Cuba, Introducing Free-Market Reforms, Begins Tearing Down Castro’s ‘Irrevocable’ Communist State

Cuba’s Communist Party is embarking on capitalist reforms, bowing to economic pressure foreign and domestic. By tearing down key pillars of Marxist-Leninism, the country is seeding the ground for prosperity. It’s also meeting one of the major statutory benchmarks it needs before President Trump or a successor can end America’s embargo. In a statement, the current dictator of Cuba, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, declared that it was “time to change” and the country “simply cannot continue on its current course.” At his direction, the National Assembly — made up of Communist Party members who run unopposed — passed 176 measures to decentralize the country’s economy.The state will no longer control imports and exports or make decisions down to who gets hired for what job. Real estate development could also proceed. Cubans could at last reap the benefits of welcoming tourists to the Pearl of the Antilles, monetizing a Caribbean climate, 200 bays, and 289 beaches along shorelines that stretch for thousands of miles.Private banks and foreign investment would be legalized. Cuba would also open its doors to amenities like restaurant chains that free nations take for granted. These changes are the largest since the country’s founding dictator, Fidel Castro, seized power on what President Kennedy called “that imprisoned island.”Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro at the United Nations, October 12, 1979. Bernard Gotfryd, Library of Congress via Wikimedia CommonsCastro’s heirs have no choice but to loosen their grip on the economy, accepting, as President Coolidge judged, that communism is contrary to human nature. “No man,” he said, “will provide me with food and other necessities of life unless he is a gainer by it in some way.”Economic freedom, though, leads to demands for other forms of liberty. The USSR’s policies of glasnost and perestroika — openness and restructuring — were meant to save Marxist-Leninism. Instead, they hastened its demise. President Reagan, as Mr. Trump is doing, hammered away at the cracks in communism.“General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan said at the Berlin Wall’s Brandenberg Gate in 1987, “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity … if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”President Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, on June 12, 1987. Via Wikimedia CommonsTwo-and-a-half years later, Berliners reduced the wall to rubble; the USSR survived just 25 months after that. Yet Cuba resisted the tide of freedom that washed away the Soviet Bloc. In 2002, Castro presided over a National Assembly gathering that declared “capitalism will never return” and communism was “irrevocable.”Vice President Carlos Lage declared that “the best political system is of just one party,” and it looked as if Cubans would keep going through the pantomime of elections with only one candidate running. “We need socialism more today than ever,” Castro said. “To guarantee the future, a strong ideological base is needed.”Twenty-four years later, Cuba is embracing an ideology that’s more Coolidge than Castro. The new measures would privatize large chunks of the economy and allow citizens to operate their own businesses. Foreign investment would rebuke the theft of property that followed Castro’s 1959 coup.Cuba’s president, Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel, then the country’s vice president, on March 21, 2016 at Havana. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThese changes would meet one requirement of the 1996 Helms-Burton, Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity, or Libertad Act. In 1962, Kennedy imposed the embargo by decree, meaning a successor could remove it the same way. Helms-Burton made the restrictions federal law and listed conditions that Cuba must meet for relief.Among Libertad’s requirements are, as this columnist wrote for The New York Sun in March, “moving toward a free-market economy.” Others are free elections, “respecting civil liberties, and human rights.” Havana must also release “all political prisoners, cease cooperation with America’s enemies, respect press freedom,” allow unions, and extradite fugitives. Mr. Díaz-Canel gave no schedule for implementing the market reforms, but the heat is on as he faces the looming fate that consumed communists in the Soviet Bloc. People who languish under communism are quick to embrace the plenty of free markets and then to question where else party bureaucrats are failing.The bright future Castro promised has grown dark thanks to frequent blackouts, hunger, lack of fuel, and unemployment. The new reforms alone aren’t enough to deliver a brighter future or to meet the Helms-Burton requirements for lifting America’s embargo. Yet free markets could give Cubans the tools they’ll need to tear down their prison walls.

Cuba, Introducing Free-Market Reforms, Begins Tearing Down Castro’s ‘Irrevocable’ Communist State

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