront.”