CUBA

Is Cuba an "Exceptional" Case within the Hemisphere?

Is Cuba an "Exceptional" Case within the Hemisphere

Introduction

The case of Cuba is extreme, and in many ways unique. Cuban history since the late 19th Century is intertwined in a relationship with one country, the United States. The mutual enmity between the two governments for much of the last 50 years has had a direct impact on conditions inside Cuba. Anything that diplomats of democratic countries can do in support of Cuban democracy development pales in significance to the potential effect of placing US-Cuba relations on a normal basis, possibly for the first time.

The only country in the western hemisphere that does not practice some form of electoral democracy, Cuba's government remains in principle a Marxist-Leninist throwback and a resolute holdout more than two decades after the abandonment of communism in Europe and adoption of the market economy in China. Expectations that Cuban communism would be merely the last domino to fall failed to recognize a signal difference with Eastern Europe where the regimes were judged to be collaborating with an outside oppressor, the USSR. The Cuban government presents itself as the patriotic defender against an outside threat. (Clinton 2010: 105-108)

The regime has from the outset been symbiotically identified with its Comandante en jefe who led the revolution that propelled it into power on January 1, 1959. Descriptive labels scholars employ to capture its essence range from “extreme paternalism” (Prof. Carollee Berghdorf, Hampshire College, UK) to “charismatic post-totalitarianism” (Prof. Eusebio Mujal-León, Georgetown University, Washington, DC). Exile adversary US Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart, has called it “the Fidel Castro regime,” pure and simple. Although an orderly succession has obviously occurred as Fidel Castro retired from public office in July, 2006 and ostensibly turned power over to Raúl Castro, the question arises whether anything significant has changed. Fidel Castro's moral influence over the country remains, though he is without direct control of all details as before. Having described himself in 1961 as a “Marxist-Leninist until I die,” he recast himself in post-retirement writings as a “utopian socialist,” adding that “one must be consistent to the end.” (Hirschman 2009: 230-235)

The regime he built over the decades, “is not the German Democratic Republic,” as one diplomat in Havana phrased it, but it is an authoritarian one-party state that has used an Orwellian security apparatus to rein in and quash democratic impulses over five decades, often citing the threat from the US as the rationale. Much of the world acknowledges the ability of Castro's Cuba to have stared down and survived determined efforts by successive US governments to end the regime, by invasion, attempted assassination, a CIA program of subversion, and a punitive economic embargo.

But increasingly, democrats rebuke the regime for its invocation of these real threats to Cuba's sovereignty to justify the continued and even tighter suffocation of human and civil rights of Cuban citizens. (Whitehead 2010: 365-375)

The case study that follows attempts to identify activities by diplomats and democracies in support of Cubans' efforts to secure rights at home, ...