Austerity

The economic decline in the late 1970s led Castro's government to reappraise its policies for the 1980s. A major difficulty was that there was little room for manoeuvre commercially, a result both of Cuba's dependence on the Soviet Union and of the US embargo applied to Cuban trade since 1962. By the early 1980s, Cuba was in a predicament:

•  The US trade embargo restricted the outlets for Cuban products to a limited number of countries, which resulted in Cuba's trade balance always being in deficit.

•  Since sugar was its main export, Cuba was particularly susceptible to adverse changes in world sugar prices. This increased Cuba's need for the Soviet Union to continue to buy the bulk of its sugar crop at a fixed price.

SOURCE E

What information about Castro does Source E provide?

Castro speaks to thousands of Cubans on the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana, 1968.

•  Practically all Cuba's oil purchases were from the USSR.

•  Cuba was in debt to the USSR by some 7 billion dollars.

•  It owed a further 3.5 billion dollars to international banks.

Castro's response was to call for more austerity. Cubans had to make sacrifices for the national good. He repeated his familiar 'moral' appeal to the people, urging them to consume less, which would reduce the need for expensive imports, and to work for lower pay or for no financial return at all. He claimed that the need for this arose from the plain fact that Cuba had a surplus of labour. Some of this could be soaked up by increasing the size of the army and by encouraging young revolutionaries to go abroad, but the basic answer lay in the Cuban people settling for less in material terms.

Although a declared communist, Castro was not an orthodox Marxist. In 1974, he modified Marx's maxim 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' to read, 'each Cuban should receive according to the work effort he applies'. His desire to improve the conditions of Cuba's poor was genuine but he believed the improvement had to be achieved not by government handouts but by individual and communal effort. Hence the severity with which slackers and saboteurs were treated by the regime.

Why did the collapse of communism in the uSSR prove so significant for Castro’s Cuba?