Russia has just reinvigorated its relationship with Cuba, and I suspect that this renewed friendship of convenience will help Cuba’s Communist regime stick around longer than it would have without it.
A few things happened, all apparently part of an elaborate quid pro quo. First, while visiting Cuba last week, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that his country was forgiving nearly all of Cuba’s lingering Soviet-era debt to Russia, or more than $30 billion. Then, a few days later, reports emerged that Cuba had agreed to allow Russia to re-open a large Soviet-era intelligence-gathering facility used to surveil the United States during the Cold War. While in Havana, Putin also spoke of reviving broader military and technological cooperation with Cuba, although he did not say exactly what that would entail. Last but not least, Russia and Cuba reportedly also signed some significant economic contracts, including ones that would allow Russian oil companies to explore Cuban waters.
Putin’s government seems to be responding in kind to what it perceives as a deepening U.S. threat on its own borders, and this is important in its own right. As a specialist on the survival and transformation of authoritarian regimes, though, I am also interested in how this reinvigorated relationship affects prospects for political change in Cuba.
Consolidated single-party regimes, like Cuba’s, are the most durable kind of autocracies, but when they do break down, it’s usually an economic or fiscal crisis that sets the process in motion. Slumping state revenues shrink the dole that encourages various factions within the party to stay loyal to the ruling elite, while wider economic problems also give ordinary citizens stronger motivations to demand reform. When frustrated citizens and disgruntled insiders find each other, the effect can be especially potent. Economic crisis doesn’t guarantee the collapse of single-party regimes, but it does significantly increase the probability of its occurrence.
The Soviet Union bankrolled Havana for many years, and the Cuban economy has been limping along since that funding stream disappeared along with the country that provided it. In 2o11, the Communist Party of Cuba finally responded to that malaise as formal theory leads us to expect that it would: by experimenting with some limited forms of economic liberalization. These reforms are significant, but as far as I can tell, they have not yet led to the kind of economic renewal that would give the ruling party a serious boost.
One of the reasons the Cuban regime managed to delay those reforms for long was the largesse it received from its close friends in Venezuela. As I discussed in a post here last year, Hugo Chavez’s government used its oil boom to help finance the Cuban regime at a time when Havana would otherwise have been hard pressed to search for new sources of revenue.
With Hugo Chavez dead and Venezuela’s economy in crisis, however, this support has become unreliable. I had expected this uncertainty to increase pressure on the Communist Party of Cuba to expand its liberalization in search of new revenues, and for that expanded liberalization, in turn, to improve prospects for popular mobilization and elite defections that could lead to broader political reforms.
The renewed embrace from Russia now has me revisiting that expectation. The forgiveness of more than $30 billion in debt should provide an immediate boost to Cuba’s finances, but I’m also intrigued by the talk of new oil concessions. For years, the Cuban government has seemed to be hoping that hydrocarbons under its waters would provide it with a new fiscal lifeline. That hasn’t happened yet, but it sounds like Russia and Havana increasingly see prospects for mutual gains in this sphere. Of course, it will also be important to see what other forms of economic and military support are on offer from Moscow and how quickly they might arrive.
None of these developments magically resolves the fundamental flaws in Cuba’s political economy, and so far the government shows no signs of rolling back the process of limited liberalization it has already begun. What’s more, Russia also has economic problems of its own, so it’s not clear how much help it can offer and how long it will be able to sustain that support. Even so, these developments probably do shrink the probability that the Cuban economy will tip soon into a deeper crisis, and with it the near-term prospects for a broader political transformation.
Dart-Throwing Chimp 