APPENDIX 5

PREPARED STATEMENT BY ALFRED STEPAN, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, YALE UNIVERSITY

fr. Chairman and Sub-Committee Members:

Thank you for your invitation to appear before your Sub-Committee.

I

a professor of Political Science at Yale University, where I frequently serve

is the Chairman of Yale's Council on Latin American Studies. I am also

Before joining the Yale faculty I was a

urrently an elected member of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies
ssociation of the United States.
ember of the Social Science Department of the Rand Corporation, where my
pecialities were civil-military relations and U.S. foreign policy in Latin
merica. My writing to date has been largely on the military regimes in
razil and Peru. Eighteen months ago, however, I began a research project
a political participation in Cuba, a project which has taken me to Cuba
wice in the last year and a half.

I will direct my testimony today to the following questions. Is Cuba's
ternal political structure different from that of the Soviet Union in some
portant respects or not? Is Cuba's external policy self-oriented in some
portant respects or not? If the answer to both questions is yes, then it
pears to me that this is an argument for the United States to construct
licies and mechanisms that will allow the United States to relate to Cuba as
separate entity and not merely as an appendage of a foreign policy constructed
r another country. Specifically, the larger issue then becomes how to advance

e national interest in the context of U.S.-Cuban relations. What policies 11 increase the relative weight of the United States?

Let me address the first question of the internal political structures Cuba, for I believe a study of these structures reveals something critical out Cuba and how Cuba may be evolving. From the victory of the guerrillas

in 1959 until 1974 there were no political elections in Cuba.
In 1974,
however, Cuba began to experiment with elections. This experiment was
undertaken first in the single province of Matanzas. In October of 1976
the experiment in elections, called in Cuba Poder Popular or "popular power",
was extended to all the municipalities in all the provinces of Cuba.

There are some features of these elections that make Cuba different from the Soviet Union. According to the 1975, revised second edition of L.G. Churchward's Contemporary Soviet Government, the Soviet Union also holds local elections. However, in these elections the candidates are normally selected by official organizations and in almost all cases there is only a single candidate per electoral post. In Cuba, the candidates are not selected by

the Party or by official organizations, but by residents of the local neighbourhood at an open neighbourhood meeting. In addition, there is no single slate

of candidates; in the election in 1976 in Cuba an average of 2.8 candidates appeared on the ballot for each electoral post. On October 10, 1976, 5,382,000 electors voted by secret ballot for their delegates to the new municipal assemblies created under Poder Popular. As a result 10,725 delegates were

elected.

How is the new system of Poder Popular actually working? It is too early in the history of the experiment, and too early in my own research, to say anything definitive about the impact of Poder Popular. With this caveat in mind, I will however offer five tentative conclusions. First, the experiment of Poder Popular is not a mere institutional formality. Significant economic and social issues are involved. The new system of political participation

can only be understood if it is seen in the context of a wide-ranging reorganization

of the Cuban economy, in the direction of greater decentralization. The new municipal assemblies created by Poder Popular have responsibility for the

overall direction, but not the day-by-day administration, of those non-strategic sectors of the economy that have been decentralized.

Thus the responsibilities

of the municipal assemblies in the Cuban economic system are very real. Second, the state bureaucracy is increasingly accountable to the municipal assemblies. I have witnessed open hearings conducted by the municipal assemblies in which state bureaucrats were questioned, even grilled, by the elected members of the municipal assembly about their actions. In numerous cases in which the municipal assemblies have not been satisfied by the results, the administrators of shops, social service units, or production units in the newly decentralized sectors of the economy have been dismissed. Third, because the new system of political participation is linked to the new system of economic decentralization, the national economic plans have had to be disaggregated in greater detail. Municipal assemblies, worker organizations and plant managers are all requesting more information about the management of the economy, and are having an opportunity to make specific inputs into national policy.

Fourth, the municipal assembly delegates are themselves increasingly accountable to their constituencies. About every three months every delegate has to hold an open, neighbourhood meeting to register the complaints of the people. They also have to report back in detail what measures have or have not been taken in response to the complaints.

Fifth, people who before did not feel comfortable speaking up at official mass organization meetings are now speaking up at these sessions if they have complaints. There has been a recognition by the people and the government that

28-531 - 78 - 12

a person does not have to be pro-revolutionary to have the right, as a citizen, to demand good government and equal treatment.

My point in stating these conclusions is certainly not that Cuba has, or would want to have, an American style electoral system. Rather it is to

suggest that it is a mistake to see Cuba as a mere replica of any other political system. On the contrary, my research has led me to believe that Cuba has recently embarked on a period of rather open-ended experimentation in its political system, and that to understand this reality it is important not to judge it mechanically, or relate to it with categories or policies developed for other countries. Furthermore, the American people, Congress, and the Executive might ponder whether, given this new phase of internal political and economic reorganization, we want to isolate ourselves from these developments or whether it might be in our interest to construct policies that would increase the weight of the United States' economic, social, political and diplomatic presence in Cuba.

Let me now turn to the second subject on which I would like to make some comments, namely Cuba's foreign policy. While not an expert on Cuba's foreign policy, I would like to offer a few thoughts on some aspects of Cuba's foreign policy that I believe are often misunderstood. In the 1960s, though not in the 1970s, Cuba followed an explicit policy of exporting revolution in the hemisphere, a policy that was often in sharp conflict with that of the Soviet Union. Concerning Angola, I think future historians will be able to make a reasonably strong case for the argument that Cuba had important and independent links with the MPLA since 1965, and that it was Cuba that took the initiative in November of 1975, when Cuba decided to increase its presence by

sending combat troops to reinforce the MPLA which was retreating under the late October attack of a South African armoured column which had already penetrated a few hundred kilometers into Angolan territory. From available accounts it appears that Cuban troops initially were transported in a Batista-vintage Dutch ship, two Cuban merchant marine ships, and a number of Cuba's old Bristol Britannia turbo-prop planes. Once in Angola, the Cuban initiative was supported by the Soviet Union. In Ethiopia, after the established government was invaded by outside military forces and requested Cuban and

Soviet support, Cuba and the Soviet Union acted as mutually re-inforcing allies. The policy point I am trying to make is that whether Cuba was in conflict with the Soviet Union, took initiatives that were supported by the Soviet Union, or acted as allies with the Soviet Union, Cuban foreign policy objectives and ideological preferences have been a significant component in determining their actions. If this is so, it distorts both history and policy to describe Cuban foreign policy as that of a "mercenary".

I could of course be wrong in some points in the above analysis. But if one accepts that in some significant ways there are degrees of autonomy in Cuba's internal structure, and degrees of self-directed choice in Cuba's external policies, then there is a strong case to be made for examining our policies from the perspective of whether they increase or decrease our capacity to advance the national interest within the specific context of U.S.-Cuban relations. Assuming that Cuban decisions are important in their own right, what policies might, within the parameters imposed by the fundamentally different natures of the Cuban and the U.S. political-economic systems, marginally

increase U.S. influence in Cuban decision-making?