CUBAN PRESIDENT Fidel Castro, who took power nearly half a century ago, announced yesterday that he planned to resign. Ever since his intestinal surgery in the summer of 2006, his brother Raúl has been temporarily in charge of governance. Until then, Raúl had been officially second-in-command and chief of the military.
Following the official shift in rule, Washington argued it favored "transition, not succession." It opposed yet another Castro ruling 90 miles off shore. It wants democracy, not dictatorship, a market economy, not socialism. The Bush administration needs to know that its current policy works against the very changes it aspires.
In 2004, President Bush tightened the so-called personal embargo, rights of Cuban émigrés to visit island family and send remittances to them. Cuban Americans can now visit island family only once every three years, and they can get official permission only to visit their closest of kin. In addition, they may share only $1,200 annually, far less than the average Latin American immigrant remits.
Other immigrants, including from China and Vietnam, face no such restrictions. In tightening the personal embargo, Bush responded to lobbying by wealthy, politically influential émigrés who fled Cuba soon after Fidel assumed power. These émigrés favor a "Berlin Wall" across the Florida Straits. They believe that in strangulating the regime they will usher in a political and economic transition.
Unlike the first émigrés, recent arrivals from Cuba, poor and without political representation, wish to visit island relatives and help, not hurt, them economically. The 20,000 arrivals from Cuba each year since the mid-1990s are responsible for most of the estimated $800 million remitted annually to Cuba, Washington restrictions notwithstanding.
Their family ties, along with their remittances, have done more to change socialism as Cubans knew it than the hard-line stance of the early émigrés. They are eroding the non-materialistic, egalitarian precepts of the revolution. Remittance recipients wish to mimic the lifestyle of their Miami relatives, and they are becoming more individualistic and less state-dependent.
Meanwhile, new tensions are fuming between the poor, peso-dependent and the dollar-spending remittance recipients. Moreover, in the aggregate, the transnational ties that the policy restricts are eroding state control of the economy and society, and weakening state authority.
The new immigrants, thus, are laying bedrock for a social, cultural, and economic transition, and possibly a political transition in turn. These changes are more consequential than Fidel's passing of the political baton to his brother. If Washington wants transition over succession, it would be wise to loosen, if not eliminate, the personal embargo. It should stop being beholden to a growing minority of old-timers who advocate a strategy that history has shown ineffective.
Susan Eckstein, a professor of sociology at Boston University, is author of "Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro" and is writing a book on the Cuban diaspora and its impact in the US and Cuba.
