Shortly after meeting with an ailing Fidel Castro in 2006, Hugo Chavez gathered with thousands of supporters to convey a message to his closest ally:
We say to Fidel: Go forward, comrade! Keep pushing the sun toward a new morning! The roosters are crowing to a new morning!
For all Chavez’s rousing words, Castro remained on his last legs—so diminished that putting the enfeebled revolutionary before a camera would only tarnish his legacy. The image he wished to preserve, of course, was wholly different: the eternal youth of communism, a comely comandante puffing at a cigar, chuckling lightly at the latest imperialist tricks. But rather than retire to embalmment and a display case, Castro spent ten more years trudging toward death in the shadows, trading his public position as president for faceless missives in Granma, the Communist Party of Cuba’s (PCC) official mouthpiece. Somewhat poetically, the man who had been the target of umpteen CIA assassination plots would enjoy a most banal death march: lots of bed rest, letters to the editor, and a tranquil passing in 2016 at the age of 90.
More poetically still, the man who tried to rouse Castro in 2006 was no longer for the world himself: Chavez would return to Havana just five years after his speech, this time seeking medical treatment. In 2011, Chavez announced from a Havana hospital that he had undergone an operation to remove tumorous abscesses—the first public acknowledgment that he had cancer. But unlike the diminished Castro, Venezuela’s comandante showed no signs of slowing down in the face of illness. Chavez would visit Havana intermittently for the next two years, all while staging a vigorous campaign to secure a fourth presidential term despite his nation’s own internal state of decay. (One trick to secure what would be Venezuela’s last fair election: an oil deal with China to supply high-tech handouts to the nation’s indigent voters, who hitherto had known only drab freebies in healthcare and education.) Yet even as he seemed to command the airwaves evermore—his image of socialist cool was still being broadcast weekly, usually for hours at a time with no script—no amount of Cuban medicine could stop all that cancer from metastasizing. In 2013, before he could be sworn in for his new term, Chavez succumbed to a lung infection at the age of 58.
Though of different epochs, Castro and Chavez are perhaps the two leaders most synonymous with Latin American socialism in recent history. While each once maintained distinct visions of revolution, the differences therein have dwindled over time. Cuba today remains a Leninist state that ruthlessly suppresses dissent and free enterprise—not unlike the Soviet Union, of which it long served as a client state. Not unlike the late-stage Soviet Union, it has spent the last decades introducing minor market reforms in a bid to salvage the regime, though these measures have largely stalled, or are even being reversed. Venezuela, still at an earlier stage of its Bolivarian Revolution, (in which the colonial liberator Simón Bolívar, Karl Marx, and Jesus Christ implausibly form a sort of trinity) retains more vestiges of democracy and a market economy. Under Chavez, the number of private businesses declined from 14,000 to 9,000, while under Maduro civil liberties have continued their disintegration, culminating in the nation’s latest and most blatant election fraud. (Under both, graft at PDVSA, the state-run oil company from which the regime secures most revenue, reached new highs.) Even as Venezuela once positioned itself as a democratic counterpoint to Cuba’s authoritarian model, its government has been trending toward the kind of totalitarian state apparatus once wielded by Castro.
For Castro and Chavez, though, the parallels run much deeper than mere ideology. We may start with the fact that each was, unlike their current successors, quite popular, mesmerizing legions of downtrodden through winding speeches steeped in the language of economic justice—less fireside chats than feats of laryngeal stamina. With the help of a golden goose—Soviet aid or the world’s largest proven oil reserves—both delivered enough social services in healthcare and education to win plaudits from first-world leftists like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Noam Chomsky (who, in all fairness, started voicing concerns about Chavez roughly ten years into his presidency, despite enjoying a big boost in book sales when Chavez read from Hegemony or Survival before the United Nations). Each projected an image of martial austerity, preferring their supporters envision them in the barracks rather than a presidential suite (or in Castro’s case, on his private island), and indeed, each maintained a chauvinistic quality more generally that is absent leftism today: Chavez, in one of his representative barbs, wouldn’t sleep with Condoleezza Rice if you paid him; Castro found gays so detestable he made homosexuality one of Cuba’s few fast tracks to legal emigration.1 Even at the more mundane, biographical level the details are similar: both baseball-loving comandantes from rural backgrounds, both obsessive students of their nations’ colonial-era revolutionary heroes, and both entering the public conscience after unsuccessful coup attempts that yielded short prison sentences.
Yet these very Plutarchan parallels, once mostly innocuous, have assumed a darker tint, as today it is the humanitarian consequences of their tenures that have converged. Since Castro and Chavez’s deaths roughly a decade ago, millions of citizens have fled Cuba and Venezuela to escape the ruin initiated under each leader. The roosters, once crowing to a new morning, were seemingly rationed off years ago.
Between 2022 and 2023, Cuba quietly lost an estimated 18 percent of its population as food shortages and widespread blackouts gripped the nation. Even Cuba’s government—known for massaging data—places the official figure at 10 percent, not far off the total emigration from Cuba between 1959 and 2019 when an estimated 1.5 million left, often to much greater fanfare. A combination of stalled economic reforms, Venezuelan oil shortfalls, the termination of doctor-sharing agreements with Brazil and Colombia, and Trump’s reinstatement of the sanctions abandoned under Obama has decimated the island economy. Unable to grow or import enough food, the nation is asking the United Nations for help for the first time since the Cuban Revolution. Such decline is even more troubling than at first glance, as Cuba has suffered from a sub-replacement fertility rate since the 1980s. Even without a mass exodus, the population would be shrinking and old. With social services fast becoming unviable, it is unclear what the basis of the PCC’s support will be over the coming decades, save brute force.
In Venezuela, the story is similar: since 2014, an estimated 25 percent of the population has fled to escape widespread shortages. After oil prices collapsed that year, a shortage of dollars left the nation’s businesses unable to import basic goods, before price controls and money printing exacerbated shortages and inflation. On the heels of this initial disaster, US sanctions under Trump contributed to an oil shortfall from which the nation still has not recovered. Yet in contrast with Cuba, Venezuela’s most immediate crisis is no longer economic. Since 2019, the nation’s economy has stabilized through the removal of tariffs, liberalization of price and currency exchange controls, and de facto dollarization. Maduro has quietly shown a willingness to reinstate market mechanisms, perhaps because a 65,000 percent inflation is enough to make anyone’s faith in state planning waver. Yet staving off famine does not mean all is well: an estimated 85 percent of Venezuelans still have incomes below the poverty line. While parts of Caracas have restored a veneer of functionality, most of the country is languishing.
The bigger acute threat to Maduro has been political opposition, as the nation’s latest election showed. Some international observers wondered if Maduro would accept a deal and stand down in favor of the opposition candidate Edmundo González—why allow for a widely popular opposition candidate to run if you intend to arrest them when they win anyway? Such a state of affairs would certainly make Kagame or Putin wince, but in this Bolivarian Revolution, a more sincere democratic procedure has long been integral to the show. For Chavez, elections featuring an uncontrolled opposition provided a stage—they were indeed the one aspect of politics that Chavez excelled at, even as he knew nothing of governance. (For Maduro, minor democratic concessions help ease the sanctions.)
Maduro, alas, is no Chavez. Following his latest election fraud, millions took to the streets to protest in favor of González. Yet since the initial outburst, Maduro has managed to repress protests and send González into exile, while enjoying continued support from key government agencies. Thanks to a military surveillance apparatus set up by Cuban intelligence, Venezuela’s armed forces have shown little willingness to break with the regime, with the head of the army declaring “absolute loyalty” to Maduro last month. With the Trump administration’s sanctions in 2019 having already failed to produce regime change once before, and export numbers at a fraction of what they were years ago, there may be little more external observers can do to unseat Maduro save direct intervention.
It is difficult to say which nation is best suited to regime change—my guess is Cuba—but it is worth considering the extent to which the two nations’ fates have become intertwined. Cuba has long depended on oil from Venezuela, which has in turn relied on Cuba for military and intelligence officials essential to the Chavista regime’s security. While Cuba has turned increasingly to Mexico and Russia for energy amid Venezuela’s oil shortfalls, a state collapse in Cuba may further destabilize the Maduro regime, depending on how self-sufficient Venezuelan intelligence officials are. (Cuban personnel have been implicated in the latest protest crackdowns.) It is strange to write this because, within the US, Cuba’s turmoil is largely going unnoticed, even as immigration from Venezuela and Haiti dominates headlines. Perhaps the Trump campaign is not keen to emphasize that over 300,000 Cuban refugees have settled in Miami-Dade county recently because they make up an important political bloc in the swing/red-tinged state of Florida, and such resettlement came on the heels of Trump hitting Cuba with new sanctions that starved the nation of remittances.
But my Anglocentrism is showing—truly, the failure of Cuba and Venezuela must be read in light of its implications for Latin America. Because whatever the fate of Venezuela and Cuba, Latin American leaders have taken greater note of their trajectories than any American politician—for better and worse. On the one hand, the implosion of two socialist states should serve as a deterrent to further experiments in mass expropriation. On the other, one could argue that leaders like Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), and Brazil’s Lula da Sula show that the spirit of Chavez is still alive, even if that of Castro was jettisoned while the embers of the Soviet Union still cooled.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a one-time Marxist guerrilla who cannot quite bring himself to disavow Chavez, has spooked foreign investors since coming to power in 2022. Recent efforts to exert executive control over Colombia’s largely private—and in many respects quite good—healthcare system were met with alarm from the business community and ordinary Colombians alike, over 200,000 of whom protested the development. His latest proposal to appropriate private bank savings for government projects has caused a similar rancor. In a move especially reminiscent of Chavez, President Petro has floated rewriting the Colombian constitution to cram through his agenda—an idea that has been met with little support.
Upon his election to a belated second term in 2023, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist who once eulogized Chavez in the New York Times, quickly wasted the goodwill extended to him by the US by restoring diplomatic relations with Venezuela and placing blame for the war in Ukraine on the West. Yet it is Brazil’s judicial branch that maintains the truly Chavista streak, with Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes moving to block the social media platform X for its failure to adequately regulate the alleged hate speech and disinformation from Lula’s opposition. (Though Chavez, himself an early adopter of Twitter, would have surely preferred pubic humiliation of opponents over TV to war by effete legalese.)
In Mexico, former president AMLO—technically retired but exerting control as ever—has shown perhaps the strongest penchant for Chavez-esque theatrics. During his six-year term, the government seized a private railway to make room for a new commuter train, while forcing the sale of the Spanish utility company Iberdrola to expand state control of energy. Showing the budgetary instincts of a Chavista with 2006 oil prices, AMLO spent billions to cancel a partially built airport in Mexico City that enjoyed favor with the business class, opting to start afresh on his own populist interpretation far from the city. In a move soon to be realized under his handpicked successor Claudia Sheinbaum, he signed into law constitutional amendments requiring the direct election of some 7,000 judges, a reform that most platonically tracks Chavez’s forays into Bolívarian democracy, both in its aims and circus-like implications.
And yet, if you have watched Petro, Lula, or AMLO speak, you will have found a certain strain of Chavismo absent: revolutionary vigor. These men—all senior citizens—are wearied. Though they were raised on a more militant, antimarket leftism, they have been cowed by father time, if not their own citizenry, into compliance with the logic of market capitalism. (A scarier thought still—perhaps they have come to accept some of its core tenets.) For every business-leery gesture, there is seemingly an equal and opposite thrust. Mexico’s faulty governance has done little to stop a record $36 billion nearshoring boom in the wake of China’s retreat to its own Maoist cave. Whatever his true designs, Petro is thoroughly constrained by a negative approval rating and entrenched Colombian conservatism. Lula himself cannot be bothered to renationalize the utility company Electrobras, the kind of move that, once enjoying some vague support from mainstream economics (a “natural monopoly,” they so oft allege), is generally catnip for the purebred Latin American socialist. Hemmed in by a conservative congress like Petro, he has turned his attention to rainforest dances. To quote Al-Jazeera’s stinging first-year assessment: “The Indigenous agenda has been a bright spot.”
In short, AMLO, Petro, and Lula do not represent a fresh wave of Latin American socialism, but an ebbing tide. The same could be said of Nicaragua, which has lurched toward a full dictatorship under Daniel Ortega, a Sandinista anachronism so obscure few seem to notice or care. Where there arguably is revolutionary vigor in Latin America today is on the political right in El Salvador and Argentina. Yet Bukele and Milei have, Maduran lapses aside, sought to woo foreign investment, a break with the revolutionary tradition in their respective nations.
Perhaps the future of leftism in Latin America is better represented by staid characters such as the 38-year-old Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who has come down especially hard on Maduro compared to his aged compadres. To the extent that state nationalization will prevail, it will take the form of public-private partnerships in commodities. But even Boric’s populist constitution did not pass muster with Chilean voters, who, perhaps recognizing that Chile’s high-income status quo is not so reproachable, were reluctant to cede rights to glaciers.
One wonders if the Latin American left, not so far off from that of the first world it long disdained, is coming to embrace a mode of politics that seeks to agitate more than it wishes to govern. (Agitate here should not be taken in the “waging guerrilla warfare in the countryside” sense, but more the “banging pots and pans in a street protest” one.) Partly, this is a story of the growing prosperity of the region. Since the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, many Latin American nations have seen their fortunes rise, even if not always at particularly impressive clips. In Brazil, Lula’s impotence stems in no small part from an emergent middle class of Brazilians who like Outback Steakhouse (a fact which I have independently confirmed) and trading stocks on their phone—they may understandably fret about the destruction of the Amazon and reject the excesses of Bolsonaro, but do they really wish to see the company’s leading aerospace company Embraer re-nationalized? Or would they prefer to be like France, where a left-wing bloc can come first in votes, and still end up ceding power to the center-right? It is little surprise that the one Latin American nation trending alarmingly toward Chavismo today, Honduras, is already nearly its poorest: a middle class that can afford bloomin’ onions and meme stocks is a powerful bulwark against the examples wrought by Castro and Chavez.
And so we reach this tentative conclusion: While left-wing Latin American leaders of tomorrow may strategically channel the rhetoric of Chavez, few will, as Chavez once did, take to the streets of their capital, point out businesses lining a historic center honoring Simón Bolívar, and order “expropriate it, Mr. Mayor” over a state TV feed. Men like Castro and Chavez have shown where the limits lie; populists like Petro must now heed them.
But the fact that most of Latin America has moved on makes the cases of Cuba and Venezuela stranger still: how have two states that have faced mass exodus for over a decade—over five decades in Cuba’s case—made it this far? It is a cliche to say “socialism doesn’t work,” yet the survival of Cuba and Venezuela’s ruling parties shows that it has worked insofar as self-preservation is concerned. North Korea is perhaps the standard bearer for hanging on by a thread. Yet, it is uniquely suited to such a condition in terms of its culture (something about Confucianism) and unrivaled totalitarianism. In Cuba and Venezuela, mass migrations show just how capable citizens are of voting with their feet, an option unavailable to most North Koreans. Rampant crime in Caracas particularly shows that the Venezuelan state is weak in key contexts one would associate with an authoritarian regime. Putin and Xi promise security if nothing else; Maduro cannot even deliver on that.
The parallels between Cuba and Venezuela shown thus far are not mere coincidence but reflect something distinctive about the political economy of each nation. Both Cuba and Venezuela were unproductive, one-dimensional economies of above-average regional development when their respective comandantes reigned. A mix of popular discontent and full state coffers gave each leader sufficient room to expand government influence, until a shock—a collapse in the Soviet Union or oil prices—laid bare a disastrous lack of market mechanisms. Yet by that point, the ruling regime was too entrenched to be unseated. The resource curse is a familiar story, and, as new countries like Suriname stumble upon riches, it is one always worth rehashing.
Latin American historiography is steeped in a certain bias. I am not an appropriately credentialed expert on Latin American affairs, but I will offer this: When Ada Ferrer’s Pultizer-winning history of Cuba invokes Howard Zinn on the first and last page, I do not think it is blasphemous to say that we are not getting the story from someone who thinks highly of capital, much less those who allocate it. Ferrer’s coverage of the Cuban Revolution is nonetheless invaluable because it is an excellent exposition of mob rule, if not—as a thoroughly people’s history—a devilish insult to Castro’s legacy.
Let us concede this: the US really has intervened in Latin American affairs, often against the will of the region’s people, and sometimes to their detriment. All the same, Latin America really has abounded with leaders so hostile to the US and basic economic dictate that they end up isolating and impoverishing their own people. Cuba embodies both principles.
The main problem with Ferrarian accounts of Cuba’s fallout with the US in 1960 is that they omit just how beneficial relations with the US were for the island's economy. With its proximity to the US and substantial trade concessions, Cuba had long appealed to American investment, which helped the nascent economy grow after gaining independence from Spain. With the US Congress’s passage of the Treaty of Commercial Reciprocity in 1902, Cuba received exclusive tariff reductions of 20 percent on all dutiable commodities. Such advantages came into focus during World War I, when a global shortage in sugar demanded a new supply. By the end of WWI, investments in the sugar industry were revolutionizing Cuba’s economy, such that it was already seeing signs of industrialization far beyond any of its Latin American neighbors:
Cuba's capital formation in equipment and machinery accounted for a quarter of the Latin American total in 1920… Cuba had the highest level of investment in machinery per inhabitant in Latin America for the period from 1890 to 1930.
The disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930 placed new tariffs on sugar, but new legislation in 1934 granted Cuba a generous quota for its sugar exports. After a lapse during WWII, the Sugar Act in 1948 reinstated the quota, allowing Cuba to sell a fixed amount of sugar to the US at two cents per pound above the world market price. Through this subsidized trade, Cuba exported sixty percent of its sugar to the US, making up an estimated 20 percent of Cuba's gross national product. These commercial ties were pivotal to the Cuban economy and plausibly explain why Castro was reluctant to immediately break with the US after successfully deposing Batista.
As the economists Marianne Ward and John Devereux show, Cuba was a wealthy place by regional standards on the cusp of revolution, thanks in no small part to this investment. In the 1950s, incomes were 50 to 60 percent of those in Europe, and the nation ranked 7th out of 47 Latin American countries in terms of GDP per capita. This made it about as wealthy as nations like Argentina and Italy.
On-the-ground reporting from the World Bank at the time paints a similar picture:
The general impression of the members of the mission travels all over Cuba, is that living levels of the farmers, industrial workers, storekeepers, and others are higher a corresponding groups in other tropical countries and in American countries.
Concerning consumption, Cuba had TV and automobile ownership rates close to the level of Europe in the 1950s. The US Department of Commerce, for its part, was impressed by the abundance of consumer goods in Cuba:
No observer with experience in Latin America can fail to be impressed by the variety, quantity, and quality of the merchandise displayed in the provincial towns and cities of the island. While such items as mechanical refrigerators, gas ranges, and television sets are prominently displayed, the strongest impressions are those formed by inspection of the stores carrying housewares, apparel, and foodstuffs.
The accounts are striking because they cut against the idea that Cuba in the 20th century was an oligarchy that served only a few wealthy landowners. Like every Latin American nation, Cuba certainly had rural poverty, but the data indicate that an emergent Cuban middle class enjoyed economic benefits despite a concentration of landed interests. Besides its relative material prosperity, Cuba looked more like a European than a Latin American nation in terms of literacy rates, infant mortality, and doctor numbers.
There is, however, a but. Despite its relatively high level of development within its region, Cuba was losing ground to wealthier countries by the 1950s. In 1929, Cuba had been as prosperous as southern states like Mississippi and South Carolina, but from 1925 to 1955, income per capita grew just 3 percent, in contrast with 28 percent in Argentina and 55 percent in the US. The Great Depression explains the initial contraction in incomes, but why was Cuba’s recovery post-depression so sluggish?
Ward and Devereux hypothesize that growth rates declined because the Cuban government began to regulate product and factor markets immensely after the Great Depression. In line with this explanation, one paper notes that the Cuban government protected inefficient sugar mills after the Great Depression, potentially dampening productivity growth in the sector. The 1930s saw an explosion in regulations more generally, including the creation of a new department of labor, minimum wage laws, enshrining the government’s right to buy any sugar produced, and nationalization of electricity. Combined with the US’s generous sugar quota, incentives for increasing productivity may have been wanting. This coincided with a steady decrease in American investment and low figures growth leading up to the revolution.
The picture of Cuba’s economy in the 1950s is thus mixed: Cuba was better off than most neighbors, but workers had seen little rise in income since before the Great Depression. Perceptions of wealth are often relative, not absolute, and we can imagine that many ordinary Cubans had become restive. Yet such a state of affairs was not plausibly the fault of American investors, but more likely Cuban government regulations, and possibly bad incentives from the US’s sugar quota, which had retarded productivity increases.
Years ago, the late Nobel Laureate Gary Becker pointed out that the Cuban economy in the 1950s shared similarities with that of Taiwan, another island nation close to a hostile superpower. While Cuba exported lots of sugar and tobacco, Taiwan sold sugar and rice. Yet today, as Taiwan exports cutting-edge semiconductors—largely to the nation that threatens its existence—Cuba exports nickel, zinc, tobacco, and hard liquor. (Its sugar industry has failed spectacularly under state management.) Perhaps Cuba never would have developed its own ASML, but suffice it to say that something went wrong on the march toward communist utopia.
This brings us to the political conditions under which Cuba began its descent. For all its relative wealth, Cuba was, again like Taiwan, a dictatorship ruled by a military general in the 1950s. Unlike Chiang Kai-Shek, of course, the Cuban generalissimo Fulgencio Batista ultimately failed to fend off a communist opposition to his island rule.2 (Chiang’s score on fending off communist opposition in non-island locales is less impressive.)
A man of African, Chinese, Spanish, and indigenous descent, Batista seemed to embody the diversity of the Caribbean well. This worldliness notwithstanding, by the 1940s he had become one of the most brutal tyrants in Latin America, abolishing term limits and violently suppressing dissent. By the 1950s, organized resistance movements had broken out across Cuba. While the US had once backed Batista, evidence suggests that on the eve of his fleeing the CIA was funneling money to the very group that would unseat his regime: the July 26th Movement led by Fidel Castro.
Who was Castro in the 1950s? The image memorialized today—a hardened lecturer against American imperialism, a man more steadfast in his Marxism than any of his Soviet counterparts—belies our understanding of Castro pre-1960. Until his fallout with the US, Castro publicly eschewed communism, instead claiming to favor a new society between capitalism and communism. (An obsession with the Cuban nationalist and revolutionary hero José Martí gave no credence to claims of communism, though it should have underscored Castro’s hostility to foreign influence.) This third-way ambiguity paid dividends, as the Eisenhower administration acknowledged Castro’s new government upon its triumph over Batista in 1959.
That year, Castro would tour the US, attracting crowds at each stop before meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon, to whom Castro insisted he had no intention of confiscating US businesses and property. Superficially, the nascent Cuban regime was far from communism indeed. Castro and his rebels tapped the exiled liberal Manuel Urrutia Lleó as interim president, who in turn appointed Jose Miro Cardona, a professor and president of the Havana Bar Association, as prime minister. Both men had disavowed communism, and Cardona would even go on to help lead the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
All the same, many of Castro’s close associates were avowed communists, none less than his brother Raúl and the Argentine doctor Che Guevara. It is tempting to speculate that Castro, as the face of the revolution, sought to whitewash any personal politics given the Cold War context and his nation’s dependency on subsidized trade with the US. Even if Castro was privately hostile to the US, a shrewd military tactician would have had ample incentive not to spurn the nation until similar Soviet generosity had been secured. Was Castro concealing his true hand?
Later reporting from the New York Times Cuba correspondent and Castro biographer Tad Szulc suggests so. Based on interviews with close associates of Castro, Szulc concludes that Castro and his rebels maintained a shadow government to supplant the liberal reformers, who were needed initially for their experience and legitimacy (a theory that the government’s later ineptitude supports). In 1961, Castro would seemingly admit his use of dissimulation: “Of course, if we stopped at the Pico Turquino [a height in the Sierra Maestra] when we were very weak and said 'We are Marxist-Leninists' we might not have been able to descend from the Pico Turquino to the plain."
We might expect a communist tyrant to harmonize their political development, but whether Castro was secretly a communist before spurning the US is somewhat academic. What is beyond doubt is that he was a strident Cuban nationalist, which, as the scholar Hugh Thomas noted, amounted to “perforce anti-Americanism.” A student of Martí, Castro must have found the fact that the US owned the majority of Cuban land and treated the island as a proto-Vegas (per Hemingway: “good for fishing and fucking”) a source of scorn. That the US had intervened in the Cuban War of Independence just before the nation secured its independence from Spain in 1898 was another sore spot. Whatever Castro’s precise vision of revolution, it was plausibly one that ended in extricating US interests from the nation. To do so without causing immediate economic ruin would require the backing of another great power.
The sudden nature of Cuba’s turn toward the Soviet Union shows as much. No sooner than the liberals were appointed to Cuba’s new government, many were resigning in favor of communists, or Castro himself. Just six weeks after being appointed prime minister, Cardona quit his post, making Castro prime minister in addition to commander in chief. Strangely, I have not been able to find the stated reason for Cardona’s abrupt resignation; it is only clear that he left for Miami and never returned to Cuba. President Urritia, however, made his reasoning clear. Amid growing tensions with Castro—who had now decided to delay elections indefinitely—he resigned months after Cardona, citing communist influence and Che Guevarra’s position in the government as the impetus. The communist Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado replaced him.
Paired with this swift remaking of the revolutionary government was a systematic liquidation of the prior regime. Upon taking power, Castro used revolutionary tribunals to dispense with the over 500 Batista officials, usually in a large ditch. In practice, these were show trials held before large crowds, many of whom had suffered under the Batista regime. When faced with criticism from US officials and journalists, Castro insisted that his purge was no different than the Nuremberg trials since the Batista regime had murdered thousands of Cubans extrajudicially—he even gave US officials a tour to show how popular the tribunals were with the masses.
Cuba’s abandonment of its early liberal commitments also came economically. Within three months of Castro’s promise to Nixon, the revolutionary government passed the First Agrarian Reform, breaking up and redistributing all farms larger than 99 acres—with exceptions for sugar, rice, and cattle—while banning foreign ownership of Cuban land. This led to the expropriation of some forty percent of arable land, which Castro’s government refused to compensate with cash, declaring that Batista had looted the government coffers. Both Cuban and American owners instead received twenty-year government bonds at 4.5 percent interest, an offer no landowners were enthusiastic about. But the US, far from picking a fight with Cuba, largely tolerated this antagonism. Even as American citizens lost vast landholdings, Eisenhower did not end the US’s large quota for Cuban sugar at this time, fearing it would only amplify Cuban support for Castro.
Whatever Castro’s true political leanings upon taking power, it is clear that he was not aligned with the Soviet Union at first—Premier Nikkita Kruschev was oblivious to the developments in the Cuban Revolution as they unfolded. Yet the Soviets quickly warmed to Castro as his antagonism toward the US became clear, and Soviet Deputy Anastas Mikoyan was dispatched to Cuba in February 1960. There, Mikoyan successfully negotiated a trade deal to swap fuel for sugar. With Soviet aid secured, it seems that Cuba no longer held reservations about spurning the US, and relations disintegrated rapidly. When the US refused to allow American-owned oil refineries to process Soviet crude oil later that year, Cuba would confiscate the refineries, prompting the US’s cancellation of the sugar quotas at last. In turn, Cuba nationalized the refineries outright. This gave rise to Eisenhower’s embargo on the sale of all goods except food and medicine to Cuba, and Cuba’s final expropriation of all US businesses and most US property on the island—a measure long planned, but shrewdly saved for this moment.
By October of 1960, not even two years into the new government, Cuba’s break with the US was complete. The chronology of events suggests that the proximate cause of the embargo was not US paranoia or aggression, but Cuban antagonism toward US business interests. As Ferrer is keen to note, it was the revolution many Cubans had dreamed of for decades. Yet even as Castro appeared to have extricated much loathed foreign interests from his nation, it would soon become clear that he had simply invited new ones.
Cuba’s communist timeline had been condensed—it was pivoting from rousing military triumph to totalitarian state consolidation with no youthful interregnum like the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Censorship of the press started almost immediately upon Castro’s ascent, and for all Guevarra’s wits (and looks), there was little time for forays into avante-garde filmmaking or sculpture. There would be no New Economic Policy like Lenin’s, either. While the first agrarian reforms in 1959 had created smallholdings and cooperatives, the second agrarian reform in 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had deepened the nation’s relationship with the Soviet Union, at last introduced large-scale collectivization of agriculture. Yet for all the support it received from communist allies, Cuba never achieved a viable model of state planning, instead becoming dependent on foreign aid until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Remarkably, Radoslav Yordanov’s archival research of the Communist Bloc’s relations with Cuba during this period reveals a Cuban government that was a pariah within the communist world for its ineptitude. Countries like Bulgaria criticized Cuba for its disorderly approach to socialism, noting that the government was dragging its feet on committing to the rigorous, scientific planning that Bulgaria apparently ascribed to itself. Here, certain stereotypes of a less than politically correct nature would seem to rear their ugly head (tropical languor, hammock-bound siestas, fishing and copulation, etc.), with Cuban officials even rejecting Soviet planning on the basis that its people were not suited to the kind of discipline wrought in Eastern Europe.
Cuba’s haphazard attempt at planning is best encapsulated in the failed ten million-ton sugar harvest, the target of which would seem to have been grounded less in the science of state planning than human affinity for large multiples of ten. As part of the Revolutionary Offensive, Castro sought to nationalize the nation’s remaining small businesses and made a sugar harvest a national obsession. Yet as everyone from lawyers to schoolchildren worked around the clock to produce a record-setting yield, other sectors of the economy languished. A French agronomist observed the pitfalls of this division-of-labor-eschewing approach, noting that many workers could only yield a small fraction of what a professional harvester could. Ultimately, Cuba produced just over 7.5 million tons of sugar, falling well short of its target, and drawing the ire of communist allies.
Even as central planning flopped, Cuba’s transition to large-scale collectivization brought a new resource to rival the fabled El Dorado: Soviet welfare. After the initial deal struck with Miyokan in 1960, Cuba would soon become dependent on ever-more generous trade deals, with the Soviet Union, like the US before it, agreeing to purchase sugar at above-market rates. Yet by the late 1960s, the incompetence of Castro’s government began to grate much of the Communist Bloc, and the Soviets threatened to withdraw aid if Castro did not reform according to Soviet planning. To preserve the relationship, Cuba deepened its emulation of the Soviet Union as 10,000 Soviet officials were sent to Cuba to manage parts of the economy. Castro had traded American entrepreneurs for Soviet planners.
To bring Cuba further in line with its planning method, the Soviet Union encouraged the nation to join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in July 1972. With developing market status, Cuba received even higher price for its sugar exports without a change to the price it paid for its oil imports, as well as a deferral on its debt repayment to 1986. Cuba, it may be said, was becoming a welfare state doubly—both in the extensive services it now provided its people and its dependency on foreign handouts. By 1983, 87 percent of Cuba's foreign trade was with the CMEA, and subsidized sugar accounted for 75 percent of the country's total exports. Yet there was little evidence of improvements in Cuban planning. Yugoslavia noted that the nation lacked material incentives (Castro, a one-time Jesuit, much preferred moral ones), and even Czechoslovakian communists could see that the island was overly dependent on sugar exports.
So dismayed were the Soviets with Cuba’s economy that they had even encouraged Castro to seek rapprochement with the US in the mid-70s. Renewed tourism, once one of the nation’s most vital industries, would help diversify Cuba’s monoculture economy. Yet even as Castro acknowledged the harms of the US embargo and made gestures toward negotiation, he eventually vetoed the effort, believing Cuba could hold out much longer. Castro perhaps worried that renewed relations with the US would end the heavily subsidized trade with the Communist Bloc, noting that Cuba could not choose between ending the embargo and trade with the Soviet Union.
Castro’s faith in—as he liked to describe this system of extensive welfare—“socialist internationalism” proved unfounded, and the 1980s marked a period of terminal decline for the Communist Bloc. As most communist countries pursued reforms to salvage stagnant economies and quell growing unrest, Cuba followed its allies' lead with its own so-called “rectification.” Yet Cuba’s reforms were an exception within the communist world: far from a democratic or pro-market rectification, they represented a recommitment to socialist ideals. As countries like Poland were introducing market reforms, Cuba was harkening back to the thinking of Guevarra in the 1960s by re-emphasizing the state, using moral rather than material incentives, and encouraging volunteer labor. Castro openly criticized Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost in Granma, suggesting they played to US interests.
By the late 1980s, Cuba concluded many trade agreements with Communist Bloc nations, as social unrest gripped nations like Poland, Hungary, and Czekoslavia. The decline of assistance from such nations made Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union more vital still: from 1986 to 1990, the over $4 billion in aid it received annually from the Soviet Union was equivalent to 15 percent of Cuba’s GDP (a figure which is misleadingly low due to the nation’s controlled exchange rate). Beyond its over-dependence on the sugar trade, what little industrial capacity Cuba had also owed largely to its patron, which had funded the development of some 400 industrial plants. Investment in the longstanding Angolan civil war consumed untenable amounts of state funding. Remarkably, some 300,000 Cubans had been dispatched to the former Portuguese colony throughout the 70s and 80s—an investment that baffled onlookers like Henry Kissinger.
Despite Castro’s best efforts, Cuba’s run as a client state was coming to a close. By 1990, Poland predicted that Cuba would collapse within months due to the changes to the CMEA. Then, in 1991, the CMEA suddenly dissolved altogether, just six months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. After decades of depending on socialist internationalism, the result was something like a balloon deflating: Between 1990 and 1993, Cuba’s GDP contracted a remarkable 35% as the nation entered what the government would call, most euphemistically, the “Special Period.”
Cuba, by all logic, should have collapsed at this moment—its allies had fallen one by one, leaving its monoculture economy isolated and unable to supply basic goods. But Castro was always better suited to hard times than good ones—even his communist allies would acknowledge his unique capacity to raise morale. With Cuba teetering on famine, Castro grudgingly legalized some private small businesses and foreign investment, while undertaking a search for new trading partners in a post-Soviet world. It seemed improbable that Cuba would get the same subsidies of yesteryear, but perhaps it could muddle through.
In his search, Castro surely took note of certain developments in South America, where a young comandante staged a failed coup in 1992. In his own words, the man of stout criollo build and slanty eyes sought to bring justice to an oil-rich nation marked by extreme inequality and government corruption. Though the message should have resonated with a fellow revolutionary, Castro denounced the effort at first, perhaps fretful of similar developments in his own fragile nation. But during a bafflingly short two-year prison sentence, the young comandante traded violent means for democratic procedure, plotting an entry into establishment politics with the help of elite contacts. His pivot from coup leader to populist politician appeared complete when, upon release in 1994, he was invited to meet with Castro in Cuba. At the Havana airport that year, Castro would exchange the first hug of many with the new Venezuelan political star soon to become Cuba’s ballast in a post-Soviet world: Hugo Chavez.
“He does not look like the candidate of 1998. But he is the same president as in 2000. What an art to hide who he was!” So comments one Venezuelan on the video of Chavez’s 1994 speech in Havanah.
Who was Chavez in the 1990s? On the one hand, he, like Castro before him, denounced communism in favor of a third-way vision that sought to right the wrongs of a few oligarchs. On the other, as some Venezuelans have come to notice, there is the nearly 40-minute speech he gave in Havanah lavishing praise on a communist dictatorship teetering on famine.
Like the young Castro, Chavez probably did not have such a well-formed political ideology throughout his ascent. Rory Carroll’s excellent account of Chavez in Comandante paints the portrait of a sentimental man who, belying his tank-like physique and love of baseball, memorized Whitman poems and read Plekhanov. (Perhaps it is no surprise that a young Chavez could not be bothered to read someone as dry as Marx himself, though, by the end of his tenure, he was exhorting ordinary Venezuelans to do just that.) Like Castro, Chavez was above all a nationalist, particularly obsessed with his nation’s own liberator, Simón Bolívar. But Bolívar himself was not such a radical—or for that matter coherent—figure: despite opposing the tyranny of the Spanish crown, he suspected South Americans were unsuited to the kind of democracy that prevailed in the US. Marx, the later addition to Chavez’s political canon, denounced him as a Bonapartist, a label which is perhaps too generous. Bolívar had less insight into statecraft than any French conservative, and maybe therein lies some of the tragedy of Chavez’s obsession with the man. It is one thing to liberate—it is another to govern.
The world into which Chavez was emerging had changed much from the time of Castro’s revolution. Communism was collapsing, and economic miracles in East Asia had shown the path to prosperity for developing nations lay in opening up to global markets. And yet the problems in Venezuela would have been familiar to any Cuban in 1960. Venezuela’s economy, though still ahead of many neighbors thanks to ample oil reserves, had been in tumult for decades. On the eve of Chavez’s election, Venezuela was only one of sixteen nations with a negative annual growth rate for real incomes since 1960. This was not, however, the product of oligarchic policies, as Chavez would claim. Venezuela’s government had undermined itself through a populist agenda of aggressive spending, import substitution policies, nationalization, and price controls to appease a population that soared from roughly 5 million in 1950 to 25 million by the time of Chavez’s election. Like Chavez decades later, Venezuelan leaders in the 1970s planned for a world where oil prices would stay high. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they didn’t, and a series of presidents were forced to wrestle with austerity measures amid an increasingly restive population.
The question that looms over Venezuelan politics pre-Chavez is why the nation could not escape its Bolívarian fate when so many other Latin American countries did. Austerity measures were common in this period—the 1980s witnessed a region-wide debt crisis that required sweeping reforms in countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Nor was initial hostility to austerity measures unusual. Venezuela’s 1989 Caracazo riots, sparked by the scrapping of fuel subsidies, had parallels in neighboring countries. In Peru, President Alberto Fujimori had overseen one of the most aggressive shock therapies on record, only to be re-elected in a landslide when the economy stabilized. Presidents Carlos Menem in Argentina and Fernando Cardozo in Brazil were equally re-elected after the success of their austerity measures. While Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez—the man Chavez had tried to topple in a coup in 1992—followed a similar path as these leaders, he seemed only to entrench distrust of the political establishment.
It could not have helped that Pérez himself proved an untrustworthy figure. He was forced out of office over corruption charges in 1993 amid his austerity program, creating an association between austerity policies and oligarchic corruption. (Corruption charges were not unknown to Peru’s Fujimori, but they would not come until the 2000s.) But the bigger problem was that Venezuela’s establishment politicians, dependent on fragile coalitions that spanned the political spectrum, never fully committed to austerity measures. Consider that Argentina, Peru, and Brazil all had inflation rates of over 1000 percent in the early 1990s, while Venezuela’s inflation rate, though too high, never surpassed 50 percent. That may sound preferable, but hyperinflation in nations like Peru gave politicians the resolve to tame inflation for good. With its more modest inflation and ample oil reserves, Venezuela avoided the truly tough medicine by spending and reimplementing price controls whenever politicians felt pressure. By the late 1990s, on the cusp of Chavez’s election, its inflation rate was nearing 100 percent—far higher than in Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, where prices had stabilized.
Javier Corrales aptly describes Venezuela in the 1980s and 90s as stuck in an “ax-relax-collapse” cycle:
Each cycle begins with the eruption of an economic crisis, to which the government responds by implementing harsh cutbacks and adjustments-the “ax.” After some initially positive results, the reforms soon lose momentum, becoming either haphazardly implemented or prematurely abandoned-the “relax” stage. This culminates in yet another economic crisis-the “collapse.”
Pérez’s successor Rafael Caldera showed the “ax-relax” dynamic at work. True, he continued to implement the IMF’s agenda, including reducing fuel subsidies, liberalizing interest rates, unifying the currency’s exchange rate, and eliminating most price controls. Yet he ultimately re-implemented price controls when inflation lurched toward 70 percent while expanding social services in response to protests. Other measures, such as privatizing the state’s sacrosanct oil company, were never up for debate. Venezuela’s leaders were unwilling to endure the fallout necessary to reset the nation’s economy.
One might say that the fecklessness of the Venezuelan political establishment—whether through outright corruption or overindulgence of populist dictate—created the perfect conditions for an outsider’s election. In 1998, running as such an outsider, Chavez easily handled the two establishment parties dating back to Venezuela’s democratic transition in 1958, winning 56 percent of the vote. Even for many wearied establishment business leaders and politicians, the election of Chavez was not a completely unwelcome development—what was there to lose? All the same, Chavez’s platform was not far off of his new mentor’s forty years before—a third-way, revolutionary remaking of Venezuela, high in morale, even if short on details.
One detail, however, was clear: the replacement of the 1961 constitution that Chavez had railed against for so long. Upon assuming office, Chavez quickly created a referendum for a new constitutional convention, garnering the support of an overwhelming majority of voters. With 95 percent of its elected members aligned with the new Chavez government, a new assembly convened to create a populist constitution that enshrined the right to public healthcare, free tertiary education, and preferences for small businesses and cooperatives. Among the starkest changes was the replacement of the nation’s bicameral legislature with a unicameral one and the elimination of congressional impeach proceedings in favor of recall elections. For a gifted politician like Chavez, removing congressional checks in favor of popular ones was an excellent tradeoff. Thankfully, it also met with little skepticism from an electorate fed up with the failures of the nation’s political establishment. In 1999, over seventy percent of voters chose to ratify the new Bolívarian constitution.
Yet even with this populist win, it was not obvious then that Chavez would soon be the man wantonly expropriating businesses over state TV. True to his third-way claims, Chavez retained several establishment officials, including the previous conservative minister of finance, and his government paid the nation’s debts and improved tax collection. Far from rallying against American imperialism, the charming new leader toured the US—just like Castro before him—even pitching at a baseball game in New York. As the US ambassador to Mexico implored: watch what he does, not what he says.
As Chavez inched toward the presidential palace, Cuba’s economy showed few signs of plugging its holes. Enfeebled from years of Soviet dependency, the nation couldn’t raise enough funds to import basic goods while selling its sugar at competitive market prices. Material conditions had deteriorated such that Cubans now ate roughly one-third fewer calories than in the 1980s, forcing many to revert from industrial jobs to farming under the new Organopónicos system. Unlike contemporary Haitians in the US, reports suggest Cubans were indeed eating cats, along with various exotic zoo animals. Oil had become so scarce that horse-drawn carriages—not the tourist kind—could be seen through the streets of Havana. After authorities blocked refugees from fleeing to the US by raft, protests erupted in 1994, a public sign of discontent that was rare in Castro’s totalitarian state.
By the time of Chavez’s election in 1999, the worst had subsided, but Cuban consumption levels were still roughly half of what they had been in 1955. Fortunately, the newly elected Chavez showed no third-way qualms when it came time to spare aid for his new Cuban mentor. In 1999, Chavez flew again to Havana with the Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who was writing a report on the new leader. (Because this is Latin America, the line between literature and politics is not so defined.) During a lengthy sojourn, Castro regaled Chavez with a baseball game, a birthplace visitation, and a canoe ride—a reception fit for the man whose oil wealth alone could salvage the Cuban economy. Perhaps it was overkill: given the many parallels, there was something overdetermined about this father-son alliance. During the visit, Chavez declared, not unlike in his new morning speech years later, that Cuba and Venezuela were “swimming together toward the same sea of happiness.” The next year, when Chavez returned the favor and hosted Castro in Caracas, an ambitious new doctors-for-oil program was finalized.
The exchange was more than a little ingenious. Despite its economic turmoil, Cuba retained vast numbers of medical personnel thanks to the nation’s investment in free healthcare and education. (Cuban medicine’s regional preeminence, of course, pre-dated the revolution, but it was one sector that the communist regime did not wish to see languish.) While Cuba’s woefully unproductive state-run enterprises could not export goods competitively, its human capital enjoyed broad demand in Latin America. The timing was just right, too. Like a divine blessing for Chavez’s unconventional strain of Marxist-Christinity, Venezuela had just been bestowed with a gift that would last until Chavez died in 2013: high oil prices. With Venezuela’s oil revenues—the primary source of state funding—reaching levels not seen in over a decade by 2000, Chavez saw no reason not to be generous toward his new mentor.
Generous he was. By 2003, Cuba received over 100,000 barrels of oil a day, with the full value of Venezuela’s subsidies reaching approximately 12 percent of Cuban GDP annually—not far off the Soviet largesse of a generation ago. It was enough oil to get rid of horse-drawn carriages, and crucially, enough to even re-export some of the crude to earn foreign currency. The deal was in no way a fair exchange, yet for Chavez, bringing Cuban doctors directly to low-income communities kept his voting bloc loyal, which would become key for winning future elections.
Yet for many in the media and business community, Chavez’s growing emulation of Castro was a cause for alarm. By 2002, Chavez relied extensively on “Bolivarian Circles” (read: paramilitary groups) and emergency powers to enforce his agenda. In 2002, Chavez made his most consequential decision to date as president. Already misappropriating the nation’s oil wealth, he fired a string of board directors at PDVSA and in a maneuver that can only be described as on-brand, humiliated them over TV. Outraged, crowds of workers and business leaders quickly organized a march on the Miraflores palace where Chavez resided.
It was not the march itself that threatened Chavez, but his supporters’ violent resistance to it. At an overpass en route to Miraflores, snipers’ shots rang out, killing 19 protestors. To this day, it is unknown who the counterdemonstrators were, but Chavez’s use of paramilitary force drew a clear connection between the killings and Venezuela’s president. Outraged over the deaths, many in the military turned on Chavez, refusing to implement his requested emergency measures. Suddenly, the media, business community, and top military officials had all coalesced against the comandante. On the evening of April 11, 2002, military officials delivered a demand to resign.
It is hard to imagine that Chavez’s confidence ever wavered, but if there was such a moment, it would have been now. As once-loyal officials broke with him, reports suggest Chavez contemplated suicide—but then, Chavez must have known he was always a man of great fortune. Suddenly at midnight, he received a phone call, coaching him to not, as Chilean President Salvador Allende did decades before when the Chilean military closed in, shoot himself, but instead to turn himself over to the military. The man on the other end was Castro.
Chavez complied with his mentor’s advice. In a scrawled letter, he agreed to step down before being arrested and moved to a military base. Despite the best efforts of Castro, the Venezuelan opposition denied Chavez asylum in Cuba—the deposed president would instead be prepared for trial. In the meantime, the economist Pedro Carmona became interim president, quickly issuing a decree to dissolve the Supreme Court and National Assembly, which were filled with Chavez supporters, and organize elections for later that year. Concerning Castro, PDVSA’s directors were restored, and oil shipments to Cuba halted.
The Bolivarian Revolution appeared over. Even the word “Bolivarian” had been dropped from the nation’s official name upon the issuance of Carmona’s decree. Chavez’s supporters continued to demonstrate for the deposed president before Miraflores, but without the support of Venezuela’s major institutions, Chavez needed a hail mary. Stewing in civilian clothes and handcuffs, he retained one.
After being warned about a possible coup attempt by fellow OPEC member states earlier in the year, Chavez had shrewdly parked the presidential guard in the underground barracks connecting to Miraflores via tunnels. Even with Chavez arrested, the legion’s commander José Baduel remained loyal. Seeing the events unfold, Baduel at last sent word to the guard that it was “now or never.” The troops made a push into the presidential palace where Carmona resided, quickly toppling the new interim president. With no further bloodshed, the revolution had been saved, and Chavez scrawled a new note reclaiming the presidency.
Up to now, Venezuela looked like the farce to Cuba’s tragedy, but the failed coup attempt made Venezuela’s drift toward a dictatorship a foregone conclusion. With the support of Castro, Chavez imported scores of Soviet-trained Cuban intelligence officials to staff his situation room and monitor opposition until his death. In 2007, after Chavez lost a referendum that would have removed term limits, a new deal with Castro allowed Cuba to train military and intelligence officials that would further fortify the Chavez regime. Those officials continue to prop up Maduro to this day, assisting in the repression of protests against this year’s election fraud. Still, Chavez himself never required quite so much force: while harassment of unfriendly journalists—including laws restricting criticism of public officials—soon proceeded, it seemed that Chavez now had enough dirt on every opponent to secure his rule without the formalities of a Leninist state.
Perhaps the most consequential post-coup policy decision was not related to security but to the economy. In 2003, as workers at PDVSA again went on strike, the nation’s oil revenues froze. As is typical, Venzuela’s oil-first economy had come to depend on importing almost everything, which required the use of dollars. Without dollars from oil sales, the nation’s businesses wouldn’t be able to fund purchases of many basic goods. No matter: Chavez reinstated a fixed exchange rate, reducing the amount of dollars that the Venezuelan bolívar could be converted to. With the strike resolved quickly, it was an emergency measure that worked in the short term. But Chavez left the fixed rate in place, and as the bolívar’s market value continued to decline amid Chavez’s spending bonanza, businesses found it increasingly difficult to exchange bolívars for the dollars they needed at the official rate. When oil prices finally plummeted in 2014 and the Venezuelan state suffered a massive shortage of dollars, the beginning of Venezuela’s ongoing crisis began.
Still, in 2002, the opposition had not given up, pursuing legal means to topple Chavez as a final recourse. This time, a recall election in 2004 failed to unseat Chavez, though for the first time in his presidency, the opposition cried fraud. Was it, though? The evidence at the time is mixed at best. If there was fraud, it was certainly not the kind staged since Chavez’s death. Perhaps Venezuela’s opposition found it difficult to accept that the nation’s emerging dictator might have popular support.
The real winner of the failed coup, though, was Castro himself. Nearing the end of his life, he had dragged his nation from a beneficiary of American foreign investment to a client state of the Soviet Union to the pet interest of a new Latin American lodestar molded in his image. The aged Castro was, as he joked to Chavez during a 2005 press conference, at last becoming the student. With the US busy humiliating itself in the Middle East, it might have even seemed that a specter was haunting Latin America. Channeling the pan-Americanism of Bolívar, Chavez’s new intergovernmental organization, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), drew in Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras, and Ecuador. Even outside the new Bolivarian Bloc, Chavez and Castro remained on good terms with leaders like Argentinian President Nicolas Kirchner.
It was, alas, a fragile equilibrium. Cuba’s economy was still far weaker than it had been in the Soviet period. With limited industrial activity and slumping agricultural output, it had become, as Richard Feinberg dubs it in his Open for Business, a low-productivity service economy. On top of that, Castro was becoming ill, setting up a potential succession crisis. Even as Chavez looked triumphant amid an oil boom, it should have been clear to an external observer that the heart of the new socialist bloc in Latin America was increasingly dependent on the price of a single commodity.
We arrive where we began—Castro in a Havana hospital in 2006, tended to by his protege. With so much morale, and indeed so much oil, it must have seemed that the new morning was within reach—what did it ever entail but sustenance and finger wags at the first world? Chavez, more of a natural comedian than the stolid Castro, had by now become a first-rate parodist of George Bush, representing him as a besotted John Wayne to his citizenry and the devil himself at the United Nations. Besides lavishing the poorest Venezuelans with free healthcare, education, food, and finally TVs, he sent discount heating oil to low-income communities in the US, a humiliating gesture enabled by Representative Joe Kennedy. Never mind the billions of dollars in subsidized gas being smuggled to Colombia and Brazil—nor the alarming shortfalls at prime oilfields controlled by PDVSA—this was as close to utopia as either comandante would get. Perhaps Castro, his illness notwithstanding, knew there was no better moment to stand down. With a seemingly immovable Chavez there to carry the torch, Castro ceded the presidency to his brother Raúl Castro in 2006, a handover that was formalized in 2008.
Castro must have held greater hope in Chavez because, besides his own senior citizen status, Raúl had shown much greater willingness to relax the vise with which the PCC controlled Cuba’s economy. Raúl quickly moved to reinstate liberalizing measures that Castro had begun to abandon after securing oil from Venezuela, and by 2011, the PCC had developed a comprehensive reform agenda. With inflation-adjusted wages in 2013 at just a quarter of their 1989 levels, it was long overdue.
Perhaps Raúl understood better than his brother that Chavez’s golden goose was not immortal. Just as Chavez’s election had coincided with a timely rise in oil prices, his premature death in 2013 now coincided with a reversal of fortunes. In 2014, oil markets sank, and the Venezuelan economy—fragile from its dependency on a single export just like Cuba before it—was in freefall. With a byzantine system of currency controls, businesses were unable to get dollars from the government to import food and other basic goods. It did not help that graft at the PDVSA, now fully staffed with Chavistas, was contributing to an oil shortfall, nor that Chavez had tapped Maduro, a former bus driver who showed no aptitude save being Chavez’s ultimate sycophant, as his successor.
In defiance of national interests, PDVSA at first responded to the calamity by buying foreign oil to ship to Cuba at a loss, a baffling exchange until one remembers that Cuban intelligence formed the backbone of the Chavista regime’s security. Still, Venezuela could not be counted on forever, and President Obama’s overture in 2015 offered a new hope for avoiding another special period. The subsequent removal of the US embargo dating to 1960 came with the allowance of remittances and tourism from the US—a new source of much-needed foreign currency. A moribund Fidel fired off a dismissive article in Granma, but by now, there was little a bedridden comandante could do to change Cuba’s course. Foreign direct investment had already swelled from $14 billion in 1985 to $580 billion in 2015.
Yet reform moved glacially. Perhaps, like North Korea and Xi Jingping’s China, the PCC fretted about where a Gorbachev-like thaw would lead. Even as private enterprises were increasingly common, an immense regulatory burden forestalled the development of competitive industries. Cubans who operated their own businesses still couldn’t access wholesale markets. Attempts to scale were prohibited. With the PCC unwilling to cede control, multinationals found permitting procedures arbitrary, slow, and opaque. It was progress—but it was not enough.
A hawkish Trump administration at last undid Obama’s opening, dealing another blow to the island nation by cutting off remittances and tourism. By now, Venezuela had already entered its first special period, and here, Cuba was nearing its second. For Cuba, more changes—radical ones for a Leninist state—came. Yet even as a 2018 constitutional reform legalized private property, it was becoming clear that a few state-affiliated mafioso were coming to control private industries, if not looting the nation outright. By 2023, Cuba’s former economic minister was sacked for corruption around the time a mysterious woman was arrested in Tampa, Florida for smuggling millions of much-needed dollars out of the nation. It was not just ordinary people, but the little wealth that remained which was fleeing.
Upon the collapse of oil prices in 2014, Venezuela, less seasoned in these matters than its ally, tried putting its economy back together with price controls and money printing. Predictably, this exacerbated shortages and caused rampant inflation. The nation’s General Assembly—unicameral after Chavez’s handiwork—granted Maduro the right to rule by decree in 2015, but then, the bus driver with the world’s worst luck suffered another blow. As it had done in Cuba, a hawkish Trump administration sought to choke the Venezuelan economy into submission. Sanctions in 2017 blocked the nation’s access to financing from the US, before a ban on oil exports to the nation Venezuela once mocked with cheap heating oil was imposed the next year. The growing shortfalls at PDVSA meant a recovery in oil prices offered little help to the starved economy. As millions fled, Venezuela’s crisis resonated with that of Cuba a generation before down to the Ripley’s-esque details: reports claimed Venezuelans—fellow swimmers in that long-awaited sea of bliss—were now eating zoo animals.
With millions left to cope with the ruin wrought in Venezuela and Cuba, an uncanny moment from the late Chavez period comes to mind. As Venezuela’s deification of Simón Bolívar proceeded in 2010, Chavez commissioned a state archaeological project to investigate the bones of Bolívar for foul play related to his premature death—perhaps the comandante, oblivious to cancer now killing him, was projecting his paranoia about a conspiracy onto his hero. It was politics meets Indiana Jones meets Joe Rogan—a stunt only Chavez could pull off, and the kind required to distract voters from the nation’s increasingly obvious decline. After a giddy state TV broadcast covering the event, Chavez—a first-rate humorist, to be sure, but not one for double entendres—fired off one of those evergreen Tweets:
“We have seen the remains of the Great Bolivar!”
To be fair, Castro later regretted this position, which was perhaps a holdover from his Jesuit youth.
In one of those facts that would seem to defy nominative determinism, Batista was never referred to as generalissimo from what I can gather, while Chiang, a Chinese man, was.
"but do they really wish to see the company’s leading aerospace company Embraer re-nationalized?"
You mean "do they really wish to see the country's leading aerospace company" I think. Good article.