Communists Signal Few Changes for Struggling Cuba

Behind closed doors, an aging but robust Fidel Castro on Wednesday opened his Communist Party’s first national congress in six years--a three-day internal debate to chart a course into the 21st century for one of the world’s last Communist states.

More than half a decade after the party outlived the collapse of its Soviet benefactor, the 1,482 delegates filled Havana’s modern convention center and started grappling with their basic dilemma: how to balance a strident strain of socialism that still subsidizes the entire life of every Cuban with the forces of global capitalism needed to finance the island’s system.

The congress is closed to outsiders. Even Castro’s speech--a marathon recounting of Cuba’s hardships and achievements since the last party congress held just weeks before the Soviet regime collapsed in late 1991--was videotaped and scheduled for broadcast hours later on state television.

Castro, 71, spoke continuously for six hours and 43 minutes, his longest speech in recent years.

But most of the nation, in fact, was focused not on what Cuban officials called their “historic congress” but on hundreds of official ceremonies at schools, plazas and monuments marking 30 years since the death of revolutionary hero Ernesto (Che) Guevara, an Argentine who aided Castro’s rise to power in 1959.

The party’s agenda, a 49-page document obtained by The Times, signals few significant changes in a nation whose struggling economy has been opening a crack at a time to the fast-moving world outside.

The document, titled “The Party of Unity, Democracy and the Human Rights We Defend,” attacks free-market economics at a time when the Cuban government has begun to open its battered economy to the West--but with tight government control. It fiercely chastises U.S.-style democracy as a system that “exploits, oppresses and excludes the great majority.”

Cuban principles, it declares, “contrast with the demagoguery, the mercantilism, the incessant financial scandals and generalized corruption that are characteristic of the politics of the United States, the nation that casts itself as the model for the world.”

Earlier this week, senior party leaders stressed that the congress will produce strategic documents that enshrine policies of political, economic and ideological “continuity” before the session ends late Friday.

Many Cubans are intent on learning what the party plans for the economy.

Isolated by decades of a U.S. trade embargo and the loss of vital Soviet aid, Cuba’s 10.5 million people have survived with government benefits, meager remittances from relatives abroad and an ingenious, nascent private economy.

The government continues to finance all health care, education and the purchase of basic foods largely through its recently booming tourism trade, which brings in more than $1 billion a year in hard currency--some of it in partnership with European companies. But since Castro legalized dollar trade in 1993, the government also has sanctioned small private enterprises a few at a time: farmers markets and small businesses in private homes, such as tiny restaurants, beauty salons and room rentals.

Economy and Planning Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez has offered little hope for more radical changes in the years ahead.

“Our economic development will not change,” he told reporters Monday, reflecting a hard-line party stance in advance of the congress. “It will continue to be based on a socialist model in which the state not only guarantees free education and health but also assumes the protagonist role of regulator and planner” for Cuba’s major industries of tourism, nickel production and biotechnology.

“That does not mean that everything has to be state-owned, nor that we base our development on what we are capable of producing, which explains the opening to foreign investment and giving a fixed space to the private sector in the country,” he said.

Among the economic reforms ahead, he added, are the introduction of new, modern banking equipment that will permit the use of credit cards--which today are nonexistent--and the reorganization and decentralization of state businesses.

Esteban Lazo, the Communist Party’s top official for Havana, justified the slow pace of economic change. The government, he said, is still trying to cope with the negative fallout from the incremental changes it has made so far.

The reforms have opened a gap between haves and have-nots in a formerly egalitarian society, acknowledged Lazo, who also serves on the party’s powerful, 25-member Politburo. “People get more money. They get more selfish, more individualistic, and then they forget about solidarity and brotherhood,” he said.

Lazo conceded that the economic changes have spawned a visibly thriving prostitution trade in Havana. They also have fueled rural migration to the capital, where unemployment is officially 6% at a time when there are 40,000 vacant government jobs--positions that pay only slightly more than subsistence wages.