COLUMN ONE : Can Castro Weather Storm? : Exiled capitalists and opponents of Cuban leader maneuver for power and influence. But the social welfare system is deeply embedded--as is a legacy of intolerance.

Jorge Mas Canosa, a Cuban immigrant who made a fortune selling tractors and stringing telephone cables in Florida, is peddling something new these days: opportunities in a “free Cuba” after President Fidel Castro is gone.

For $10,000 a year, he tells business people, you can become a “director” of his Cuban American National Foundation, which has drafted a new constitution for the island and a 430-page blueprint for converting its economy from socialism to consumerism.

“The pitch is basically that, ‘We’re writing a plan for the future of Cuba, and if you grease our palm now, we’ll take care of you later,’ ” said a Florida vegetable grower hustled by Mas Canosa and his deputies at a cocktail party. “They said all the land in Cuba is government-controlled and, naturally, they were going to be the provisional government.”

Mas Canosa, a combative, ambitious man of 52, is not the only one betting that the Soviet Union’s collapse will soon bring down Havana’s Communist revolution. Other anti-Castro politicians, capitalists and economic gurus are maneuvering for power and influence in a post-Castro Cuba.

Nowhere is the anticipation more naked than in south Florida, where more than 600,000 Cuban exiles live, dream and conspire within 300 miles of the motherland. Viewed from here, the economic crisis precipitated in Havana by the loss of Soviet Bloc patronage makes the 65-year-old dictator a terminal case.

Cuban-Americans convinced that the end is near are selling their homes for cash to start businesses in Cuba. Bay of Pigs veterans belonging to Alfa 66 and other paramilitary bands are training in the Everglades, eager for a shot at claiming a role in Castro’s downfall.

Texaco, RJR Nabisco and 10 other U.S. firms have commissioned research on Cuba by the University of Miami. Conferences on the post-Castro era are held in Miami and in Caracas, Venezuela, with specialists on Russia, Eastern Europe and Nicaragua imparting wisdom to Cuban exiles on how to manage a “transition.”

But wait: Can’t Castro confound them all and survive this crisis? If not, can communism survive him? Who would take over? Will the future belong to those who left Cuba and grew rich or those who stayed and endured? Can any new regime overcome the Castro legacy of economic decay and political division?

While differing in their predictions, Cubans and Cuba watchers caution that any leadership change provoked by the island’s current crisis could be so chaotic, perhaps so bloody, as to wreck anyone’s best-laid plans. And even after the dust settles, they say, Cuba’s strongest assets for an economic rebound--the skill of its work force, the energy of its exiles, the proximity of the U.S. market--could be devalued by its greatest liability: a history, predating Castro, of intolerant, undemocratic behavior.

“The future of Cuba is not bright,” said Jorge Dominguez, a Cuba scholar teaching political science at Harvard University, “no matter who its rulers are or what form the regime takes.”

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Cuban exiles coined a self-assuring little rhyme: En el noventa, se revienta . In ‘90, it will explode. But 1990 passed and Cuba stayed intact, so the refrain was altered slightly: In the ‘90s, it will explode.

Castro has defied such predictions, year after year, since seizing power in 1959. This crisis is his worst, but he has a plan to overcome it.

Cuba’s economy, squeezed for three decades by a U.S. trade embargo, has shrunk more than 25% since its trading partners in Eastern Europe abandoned communism. Petroleum imports, nearly all from Russia, could fall this year to a third of their 1989 level. As tractors run out of fuel, the harvest of sugar, Cuba’s chief export, is threatened. Consumer shortages are severe. Discontent is widespread.

The Lid on Dissent

Yet there is no political upheaval. Castro’s heavily policed one-party state keeps a lid on dissent while trying to revive the economy with Western investment and trade. Foreign companies eager to get into Cuba ahead of American rivals if the embargo is ever lifted have signed 100 joint ventures in tourism, biotechnology, construction, mining and food processing. Central planning is being quietly relaxed in some export industries.

Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economist, likens the strategy to China’s and considers it viable. His forecast is optimistic for a Cuba watcher: The economy will contract another 7% to 12% this year, then start expanding.

If the strategy works, Cuba could achieve economic independence under a less rigid socialism and a triumphant Castro. But the end of the crisis could bring new uncertainties. An economy more open to the West, for instance, might weaken his Communist Party’s long-term hold on power.

For now, Castro holds off political change by framing all debate about it as a stark choice stacked in his favor: me or Miami. Cubans are warned that his brightest achievements--health and education standards still among the highest in Latin America--will be trashed if counterrevolutionary exiles take back the island.

“What land are they going to seize?” Castro asked in a recent speech. “What are they going to do with the houses the revolution has given to the people? Are they going to turn the child-care centers into brothels?”

Under the dictator’s withering attacks, any blueprint brandished in Miami can look like self-defeating prophecy. “Castro needs the stupidity of the exiles to stay in power,” said Frank Calzon, a Cuban-American at Freedom House in Washington. “He needs us to keep declaring victory ahead of time.”

If the crisis persists, it’s hard enough to predict how long Castro might cling to power. The real question--what happens if the crisis defeats him?--is inconceivable on an island where half the population is too young to remember any other leader.

Public discussion of Castro’s mortality is taboo in Cuba, except by the president himself. Broaching the subject in a speech last month, he warned against hope for radical change after he’s gone. “One shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking the revolution is one man,” he said.

Scenarios for Change

But many Cuba watchers doubt that the highly militarized, personalized and socialized welfare state Castro created and so thoroughly dominates could long survive him. What replaces it, they say, will depend on the circumstances of his departure. They offer three scenarios:

* Castro dies, is assassinated, is incapacitated by illness or (least likely) retires.

His uncharismatic 60-year-old brother and armed forces minister, Gen. Raul Castro, is next in command. Cuban officials say privately, however, that a junta would probably take over. Other likely members include Interior Minister Abelardo Colome, 52, an army general who commands the police, and Carlos Aldana, 49, the Communist Party’s chief of ideology.

This may be the best formula for fidelismo without Fidel. But are these men able--or even willing--to resist pressure from party reformers and other Cubans for rapprochement with the United States, competitive elections, a freer market? “As long as Fidel is there, we don’t know what the people around him are really like,” said RAND Corp. analyst Edward Gonzalez.

* Castro is ousted, along with his brother, by junior army officers and party reformers in the midst of widespread food riots.

Younger officers are believed to harbor resentment over the 1989 firing-squad execution of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, an Angola war hero, on what many considered trumped-up drug-trafficking charges. Fear instilled by his demise might keep the young officers from acting unilaterally, but civil disorder would offer a pretext. If the mobs are big enough, Castro’s support in the top army ranks and the police could collapse.

While paying lip service to revolutionary nationalism, the interim rulers would move decisively away from communism. “In that scenario, you’d have a tremendous backlash,” said Mexican political scientist Jorge Castaneda. “Everything from the past would be discredited.”

The new regime, however, might be less clear in its commitment to early elections. But unless it matches Castro’s repression, non-Communist parties could proliferate, with exiles returning to jump into the game.

* Castro loses a civil war sparked by popular unrest that divides the armed forces.

The longer the struggle, the less predictable the shape of the post-Castro order--and the more likely it would degenerate into disorder. The United States would face pressure from Cuban-Americans to intervene, to keep Communists from coming out on top. Armed exiles might stage raids from Florida.

Even if the United States stays out, Castro’s defenders would accuse it of engineering his ouster and keep fighting. “This would excite the Cubans’ nationalistic instincts,” said Georgetown University research scholar Gillian Gunn. “You’d have the ingredients of a major, ongoing conflict.”

However Castro leaves, a crucial decision for his successor will be how far to open the door to Cuba’s exiles--and their capitalist dreams and political ambitions.

Cuba stands to be reshaped by homecoming exiles more than any nation that has already abandoned communism. More than a million Cubans live in exile, about half of them in south Florida, and their total income far exceeds that of the 10 million people on the island.

The problem is that the Cubans with the most money to offer are the most conflictive. Rich white Miami exiles, decades removed from an island many left as children, tend to belittle Castro’s accomplishments in education and health and to brand those who stayed behind as chivatos, or informers, devoid of any other talent.

Islanders have their own epithet for those exiles: gusanos, or maggots. Privileged professionals fear losing their status. Blacks, who have gained opportunities under Castro, fear a return to the more racist past.

“We saw in Kuwait that you had, even after a few months, this deep division between those who stayed and those who left,” said Wayne Smith, a former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. “In Cuba, it’s been 30 years!”

According to a Florida International University survey, 90% of the Cubans here would not return to live permanently in a post-Castro Cuba. But among the other 10% are many, like Mas Canosa, with well-financed plans for “rebuilding” the homeland.

Mas Canosa is controversial enough in Miami, where he once challenged a city commissioner to a duel with pistols. Through Havana’s propaganda prism, he is more so--the symbol of Cuba’s Dickensian capitalist past, the devil to be avoided in favor of “socialism or death,” in the words of Castro’s rallying cry.

Like a mirror image of his archenemy, the exile leader paints Cuba’s choices as black or white.

“The current conditions prevent people on the island from planning a post-Castro Cuba,” he said in a speech last year. “We, the free Cubans, are filling that void.”

In an interview, Mas Canosa denied any ambition to form a provisional government. But he said his foundation would back a candidate, possibly himself, who favors rapid privatization.

“Our participation in the reconstruction of Cuba is subject to these people holding elections,” he said. If they choose capitalism, he added, exile money will pour in, and “Havana will be an extension of Miami.”

That kind of boast only magnifies his notoriety on the island, reminding people of how thoroughly the United States dominated Cuba’s pre-revolutionary economy.

“Cubans would love to have what the exiles have--stores full of clothes, limousines, Coca-Cola--but without their politics, without the Yankees,” said a Havana University student. “We want paradise without the serpent.”

Sensitive to such sentiment, Mas Canosa’s chief rival in exile politics, Carlos Alberto Montaner and his Madrid-based Democratic Platform, have forged ties to the island’s pro-democracy movement, touting it as the alternative from within. Montaner says he would back a movement leader--Gustavo Arcos, a human-rights activist, or Maria Elena Cruz, a poet now in prison--for president.

But Castro’s one-party system allows them little in the way of an organized following or even name recognition at home.

Perhaps as important are the small, liberal exile groups and the growing informal contacts between Miami’s Cuban-American intellectuals and their Havana counterparts, who can travel more freely these days.

“Moderates on both sides will play very important roles after Castro,” said Damien Fernandez, a political scientist at Florida International. “It’s not going to be two blocs fighting each other, but a multiplicity of groups. Some will build bridges.”

Looming Struggle

Underlying the tension between exiles and islanders is the looming struggle over nationalized property that is certain to complicate any post-Castro recovery.

A government taking over today would inherit an economy crippled by chronic trade deficits and $30 billion in foreign debt. It would find 1 million Cubans without electricity, Havana’s famed harbor polluted like a sewer and its water system near collapse. The Central Bank holds less than $100 million in reserves. One engineer estimates that it would cost $4.5 billion just to fix Cuba’s failing telephones and buses.

If the new rulers were agreeable to Washington, the U.S. embargo would end, making Havana eligible for American aid and multilateral bank loans. Even then, economists estimate, Cuba could not count on more than $500 million in aid and $2 billion in loans. Who would provide the rest?

That’s where Mas Canosa comes in. He proposes to auction 60% of Cuba’s nationalized assets to private investors. After consulting an expert team led by Reaganomics guru Arthur B. Laffer, Mas Canosa contended that such an auction could raise $15 billion in 15 months.

Critics of the plan call it politically unthinkable. “Doesn’t (Mas Canosa) realize that although Marxist ideology is dead, nationalism (in Cuba) is very much alive?” asked Ernesto F. Betancourt, former head of Radio Marti, the U.S.-sponsored station beamed at Cuba.

Nationalism, or fear of U.S. domination, is indeed one reason Castro outlasted the Soviet-imposed regimes of Eastern Europe. It tempers all debate among economists over how to apply in Cuba the technocratic lessons of privatization learned from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

But so far, the debates have produced no consensus. For example, Felipe Pazos, who was Castro’s first Central Bank president and is now an exile, proposed more than a year ago that 70% of all state farms and factories be divided among the workers, to limit foreign takeovers. His plan has been assailed as unproven elsewhere, but it is still widely discussed.

Formidable Hurdles

Beyond the transition, any new government inheriting the current crisis would face formidable economic and political hurdles.

It would confront the same riddle bedeviling Castro--how to sustain one of Latin America’s most envied public welfare systems with the income of a declining sugar industry.

Rather than break Cuba’s dependence on sugar for 75% of the island’s export income, Castro switched from the U.S. market to the Soviet Union’s. Now Russia’s huge price subsidies have collapsed, the spot market is depressed and Cuba’s old quota for preferential U.S. prices is divided among other countries.

“The reconstruction of Cuba cannot be centered on sugar,” said Alvaro Carta, an exiled Cuban sugar producer. “It is an industry of the past.”

Tourism and nickel are promising alternatives. Ending the U.S. embargo would reunite Cuba with American vacationers, igniting a tourist boom. Cuba has the world’s largest nickel reserves, but the island’s Soviet-made nickel plant is such a gas-guzzler that its products may be too costly for export.

Meanwhile, the bill for social services and pensions is mounting as Cuba’s well-cared-for population turns gray and the veterans of its African wars come home. What leader could afford to cut their benefits? “The political cost of not trying to keep them would be too high,” admitted exile leader Montaner.

Some Cuba watchers believe that the Communist Party, even if ousted, could survive in opposition by rallying Cubans to defend such popular Castro achievements as universal health care, near-full-employment and mass participatory assemblies in neighborhoods and factories. The party encompasses the military officer corps, which could resist efforts to trim the 386,500-strong regular armed forces.

“A possible future for Cuba looks like (present-day) Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas--though a minority in the electorate--are the largest single political force, with continuing significant weight in the country,” said Harvard’s Dominguez.

Recipe for Conflict

That might be a recipe for violent conflict on an island ruled by dictators for most of its 90-year independence. But some Cuba watchers believe that multi-party democracy can take root if enough training and institutional support flow from the United States and Latin America.

One such optimist is Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington institute funded by Congress and run by a board of leading Democrats and Republicans to assist political movements abroad. The institute last year doubled its allotment for Cuban opposition groups, both on the island and in exile, to $462,132.

“I think Cuba will make it because I see it happening in a place as unlikely as Romania,” Gershman said.

Many Cuban exiles are skeptical--and not just because of antipathy on the island. Miami has democracy, they note, and yet some exiles still practice terrorism here to enforce far-right standards of political correctness.

A case in point is the campaign of death threats, bomb scares and vandalism launched against the Miami Herald in January after Mas Canosa accused it of “manipulating information just like Granma,” Cuba’s official newspaper. The Herald opposes a congressional bill pushed by Mas Canosa’s foundation to tighten the U.S. embargo against Havana.

“The leaders of the Cuban community here have had 33 years to prove they really believe in democracy, free expression and tolerance, and they haven’t done it,” said Francisco Aruca, the Cuban-American owner of Miami’s Radio Progreso. “Do you believe that, if placed in Cuba all of a sudden, they would behave any differently?”

An Island in Need

The Cuban economy has shrunk 25% in the last two years as subsidies from other communist nations have dried up. The drop in oil supply has crippled farm equipment and hurt sugar production, Cuba’s most important trade commodity.

Total imports from Soviet Union

1989: $5.52 billion

1991: $1.74

*1992: $1.2

* Projected (note: in 1992 the imports are from Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union)

Oil imports from Soviet Union

1989: 13.11 million tons

1991: 8.5

*1992: 3.75 to 4.5

* Projected

Sugar production

1989-90: 8.1 million tons

1990-91: 7.2

*1991-92: 5.2 to 6.5

* Projected

CUBAN TRADE OUTLETS

Here are Cuba’s leading trade partners, with projections for Cuban exports to the nations in 1992:

China: $200-$250 million

Japan: $200-$250 million

Spain: $150-$200 million

Canada: $150-$200 million

Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union:

Sugar: $900 million

Citrus, seafood, tobacco: $70-$80 million

Nickel and chrome: less than $150 million

Footnote: 1992 projections. Trade with China, Japan, Spain and Canada are primarily sugar and some tobacco.

Source: Jorge Salazar, professor of economics and director of the Center for Economic Research at Florida International University

Compiled by Times researcher Anna M. Virtue

U.S.-Cuba Relations: Three Decades of Tension and Crises

The United States has barred all commerce and most travel with Cuba for 30 years. Here are key moments in a continuously testy relationship.

1959--Castro takes power

1960--Nationalization of U.S. properties in Cuba. U.S. cuts off sugar quota. Soviet Union establishes diplomatic relations with Cuba and starts military buildup.

1961--U.S. breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba. Bay of Pigs invasion.

1962--U.S. imposes trade embargo. Cuban missile crisis. Castro pledges support of guerrilla movements in Latin America. Membership of Cuba in the Organization of American States is suspended.

1975--Cuba sends troops to defend Soviet-backed regime in Angola, marking escalation of Havana’s aid to socialist governments in Africa. OAS allows members to normalize relations with Havana.

1977--U.S. and Cuba partially restore diplomatic relations by establishing special interest sections in Havana and Washington.

1979--Sandinista movement backed by Cuba gains power in Nicaragua, and a guerrilla movement launches 12 years of insurrection in El Salvador.

1980--Massive emigration known as Mariel boat lift.

1983--U.S. ousts Cuban-backed government in Grenada and relations between Cuba and U.S. deteriorate.

1985--Gorbachev rise to power marks slow withdrawal of Soviet aid.

1989--Fall of communism in Eastern Europe throttles Cuba’s trade relations.

1990--U.S.-backed coalition wins elections in Nicaragua.

1991--Last Cuban troops come home from Africa. Gorbachev announces the start of withdrawal of Soviet troops from Cuba.

1992--Peace agreement signed in El Salvador.