Five hundred years of history, sixty years of communism. 2019 will not be just any year for Cuba: it was November 1519 when Diego Velazquez de Cuellar founded the city of Havana, which later became the capital of the Caribbean island and main port of all the Spanish colonies of that New World discovered a few decades Before. Many centuries later, on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro's regime officially began: that day sixty years ago the dictator Fulgencio Batista, a friend of drug traffickers and the United States, fled from Havana and the revolution also supported by the Argentine guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara (and others, such as Camilo Cienfuegos) triumphed on the island , then killed in 1967 but became – especially for later generations – an icon of that experience.
More than half a century later, Fidel and his brother and successor Raul also died, who restarted dialogue with the United States after years of tensions, the cold war and the embargo, he left the presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel, an engineer of humble origins born exactly one year after the revolution, in 1960. The regime, which for decades made Cuba unique in Latin America in terms of literacy and health care, is now feeling the weight of the years and is faced with the challenge of updating its communism, uncompromising in the era of Fidel and more moderate in recent years, under the presidency of Raul. The economic situation on the Caribbean island is not encouraging: according to some experts, the standard of living is at a standstill or has returned to that of the "special period" of the 90s, when aid from the Soviet Union ended but not the embargo decreed by the United States, which is still in force.
The hostile proximity of the North American superpower has always influenced the history of Cuba. Taken by Great Britain from Spain in the 18th century, at the beginning of the 20th century it became a US protectorate, ideal vacation spot during the years of Prohibition and above all a land of enormous economic interests thanks to its natural resources, in particular sugar cane, as Edoardo Galeano viscerally recounts in "The open veins of Latin America". Cuba has been the world's leading sugar producer over the centuries, ever since the days when slaves were imported from Africa to work on the plantations. Until Castro's revolution, the entire business was in the hands of multinationals with stars and stripes. Then things changed, Cuba regained possession of its territory, diversified crops in order to try to be autonomous, built infrastructures, brought education even to the most remote and poorest places on the island. However, it has remained subjected to very harsh tests, which have also stimulated Cuban pride, often bordering on provocation.
And they influenced, if not dictated, political and ideological choices, and consequent alliances, characterizing the Caribbean version of communism. Barack Obama had re-established diplomatic ties with the meeting and historic handshake with Raul Castro in Havana in 2016, interrupting a cold war that lasted more than half a century (not to mention that he was the first American president to set foot in Cuba in 88 years). Donald Trump then interrupted the détente process started by his predecessor by confirming what Vicki Huddleston, once an American diplomat in Havana, and many other experts maintain, namely that decades of sanctions have not convinced Cuban leaders to give up their communism nor to apply – according to Washington's point of view – democratic freedoms. Trump has reverted to the old, almost Cold War methods, and the Havana regime has slowed down reforms. Proof of this is the text of the new Constitution, which opens up to a new phase, but with caution.
He has widened the space reserved for private initiative, but the regime is still stingy in granting some essential individual freedoms. For example, on the front of the persecution of homosexuals, undoubtedly one of the stains of Castroism together with that of dissident intellectuals, there will be a step forward in the sense that the new Constitution no longer speaks of marriage "between a man and a woman", as written into the current 1976 Constitution; but the formula initially proposed by Mariela Castro, daughter of Raul, who spoke even more openly of "egalitarian marriage", that is between people of the same gender, has also disappeared. Now we speak generically of free marriage between spouses, but the specific legislation will then be defined in the new Family Code. Then there is the confirmation of the communist party as a single party and of state control of all the media, and the direct election of the president of the republic or of other regional and provincial bodies has not been accepted.
In the text of the new Constitution, discussed in tens of thousands of assemblies, which according to sources eight million Cubans (out of eleven million) participated, and approved in recent days by the National Assembly (it will be submitted to a popular referendum at the end of February) , the reference to communism was also taken up which with socialism provides "the only guarantee" for human beings to attain full dignity. The socialist state is confirmed as the regulator of the market and of economic planning, while coexisting with private property. So try to resist Cuban communism, which survived the Soviet one that inspired and supported it, before abandoning it prematurely 30 years ago: 2019 is also the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
