OPINION | What is the future of the political opposition in Cuba?

Editor’s note: Jorge Dávila Miguel has a degree in Journalism since 1973 and has maintained a continuous career in his profession to date. He has postgraduate degrees in Social Information Sciences and Social Media, as well as post-university studies in International Relations, Political Economy and Latin American History. Currently, Dávila Miguel is a columnist for El Nuevo Herald, on the McClatchy network, and a political analyst and columnist for CNN en Español. The comments expressed in this column belong exclusively to the author. See more at cnne.com/opinion

(CNN Spanish) – The president of the United States, Joe Biden, was wrong when he said that Cuba is a failed state. With that, as with other measures against Havana, he wants to flatter the conservatives in the courtyard not to call him a communist and also the Cuban-Americans in Miami, who despise him anyway. Oh Joe! If you only knew what they say about you at the Versailles restaurant or at La Carreta on Bird Road while having a coffee …

And Juan González, his main adviser for the Western Hemisphere, not because he does not know much, but because it touches him, also says his little things in this latest crusade against Havana: That the embargo “does not make the Cuban people suffer,” he said in an interview. with EFE and that the United States will punish those responsible for Cuba in the event that the organizers of the 15N march end up being prosecuted or imprisoned.

But the question in the title defines the subject of this note. And maybe it’s an unanswered question, it consists of many variables and no math. Anyone can predict what will happen, not worrying about what happens, because when it happens no one will remember who was wrong. But it is a legitimate and interesting question, theoretical and somewhat speculative. I will try to answer it.

The opposition already exists in Cuba. And relatively tolerated by the State, although not legitimized. It exists as a disorganized popular opinion and as an organized opposition, but closely related and sometimes financed, as the journalist Tracey Eaton has pointed out, through exiled Cuban-American organizations, from the US Government, which casts doubt on its specifically national character. .

Relative tolerance is part of the policy initiated by Raúl Castro during the Barack Obama administration, in search of an appropriate image projection for the thaw. Although we should not doubt that the Cuban State, in the face of Biden’s Trumpist policy, and to the extent that its power is threatened, is capable of changing its policies in accordance with its comfort zone. And in that, the conduct of Washington with respect to Cuba is defining.

If Biden remains akin to the secret memorandum of Lester Mallory, assistant secretary for Inter-American Affairs in 1960, when the embargo on Cuba was brewing, which recommended: “cause hunger, despair and the overthrow of the government”; or if he decides to “be Obama” even if his pride bothers him, in order to solve “the Cuba-US dispute”, letting the Cubans solve their problems among themselves.

That, for a radical from exile, would be like “delivering the Cuban people into the jaws of communism,” but it would also be a healthy limit to the US influence in Cuban political reality, which has lasted for 119 years and has always defined -to For better or for worse – the island’s governments, from Tomás Estrada Palma, in 1902, to Miguel Díaz-Canel, in 2021. Cuba has always been like an appendage, pampered or condemned, of Washington.

And perhaps as a corollary of the previous reflection, we can talk about what would be the future of a legal opposition within Cuba.

No Leninist state, from October 1917 in Russia to Havana in 2021, that is, in its 104 years of history, has allowed a previously announced demonstration of a political nature, like that of the next 15N. Nor has any of them accepted a political opposition as legal.

Leninism, which runs through the veins of Cuban politicians, leaders, and intellectuals, and in a less concentrated solution for the police and the part of the people that communes with the Revolution, tries to define the inevitable future of society according to two or three precepts economic-social. And he always categorically assured what was the destiny of humanity: communism.

Now, when the holy grail of Leninism remains, for lack of international hospitality, hosted in Havana, it can be said, without a doubt, that a real political opposition will never be allowed in Cuba as long as its State continues to have that ideology. And the 2019 Constitution says it clearly, in its article 4: “The socialist system […] it is irrevocable ”.

Cuba currently has a very difficult economic situation. The all-powerful Cuban state has not succeeded, although it has tried, to make the laws of the economy obey it. It seems that there are no arrangements against reality. Current inflation in Cuba reaches 6,900% in the informal market. Massive layoffs are expected if when unproductive state-owned companies close, the self-employed, after the pandemic, do not have the capacity to employ them.

That is why the Government has streamlined the legislation on MSMEs, it has already approved 168 private companies in Cuba. He has temporarily forgotten Raúl Castro’s maxim to go “slowly, but without pause.” But the crucial thing would be to know who will go faster, who will reach the reality of Cuba first, if the economic solution or the worsening of the crisis.

Because only new economic measures, linked to national reality and far from slogans, can repair the battered Cuban economy, encourage acceptance of the 2019 Constitution, despite its limitations, and, with it, legitimize President Díaz-Canel.

There are those who think that the potential positive transformation of the Cuban economy would automatically advance the civic rights of political association and, with it, the acceptance of a legalized opposition. But that has not happened in Vietnam, nor in China. And I doubt very much that it will happen peacefully, in the countries that follow the parameters of Leninism, where Cuba is located.