Hope for Cuba

National Post, Canada  

There are signs that Cuba is beginning a curious modernization. On Thursday, Raul Castro, the new President and brother of retired dictator Fidel, announced that his countrymen would henceforth be permitted computers and DVD players. Next year, they will be allowed air conditioners -- if they can afford them -- and by 2010, who knows, perhaps even electric ovens and toasters.

No doubt, Cubans will be delighted to have access to the sort of kitchen appliances that our grandparents put on their wedding registries. But some may also suspect that they are being bribed: There's not enough food, comrades, and not much hope of more for the next couple of years. You won't be needing toasters and ovens for a while. So watch some old Stallone flicks and some Miami television, or surf the internet in the comfort of your air conditioned living rooms until the Council of State can figure out how to get broiler chickens off the endangered species list.

But whatever President Raul's motives, economic liberalization offers the best hope for a rescue of the Cuban people after half a century of grinding Communist oppression.

The government in Havana has long claimed that the outlawing of most appliances and consumer electronics in the 1990s was a decision forced on the regime by the collapse of the Soviet empire. Without cheap Soviet oil shipments, Cuban power plants could not generate electricity. To avoid widespread blackouts, Cuban households had to be stripped bare of even basic amenities. It was for the good of the Revolucion. (The fact that the Revolucion is now healthy enough to permit the use of mass-market appliances is likely owed to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who has picked up where the U.S.S.R. left off as Cuba's oil sugar daddy.)

But there was another reason for Fidel's ban on electric goods. The early 1990s brought not only the demise of the Soviet Union, but also an explosion in satellite television and information technology. Uncontrolled information flow is always a threat to totalitarian regimes. The longer Fidel kept his electronics ban in place, the longer he could maintain his government's monopoly on news dissemination.

Now that the lid has officially been lifted on Cuba's computer ban, expect calls for reform to spread like wildfire across the Communist island. Recall that last month a pointed exchange between Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly, and computing science students at a prestigious Havana university -- in which the students asked why the government was afraid to let them travel outside the country and use such web services as Google -- was rapidly disseminated around the country by students passing jump drives (also known as flash drives or memory sticks) from one to another and watching the video on public-access PCs. Such acts of "soft rebellion" can only become easier as more individuals have their own desktops and laptops.

Cuba still has a plethora of problems -- including tightly rationed foodstuffs -- nearly all of which are the result of failed central planning. But by permitting Cubans greater access to the outside world through television, movies and the internet, Raul Castro has inched his country closer to the day when the Communist Party can no longer delude the populace into blind devotion.