Cuba: A Capricious Coquette

CUBA

A Capricious Coquette

Britain’s Prince Charles is scheduled to visit Cuba in the spring, a rare visit of a royal to a country whose communist ideology opposes monarchy. (His ancestors avoided visiting the Soviet Union because the Bolsheviks murdered their relatives, the Romanovs, in the Russian revolution.)

Charles will see vintage cars and, as the Guardian wrote, likely eat cassava bread – though maybe not “Moros y Cristianos,” or Moors and Christians, a politically incorrect term for rice and beans.

The trip comes as Cuba undergoes momentous changes.

On Feb. 24, Cubans will vote on a new constitution. The proposed document will retain the supremacy of the Communist Party and state control of the economy. However, it will legalize private property and businesses that have been popping up throughout the Caribbean island in recent years, open the door to more foreign investment, and potentially hasten the acceptance of same-sex marriage, Reuters reported.

Even before the former dictator Fidel Castro fell ill and died in 2016, Cuban officials had been loosening their control of the economy and civil society. Acknowledging the changes but stressing the country has not yet entirely sloughed off its totalitarian past, the United States opened an embassy on the island in 2015.

To be clear, the Cuban government is still oppressive.

Security agents have arrested and mistreated activists who oppose the new constitution because, they argue, it legitimizes the current government of Raúl Castro, Fidel’s 87-year-old brother, who stepped down as president last year but still wields power as head of the Communist Party.

“During the detention they punched me in the stomach, took me outside with handcuffs put on really tight, shoved me around and hit me on the head a couple of times,” dissident José Daniel Ferrertold the Miami Herald. “They told me clearly that it was a response to the campaign against the constitution.”

In an op-ed in the Miami Herald, Outreach Aid to the Americas President Teo Babun also argued that the new constitution fails to enshrine freedom of religion in the country.

The constitution symbolizes the contradiction at the heart of Cuban society, wrote Elizabeth Gonzalez of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas.

It would empower President Miguel Díaz-Canel – widely viewed as Castro’s successor in waiting – to make further changes. Díaz-Canel, 58, is a “Twitter personality and proponent of technological innovation,” wrote Gonzalez. But he also promotes the hashtag #WeAreContinuity, emphasizing how his designs are in keeping with the ideas of older revolutionaries.

Díaz-Canel, for example, recently said the new constitution would defend Cuba’s “sovereignty, independence and dignity,” wrotePrensa Latina, the country’s state-run news service. He’s not talking about democracy and civil rights.

Still, the winds of change are blowing in Cuba. What they bring in and out of the country could be historic.