This monograph issued by Freedom House is wise enough to raise the issue of change in Cuba as a question rather than speculate upon an answer. Given its ranking of Cuba as “on the threshold of the worst of repressive societies in the world” it would be risky for this esteemed organization to be overly optimistic. This is an important, honest survey assessment that has meaning at a variety of levels. It therefore deserves both attention and scrutiny. It is the most recent in a long line of independent surveys of Cuban society taken on site, which is within Cuba proper. Freedom House has played a particularly active part in generating such “value data.” But there have been other agencies, extending from the Gallup Poll, which assessed personal freedom of Cubans, to interviews conducted in fourteen provinces by the IRI (Independent Republican Institute), and The Council on Foreign Relations, which issued two major policy reports on Cuba, with a special emphasis on its relations with the United States. So we are not lacking in either information or ideology on this unique communist outpost more than fifty years old and less than one hundred miles from the shores of the United States.
In the same week as this report was issued, there were complaints that the U.S. Agency for International Development was asking for risky information about how its Cuban democracy funds are spent. Freedom House has surrendered a $1.7 million grant from USAID. The deputy director of programs at Freedom House expressed concerns that the identities and travel plans of the people involved in its Cuban programs could be leaked to Havana. Such programs are designed to support peaceful civil society activities in the communist-ruled island. Cuba has branded such activities as subversive and made it illegal to deliver or accept U.S. assistance. This help requires what USAID calls “discretion” or more simply transparency—the current Washington buzz word for an open policy.
The problem for Freedom House and with the $1.7 million installment is that USAID added a requirement for the prior vetting and approval of every contractor and subcontractor involved in the Freedom House Cuban program. While the abstract culprit mentioned is Wikileaks, the specific fear on the part of those contacting such resources is tacit support by Senator John Kerry of the Cuban regime. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen blasted Kerry for continuing to bloc USAID and State Department efforts to spend another $20 million for the Cuban programs. So Freedom House as it has since its founding seventy years ago in 1941, became once more a thorn in the side of presumed American foreign policy. Such political infighting is the domestic background of this monograph. Indeed, this report on Cuba was based in the Freedom House office in Mexico City and not in Washington D.C.
As this larger dispute over the allocation of funds makes evident, it is hardly a secret that honest public opinion interviews are very difficult to conduct in totalitarian lands. The sample sizes of a population of eleven million are invariably in the hundreds, and this latest effort is based on only 120 field interviews. A nit-picker can rightly say that such a small sample size casts doubt on the validity of broad ranging conclusions. Indeed, respondents’ courage in even participating in the survey come to question due to well grounded fears that even talking to strangers may elicit gossip and reports by neighbors and self-appointed guardians of the regime to police authorities. But for those not completely in the thrall of exacting methodological standards of ranges of error, this interviewing is as good as it gets.
From my own point of view, the cumulative and genuine results of all of these sample surveys are themselves a testimonial to the situation in Cuba. The study deserves to be taken seriously as a measure of repression, or what I have called the “soft Stalinism” that characterizes the Cuba of Fidel and Raul Castro and their comrades. The three authors of this study are products of a younger generation formally educated in the United States. With life experiences in Mexico, they are intelligent and forward looking. They make up in deep concerns about the nature of democracy, what they may lack in a sense of Cuban history; especially the bitter taste of so long standing a tyranny of their elders. Their findings are entirely supported with all available evidence, and are stated in summary fashion. Before examining some specific problems this sort of effort presents, it is fit and proper to repeat the summary of what their findings in interviews, conducted in December 2010 and January 2011, yielded.
It appears that the transition from Fidel to Raul has had a minimal effect on personal concerns and behavior. Cubans do not anticipate any positive changes in their personal situation. They remain preoccupied by economic issues and daily needs. They are frustrated by the dual monetary system that prevents their access to benefits that are available to foreigners. They are divided in their view of a future based on either social welfare or private enterprise models, quite understandably since they have never experienced life beyond state controlled mechanisms. In general, the interview reports indicate political passivity on the part of large numbers, and alienation from the regime and its pledges.
Some of the more intriguing results are that the people of Cuba are primarily interested in personal economic gain. Rather than channel such desires into political activities, they are converting their apathy into a desire to leave the country, or perhaps seek what they view as the personal benefits of the hierarchical corruption of the Communist Party. The Catholic Church is a presence on the island, but not especially a political force for change, since it tends to restrict dissent or confine activities beyond the ecclesiastical. The isolation of Cuba from world events continues, since new technologies remain highly restricted, and even dangerous to its users. The admixture of economic cost and fear of police action suffices to contain such desires for a worldlier outlook. This is reflected in the failure of the grassroots democracy movement to take hold with a vast majority of Cubans.
Particularly vexing for the authors of this study are the difficulties in explaining existing polarities of traditional versus secular values. The authors see Cuba as a “unique case” at least in Latin America: both more socially liberal (and that seems to be in terms of sexual mores), yet also more religious than most communist regimes in the world. It is with the issue of Cuban “exceptionalism” that the authors of this study seem to be floundering in murky valuational waters. At one level, the existence of sexual freedom is partially explained precisely by the absence of a stake in the larger society, or a variety of opportunities in reshaping the society or its prospects—alternatives not discussed. While there are indeed divisions between the secular and clerical, it should be noted that the Catholic Church only rarely in Cuban history played an active political role. Its clergy were largely derived from Spanish ethnic roots, and hence were strongly influenced by conservative values with respect to civil society. Indeed, as the Miami Herald (June 25, 2011) reported, according to a State Department brief, a Vatican expert on Cuba told U.S. diplomats in 2007 that Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega had pushed to shutter a highly regarded Roman Catholic magazine that often criticized the communist system. In short, this tradition of allegiance to the ruling regimes continues to the present.
The authors seem taken with the efforts of the World Values Survey Association as well as the world association for public opinion research as a whole, and that is where serious issues of social scientific theory arise. An attempt to quantify issues of values ends up by introducing serious problems in qualitative narratives as well as survey research designs. The World Value Survey Cultural Map 2005-2008 provided as an appendix to the monograph is more the source of problems than solutions. The world is divided into nine value parts with vertical lines indicating degrees of traditional versus secular beliefs, and horizontal lines that range from survival to self-expression.
This strangely drawn valuation map of the world involves acceptance of “English Speaking” as a separate universe, strongly implying that a language category is the core unifying element in countries ranging from the United States to Ireland. “Protestant Europe” is separated from “Catholic Europe” although the degree of actual church going from France to Norway would hardly confirm religious institutions as the guiding light. Then there is a category called “Orthodox” (presumably religious in character) in which Russia and Macedonia are in the same cluster. “South Asia” and “Africa” are thankfully listed as a group unto itself, while places as distinct as Turkey and Zimbabwe are part of an entry listed as “Islamic.” And then there is “Latin America” as a whole which includes everything from Puerto Rico to Brazil. Such broad categories, no matter how carefully the scales are drawn provide a source of serious confusion in the valuation of a nation like Cuba. Indeed, it may help explain the inability of the authors to provide a serious prognosis of the current situation or its future outcomes.
The major problem in this important report is not simply with problems in public opinion surveys made in dictatorial nations, or even in the overall entirely decent appreciation of the serious dilemmas of Cuban society in a precarious period (when was it otherwise!). Rather the core dilemma is one that has long occupied the paradigms within which the social sciences operate. The very notion is that the issues at stake are essentially matters of value. For a long period of time American social science has labored under the consensual belief that values are the critical measure of a nation’s political openness and free expression, but such a “soft” notion of an open society leaves out of the reckoning many systemic issues.
While it is certainly the case that value preferences do have a major stake in defining a nation and its trajectories; value theory makes decidedly short shrift in equally important if not greater issues of political, organizational, and military interests as well as personal leadership. The debate goes back in time to a line of thought that has a long pedigree from Locke to Mill on one side that emphasize values as the root determination of measuring a social order. However, the other side of the coin is the line that extends from Machiavelli through Hobbes and Marx and Pareto that takes very seriously the role of interests and dynastic elites in the determination of political order.
Public opinion research in its very nature measures the sentiments, beliefs and desires of the everyday individual, the common man argument for freedom if you will. It is implicitly a democratic tool. But in a world in which the determination of power and authority is hierarchical, and whose dynamic runs from, top to bottom, such measures are less successful. They provide little guidance in the study and explanation of how societies actually function. It is especially the case, as the Franco-Italian School of social theory explains, that studying the nature of a society on the basis of public opinion may indicate the extent of free speech even in desperate times and places. But the exercise of such liberties often fail to describe situations in which rule and decision making do not depend on the consent of the governed so much as the power of the governor. In that sense, it is political psychology rather than opinion research that drives a distinctive place like Cuba. This is a world in which family rule has determined priorities for more than a half century. As such, it is far more reminiscent of medieval castles rather than modern nations.
The grotesquely uneven distribution of rights and powers in Cuba has been the irreducible fact for the past half century. Interests ultimately determine the value of any piece of analysis, however open or closed; at different times it may lead to statistical samples and public opinion comments. As a statement of the tragedy of Cuban authoritarianism as seen from democratic perches, this work is entirely worthwhile. As a study of every day life on the ground it misses fire. As a 58 year old respondent to a questionnaire notes with respect to political pilgrims who visit Cuba and pay homage to its leaders: “It’s very easy to defend the [Cuban] revolution when you have a set date for returning to your country. We have to ask permission to leave; they come and go without problems.” I daresay that this is a lesson in how interests trump values. Investigators must always keep this tough lesson in mind when examining the quotidian life of Cuban people. On this note we can only thank this new generation of young and honest researchers for a first rate and unflinching study. By the same token, the work of Freedom House for the past fifty years in monitoring and reporting the human situation in Cuba should not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
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Irving Louis Horowitz is the Hannah Arendt distinguished university professor emeritus at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Long Night of Dark Intent: A Half Century of Cuban Communism, and editor, along with Jaime Suchlicki, of Cuban Communism, which has gone through eleven editions from 1969 to the present.
