Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba

Extract

Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba. By Juan J. López. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 272p. $42.50.

When the Berlin wall came down, many Cuban-Americans eagerly anticipated the imminent fall of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. “Next Christmas in Havana,” read the bumper stickers in Miami. But most scholars studying Cuba doubted that Castro would be so easily dislodged. They cited manifest differences between Cuban and European communism: Cuba had an authentic revolution that began with broad support, whereas communism arrived in most of Eastern Europe in the rucksack of the Red Army. Cuban nationalism bolstered the legitimacy of a government in conflict with the United States, whereas European nationalism corroded the legitimacy of regimes beholden to Soviet Russia. The standard of living in communist Europe paled in comparison to that of the West, whereas Cuban conditions compared favorably to much of Latin America and the Caribbean. European communist regimes were led by colorless bureaucrats who had long since lost faith in their own ideology, whereas Cuba was still led by the charismatic Fidel Castro and the generation that made the revolution.