Next Step : Cuban Communists Are Seeking a New Agenda : Behind Castro’s slogan of ‘socialism or death,’ the party is trying to rid itself of ineffective Soviet dogma.

Since the collapse of Communist dictatorships across Eastern Europe more than a year ago, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro has adopted the slogan “socialism or death,” trumpeting his resolve to keep ruling this Caribbean island as a one-party socialist state.

“If they told me that 98% of the people did not believe in the revolution, I would carry on fighting,” he declared in a speech last October. “A revolutionary must be a man who, even if he is left alone, continues to fight for his ideas.”

But behind the aging leader’s defiant rhetoric, his Communist Party is engaged in a lively debate over how to rid the political system of some of its dogmatic, Soviet-style trappings and make it more responsive to the needs of 10 million Cubans during their worst economic hardships since Castro led a guerrilla band to power in 1959.

Most of the discussions are part of an official effort to shape the everyday complaints of ordinary Cubans into an agenda of reforms at the Fourth Party Congress to be held some time this year. Among the demands most likely to be accepted are freer emigration and an end to discrimination against religious believers.

At less formal round tables, held twice a month at the University of Havana, Communists and outsiders are debating the “crisis of socialism” and what new form Cuba’s official creed must take to survive. One indication is the university’s curriculum, which requires more study these days of 19th-Century Cuban independence hero Jose Marti and less of Karl Marx.

“The Cuban revolution is searching for a new philosophy,” Mercedes Arce, head of the university’s Center for Study of Political Alternatives, said in an interview. Tying Cuba’s economy to the Soviet Bloc, she explained, influenced the way the entire society was organized. Now that those ties are unraveling, “people are hopeful that the Party Congress will steer a new course for society.”

Some Cuba watchers dismiss the debate as insignificant because Communist leaders have precluded any challenge to Castro’s rule. Yet even the most skeptical admit that the 64-year-old president’s charismatic appeals to Cuban nationalism and his image as a renovator could shore up his popularity.

“The Party Congress is not going to change Cuba into a quasi-capitalist system or a democracy,” a Western diplomat said. “But it could bring some changes to make the system appear more open and more productive.”

That’s exactly what some party leaders hope for in order to help confront growing shortages of food and machinery, once supplied by Cuba’s former East European allies, and of Soviet fuel, which became costlier under a new commercial agreement that all but ended Cuba’s status as a favored Soviet trading partner.

Cuba’s productivity, especially in agriculture, has declined since 1986. That is when Castro abandoned a short-lived experiment with market mechanisms on the ground that material incentives had created a class of high-paid middlemen who exploited the Cuban people by charging exorbitant prices for food and services.

Managers of the centralized economy are now relying on moral incentives--and the rallying slogan “Cuba va” (Cuba can make it)--to enforce a wartime rationing plan, mobilize 20,000 volunteer workers from Havana to the farms and replace thousands of cars and tractors with bicycles and oxen. The rationing regime, dubbed “special period in time of peace,” has raised the level of grumbling and cynicism among Cubans, who stand in longer lines for more of their food.

Part of the debate within the party is over the extent to which the market should be restored. Material incentives, in the form of better pay and privileges, already go to workers in tourist hotels and pharmaceutical research labs--two of Cuba’s most promising dollar earners. Thousands of Cubans have acquired pigs since the government last October authorized independent trading in pork--part of the 5% of agricultural production now in private hands.

Dining in a popular state-owned restaurant one night, a party official thought of McDonald’s. He wondered aloud why the state couldn’t adopt the franchise concept--retaining control of businesses but allowing private individuals to manage them as concessions and share profits.

“It is fair to say that there are two currents in the party--the more orthodox Marxists and those looking for a creative process of change, in a uniquely Cuban way,” said the official, who put himself in the latter camp and claimed it was gaining the upper hand.

But Angel Tomas Gonzalez, a journalist for the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, predicted “a period of backsliding as the economic crisis forces more centralization at a time when we should be moving the other way.”

Foreign journalists got a hint of the debate in January when the manager of a state farm they were visiting boasted that such collectives were the most efficient way of pursuing Cuba’s goal of self sufficiency in food. He was immediately corrected by a Foreign Ministry escort who said the issue would be debated at the Party Congress. Some officials said the Congress might authorize individual ownership of such small-time enterprises as barber shops and taxi services.

But party leaders are wary of allowing privatization to go too far. They have studied the recent Chinese lesson that a Communist government can unleash intolerable levels of dissent if it opens the economy too quickly. A Cuban Communist Youth official who recently visited Beijing came home with a proverb from his Chinese hosts: “When you open the window, you let in not only fresh air but flies.”

“When Cuba gained its independence from Spain,” said Culture Minister Armando Hart, a member of the Politburo, “it might have developed an independent form of capitalism, but it was confronted with an imperialist power (the United States) that wouldn’t let this happen. So why do we have to invent capitalism now?”

Castro’s position has been to defend socialism as the most humane system possible and a badge of independence from the United States, which lost huge investments on the island after 1959. “If capitalism returned some day to Cuba, our sovereignty would disappear forever,” the president has said. “We would be an extension of Miami.”

The socialism practiced by Castro was built on the Soviet model during the 1960s and ‘70s--a period Moscow now officially brands “the era of stagnation.” It provides free education and medical care for all, cradle-to-grave social benefits and rigid state planning of agricultural and industrial production.

Although socialism itself is not openly questioned in Cuba, there is discussion over who bears responsibility for its shortcomings and how to fix them. The following joke heard in Havana illustrates part of the debate:

Castro visits a pig farm and admires a pregnant sow. “Beautiful!” he exclaims. “I predict she will produce at least 10 piglets.”

A few weeks later, the sow delivers only six piglets. Fearful of disappointing the president, the farm manager reports she had seven. His boss raises the figure to eight piglets and his superior ups it to nine. The minister of agriculture, who must inform Castro, makes it 10 piglets.

“Magnificent,” Fidel says as he reads the report. “We’ll export 60% of the pigs and use 40% for domestic consumption.”

To some who tell the joke, the point is that food shortages and other failures are the fault of the bureaucracy, not the leadership. To others, it shows how an all-powerful leader like Castro, who involves himself in every detail of Cuba’s development, can stifle individual responsibility among his underlings, who end up telling him only what they think he wants to hear.

Seeking to make the system work better, the party leadership invited Cubans last March to voice their complaints at public meetings leading to this year’s Party Congress. The call drew little reaction at first; people were unaccustomed to speaking out, uncertain how far they could go in their criticism.

The meetings were suspended in April. They resumed two months later after the Politburo announced that any questioning of “the socialist option” or “the idea of a sole party” would not be permitted -- but that any other policy was fair game for criticism.

Freed to debate anything else, Cubans have responded with a torrent of opinions--more than 800,000 in all. They have complained about too much paperwork, too many meetings to attend, boring shoe designs, travel restrictions, discrimination against homosexuals, abysmal bus service, official laxity with criminals, government promotion of mediocre performers and “tourism apartheid”--the practice of excluding ordinary Cubans from some places frequented by dollar-spending tourists.

The complaints reflect some dissatisfaction with the political system. In a survey of 957 people by the Cuban magazine Bohemia last July, 48% criticized their municipal government delegates--the only officials elected directly by the Cuban people--for failing to represent them well. One woman complained that her delegate was getting a house built for himself while claiming a shortage of funds to stop the neighborhood sewage system from overflowing into her home.

Cuban officials say they learned from the upheavals in the Soviet Bloc that Communist leaders lost touch with the people by failing to respond to such everyday gripes. The line to be adopted by the Party Congress, the officials say, is more participation in a one-party system--not the creation of new parties and competitive elections as happened in Eastern Europe.

“Cuba cannot be understood using the guidelines of Western democracies,” Carlos Aldana, the party Central Committee’s influential secretary of ideology, told the Spanish magazine Cambio 16. “Our guidelines are based on socialism.”

Aldana said the party would continue to choose all candidates for higher government office--the National Assembly, the Council of State and the presidency--but would permit more democracy within its ranks. “We are talking about greater participation by the rank and file in creating the candidacies,” he said. “We want to eliminate edicts from the top and promote creativity from the bottom up.”

One proposed reform would introduce direct elections for the National Assembly, give it a budget, and allow it to exercise independence from the party, whose decisions it now rubber stamps.

The initiatives appear to be aimed at making the system work more efficiently for those who are loyal to it; unlike Soviet-style glasnost, they do not address the concerns of dissidents.

In fact, the talk of reform has been matched over the past year by a crackdown that all but crushed the island’s small human-rights movement. And one change Aldana regards as a certainty in the coming months would undoubtedly rid the island of large numbers of malcontents--by lowering from 45 to 18 the minimum age for obtaining a passport to leave Cuba.

While shunning the democratic reforms now under way in the Soviet Union, Cuban communists are shedding other features of the old Soviet model. The University of Havana, for example, now has its own journalism texts, instead of the one translated straight from Moscow State University. Cuban high schools are de-emphasizing technical and ideological training and introducing courses in personal ethics and morality.

Perhaps the most far-reaching reform on the agenda would drop the official atheist ideology. That would open Communist membership to pro-Castro Christians who have been clamoring to join the party and would lift a ban that prevents religious believers from pursuing such careers as nuclear physics and the military officer corps.

If that happens, political scientists wonder whether Cuba’s version of one-party socialism can survive. Says Arce: “A party with religious believers is not going to be the same party. It will be more representative of the society.”

Is the party leadership ready for such a change? Perhaps so. The Politburo, the top layer of a party structure copied from Moscow, has commissioned the Center for Marti Studies for information on Jose Marti’s loose 19th-Century alliance of pro-independence groups. Some read this as a sign that the party is ready to change its nature from an elite Leninist “vanguard” now numbering 500,000 militants to a broader “umbrella” coalition of diverse groups that support the general aim of social justice.

But others believe that Cuban Communist leaders may just be looking to their own history to justify continuing one-party rule. They are arguing these days that the one-party model is more Cuban than Soviet, since Marti implemented it before Lenin even thought of it.