Cubans on Left and Right Question the Revolution

By JUANITA DARLING

Aug. 20, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BIRAN, Cuba —

President Fidel Castro’s hometown is a collection of identical prefabricated duplexes with wooden-louvered doors and windows.

The only buildings different from the rest are the high school, with dormitories for boarding students, and the Red Dragon Inn, the local tavern and gathering place in this village without a town square or a park.

Four Chinese-style prints and a locally made wood carving are the sole decorations amid the card tables and folding chairs in the hot, stuffy room where men get bleary-eyed on rough rum ladled from a tin pot at 5 pesos--25 cents--a shot.

Beer has not arrived today from the brewery 35 miles away in the state capital of Holguin. When it does, it will be an anonymous, flat-tasting draft, not the cans of Hatuey pilsener, dark Bucanero and Crystal brands sold in tourist hotels.

Even without beer or Havana Club rum, sentiment here remains strongly in favor of the socialist revolution that started in the nearby Sierra Maestra and of the man who led it--a man who turned 70 last week and has given no indication that he will retire any time soon.

“They say that Fidel is getting old, that we need new leaders,” the tavern’s bartender says. “Well, I say let those who burned their eyelashes [broke their backs] in the mountains stay in power.”

Such unquestioning loyalty to revolutionary leaders is becoming increasingly rare. As Cuba struggles to overcome economic disaster, the revolution itself is now being questioned from the left as well as the right, both on and off the island.

Wayne Smith of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, who is among the experts on Cuba respected for their neutrality, said bluntly: “The revolution today is in something of a shambles.”

During their 37 years in power, the revolutionary leaders--headed by Castro and his brother Raul--have indisputably raised the living standards of the poorest Cubans, leading their island nation to health, education and housing levels in some ways comparable to those in industrialized countries.

Most recently, they rallied Cubans around free-market reforms that allowed this country to begin a tentative recovery from a depression that had shrunk the economy nearly in half.

Yet over the years, many who “burned their eyelashes” in the mountains, like Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, have become little more than memories whose youthful pictures look down from billboards exhorting Cubans to remain loyal or work harder. Others who fought for the revolution, such as Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, were exiled after years in Cuban prisons.

Government officials claim that the revolution has triumphed because Cuba has not fallen nearly five years after its main sponsor, the Soviet Union, collapsed.

But the economic reforms that have kept the country afloat have brought their own consequences: The revolution that has been criticized by conservatives for more than three decades is now being called a failure by radical Latin American leftists who claim to admire Castro.

Cuba’s supporters worry that the greatest achievement of the revolution--social and economic equality--has been irreparably undermined by economic reforms that have sharply increased income differences.

And Cubans themselves are becoming increasingly frustrated as the “special economic period”--Cuba-speak for free-market reforms--drags on, leaving them in limbo between the socialism they knew and the capitalism they are learning about.

Angel Pelier returned to Santiago in southeastern Cuba from the former East Germany shortly after the 1990 reunification of Germany. He had been on a work-study program there.

“I could have stayed, but I did not want to live in a capitalist country,” the sandy-haired 33-year-old said as he passed around a plastic tumbler of warm beer that he and his friends had bought from one of the huge, mobile kegs that circulate in working-class neighborhoods.

Now he wishes Cuba would decide whether it is a socialist state that guarantees full employment or a capitalist nation that frees its citizens to find their own work.

He came back home to a country in the midst of a severe economic depression, with no jobs for a cabinetmaker, his trade. “Fortunately, I brought back this,” he said, patting the motorcycle on which he perched as he listened to the rhythm of a neighborhood percussion band.

He earns his living by using the motorcycle as an illegal taxi. “If it were a horse cart or a car or truck, I could get a business license for it,” Pelier said. “They will not give me a license for a motorcycle, but I have to support my wife and child, and I can’t get any other work.”

Restrictions like the ones that keep Pelier from licensing his motorcycle service show the limits of Cuba’s much-touted reforms, which have allowed more than 200,000 family businesses to open in the last two years and permitted foreign corporations to invest in the island.

Those changes--combined with an increase in tourism, which now brings in more dollars than sugar--have created income disparities that were practically nonexistent in Cuba before economic reforms began seven years ago.

Concerns about greed are reflected in the bestseller “Past Perfect,” a mystery novel about a government official and Communist Party activist who becomes corrupted by trips abroad to promote foreign investment and by the large sums of dollars he handles.

Despite such worries inside Cuba, critics outside the country say Castro is reforming too slowly.

“Undoubtedly, they are on the right road, but they are too timid, moving at an evolutionary pace,” said Gutierrez Menoyo, a former revolutionary who now heads Cambio Cubano, a moderate exile group based in Miami. “Change is needed now.”

He is trying to persuade Cuban officials to peacefully end one-party rule and permit Cubans--both inside and outside Cuba--to invest in their country, just as foreign corporations do.

“The revolution has aged. It has completely stopped and needs rejuvenation,” he said.

Radical leftist Hugo “Bochica” Toro Restrepo, head of the terrorists known as Dignity for Colombia, agrees--for completely different reasons. From his Colombian prison cell, where he is being held for murder, Toro Restrepo wrote Castro this summer that he must be “anguished over the failure of [the] revolution.”

He suggested that Castro read two rambling tracts he wrote, which “could be a source of inspiration to return to socialism.”

That, however, is not an option Castro has, according to most Cuba watchers.

“If he had a choice, he would not carry out reforms, but he has no choice,” said Smith, who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba--which substitutes for an American Embassy--when it opened nearly two decades ago. “Rather than a socialist society, they are going to end up with a mixed society.”

Castro, of course, vigorously denies that accusation.

He ended his two-hour speech marking the anniversary of the revolution last month with the customary: “Socialism or death. We will win.”

During the speech, Castro--clad in the trademark military fatigues he has abandoned on recent trips abroad--reminded thousands of cheering supporters of his promise seven years before: Even if the Soviet Union fell, Cuba would continue the socialist struggle.

“Cuba was capable of resisting,” he said to shouts of “Fidel, Fidel!”

He added, “Cuba has kept its word even though it was left alone and more rigorously blockaded than ever”--a reference to the U.S. embargo of the island. The decades-old embargo has been tightened twice since 1992, most recently with a law that punishes corporations in foreign countries that make certain types of investments in Cuba.

Among those applauding Castro’s speech last month, seated a few yards from the president in a red T-shirt with the logo “Cuba Is [Still] Here,” was a man who has devoted his life to socialism. Manuel Cobas, the son of peasant farmers, went to work in the Young Pioneers and then Cuba’s rebel Youth organization immediately after finishing his mandatory three years of military service.

When Cobas was too old to work in the Youth group, he took a job with the Communist Party. Now 48, he has spent the last year leading the Calixto Garcia brigade, a military-style farm workers group named for a hero of Cuba’s war for independence from Spain.

Earlier that day, wearing a bush hat and a machete attached to an army-style belt, Cobas led a tour of the farm, which is cultivating varieties of bananas new to Cuba.

“We are introducing a new style of work on the farm,” he explained. Technical points, such as twice-daily irrigation with precisely measured amounts of water, are rigorously observed. Workers are responsible for specific areas, and good performance--punctuality and attendance--is rewarded with additional food for the ration books that all Cubans receive.

Even as Cuba, with all its drawbacks, undergoes difficult changes, it does not look so bad from the bottom of the U.S. economic ladder.

Holly Bailey, a 20-year-old Boston native who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., was one of 154 young U.S. adults who visited Cuba for two weeks, sponsored by American Socialists. They worked in an agricultural camp and lived with families in Santiago.

Bailey’s single mother put her and her dozen brothers and sisters through high school--and paid the first year of Holly’s $25,000 college tuition in the hope that she could get financial aid later. When she could not, she had to quit school and go to work to try to save for college.

“It is impossible for me to live and be healthy and save to go to school,” she said, near tears. “I would like to commend Cuba for enabling youths to go to school and not have to struggle for it.”

As long as the government can continue to provide free education and health care, most regular Cubans will continue to support the revolution, even if income differences grow, Smith predicted.

“The revolution did not achieve what it set out to do, but it wasn’t in vain,” Smith said. “It was going to be a more egalitarian society, and it was. Now they have had to make sweeping adjustments in order to come out of an economic crisis. To what degree will that undercut the kind of society they talked about creating in 1959? It will to a degree . . . but they are still better off than most neighboring countries.”

* RADIO MARTI: Criticism surrounds plan to move operation to Miami. A5

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Cuban Revolution Results

The Cuban government prides itself on improvements in housing, health care and education since the 1959 revolution that brought communist Fidel Castro to power. The country compares itself to industrialized nations, rather than Third World countries in its achievements in those fields.

Then & Now

Housing (in thousands of units)

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1958 1993 All housing 1,500 2,741 Condition: Good 195 1,216 Mediocre 600 1,055 Poor 705 469

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1959 1992 Percentage of population with electricity 56 92 Electricity consumption per capita (Kwh/inhabitant) 406 1,132

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Worldwide Comparisons

Education