After 60 years of revolution in Cuba, cracks in leadership emerge
Six months after taking office as president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel will preside over ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of a revolution while facing a stagnant economy and growing citizen protests. Six decades into its socialist experiment, his government is still trying to figure out how to satisfy the basic necessities of its population.
With minimal economic growth in 2018 and continuing shortages of basic staples like flour at year-end, experts say the government is failing under his leadership.
And unlike his predecessors, who ruled with almost absolute power, Diaz-Canel exposed internal conflicts this year when his government reversed unpopular regulations to increase control over the private sector, was prone to soften a decree that legalizes censorship of independent art, and decided to withdraw from the draft constitution a controversial article that would open a path to same-sex marriage. The move was viewed by Cuba watchers as a response to fear of losing support from members of the religious sector for a referendum in 2019.
“By revising the regulations governing the private sector and making concessions to the artists on the decree law regulating the arts, the government has shown a responsiveness to organized public pressure that is unprecedented,” said William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University who recently participated in an event organized by the Cuban foreign ministry in Havana.
“In the past, the government modified some draft laws after public discussions indicated opposition to particular features, but its response to organized opposition in the past has been unyielding,” LeoGrande said. “This pragmatic response indicates both the government’s flexibility and also its recognition that the Cuba of 2018 is not one in which people will simply accept whatever the authorities dictate.”
Six decades after the Jan. 1, 1959, triumph of the revolution led by Fidel Castro, Diaz-Canel stands as the figurehead of a country that only recently gave mobile phone users access to the internet, letting them post videos of people standing in long lines to buy bread and to document private taxi drivers who went on strike in protest against new control measures implemented by the state.
Limits on the number of permits for private-sector work that any one person can have and the number of chairs allowed at private restaurants known as paladares, which were included in a decree published in July, also sparked discontent among the so-called self-employed and dismay from foreign governments and experts who had expected an economic opening from what was supposed to be a more modern government with a younger face.
After months of criticisms, Labor Minister Magarita Gonzalez announced in early December that those two measures had been erased.
On Twitter, Diaz-Canel defended the decision and dismissed speculation that it was the result of a fragile government: “There’s no reason to believe that corrections are steps backward, or to confuse them with weaknesses when the people are heard. Revolution is to change everything that should be changed. None of us is as powerful as all of us together,” he wrote.