From the Publisher
Americans no longer think of Cuba as a major threat. In fact, many Americans imagine that when Fidel Castro is gone, Cuba will become a free-market democracy.
Mark Falcoff, AEI resident scholar in Latin American Studies, challenges both assumptions in Cuba the Morning After, a major study of U.S.-Cuban relations. He suggests that this island is mired in history and fantasy--in thrall to an economic and social system that does not work and cannot work. Communism has shattered a once-rich civil society, one that cannot be rapidly reconstructed, particularly in the absence of a small-business class and a freer access to organized political activity. Fear of the future, declining demographies, a culture of dependency, and a tendency to opt out for emigration to the United States add to the mixture.
Cuba the Morning After compares past and present, underscoring the huge changes that have occurred in Cuba, the U.S., and the world economy since the triumph of the revolution. Cuba was once one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. Its propserity was based on a privileged place in the U.S. sugar market, where it could sell its crop at a highly-subsidized price. Since 1960, the old Cuban quota has been parceled out to other producers. Meanwhile, the Cuban sugar industry is in ruins.
Falcoff concludes that an economically unviable and otherwise dysfunctional Cuba with all the restraints removed could even be a bigger threat to the United States than the island posed in its communist heyday. Although Cuba has ceased to be a conventional military or strategic threat since the collapse of the Soviet Union, now, with the prospect of nothing to sell and no one to buy it, the country may become, like Haiti, a platform for the export of drugs and illegal immigrants. It may also pose a threat to our struggle against terrorism.
It is an open secret in Washington that for some time now the Joint Chiefs of Staff have privately agonized over the prospects of a violent transition in Cuba erupting into civil war. Under such circumstance, they fear that the U.S. exile community would intervene, forcing the U.S. miltary to invade the island and separate the contending forces. Faced with the choice of stability or chaos in the post-Castro era, Washington may well choose the former, eve at the cost of supporting democracy or human rights.
The Washington Post
Falcoff's purpose, however, is not simply to enumerate the many well-known deficiencies of the Cuban economy. His book questions the assumptions of many Cuba-watchers opposed to the regime who believe that once Castro is gone his socialist legacy will evaporate, foreign investment and know-how will flood in, and the island will return to its pre-1959 prosperity.
— Mary Speck
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