If you’ve been following the recent headlines about Cuba, chances are you’ve heard that the Communist island is undergoing major changes. In reality, President Raúl Castro’s vaunted reforms essentially amount to some modest economic adjustments, not unlike those that Havana implemented during the “special period” of the mid-1990s, following the demise of the Soviet Union.
For example, Cuba has increased the number of legally permissible self-employment activities, which will give a slight boost to domestic entrepreneurship. The regime has also pledged to let citizens “sell” their homes, but this doesn’t really make sense, because those homes are officially government property. As Cuban dissident economist Oscar Chepe told the Financial Times, the Castro reforms are “too little, too limited, and too late.” Communist authorities are not fundamentally revamping the Cuban economic system; they are merely treading water, attempting to stay afloat amid the country’s worst crisis since the 1959 revolution.
While the economic changes have been meager, the political changes have been virtually nonexistent. Saying that regime officials will heretofore be limited to two five-year terms, as Raúl Castro did in April, is not much of a concession. After all, the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) continues to wield absolute, totalitarian power. Without political pluralism and free elections, term limits are meaningless. The two men who now sit directly below Castro in the CCP hierarchy are octogenarian José Machado Ventura and near-octogenarian Ramiro Valdés: both members of the original revolutionary generation, and both ideological hardliners. (Valdés founded Cuba’s notoriously brutal G2 spy agency.)
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