Elián González, Politician

Thoughts on the rise of Elián Gonález's political star in Cuba

In late 1999 a little Cuban boy was found floating off the coast of Florida by fishermen who took him to shore. He was the only survivor of a group of Cuban immigrants, that had included his mother and her boyfriend. They had attempted to flee to the United States on an improvised rickety boat that wasn’t up to crossing the Florida Strait. This marked the beginning of his transformation from a complete unknown into a household name both in the United States & Cuba, as his extended family in Miami and his father in Cuba fought an extended legal battle for custody over him. After his rescue from his extended family in Miami, who refused to give him over to the authorities, he went back to Cuba where spent the rest of his childhood in relative privacy.

Elián has rocketed back into public consciousness thanks to the beginning of his formal political career as a member of the Cuban National Assembly. Unlike most legislative bodies, the National Assembly does not actually confer much actual power due to its role as a ratifier of decisions already made by the government leadership. His new role is still significant, however, for what it seems to signal both about Elián’s future and the broader political evolution of the Cuban political system.

For Elián, a formal position in a symbolically important institution may be a stepping stone to bigger and brighter things. After a few years in the legislature he may start being elevated to positions with more formal responsibilities and power, including eventually the key postings at the Central Committee of the Communist Party or in the governing Council of Ministers. Whether in his most recent interview and even in his first interview with US media as an adult back in 2015, it is possible to see the emergence of a specifically Elián brand of messaging. It doesn’t exactly stray from the official line, but is instead attempts to rearticulate the government’s position in a less bombastic and needlessly caustic way, both for domestic audiences and émigré ones. It is still too early to tell whether this marks the beginning of a long and important career, for which the tragedy he went through as a boy seems like a golden ticket, or whether it will be stomped out early, like the careers of once powerful Carlos Lage or Felipe Pérez Roque. For now at least, the stars seemed aligned in his favor.

What is more interesting about his case, for me at least, is that it seems symptomatic of the broader institutionalization of Cuban politics since Fidel Castro. Under Fidel, politics were deeply personalized and centralized in his hands. While Cuba did undergo institutionalization in the mid-1970s, Fidel could and did still override policy at a whim, reorienting the various institutions of the state to whatever new initiative he had dreamed up the night before. Although not as freewheeling as he had been in the chaotic 1960s, institutions still largely served as his tools, not largely autonomous organizations each with their own domain.

Under his brother and successor, Raúl Castro, this started to shift. We began to see the institutionalization of the state and a greater use of consensus building within the government coalition ahead of policy changes. Ultimate power, of course, still rested in the Party - and in Raúl in particular - but the violent shifts in policy were fewer, the great political initiatives like the ‘Battle of Ideas’ were largely gone, and institutions were increasingly expected to cultivate each their own gardens. Political reforms began to dismantle Fidel’s dysfunctional, even nonfunctional, economist project and attempted to incorporate the country’s massive black market into something legal and - most important - taxable. After years of being mocked, not unreasonably, as a gerontocracy, under President Miguel Díaz-Canel Cuba’s political leadership - including the Council of Ministers - finally had the generational change that people had long waited for. Some of the old guard still remain, such as Vice Prime Minister Ramiro Valdés. Raúl himself clearly still wields considerable influence even though he no longer enjoys a formal institutional role. Nevertheless, the generational change has finally come for the Cuban government’s leadership. And it seems like it is here to stay, with term limits on the presidency meaning that Díaz-Canel’s current term will be his last, meaning that the government already has to start thinking about who will lead in the future. In many ways Raúl played the Deng Xiaoping to Fidel Castro’s Mao; institutionalizing what had been personalized, reforming what had been dysfunctional, and regularizing change in power so that no single man can run roughshod over the country’s experts like his predecessor did.

Elián fits into this broader trend because the rise of his political star seems part of this shift towards cultivating and promoting potential leaders ahead of time and regularly instead of as part of an ad hoc individualized process. While Xi Jingping broke with the precedents and rules of his predecessors by giving himself a third term in office, by and large China represents a successful model for uniparty system’s like Cuba to transcend the instability of personalism by embracing institutionalization of the handover of power. Maybe one day Elián himself will be the one to whom power his handed. Time will tell.