Cuba Marks Revolution After Storms, Commodity Bust
Jan. 1 (Bloomberg) — Cuba’s communist revolution marks its 50th anniversary today at a time when the leaders who shaped its last half-century are trying to fashion a future that will survive them.
President Raul Castro, 77, is likely to extol the revolution’s history when he speaks in Santiago de Cuba, seized by his brother, Fidel, on New Year’s Day 1959 as Ernesto “Che” Guevara marched into Havana. The ailing Fidel, 82, who stepped down as president in February, isn’t scheduled to appear.
The island-wide festivities will give the Castros an opportunity, if they want it, to respond to changes in the political and economic environments, including plunging commodity prices and the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. Obama said during his campaign that he might be willing to ease the U.S. trade embargo under certain conditions.
“The stars are aligned for a change, and the circumstances are the best they’ve ever been,” said Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba documentation project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. “How much they’ll change is hard to tell.”
The celebration comes amid growing economic pressures that last weekend prompted President Castro to warn Cubans they’ll have to tighten their belts.
‘Realism’
“The accounts simply do not add up,” Castro said during a speech in Havana to parliament. “Two plus two always makes four, never five; we must act with realism and adjust all of our dreams to real possibilities.”
Across Old Havana, streets are decorated with colored lights shaped into the number 50. Posters of a younger Fidel Castro read “50 Years of Revolution and More.” Hand-lettered signs in windows cheer, “Long live the revolution!”
Still, this year’s hurricanes and the global financial crisis will probably color Raul Castro’s remarks, said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington.
Hurricanes Ike, Gustav and Paloma caused about $10 billion in damage, the equivalent of 20 percent of gross domestic product, Castro said in the Dec. 27 speech.
Prices for exports such as nickel, sugar and seafood have dropped, he said. Cuba, the world’s seventh-biggest nickel exporter, has seen the price tumble 59 percent this year.
Chavez Aid
At the same time, a 76 percent, five-month plunge in oil means Cuba’s biggest benefactor, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, will have to tap reserves for next year’s budget. Cuba gets about 90,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil a day for the services of doctors and other professionals, an exchange never accounted for publicly.
Cubans will need to work harder as a result while the government will cut its travel budgets and reduce workers’ subsidies, Castro said. Economic problems will also postpone a planned government restructuring, he added.
Castro has taken halting steps to open social and economic life. He allowed Cubans to buy mobile phones and DVD players few can afford, and lifted a ban on citizens using tourist hotels accessible only with foreign currency. He has also announced that unused government land will be distributed to private farmers.
“They’re changing slowly in Cuba and a better relationship with the U.S. would help move that along,” said Jake Colvin, vice president for global trade at the National Foreign Trade Council, a Washington-based group of companies and trade associations. “There’s recognition internally that they need economic development and reform.”
U.S. Embargo
The U.S. embargo, imposed in 1960 after Fidel expropriated American property, stands in the way, Colvin said.
During his campaign, Obama vowed to maintain the trade ban, promising at the same time to loosen Bush administration regulations that limited visits and remittances to the island by Cuban-Americans.
Obama also said he’d be willing to talk with Cuba and begin easing the sanctions if the government made democratic moves such as freeing political prisoners. Castro on Dec. 18 proposed an exchange of his prisoners for five Cubans convicted of espionage in the U.S. in 2001.
The National Foreign Trade Council is calling for Obama to open Cuba to all U.S. travelers and let U.S. companies work on the island.
The region is unified in urging an end to the embargo, as a Latin American and Caribbean summit last month made clear. Castro, making the summit his first trip abroad as president, received a warm welcome from the heads of state, who gathered for the first time without U.S. or European participation.
Revolutionary War
Raul and Fidel Castro began their revolution in 1953 with a failed assault on the Moncada army barracks. Released from jail in a general amnesty, they joined the Argentine revolutionary Guevara in Mexico, and in 1956 crossed the Caribbean with 82 fighters to attack the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
After Batista’s forces killed all but about 20 of the insurgents, the Castros fled to the Sierra Maestra mountains and built their guerrilla army. On New Year’s Day in 1959, Batista fled the island.
In his 49 years in power, Fidel Castro outlasted 10 U.S. presidents, almost five decades of the U.S. trade embargo, and the collapse of his primary patron, the Soviet Union.
Fidel Castro congratulated the “heroic people” of Cuba in a brief note posted on the Web site of government newspaper Granma. Since handing power to his brother, Fidel Castro has made the newspaper, named for the boat he rode to launch his revolution, his primary form of communication.