Fidel Castro's power secret: His choice of political enemies

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Fidel Castro's 71st birthday last week was greeted with the usual nonsense by both sides. Granma, Cuba's state-controlled newspaper, wrote that the "head of the most worthy, strong, and heroic revolution in modern times" was celebrating his birthday "with the love of all the people." Cuban-American Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart said: "I think Castro is an unburied corpse. The only question is how much disease he can spread before he's buried."

No surprises there -- but the old lines were lent a new urgency by the bombs that have started going off in Cuba. Not big bombs, mind you: the first, in the Hotel Melia Cohiba in Havana in mid-April, was so small that the authorities managed to pass it off at first as a 'gas explosion'. But the bombings have continued, and they are of a professional standard that suggests somebody serious is behind them.

In July, bombs hit the lobbies of two major Havana hotels, the Nacional and the Capri, slightly injuring three people. On Aug. 4 there was another bomb at the Melia Cohiba, and the next day a blast ripped through the Cuban government-owned tourist office in the Bahamas. Somebody is going to a lot of trouble to drive tourists away from Cuba, and they are skilled enough to avoid hurting their own cause in the process by causing a bloodbath.

So the speculation erupts: is this the beginning of the end for Castro? Alvaro Prendes, a Cuban air force colonel who defected three years ago, believes that only people in the Cuban armed forces could have set the bombs: "The increasing desperation of the Cuban people is equally shared by the junior ranks of the armed forces, where an attitude of rebellion is becoming entrenched."

"Things in Cuba will get worse before they get better," Prendes continued. "Bloodshed is inevitable." But he would say that, wouldn't he?

The truth is probably quite the opposite. Castro has weathered the worst of the crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, and the bombers are trying to sabotage the Cuban tourist industry precisely because it is a major element in Cuba's economic recovery.

'Recovery' is perhaps too positive a word for what has happened in Cuba, where most people still live in circumstances of great scarcity and quiet desperation. The 'equality' that was once paid for by huge Soviet subsidies has been replaced by a two-tier society where those who have access to dollars -- people with relatives abroad, and people whose jobs bring them into contact with foreigners -- live in some comfort, and the other three-quarters of the population live almost literally in rags.

Nevertheless, the recovery is real. In 1993, at the bottom of the post-Soviet crisis, half of Havana seemed to have taken up prostitution, black-marketeering, or mugging out of sheer desperation. I took my 73-year-old parents-in-law there to see the last place in the world where the buildings are covered with Communist slogans in Latin script, and they got mugged twice in a week.

At that time, too, people had largely lost their fear of the regime. The same process one had seen in East Berlin in 1989 or in Moscow in 1990 was well underway in Havana: the police, including the secret police, were beginning to behave with greater caution, just in case there was a change of regime and they became answerable for their behavior. And the population, seeing the police in psychological retreat, was taking greater and greater liberties.

But Castro is a lot more adroit than the Honeckers and Gorbachevs of Eastern Europe: once the world's youngest dictator, he is now the longest-ruling one. To survive, he has eased off just enough on the strict state controls. "Today life -- reality -- forces us to do what we would never otherwise have done," he said in 1993 as he made it legal for Cubans to hold U.S. dollars. "We must make concessions."

The concessions have included letting farmers sell up to 20 percent of their produce in private markets, and 'dollar' shops where anybody with the right kind of currency can buy all the consumer goods that are unavailable to those with nearly worthless Cuban pesos, and much easier rules for foreign investment. The aim was to make enough people content enough to take the situation off the boil -- and it appears that Castro has succeeded.

But none of these concessions is irreversible, and Castro scarcely bothers to hide the fact that he would like to rescind some of them as soon as the situation has fully stabilized. (He has done that before, legalizing farmers' markets in 1986 and then banning them again a few years later). Already the secret police have their confidence back, and ordinary people are much more reluctant to criticize the regime's performance.

This is the context in which the bombings should be seen. They are not evidence of growing desperation and rebelliousness in Cuba, but rather proof that some group of people, on the island or off it, are so depressed by the regime's talent for survival that they are willing to take direct action against the booming tourist industry -- even at the risk of alienating many Cubans who depend on it for a living. But it probably won't make much difference to the regime's longevity.

Castro's secret of survival, in a world where Communist dictators are an endangered species, is partly a matter of tactical political skills, but it is primarily his choice of enemies. Cuba is still a 'tropical gulag', and an increasingly impoverished and unequal one, and Castro himself is a long-winded tyrant with worn-out ideas. But the United States hates him obsessively, and that makes most of the 10 million Cubans reluctant to betray his dream of unconditional independence.

Besides, getting him out could easily involve a civil war, since the island is awash in arms and at least 10 or 20 percent of the population would fight to defend him. So Castro will probably also celebrate his 75th birthday in power. Indeed, he may still be there for his 80th.