Whiplash and Backlash in the Republic of Cuba: New at Reason

In Cuba, the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union are known as “the special period.”

It is a euphemism of the highest order. The withdrawal of a global superpower, which had been propping up the Cuban economy with subsidies estimated at $6 billion a year, brought almost unimaginable misery to the tiny nation. Gross domestic product plummeted by more than a third from 1989 to 1993. Daily power blackouts became common. Farms and factories sat idle. So hungry were the Cuban people that cats disappeared from the island—”and doves and pigeons,” says Leo, my 30-year-old guide in Havana this summer. He’s not the only one to mention the cats.

Leo grew up in a Communist family, so there was no questioning the political system in their household. The state offered meager rations of food—drastically reduced from the quantities in the ’70s and ’80s, according to Oxfam—but at least it was something. His mother was employed by the Cuban military, which provided lunch to its workers. She would save it, bringing it home, so her kindergarten-age son could have at least one meal a day.

The special years took a toll. The average Cuban lost 12 pounds. Some estimates put the figure at 20.

Which, after all, was what America’s policy toward Cuba had been aimed at all along. For decades, U.S. politicians have believed empty bellies are the best way to bring Cubans around to the virtues of a market economy and electoral democracy. “If they are hungry,” President Dwight Eisenhower allegedly said, “they will throw Castro out.” In 1962, President John F. Kennedy called for a total embargo on the country. In 1994, the conservative Heritage Foundation argued for maintaining the ban: “As the economy’s collapse has accelerated, popular discontent has increased to levels that threaten the survival of the regime.”

But the disaster of the special period had an unexpectedly trivial effect on the Cuban government’s legitimacy. One-party rule continued. Fidel Castro remained.

The material conditions of the average Cuban have improved since that dark time, partly because of the country’s close ties to oil-rich Venezuela, and partly because of moves by the Castros—reluctant at first, later with more confidence—to let a non-governmental sector begin to bloom, writes Stephanie Slade.

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