In the magnificent novel “The Man Who Loved Dogs”, from 2009, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura paints a great picture of the failure of real socialism, through the intertwined stories of three characters: Leon Trotsky, leader of the 1917 Revolution, forced into exile by the relentless persecution of Josef Stalin; the Spaniard Ramon Mercader, a communist militant who penetrates the refuge of the Russian revolutionary leader in Mexico to assassinate him; and the Cuban writer Ivan Cárdenas, a fictional character, who tells us the story of the first two.
Trotsky and Mercader experience epic tragedies: the first, leader of the masses, is run over by the Russian Revolution’s degradation of egalitarian promises into a bloody totalitarian machine; the other, a communist revolutionary, becomes a murderer in the service of Moscow after the crushing of the Spanish republic by Francisco Franco’s fascists.
Cárdenas, the narrator, has a less heroic fate: the failure of his project to become a writer, swallowed up by the slow crumbling of the promises of the Cuban Revolution and by the bitter daily life on Fidel Castro’s island. In the end, he dies buried when the roof of his decrepit house collapses.
—as are, in fact, the homes of the majority of Cubans forced into repeated penury.
The fate of Ivan Cárdenas, a character in the novel, comes to mind with every description of the day-to-day deprivations faced by the flesh-and-blood inhabitants of the Caribbean island these days. The Cuban socialist system is in agony, under the impact of the inhumane embargo imposed by Donald Trump, which cut off the country’s access to imported oil. But it would be a mistake to attribute the current disaster to the measure decreed by the brutal American president, or even to the economic blockade that the United States has imposed on the Castro regime since 1962.
The economic failure of is largely due to the design and administration of the socialist model; and the way in which, since the 1990s, reforms to make it more flexible were designed and implemented.
Thus, political scientist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, from the University of Pittsburgh, a specialist in Cuban affairs, rejects the antagonistic explanations according to which everything is due to either the “embargo” or “communism”. For him, the adoption of an inefficient model —based on state control of economic activity— and poorly designed reforms are the central cause of the disaster. But the embargo, Venezuela’s collapse and global economic shocks are powerful secondary factors.
In fact, experiments in reforming real socialism were only successful when they meant transitioning to peculiar forms of market economies, under strong state coordination —which have little of socialism—, as occurred in Vietnam and China. What never proved possible was to advance political reforms that would guarantee pluralism and respect for fundamental freedoms, much less representative democracy.
In agonizing Cuba, which has already set back even real gains in health and education, what remains of real socialism is the repressive apparatus that supports the single-party government.
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